(1) A nine-year-old schoolgirl single-handedly cooks up a science-fair experiment that ends up debunking a widely practiced medical treatment. Emily Rosa’s target was a practice known as therapeutic touch (TT for short), whose advocates manipulate patients’ “energy field” to make them feel better and even, say some, to cure them of various ills. Yet Emily’s test shows that these energy fields can’t be detected, even by trained TT practitioners. Obviously mindful of the publicity value of the situation, a journal editor George Lundberg appeared on TV to declare, “Age doesn’t matter. It’s good science that matters, and this is good science.”

(2) Emily’s mother Linda Rosa, a registered nurse, has been campaigning against TT for nearly a decade. Linda first thought about TT in the late 1980s, when she learned it was on the approved list for continuing nursing education in Colorado. Its 100,000 trained practitioners (48,000 in the U.S.) don’t even touch their patients. Instead, they waved their hands a few inches from the patient’s body, pushing energy fields around until they’re in “balance.” TT advocates say these manipulations can help heal wounds, relieve pain and reduce fever. The claims are taken seriously enough that TT therapists are frequently hired by leading hospitals, at up to $70 an hour, to smooth patients’ energy, sometimes during surgery.

(3) Yet Rosa could not find any evidence that it works. To provide such proof, TT therapists would have to sit down for independent testing—something they haven’t been eager to do, even though James Randi has offered more than $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a human energy field. (He’s had one taker so far. She failed.) A skeptic might conclude that TT practitioners are afraid to lay their beliefs on the line. But who could turn down an innocent fourth-grader? says Emily, “I think they didn’t take me very seriously because I’m a kid.”

(4) The experiment was straightforward: 21 TT therapists stuck their hands, palms up, through a screen. Emily held her own hand over one of theirs—left or right—and the practitioners had to say which hand it was. When the results were recorded, they’d done no better than they would have by simply guessing. If there was an energy field, they couldn’t feel it. Emily is quick to point out that her test must be replicated before it’s considered definitive. But it isn’t good news for the TT community.

(5) TT supporters, predictably, attacked the study. Says Dolores Krieger, professor emerita of nursing at New York University: “It’s a cute idea, but it’s not valid. The way her subjects sat is foreign to TT, and our hands are moving, not stationary. You don’t just walk into a room and perform—it’s a whole process.”

(6) That’s a pretty weak defense. A stronger one is that many patients really do say they feel better after TT treatment. Emily’s experiment shows that TT does not work the way its advocates claim. But what nobody has done—neither Emily nor the die-hard skeptics who were so quick to champion her findings—is try to understand why TT does anything at all. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect. Maybe the simple fact that someone is hovering over you, paying attention to you, has therapeutic value. But, if so, that’s not such a bad thing. And what harm would there be in learning how to do it better?

Why did some TT practitioners agree to be the subjects of Emily’s experiment?