Talk:Emily Rosa

Criticism

This is pretty sad. Emily Rosa played a minor part in a fabricated report of a supposed study of Therapeutic Touch. As a science fair project it was unlikely to meet the usual criteria of being primarily the work of a student due to the acknowledged participation of adults in recruitment and statistical analyses. The data reported in the JAMA article, when properly analyzed, actually contradict the much heralded conclusions reported in the JAMA article.
Two pieces:

• Nursing Philosophy: "Dialogue Transgressing the boundaries of science: Glazer, scepticism, and Emily's experiment" Thomas Cox. April, 2004, Vol. 5 Issue 1, p75-78, 4p
• Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine: "A nurse-statistician reanalyzes data from the Rosa therapeutic touch study" Thomas Cox. Aliso Viejo: Jan/Feb 2003. Vol. 9, Iss. 1; p. 58 (7 pages)

demonstrate that the author's published JAMA data do not support the over-reaching conclusions offered in the same article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drtcbear (talk • contribs) 02:33, 15 March 2006

You are a Quack. TT is no better then snake oil. Well you get an actual product with snake oil. So, TT is even more of a rip-off then snake oil. 70.243.125.134 (talk) 06:34, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

The Rocky Mountain Skeptic critiqued the Rosa JAMA study here: http://www.rationalmagic.com/RMS/rms-jamacrit.html Lippard (talk) 03:56, 11 March 2009 (UTC) ^{Thnidu (talk) 02:38, 19 October 2015 (UTC)}

Someone changed the statement about the statistical results being "no better or no worse" than guessing to "no better" only, i.e. excising "or no worse" part. (The person promoting this position outside of Wikipedia is Thomas Cox, aka "bear" and "Drtcbear.") I am restoring the original statement, as the null hypothesis could not be rejected.

The criticizing materials cited above were incorporated into the "Critics" section. The RMS piece is included in the book Therapeutic Touch, where full authorship is cited.ConsumerAdvocate (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC).

Actually, I removed the "or worse" part, because it is mathematically incorrect. The word "expectation" when talking about random events is the raw probability of an event. For example, when flipping a fair coin the expectation is .5 heads and .5 tails. See Expected value. I don't know who this Thomas Cox is and it doesn't really matter. To say that .4 is no worse than the expected value of a coin flip (.5) is simply mathematically wrong. However, I'll concede that the word "worse" is a value statement so I've adjusted the text to be more neutral. -- ShinmaWa^(talk) 22:05, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

This is a misunderstanding of statistics. If the result was inside of the confidence interval of expected value (which it was) than we say that it was "no better or no worse" even though it *is* slightly lower than the expected value. This is because it needs to be significantly outside (higher or lower) of the range of expected values to be considered statistically significant with a 95% confidence interval. Mccartneyac (talk) 15:40, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

The statistical conclusion reported in the paper was, "Therefore, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the .05 level of significance for a 1-tailed test, which means that our subjects, with only 123 of 280 correct in the 2 trials, did not perform better than chance." That the null hypothesis could not be rejected justifies the original statement in the article that they did not perform worse than chance either. However, since the purpose of the Wiki article is to be an historical report, let us settle on using the quote above, which eliminates the word "worse" without being judgmental about it. ConsumerAdvocate (talk) 23:58, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm good with the new wording -- both accurate and neutral. -- ShinmaWa^(talk) 00:30, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Stephen Barrett's website www.quackwatch.com reported 122 correct responses at the same time the JAMA article reported 123 correct responses. Both reports refer to the same 280 trials. Both Barrett and Sarner refused to discuss this disparity. As well, the JAMA power calculations were based on a single phase of 10 trials while the standard for accepting practitioner's skills involved two independent sets of 10 trials. Hence the published JAMA power calculations are incorrect. The test of "Hand" was also incorrectly analyzed and reported in the JAMA article. How many mistakes in analysis in a single article are acceptable? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drtcbear (talk • contribs) 18:16, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Related articles

Just adding links to articles I will create but are currently orphaned: Dorothy Straight, Souza Barra Teixeira, Bertha Wood.

– Kitia 23:39, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

More recently

I haven't read the book "Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion", but I did read Emily Rosa's contribution, titled "Growing Up Godless: How I Survived Amateur Secular Parenting". The title is mostly in jest, I'd say.

I think I'll add a mention of this to the article sometime soon.

– Misha (216.254.12.114/talk) 17:19, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Er, well, it wasn't soon, but it's done. It's slightly rough, could use a citation.

— Misha

216.254.12.114 (talk) 02:38, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

"Study" rewrite

I think the recent rewrite of the study section is just dandy, but there is one thing Linda Rosa removed which I think is worth mentioning. I'll show the removed bit:

The daughter of a registered nurse and an inventor...

That's an interesting thing. If "Ms L. Rosa/Linda Rosa, BSN, RN" is important enough to be mentioned in the JAMA article that made Emily notable, I think she ought to be mentioned somewhere in this article, especially because of the apparent nurse connection — no matter what she herself thinks. Objections?

Misha Vargas (talk) 01:19, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

added criticism section

added criticism section as there are quite a few criticisms of this study. --stmrlbs|talk 08:10, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Change title?

This appears to be about a study rather than an individual and the article title should surely be changed to reflect that. Flapdragon (talk) 16:00, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

I just came here and thought exactly the same thing. This is classic case of a person known for one event, so it should be about the event, not the person per WP:ONEEVENT. I'll propose some new titles in a moment. GDallimore (Talk) 15:28, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Not really. If she wasn't 9 years old it probably wouldn't be notable enough as a study to have it's own article - though it did bring about the near demise of TT. If she hadn't been only 9 the whole thing would not have got so much publicity and therefore probably would not have been as effective as it was. There are many studies comprehensively debunking various pseudoscientific practices which don't make the headlines.Fainites ^barleyscribs 14:09, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

It's still one event, no matter what age she was when it happened. GDallimore (Talk) 21:44, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Tricky. I can't think off hand of a title for an article on the study though. The study was called A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch.Fainites ^barleyscribs

I've already made my proposal on the article page: merging it with the article about TT. Neither article is overly long. GDallimore (Talk) 22:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

User:LindaRosaRN I agree with Fainites. A separate webpage is appropriate also because Emily Rosa holds a significant Guinness World Record: "Emily Rosa became the youngest person at the age of 11, to have serious research results published in a medical journal with an article which she co-authored appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reporting on an experiment conceived by Emily at the age of eight."

Undefined term

"Hufford pointed out that research by CAM proponents ..." Someone who knows, please define what CAM means here. - SamIAmNot (talk) 18:17, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

CAM = complementary and alternative medicine. All that medical stuff that hasn't passed (some have been tested and failed) the scientific method is called alternative, such as homeopathy, reflexology, bioharmonics, ear candles, rolfing, chiropractice, palmistry, orgone energy, angel therapy, prayer, psychic surgery, feng shui, past life regression therapy, aura therapy, chakra, pray the gay away, acupuncture, etc. However, that piece of text is no longer present in the article. I guess between July 16, 2012 and now, someone removed it. Vmelkon (talk) 13:51, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Awards

I've divided the Awards section into two subsections, "Therapeutic Touch experiment" and "Other work" and deleted two items (pasted below) from the TT experiment sub§. In two hours of searching, starting from the web sites of the organizations said to have granted the awards, I haven't found a single reference for them. There's one explicit cite that points back to this page, and one tantalizing one that might be valid but is incomplete in what I can find. I think these are good-faith conflations of mentions of Emily Rosa's experiment with other, unrelated mentions of awards.

Deleted

1998: "Skeptic of the Year" James Randi Award from the Skeptics Society.((citation needed|date=May 2015))

This hit might be helpful if I had the book at hand:

We brought Emily to Caltech to present her with our Skeptic of the Year award

Source (02:04, 19 October 2015 (UTC)) Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown. Michael Shermer. Macmillan, Apr 1, 2010. P.xxviii. Google Books

But I haven't been able to dig out who the "we" refers to.

Deleted

1998: James Randi Educational Foundation $1000 prize.((citation needed|date=May 2015))

I can't find anything for this "Other work" award either, but I'm too tired to keep looking:

Left in

2003: Atheist Alliance International: "The Future of Free Thought" Award.((citation needed|date=May 2015))

--Thnidu (talk) 04:30, 19 October 2015 (UTC)