I was intrigued at the recent news blitz surrounding the debunking of therapeutic touch by a 9-year-old girl. I caught the television spot at work. A co-worker came up to me and said, “Well, I guess all those times you did therapeutic touch with me and I left feeling better weren’t real.” She was joking, knowing she and many patients we’ve seen in common have benefited from this modality.

A 9-year-old holding her hand over another person’s hand and having them guess where the hand is has nothing to do with therapeutic touch. I’ve been a practitioner of this therapy for 12 years and an instructor for three years. I wouldn’t be able to detect where someone’s hand was either.

Now if a practitioner were directing energy toward my hand or if I were passing my hand through someone’s energy field, that would be a different story. Picture an energy field like a moving stream — if you pass your hand through it you can feel changes in current velocity, direction or temperature changes in the water. A static hand held over my hand would be very difficult to detect in the same way putting a hand into tepid bath water can feel like no change at all.

The Alternative Therapy office at the National Institute of Health talks about therapeutic touch as being the most researched treatment it studied, stating that it works, it’s cost effective; start using it now. Judy Holland, R.N. Therapeutic touch instructor, Bangor