Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural: A Look Behind the Curtain)

by Paul A. Offit

Another example of Oz’s embrace of supernatural beliefs can be seen during his surgeries, which look like those of any other surgeon with one exception: the presence of reiki masters like Pamela Miles, a practitioner of therapeutic touch whom Oz has featured on his show. Miles claims that she can detect human energy fields and manipulate them to heal the sick. Oz has never put Miles’s claims to the test. But it wouldn’t be that hard to do. In fact, it was done a few years ago in a study designed, conducted, and analyzed by Emily Rosa. Rosa asked twenty-one therapeutic touch healers to sit behind a large partition with two holes at the bottom; she couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see her. Then she asked the healers to put their hands, palms up, through the holes. After flipping a coin, Rosa put her hand slightly above each healer’s right or left hand, asking them to pick which she had chosen. If healers could truly detect her energy field, they would have picked the correct hand 100 percent of the time; if not, about 50 percent of the time. Rosa found that healers were right 44 percent of the time—no different than chance. She concluded, “Their failure to substantiate therapeutic touch’s most fundamental claim is unrefuted evidence that [their beliefs] are groundless and that further professional use is unjustified.” In 1999, Emily Rosa published her paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was titled “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch.” Unlike Mehmet...