Dolores Krieger

Dolores “Dee” Krieger (1 August 1921 – 16 June 2019) was an American nurse and professor emerita of nursing science at New York University who, with the Theosophist and clairvoyant Dora Kunz, co-developed Therapeutic Touch (TT) in the early 1970s.

Trained as a registered nurse and holding a doctorate from NYU (1967), Krieger first taught the method to her graduate nursing students in 1972, framing it as a secular, contemplative adaptation of the traditional “laying on of hands.” In 1979 she founded the professional body Nurse Healers–Professional Associates, later the Therapeutic Touch International Association, and her books were translated into numerous languages as the practice spread through nursing schools and hospitals.

Therapeutic Touch holds that a practitioner can sense and rebalance a patient’s “human energy field” by moving the hands at a distance from the body, without physical contact. This central claim was put to a notable test in 1998, when nine-year-old Emily Rosa designed a simple single-blind experiment — TT practitioners, hands behind a screen, were asked to detect whether her hand hovered above their right or left hand.

Their results were no better than chance, and the study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, becoming a widely cited challenge to TT’s premise; Krieger and Kunz were later named for a satirical Ig Nobel award.

The honest reading is that no well-designed study has demonstrated the postulated energy field; the comfort and relaxation patients report are real but better explained by attentive presence, expectancy, and the therapeutic relationship.