Emily Rosa
Emily Rosa, an American from Loveland, Colorado, became at the age of 11 the youngest person ever to have a research paper published in a peer-reviewed medical journal — the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The daughter of a registered nurse and an inventor, Rosa at age 9 in 1996 performed a study which debunked the claimed ability of 21 Therapeutic Touch (TT) practitioners to detect a Human Energy Field or aura.
To perform her blind study, Rosa had each of the TT practitioners put both of their hands through a screen, behind which Rosa sat. She then flipped a coin as a means of randomly selecting which of the TT practitioner's hands she would put her hand next to, on the theory that if they could feel and manipulate a person's "aura", then surely they could at least feel someone's aura when that person placed a hand next to the practitioner's hand. The results did not prove any better than results which would have emerged from mere guessing, showing that the practitioners could not detect Rosa's aura.
Rosa's study originally took place as part of a school science fair when Rosa was 9. An "astonished" American Medical Association then accepted her paper on the study for its journal and published it in 1998 when she had reached the age of 11. She also won the "Skeptic of the Year" award from the Skeptics Society.
She has appeared in Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode two "New Age Medicine", of season six.
External links
Bibliography
- Thomas Cox: "Dialogue Transgressing the boundaries of science: Glazer, scepticism, and Emily's experiment". Nursing Philosophy: April, 2004, Vol. 5 Issue 1, p75-78, 4p
- Thomas Cox; Aliso Viejo: "A nurse-statistician reanalyzes data from the Rosa therapeutic touch study". Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine: Jan/Feb 2003. Vol. 9, Iss. 1; p. 58 (7 pages)
- Linda Rosa; Emily Rosa; Larry Sarner; Stephen Barrett: "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch" Journal of the American Medical Association, April 1998; 279: 1005 - 1010. - Emily Rosa's research paper