Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Actual touch not included ∞

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
Get posts in your inbox:
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Auras don’t exist and can’t be felt, let alone manipulated therapeutically, but this is the basis of a popular therapy called therapeutic “touch” (actual touch not included). This tiny new article summarizes the skeptical position on therapeutic touch and energy medicine.

I’ve never written about therapeutic touch before, or gotten involved in the many online debates about energy medicine that are more or less constantly burning somewhere on the internet (especially Facebook). I am a science writer, my plate is plenty full with that, and I just couldn’t be bothered delving into that very anti-scientific topic. On the other hand, I also want to “touch” on every therapy and pain topic, at least a little — that’s my ultimate writing goal for PainScience.com. So I finally got around to it.