In chapter 8 of my recently released trade book The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature, I discuss various peddlers of hope that cater to our innate Darwinian-based insecurities. These include religious narratives, self-help gurus, and medical quackeries. An otherwise intractable problem (e.g., mortality, terminal disease) is "resolved" by believing in some hopeful message, as dispensed by one of the latter sources. In the words of none other than Superman (Christopher Reeve), "Once you choose hope, anything's possible."

In today's post, I'd like to briefly discuss the case of Emily Rosa, who in 1998, as a precocious eleven-year old coauthored a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, where she debunked therapeutic touch (TT), one of many forms of "alternative" medical therapies (see also here). She devised a very simple scientific test to gauge the efficacy of TT. Practitioners of TT are supposedly capable of curing specific ailments (e.g., pain) via the transference (or manipulation) of human energy fields (?) from their hands to a patient's afflicted body part. Rosa's experiment consisted of having TT healers slip their hands through a partition that would not permit them to see the other side of the partition. She would then place her hand above either their right or left hands, and ask them to state the location of her hand. Twenty-one TT healers of differing levels of experience (one to twenty-seven years) took part in the study. Two hundred and eighty trials were conducted in total. The healers achieved a success rate of 44%, namely their performance was worse than what one might expect via random guessing!