She may also be the youngest person to have her work presented in a major scientific journal. Her research, a fourth-grade science project conducted two years ago, supposedly debunks a mainstay of alternative medicine: therapeutic touch (TT), whose practitioners claim to treat everything from colic to cancer by passing their hands several inches above a patient's body and manipulating the so-called human energy field, sometimes felt as heat or tingling. It all sounds vaguely Uri Gellerish, but in fact TT is taught at nursing schools and universities in more than 70 countries and is employed at some 80 hospitals in North America.
Rosa, though, wasn't convinced that TT healers could even find a human energy field, much less cure the sick with it. So she designed a simple test—too simple, some say—enlisting a sample group of 21 therapists, recruited by her mother mainly through ads in alternative medical publications. In trials conducted at subjects' homes and businesses or at a local hospital, each therapist sat separated from Emily by a cardboard partition and stuck his or her hands through cutouts. Based on a coin toss, Rosa then placed her own hand over either the subject's right or left hand. If TT were valid, she reasoned, a practitioner should be able to find her hand by feeling her energy field. But in 280 trials, the therapists chose correctly only 44 percent of the time—less than the 50 percent they might expect from just guessing.
"Our toughest statistical editor said this is a wonderful study because of its simplicity, ease and clarity," says JAMA editor-in-chief Dr. George Lundberg. A home-schooled sixth-grader, Emily shared her byline with the actual authors of the article, her mother, Linda Rosa, a nurse, her stepfather, Larry Sarner, a computer analyst, and Dr. Stephen Barrett. "I said, 'Emily, this is going to look really great on a résumé,' " says Linda, 49. "She said, 'What's a résumé?' "
Therapeutic touchers are distinctly unamused, among them Dr. Dolores Krieger, who helped develop the technique in the early 1970s. "I thought it was an April Fools' joke—a parlor game," says Krieger, professor emeritus of nursing science at New York University. The experiment was flawed, she notes, largely because Emily wasn't sick—TT depends on the transfer of emotional energy during a medical crisis. "It is well known in life science that everyone is able to transfer human energies—you can feel someone's love across a room," she says. "[TT] is motivated by compassion. If we feel compassion, a sick person can feel energies that are healing." What's more, Krieger argues, TT works. "A study done 10 years ago on postoperative patients found that wound healing was more rapid in patients who had TT," she says.
Emily remains dubious. In fact she was raised by avowed doubters—her mother and stepfather founded Front Range Skeptics, a Colorado group dedicated to exposing a variety of practices they consider questionable. Linda Rosa has long opposed TT, though it is sanctioned by the Colorado Board of Nursing, and has shown Emily videos denouncing its use. "I have to question how much Emily's belief system affects the stimulus," says Mary Whalen, a Fort Collins, Colo., chiropractor who participated in Emily's experiment and recalls that Emily seemed "very bored" while conducting it. "When I found out the parents were part of the skeptics organization, I felt duped. I felt I was doing this for a kid."
A kid, to be sure, with unabashed curiosity. "When she was 3 or 4 and just learning about genitals," says her mother, "she would ask everyone in the grocery store 'Do you have a penis or a vagina?' " Linda and Sarner pulled her out of public school after first grade—"We thought she was bored," says Linda—and though Emily attended private school later on, now she's back home again. What paths of discovery lie ahead?
"I probably want to be a veterinarian when I grow up," says Emily, who has a cat, two dogs, two birds and a tarantula named Rosie. Not that she's finished investigating alternative philosophies. Her next inquiry may focus on the therapeutic use of magnets. "This is good advice," Emily says, pointing a skeptical finger. "Look into something before you spend your money."
Richard Jerome
Vickie Bane in Loveland
- Contributors:
- Vickie Bane.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
