The following was on the 'Ask Dr. Weil' web site. (http://www.pathfinder.com/drweil) Thought you might find it interesting.

"Q. I was terribly upset by the reports discrediting therapeutic touch as a healing art, especially since I've heard so many good things about it from people I trust. What's your opinion on the matter? A. I agree with you that the recent news on therapeutic touch has been disturbing. The name "therapeutic touch," or "TT" for short, is something of a misnomer, since it usually does not involve actual touch. Instead, practitioners (mostly registered nurses) use their hands as sensors to assess and balance the energy field surrounding the body in order to promote our own natural ability to heal. Some call this energy field an aura, others familiar with Asian healing arts know this energy as "Chi." It's the energy your body radiates by being alive, flowing within you and without you.

TT was pioneered 25 years ago by Delores Krieger, Ph.D., a registered nurse and professor at New York University, and Dora Kunz, a noted healer. Now the technique is practiced by an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 professionals around the world, offered in at least 200 U.S. hospitals, including Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and taught in more than 80 universities.

A typical TT session lasts somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes, during which the recipient sits or lies down fully clothed. The practictioner uses her hands to sense energy blockages around the body, then directs healing energy from herself to the patient. The vast majority of patients who receive TT report feeling deeply relaxed during the treatment (some may even fall asleep).

While the health benefits of TT have been and are continuing to be demonstrated in many clinical studies, along comes an 11-year-old girl with a science project that gets published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA ) and picked up by the press. The objective was to investigate whether TT practitioners can actually perceive a "human energy field." The 21 experienced TT practitioners tested were unable to detect the investigator's "energy field." The conclusion was that their failure to substantiate TT's most fundamental claim is proof that the claims of TT are groundless and that further professional use is unjustified.

I don't buy that. There's too much evidence that healing energy systems work, in cultures throughout the world, in a variety of forms, including Reiki, Jin Shin Jyutsu and American-style TT.

There is controlled research on TT in which patients with chronic pain were randomly divided into two groups. One group got real TT from trained practitioners, and the other got placebo treatments from nurses who held up their hands and were told to count backward in sevens. Patients having the real TT treatment experienced a statistically significant reduction in pain over the group getting false treatments. I regularly recommend this modality to my patients as a means of boosting the healing process and easing pain without the side effects of drugs, and I've witnessed the efficacy of TT. We don't yet understand how it works, but that shouldn't keep us from using it and investigating it.