Therapeutic Touch: 

Popularized by New York University nursing professor Dolores Krieger in the 1970s, Therapeutic Touch is practiced by registered nurses and others to relieve pain and stress. The practitioner assesses where the person's energy field is weak or congested and then uses his or her hands to direct energy into the field to balance it.  Ironically, practitioners of Therapeutic Touch claim no touch is actually necessary, and therefore patients are not always touched, making the name of the therapy a misnomer. The healing in Therapeutic Touch takes place via a supposed physical process called “electron transfer resonance”, which physicist Alan Sokal describes as “nonsense”. A study in JAMA in 1998 found that practitioners of therapeutic touch could not detect the presence or absence of a hand placed a few inches above theirs when their vision was obstructed and in the 2008 book “Trick or Treatment” it was concluded the “energy field was probably nothing more than a figment in the imaginations of the healers”.  The American Cancer Society notes “Available scientific evidence does not support any claims that therapeutic touch can cure cancer or other diseases”. A year 2000 review of therapeutic touch found profound bias in the nursing profession and misinterpretation of the studies results as positive, even when the research indicated it was ineffective (J Nurs Scholarsh 2000;32(3):279-85).  However there is some alpha level evidence that therapeutic touch has a very small effect (average reduction of pain was 0.8 on a VAS scale of 1-10) but this study included “Healing touch”, “therapeutic touch” and Reiki, with most of the positive results being due to Reiki (Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2008 Oct 8;(4):CD006535)  Therapeutic touch is therefore more of a nursing profession “belief system” rather than a valid scientifically proven therapy.