Healing Touch

Therapeutic touch (TT), also called Non-Contact Therapeutic Touch (NCTT) or Distance Healing, is an energy therapy claimed to promote healing and reduce pain and anxiety. TT practitioners say that by placing their hands on or near the patient they can detect and manipulate the patient's putative energy field. Although there are 251 articles on TT on PubMed quality of controlled research is variable. One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that TT practitioners could not detect the presence or absence of a hand placed a few inches above theirs when their vision was obstructed. The existence of a "biofield" or "bioenergetic field," a necessary component of TT theory, directly contradicts many principles of modern physics, chemistry, and biology.