Talk:Thought Field Therapy

Untitled
Please note that the 'Revision as of 05:15, 2 May 2006' incorrectly shows me doing a massive edit. In that revision I edited only 1 or 2 sentences. Ashmoo 05:22, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah, yes Ashmoo, I appreciate that now. I have read up on this one and I have not yet seen an incorrect line in the article. I suggest we take a look for attributions and make requests for clarity instead of removal. I believe your edits may be ok, but we could wait a bit. Cheers KrishnaVindaloo 05:29, 2 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Well this article seems to be going along fine. I'll keep on hunting for refs if there are any new research articles to add.  Best regards KrishnaVindaloo 06:28, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

citation check
What is "Devilly (1996 p.444)"? --JWSchmidt 06:51, 1 October 2006 (UTC) It looks like 1996 was an error. The reference should be Devilly 2005 and this is included in the list of references. I fixed it. Is this the reason the verification on this article was questioned? --MonicaPignotti 23:44, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

It appears that TFT proponents have been attempting to add comments to this article, implying that the overwhelming consensus is that TFT works on "tens of thousands" of people and that the critics are just a minority. I just added a reference in (Norcross, Garofalo, and Koocher) that refutes this opinion. This study, published in an APA journal, surveyed psychologists on whether they considered certain therapies discredited and they rated TFT as "probably discredited". The respondents in this study included both practicing clinical psychologists and academics, so this was not just the opinion of academic psychologists.--MonicaPignotti 14:12, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

POV?
Is this article a bit hard on TFT? Or are they really dodgy?Merkinsmum 01:04, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The facts in this article are all verifiable and references have been provided. If there is there something specific you're skeptical about that you think needs more documentation, please feel free to share that with us, or if there is some reference in support of TFT you feel has been left out, please feel free to share that as well. I'm curious what specifically in this article you thought was "a bit hard on TFT" or if you see any factual errors? --MonicaPignotti 19:09, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

I see that some TFT proponents have seen fit to cite my earlier very favorable opinions on TFT. It is very well known in the TFT community that I reversed my favorable opinion of the Figley/Carbonell study and published a later opinion that was unfavorable of TFT and pointed out the flaws of this study in an article published in the peer reviewed journal, The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice entitled TFT in the Media (See references). I consider this misleading representation of my position. Moreover, it looks like someone deleted earlier legitimate references I had to my TFT/VT study with only the favorable uncontrolled radio study by Callahan published in a proprietary archive referenced. I consider this removal of my published study and insertion of my earlier highly favorable opinions on TFT which I no longer hold to be outdated and vandalism of the article and ask the moderators to please step in and make sure my views are not misrepresented in this manner (i.e. describing me as a TFT practitioner in the present tense is false and it is well known and widely stated on the Internet and in peer reviewed journals that I have not practiced TFT since 2004 and publicly retracted all I wrote on TFT prior to that date). If this irrelevant positive expression of opinion about TFT is allowed in then you need to truthfully state I am a "Former TFT Practitioner" and then cite all of my retractions of TFT but it would be best for the article to not go off on this tangent and leave out my positive Letter to the Editor completely which was nothing more than a positive opinion not appropriate for an encyclopedia--Giving misleading information of this sort is not "balance" in any rational sense of the word. Encyclopedias need to report facts, whether the balance comes down on one side or not. Do not misrepresent my stance on TFT again. Please note that I am not making any legal threats about this matter (I just edited this section because my earlier statement could have caused a misunderstanding on this point), but I am going to exercise my right to free speech and speak up very loudly in whatever forums are available to me on the internet to correct any false information about me, wherever it appears. MonicaPignotti 20:16, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Comments
These comments were put up by an anon IP on the page. Please discuss this on the talk page, not on the main article page. 

Comments on this article
- 1. This article is one-sided and heavily influenced by a handful of so-called researchers. You can see how this article cites heavily on one author (See the reference yourself.) -   - 2. Besides since most of the critics (I have checked the original articles), DON'T believe the method and have not used them in their own practice. So they have NOT seen the method in practice. -   - 3. I don't appreciate Callahan's way of making lots of money by protecting VT technology. -   - 4. Besides, many articles which are critizing the method have used bad labels. So-called pseudo-science. But if the same critiria are set on these so-called standards. Then this identification is by itself: Psudo-science. Have these critiria been tested scientifically? -   - 5. Have we posted all the criticisms (with the same bias) against TFT be put on all other psychotherapy methods? If so, we will find that lots of them must be evaded from the Earth. -   - 6. TFT, though not perfect, is an effective way that provides us an observed instant effect. Let's assume it is so-called placebo effect. Why and How comes it is so strong? We cannot see other psychotherapy methods have the same effect. [Besides, placebo effect demands some respect and research if it can 'cure' people.] TFT has a long-lasting so-called 'placebo effect' (as labeled by critics), then we must ask why and how we can reinforce it. -   - 7. Callahan is wrong when he uses the "thought field" which has never be observed (and cannot be tested). I think it is wrong. But acupunture and meridians are not false. (But some so-called skeptics wrongly label acupunture as pseudo-science. Acupunture has been used over 2000 years and cured millions of people in China and all over the World. If it is so-called pseudo-science. Then science must be redefined because millions of experiments in human bodies do not count! Actually the basic problem lies in the "belief" (actual religion in its own right)of modern Western way of medicine is the ONLY RIGHT way. One example may falsify this: When Presiden Nixon visited China, he has been suffered from back pain, but cannot be cured by the Western doctors! He has been cured by the acupunture in China! It is why NIH starts the researches on that.) -   - 8. Some acupoints have been observed affecting the heart beat rate and they are related to the emotional problems. The acupoints used by TFT (mainly four meridians) are related to the emotions which are controlled by the symthetic nerve system. Callahan has been using the wrong analytical paradigm. By using modern analysis on acupunture, we can see that the method may have trigered an less observed relationship between acupunture and emotional control. It demands more research to be done. (Since all the related researches are reported in Chinese, I cannot post here. But I can post some in Chinese section, if necessary.) -   - 9. The over-stated effects of TFT contribute to the wild attacks from the critics. -   - 10. I have tried other ways of psychotherapies, but found this more effective than the others. So I have tested it after the initial success (But when I test it the first time, I have doubts on that. Its claims are too "big."), I have found that it is not always working (70-80%); but it has cured a compulsion patient! Placebo effect cannot explain it. Because he does not believe in this method! Besides all the clients who are cured don't trapped by the same problem after two years. Placebo effect does not last so long. Besides the clients have first encounted this method and are skeptic to it. No positive affirmations are made in all these clients. -   - === My suggestion === - Make more unbiased and thorough researches (with larger sample sizes) be done on this method. Re-construct and find a real-reliable explanation on the effect (thought field and placebo effect don't work.) There must be more than that. Besides it really works for some patients (not all), why is it so? How to improve the method and benefit more patients in different problems? Thanks - xC -  |  ☎  17:35, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that research needs to be done and this needs to happen before proponents of TFT can make legitimate claims because they have the burden of proof to support their claims and publish their research in peer reviewed journals. This is the main point that has been made in the criticisms of TFT. In any case, your assertion that TFT works is based upon anecdotes and there are a number of reasons why patients can have their problems get better. Placebo is just one form of non-specific treatment effect that can be responsible for a positive outcome. I don't understand what you mean by "wild attacks" from critics of TFT. The information in this article has been documented with references and there are no personal attacks on anyone. This is an encyclopedia and the purpose, as I understand it, is not to speculate on why people believe TFT works, especially when evidence is lacking in the form of well designed studies that it works at all. Based on your statement "Some acupoints have been observed affecting the heart beat rate and they are related to the emotional problems. " you appear to have a misunderstanding about the articles on TFT, which are on Heart Rate Variability, a very different measure from "heart beat rate". However, as the reviews of the articles published by TFT proponents on TFT and HRV have demonstrated (I was one of the authors of one of the TFT-favorable articles, by the way), their methodology was inadequate and thus not supportive of their claims. If there is actual published research on heart rate and TFT I am unaware of, feel free to supply references to support your claim. I also do not understand how you could conclude that this article "cites heavily one author" when a number of authors have been cited (Callahan was the most frequently cited author in this article with 7 citations).--MonicaPignotti 19:26, 22 July 2007 (UTC)


 * A quote from Pignotti that was apparently removed by Pignotti has been reinstated. Using the talk page and the artcile to battle out the pros and cons is already questionable; however for one of the participants to be suppressing material is way out of bounds.Boodlesthecat 17:39, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Boodles: I retracted that article and my retraction is being published in the journal. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Boodles for bringing this to my attention because it reminded me that I needed to specifically formally retract my Traumatology articles, even though I already had numerous publications retracting my views on TFT. As a result, I wrote a formal retraction that the Traumatology journal has been accepted. This was not suppression of information because I retracted my views on TFT but since I am a very busy person and do not have the time to go through a formal arbitration, I am leaving it in along with a reference and quote from my formal retraction of what Boodles quoted. Just a friendly reminder to Boodles, any attempt to delete my reference and direct quote from my formal retraction of the quote is suppression of information. A statement of opinion made without basis by a TFT therapist is not something that should ever be printed in a credible encyclopedia in the first place but if the moderators do choose to keep this in, then they need to allow me to present all the facts, not just the ones that are favorable towards TFT. I also mentioned Wikipedia and what occurred here by name in the published retraction that will be appearing in the Traumatology journal and I will also be commenting on this Wikipedian incident in an article I have been invited to write for an APA publication. --MonicaPignotti 12:56, 19 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I really do not appreciate MonicaPignotti's intimation above that I may attempt to delete anything from this article and engage in "suppression of information." I would also suggest that as someone extremely close to the content of this article, and as someone with a professional stake in a particular point of view regarding this fringe therapy, that she look through WP:COI, rather than engage in passively aggressively formulated speculations ("Just a friendly reminder...") about other editor's future behaviors. she should also note that letters to peer reviewed journals are perfectly acceptable as sources.Boodlesthecat 17:40, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

A couple of issues

 * Several of the references seem to be to 'letters to the editor' or 'opinion piece' type documents. These are not useful as reliable sources for anything other than the opinion of the writer, and the opinion of the writer is only useful if they are an expert in the field.  Please see reliable sources guidelines.


 * MonicaPignotti may actually be an expert in the field. As such please be careful of conflict of interest (either pro or con).  The goal is to have an article the fairly describes the subject including the problems.

Please, regular editors of this article review it closely. Wikipedia is after verifiability, not truth. --Rocksanddirt 19:45, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I've started to format the references/notes per wikipedia normal for inline references. If I screw any up please fix.

I also removed the irrelevant and not reliably sourced information on MonicaPignotti's comments. --Rocksanddirt 20:24, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for removing the outdated quote from me. That was all I was asking. I have published numerous articles on TFT. I do not have any current financial interest in TFT, either pro or con. In the past, I was a leading proponent of TFT but have since changed my views. I do consider myself and have been recognized as an expert, but that letter to the editor represented my (now outdated) views from 1998. I have received no profit from any of the articles I published on TFT. What I would recommend watching out for is TFT supporters coming on here with agendas --MonicaPignotti 15:08, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * exactly. Though the first attempt to push thier POV will be to say you have a bias and COI against thier theory, so be aware of that.  For how awful it can get, please see Requests_for_arbitration/Attachment_Therapy.  --Rocksanddirt 17:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * There appear to be a few refs not on the list, and a few on the list that are not footnoted in the article. --Rocksanddirt 23:08, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

removal of information
someone removed a whole section on training and the associated external links and references. I have undone this removal. If there is a good reason to remove it, please note it here, and lets discuss what should be removed. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 19:15, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Good catch, Rocksanddirt. I noticed that the changes came from an anonymous IP and removed the information about the $120,000 fees for VT and the references to Gary Craig's articles on Voice Technology. If whoever did this wants to argue that Gary Craig's writings are off-topic just because he is the developer of EFT, that is not the case because Gary Craig was the first person ever to train with Roger Callahan in Thought Field Therapy VT and thus, his articles deserve to be cited. As for the fee for VT, that comes directly from the Callahan website. This is something Callahan openly advertises himself, so I found the attempt to delete it and suppress this information rather curious.--MonicaPignotti (talk) 15:22, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Infobox
I changed the infobox for the same reasons given here for EFT. Famousdog (talk) 14:20, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

The Scientism is Showing Here
This is unarguably one of the most one-sided pieces I've seen on Wikipedia. The fact that it is deemed part of a project called "Rational Skepticism" is, I suppose, a dead give-away as to the prejudice brought to the subject by those who originally authored the article.

In the past 20 or so years, there have been dozens of "convergences" between science and what is broadly lumped under the rubric of "spirituality" but which might better be thought of as philosophy. Quantum physicists like Fred Alan Wolf, Michio Kaku, and bioresearchers like Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton, to mention but a few, have been at the forefront of what could be the next advance in the study of science, namely the acknowledgment that there are phenomena that are outside the purview of the Scientific Method that are not less important or relevant for that fact. The Institute of Noetic Sciences has compiled mountains of research data pointing to the narrowness and myopia of the view that I think of as the religion of "Scientism" which appears to hold that anything that cannot be sensed by our shared five senses, measured by some instrumentality and quantified and compared in repeatable experience is by definition and laughably false.

It apparently never occurs to proponents of this fundamentalist view that most if not all the advances made by science in the past 200 years have started very much the same way: as seemingly heretical departures from the "known truth" of science which science ultimately had to accommodate or become itself obsolete and irrelevant.

Much of what TFT and its younger cousin EFT have to offer humanity is in fact documented and based on repeatable scientific experiment (see, e.g., the aforementioned Dr. Pert's book The Molecules of Emotion in which she carefully documents the measurable but subtle shifts in electrical energy fields surrounding the human body in a number of situations and settings that conventional scientists whose minds are made up would not even deign to consider valid experimentation.

My purpose here is not to defend TFT, though I will acknowledge that I am a user and practitioner of EFT with which I have had hundreds of personal experiences of success -- and a few "failures" -- but rather to point out that this article is simply grossly unfair and destined to remain so as long as it remains the province of scientists with an agenda to defend to sit in judgment of new potential horizons of human thought and consciousness that they deny only because they fail to fit neatly within their compartmentalized views of Reality. dshafer


 * Well, I disagree with most of that and if your "purpose here is not to defend TFT/EFT" and you haven't made any sensible suggestions for making this article better (which is what talk pages are for, not for your anti-rationalist ranting), why are you here? Do you have any concrete changes that you would like to make to the article to make it less "one-sided"? In my opinion it is only "one-sided" in the sense that "one side" has all the concrete evidence and logic on their side while the other has only people's subjective reports of how they feel "much better thank you" after tapping themselves happy (by the standards of which, a nice cup of tea is a "miracle cure"), but please, educate me. Finally, "scientism"? Is that supposed to be a perjorative? Why don't you hurl other insults at the editors of this article, like: "clever", "rational" or "handsome"... Famousdog (talk) 10:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

regarding review of trials -
The article needs to be payed for, but it can be read here: innersource.net/ep/images/stories/downloads/mechanisms.pdf

The whole framework of procedures is mentioned (p. 5) as "a common though unconventional procedure that is appearing in a variety of clinical formats, with "Thought Field Therapy" (TFT), the "Tapas Acupressure Technique" (TAT), and the "Emotional Freedom Techniques" (EFT) being among the most widely practiced." Hence this review is applicable for all of those entries.Pottinger&#39;s cats (talk) 15:18, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Per WP:FRINGE, we need to use independent source. Feinberg is a promoter of these "Energy Psychology" and is not an independent arbitrator of if it works or not. Yobol (talk) 22:22, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Again, this was a review of evidence published in a mainstream journal. RCTs published in mainstream journals have also demonstrated efficacy of this and related modalities, like, , http://www.hindawi.com/journals/drt/2012/257172/, , and http://tmt.sagepub.com/content/18/3/73Pottinger&#39;s cats (talk) 09:00, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
 * WP:FRINGE proponents should not be used as independent arbitrators of whether the fringe techniques work. Per WP:MEDRS, WP:WEIGHT, and WP:PSTS, we use secondary sources, not primary sources here.  If you have evidence from reliable sources that the broader psychology community has accepted these techniques, go right ahead, but they do not appear to have that currently, and so we cannot represent them as having such.  Yobol (talk) 17:25, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Thought Field Therapy: Introduction
The theory behind TFT is a mixture of concepts "derived from a variety of sources. Foremost among these is the ancient Chinese philosophy of chi, which is thought to be the “life force” that flows throughout the body". Callahan also bases his theory upon applied kinesiology and physics.

This should be added, because it explains the origins of Callahan's TFT theory and how he may have been inspired by other cultures, fields, and medical practices. As the introduction I think it should provide some background as to where TFT may have derived. Howac15 (talk) 06:53, 17 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I have made some minor copy edits. -- BullRangifer (talk) 04:03, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I am experiencing disruptive editing from user JZG. Information cited from "National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices"; is repeatedly deleted despite it being more than a reliable site. Can any other editors weigh in on this?

SAMSHA
An anon (actually almost certainly user:Inquiry201) is very keen to add this to the lede:
 * Thought Field Therapy is listed on SAMSHA National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP) as an effective practice for improving personal "resilience/self-concept, self-regulation, and reducting trauma and stressor-related disorders. Also, Thought Field Therapy is also listed for having promising outcomes affecting "depression and depressive symptoms; general functioning and well-being; phobia, panic, and generalized anxiety disorders and symptoms; and unspecified and other mental health disorders and symptoms.

I removed this per WP:UNDUE. It seems to me to be blatant special pleading since the article makes it quite clear that the therapy is entirely implausible and lacks credible evidence. The source proposed does not seem to be anything more than a directory with details submitted almost certainly by practitioners. The effect sizes are tiny (as is common for questionable therapies where the evidence is produced entirely by proponents).

Worse, the references on which the evaluation is based are a paper in International Journal of Emergency Mental Health, a journal published by OMICS Group; an unpublished manuscript; and Explore, the non-wonderful journal of credulous nonsense one of whose editors is Dean Radin. Guy (Help!) 08:17, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 9 March 2018
Dragonlark (talk) 19:14, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Thought Field Therapy has been found to be a research validated therapy for treating trauma and PTSD by the division of The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services known as SAMSA's National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP). See the following link: https://nrepp.samhsa.gov/ProgramProfile.aspx?id=60#hide1
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Upsidedown Keyboard (talk) 01:07, 10 March 2018 (UTC)


 * That link does not support the claim that TFT is validated, it is primary material by people vested in TFT. Guy (Help!) 13:06, 12 March 2018 (UTC)