The following is a response to a commentary written by Randy Cohen of the New York Times about nurses using therapeutic touch. You can view the original annotation here.
Dear Ethicist—
In the December 2 New York Times, you suggest that nurses should not use therapeutic or healing touch on patients. You write “These nurses should not perform unproven therapies… To do so is to tell a kind of lie to patients.” What you perhaps don’t realize is that much of medicine lacks an evidence base. In fact, current estimates suggest that 40% of medicine has little or no evidence to support it. Yet these procedures are performed all of the time—and modern medicine would suffer without them. Would you like to tell the 25.6 million Americans with heart disease that they cannot have open heart surgery because no clinical trials have shown that it is effective when compared to placebo?
Secondly, you suggest that supplying facts is more important than the placebo effect. The reality is that while scientific studies try to minimize placebo effect, medicine aims to maximize it. When a patient wants to get well, does it truly matter if the therapy that helps them is a result of an externally applied biochemical reaction or an internal one? Furthermore, there is a substantial body of evidence that supports the placebo effect. So by your own standards, the placebo effect should be used in medicine.
– Heather Zwickey
Director of Research
Helfgott Research Institute
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These religious people generally Hindus gains energy by meditation and once they gain some specific energy and after gaining the energy when they bless somebody by touching his forehead/or head ar the portion of the body where the pain/problem is, with the effect of the strong energy the problem/ailment gets cured or sometimes feeling of pains specially subsides.