Concept

Therapeutic touch

Overview

Therapeutic touch (TT), or non-contact therapeutic touch (NCTT), also generically called healing touch, is a pseudoscientific energy therapy which practitioners claim promotes healing and reduces pain and anxiety. "Therapeutic Touch" is a registered trademark in Canada for the "[s]tructured and standardized healing practice performed by practitioners trained to be sensitive to the receiver's energy field that surrounds the body;...no touching is required."

Practitioners of therapeutic touch state that by placing their hands on, or near, a patient, they are able to detect and manipulate what they say is the patient's energy field. One highly cited study, designed by the then-nine-year-old Emily Rosa and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association 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. Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst concluded in their 2008 book Trick or Treatment that "the energy field was probably nothing more than a figment in the imaginations of the healers". The American Cancer Society noted, "Available scientific evidence does not support any claims that TT can cure cancer or other diseases." A 2004 Cochrane review found no good evidence that it helped with wound healing, but the authors withdrew it in 2016 out of "serious concerns over the validity of included studies".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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I mean _mechanical activity_. It is indisputable that a suffering existence can be thereby considerably alleviated. This fact is called to-day by the somewhat ignoble title of the "Blessing of work." The alleviation consists in the attention of the sufferer being absolutely diverted from suffering, in the incessant monopoly of the consciousness by action, so that consequently there is little room left for…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
States what Therapeutic touch is.
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If it is possible to clear up this state of things, the cause of the disturbance is found to consist in certain intense feelings of affection which the patient has transferred on to the physician, not accounted for by the latter’s behaviour nor by the relationship involved by the treatment. The form in which this affectionate feeling is expressed and the goal it seeks naturally depend upon the circumstances of the…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
Close in meaning to Therapeutic touch; the term itself is not named.
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Where the healing power of the royal touch is concerned we do not have to look for examples among savages. In comparatively recent times the kings of England exercised this power upon scrofula, whence it was called ‘The King’s Evil’.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and taboo
Close in meaning to Therapeutic touch; the term itself is not named.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Vitalism.

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