Her study, reported today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, has thrown the field into tumult. Emily is 11 years old. She did the experiment for her fourth grade science fair. The method is practiced in healing centers and medical centers throughout the world, and is taught at prominent universities and schools of nursing. Tens of thousands of people have been trained to treat patients through the use of therapeutic touch.
Practitioners insist that the human energy field is real and that anyone can be trained to feel it.
Her method was devilishly simple. It was a question critics of alternative medicine had asked before. But only one practitioner agreed to submit to a test, said James Randi, a magician who conducted the test. Emily, however, was able to recruit 21 practitioners. Then she glanced at the television screen in her home where her mother was watching a videotape about therapeutic touch.