A Screen, a Towel, and a Coin

Therapeutic touch, developed within nursing from the 1970s and taught in nursing schools for decades afterwards, holds that a practitioner can perceive a field extending beyond the body and can smooth or rebalance it with the hands, generally without contact. The claim contains a testable component that had apparently gone untested: if the field can be perceived, a practitioner should be able to say which of their own hands another person's hand is hovering over. The apparatus was a cardboard screen with two holes at the bottom, through which the practitioner put their hands palm up, and a towel laid over the forearms so the experimenter's movements could not be seen.

The experimenter flipped a coin, held a hand a few inches above the practitioner's left or right palm as the coin dictated, and asked which. Twenty-one practitioners, recruited from those willing to be tested, completed 280 such trials between them. They were correct on 44 percent, where chance alone predicts 50. The test cost nothing and required no expertise beyond the discipline to run it exactly as specified. Fourteen of the twenty-one were tested twice, in sessions several months apart, which allowed the investigators to check whether any individual performed consistently rather than only whether the group did. None did.