Deconstructing Scepticism

I looked at some sceptical sites and was interested in taking apart the assumptions and poor scientific thinking behind the ideas. The problem was that there was so much to choose from. So when I saw a program on The Discovery TV channel about a ‘sceptical’ analysis on Therapeutic Touch my ears pricked up. The arguments laid assumptions on top of sloppy thinking and, in typical sceptical style, a note of dishonesty and derision.

Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a procedure used in many US hospitals by nurses. This is from quackwatch:

Today's proponents state that more than 100,000 people worldwide have been trained in TT technique, including at least 43,000 health care professionals, and that about half of those trained actually practice it. TT generally involves four steps: (1) "centering," a meditative process said to align the healer with the patent's energy level, (2) "assessment," said to be performed by using one's hands to detect forces emanating from the patient, (3) "unruffling the field," said to involve sweeping "stagnant energy" downward to prepare for energy transfer, and (4) transfer of "energy" from practitioner to patient. "Non-contact therapeutic touch" is done the same way, except that the "healer's" hands are held a few inches away from the body. TT is sometimes used together with massage.

There are a number of Internet sites with articles on TT but what was particularly interesting was that a registered nurse, Linda Rosa, a TT sceptic, and her daughter, Emily (then aged 11), devised an experiment that the Skeptics Society was enthusiastic about. It went like this. A practitioner put both hands palms up through holes in a screen and Emily then hovered her hand above one of the practitioner’s palms. The practitioner then had to guess what hand Emily was holding her hand over.

The results were that the practitioners guessed less than 50% of the time. On the TV program a spokesman for the Skeptics association said that they had ‘proved’ that TT didn't work under controlled conditions and therefore it was up to the practitioners to prove otherwise.

Why should the advocates of TT have to jump through hoops that the Sceptics set up for them? There is a fault in this thinking that underlies a lot of Sceptical studies – they make the assumption that that they are testing TT, although there is no evidence that someone who is successful at TT should be able to detect hands being held near them. In fact looking at their own description of TT, such a relationship would appear to be somewhat tenuous. A proper study of TT would involve a double-blind experiment with half receiving TT and the other half getting nothing. This, so far as I can see, hasn't been performed.

However, even given the shoddy thinking behind this experiment, and despite the fact that it is reported ad-nausium on Sceptic web sites, the figures don't show what they claim they show. The relevant page is here. Firstly looking at the overall results the percentage correct is 44%. More got it wrong than right - a standard deviation of around 2 – but this in itself is significant for reasons that I will explain later.

The table shows that on the first attempt one got 8/10 and two others got 7/10. Whether that is significant depends on a number of factors. Taken at face value these are impressive results but in a sample there is a probability that some people will perform better than average and others worse. The question is: were the good results repeatable and, for that matter, were the bad results predictable. If there was absolutely nothing in TT then the results should be no better, and no worse, than random.

Unfortunately, the results as described make it impossible to draw any conclusion. Some of the tests were repeated but not all. There was considerable differences between practitioners and I don't think it’s correct to assume that someone who has been at it longer is going to have better results. There are also other considerations: How long was allowed between the tests? Were the practitioners told their results of the first test before it was repeated? Were the practitioners tired? What did they say about the tests?

In order to understand why the results may be worse than average, we have to understand something of the how the mind responds to these subtle energies. Often when people start to form a relationship with these subtle aspects of their being they don't properly understand what they are dealing with. This is really no different from any other kind of mind / body learning. For example, when you learn to catch a ball you learn that the successful approach is to keep your eye on the ball and you may find that you have a very good success rate in catching, but you may be completely unable to describe the process that you do. You are forced to fall back onto some cliché such as ‘it just happens’. Similarly, when these TT practitioners are put under a test and asked to make decisions about things that they have not previously thought about, they often find themselves performing poorly. What's more, they may feel something but don't necessarily know how to relate what they are feeling with whether a hand is being held near theirs in the test. Consequently, they may give the opposite answer to the correct one. This is simply a matter of training the practitioner on how to answer the questions.

Of course, the sceptics are not interested in any of this. Having convinced themselves that TT doesn't work they are less than enthusiastic in examining the situation any further. They are not interested in understanding, simply in debunking.

It is particularly amazing that sceptics refer to the results above countlessly as ‘proof’ that TT doesn't work, even though the results prove, at the very least, that something unexpected is happening. If the group reporting this had any integrity, they would publish sensible results instead of figures that appear to be deliberately confused in order, I suspect, to muddy the waters. Of course if they had any integrity they would attempt to understand what they are purporting to test and would understand that what they are testing is not TT - it is an artificial situation which may or may not bear any resemblance to TT.