This is almost certainly the case, and you give it a bit of short shrift.
I did consider covering it more, but… this was already ~7,000 words cataloging different mechanisms for woo. I could have written a few thousand words more discussing, say, how if energy healing works by something like inducing relaxation, and placebo effects can also induce relaxation by somewhat similar mechanisms (e.g. making the person feel like they are the center of someone’s attention), then that can be part of the package that makes energy healing work. (And how, say, trying to do RCTs of energy healing in especially clinical-feeling environments can make it look like energy healing doesn’t do anything, if those clinical-feeling environments also eliminate part of the psychological setting that helps people relax into it.)
But at some point you need to finish writing the article and publish it, so I just gestured a bit in that direction and left the details open. There were also a bunch of other woo practices like some neopagan stuff that I didn’t go into at all, because writing up just this was already enough work.
Still, if you want a bit more commentary on that, here’s something that Claude commented about placebo effects on an earlier draft of this article, that I think I roughly endorse. (But didn’t incorporate into the essay because while e.g. its tripartite prediction felt mostly right there was something that felt slightly off about it and I’d have wanted to figure out what exactly about it was off and how to revise it and express in my own voice… at which point I was like eh whatever, I think this is good enough for now, let me publish.)
Your framework predicts a specific pattern of evidence, which is worth making explicit because it’s testable (at least loosely):
1.Claims that require practitioners to have perceptual or causal abilities beyond ordinary human ones (remote sensing energy fields, detecting auras blind, distant healing affecting biological outcomes) should fail under rigorous testing. Rosa is one data point here; distant intercessory prayer studies are another large body of converging negative evidence.
2.Claims about subjective psychological benefits — pain, anxiety, stress, mood, quality of life, feeling more connected — should show modest positive effects in contexts where the intervention involves attention, touch or near-touch, ritualized calm, and a caring practitioner. But these effects should be roughly what you’d predict from the non-energy components (placebo, attention, relaxation, therapeutic alliance, possibly actual somatic release through the mechanisms you describe), and shouldn’t look meaningfully different from a well-designed sham that preserves those components.
3.Claims about objective biomedical outcomes (wound healing, disease progression, biomarkers) should be weak or null.
And that’s… pretty much what the literature shows. Category 1 reliably fails. Category 3 is mostly null. Category 2 shows those modest positive effects, with the critical caveat that the studies mostly aren’t rigorous enough to distinguish “energy work specifically does something” from “any intervention with these psychosocial components does something similar.”
So “[the research] doesn’t clearly show [effects] but doesn’t clearly exclude them either” is accurate, but I’d push you to be more precise about which effects, because your own framework already implies you shouldn’t expect research to find evidence of energy-specific mechanisms — you’d expect it to find evidence of the bundle of real psychological and somatic processes that energy language is tracking. And that’s approximately what’s there.
A few things worth weaving in if you’re writing about this:
The sham control problem is your friend, not your enemy. A common defense from energy practitioners is that sham [energy healing] (where a non-practitioner mimics the hand motions without “intent”) sometimes shows similar effects to real [energy healing], and they treat this as a study design flaw. Under your framework, that’s not a flaw — that’s exactly the predicted result. If energy work is operating through attention, relaxation, calming presence, and somatic cues that the recipient subconsciously reads, then a sham that preserves those components should produce similar effects. The proponents are accidentally making the skeptical point for you, and you can turn this around: the finding that sham is roughly as effective as “real” energy work is consistent with the thing actually being useful at the psychological level while not being about energy in any literal sense. [...]
There’s a selection effect in what gets studied. Studies overwhelmingly measure subjective endpoints (pain scales, anxiety inventories, QoL measures) in populations where those endpoints are expected to improve anyway with attention and kindness (cancer patients, chronic pain, hospitalized patients, pre-surgical anxiety). The field doesn’t run many studies of the form “can practitioners detect which patient has X condition by feeling their biofield” because those studies, when they are run, tend to go the way Rosa’s did. So the literature is weighted toward categories where positive findings are almost guaranteed and away from categories where the energy-specific claim would be put to a real test. Your essay might want to note that this selection pattern is itself informative — it’s consistent with a field that has, consciously or not, narrowed to the range where the psychosocial bundle produces results.
One caveat I’d flag. The case for “purely psychological benefits exist” is actually on slightly firmer ground than the general “doesn’t clearly exclude” phrasing suggests, because we have enormous independent evidence for the underlying mechanisms — placebo effects, therapeutic alliance effects, attention effects, somatic release through breathwork and touch, interoceptive shifts from focused awareness. These are all well-documented. What the energy-work literature specifically adds is uncertain, but the underlying building blocks you’re pointing to are well-established, and somatic therapy (Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy) has a growing if still imperfect evidence base that works from a similar mechanistic picture to yours without the energy vocabulary. So you can say with some confidence that something in the general neighborhood works, even if the specific claim “this works because of energy manipulation” doesn’t have clean empirical support.
The cleaner framing for your essay might be: “The research evidence is compatible with my framework — practitioners can’t do the perceptual/causal things they claim at a distance, but the psychological and somatic effects my framework predicts are plausibly real and have some empirical support, though the specific contribution of energy-work practices over well-matched controls is unclear.” That’s both more honest about the evidence and more illuminating about what your framework actually predicts.
One last thing: there’s a reasonable question you could raise but don’t have to — whether the specific rituals and practices of energy work are more effective at reliably producing these psychological benefits than, say, telling someone “please relax and breathe.” The framework-neutral answer is probably yes, because elaborate ritualized practices with a confident practitioner and a coherent explanatory story seem to be a pretty good way of producing placebo-adjacent effects in humans, and the energy framework is a very well-developed ritual system. Whether that means “energy work works” or “ritual works and energy work is a particularly elaborate ritual” is partly a semantic question, but it’s one worth being deliberate about in the essay.
I did consider covering it more, but… this was already ~7,000 words cataloging different mechanisms for woo. I could have written a few thousand words more discussing, say, how if energy healing works by something like inducing relaxation, and placebo effects can also induce relaxation by somewhat similar mechanisms (e.g. making the person feel like they are the center of someone’s attention), then that can be part of the package that makes energy healing work. (And how, say, trying to do RCTs of energy healing in especially clinical-feeling environments can make it look like energy healing doesn’t do anything, if those clinical-feeling environments also eliminate part of the psychological setting that helps people relax into it.)
But at some point you need to finish writing the article and publish it, so I just gestured a bit in that direction and left the details open. There were also a bunch of other woo practices like some neopagan stuff that I didn’t go into at all, because writing up just this was already enough work.
Still, if you want a bit more commentary on that, here’s something that Claude commented about placebo effects on an earlier draft of this article, that I think I roughly endorse. (But didn’t incorporate into the essay because while e.g. its tripartite prediction felt mostly right there was something that felt slightly off about it and I’d have wanted to figure out what exactly about it was off and how to revise it and express in my own voice… at which point I was like eh whatever, I think this is good enough for now, let me publish.)
Your framework predicts a specific pattern of evidence, which is worth making explicit because it’s testable (at least loosely):
1.Claims that require practitioners to have perceptual or causal abilities beyond ordinary human ones (remote sensing energy fields, detecting auras blind, distant healing affecting biological outcomes) should fail under rigorous testing. Rosa is one data point here; distant intercessory prayer studies are another large body of converging negative evidence.
2.Claims about subjective psychological benefits — pain, anxiety, stress, mood, quality of life, feeling more connected — should show modest positive effects in contexts where the intervention involves attention, touch or near-touch, ritualized calm, and a caring practitioner. But these effects should be roughly what you’d predict from the non-energy components (placebo, attention, relaxation, therapeutic alliance, possibly actual somatic release through the mechanisms you describe), and shouldn’t look meaningfully different from a well-designed sham that preserves those components.
3.Claims about objective biomedical outcomes (wound healing, disease progression, biomarkers) should be weak or null.
And that’s… pretty much what the literature shows. Category 1 reliably fails. Category 3 is mostly null. Category 2 shows those modest positive effects, with the critical caveat that the studies mostly aren’t rigorous enough to distinguish “energy work specifically does something” from “any intervention with these psychosocial components does something similar.”
So “[the research] doesn’t clearly show [effects] but doesn’t clearly exclude them either” is accurate, but I’d push you to be more precise about which effects, because your own framework already implies you shouldn’t expect research to find evidence of energy-specific mechanisms — you’d expect it to find evidence of the bundle of real psychological and somatic processes that energy language is tracking. And that’s approximately what’s there.
A few things worth weaving in if you’re writing about this:
The sham control problem is your friend, not your enemy. A common defense from energy practitioners is that sham [energy healing] (where a non-practitioner mimics the hand motions without “intent”) sometimes shows similar effects to real [energy healing], and they treat this as a study design flaw. Under your framework, that’s not a flaw — that’s exactly the predicted result. If energy work is operating through attention, relaxation, calming presence, and somatic cues that the recipient subconsciously reads, then a sham that preserves those components should produce similar effects. The proponents are accidentally making the skeptical point for you, and you can turn this around: the finding that sham is roughly as effective as “real” energy work is consistent with the thing actually being useful at the psychological level while not being about energy in any literal sense. [...]
There’s a selection effect in what gets studied. Studies overwhelmingly measure subjective endpoints (pain scales, anxiety inventories, QoL measures) in populations where those endpoints are expected to improve anyway with attention and kindness (cancer patients, chronic pain, hospitalized patients, pre-surgical anxiety). The field doesn’t run many studies of the form “can practitioners detect which patient has X condition by feeling their biofield” because those studies, when they are run, tend to go the way Rosa’s did. So the literature is weighted toward categories where positive findings are almost guaranteed and away from categories where the energy-specific claim would be put to a real test. Your essay might want to note that this selection pattern is itself informative — it’s consistent with a field that has, consciously or not, narrowed to the range where the psychosocial bundle produces results.
One caveat I’d flag. The case for “purely psychological benefits exist” is actually on slightly firmer ground than the general “doesn’t clearly exclude” phrasing suggests, because we have enormous independent evidence for the underlying mechanisms — placebo effects, therapeutic alliance effects, attention effects, somatic release through breathwork and touch, interoceptive shifts from focused awareness. These are all well-documented. What the energy-work literature specifically adds is uncertain, but the underlying building blocks you’re pointing to are well-established, and somatic therapy (Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy) has a growing if still imperfect evidence base that works from a similar mechanistic picture to yours without the energy vocabulary. So you can say with some confidence that something in the general neighborhood works, even if the specific claim “this works because of energy manipulation” doesn’t have clean empirical support.
The cleaner framing for your essay might be: “The research evidence is compatible with my framework — practitioners can’t do the perceptual/causal things they claim at a distance, but the psychological and somatic effects my framework predicts are plausibly real and have some empirical support, though the specific contribution of energy-work practices over well-matched controls is unclear.” That’s both more honest about the evidence and more illuminating about what your framework actually predicts.
One last thing: there’s a reasonable question you could raise but don’t have to — whether the specific rituals and practices of energy work are more effective at reliably producing these psychological benefits than, say, telling someone “please relax and breathe.” The framework-neutral answer is probably yes, because elaborate ritualized practices with a confident practitioner and a coherent explanatory story seem to be a pretty good way of producing placebo-adjacent effects in humans, and the energy framework is a very well-developed ritual system. Whether that means “energy work works” or “ritual works and energy work is a particularly elaborate ritual” is partly a semantic question, but it’s one worth being deliberate about in the essay.