Tapping with EFT

EFT, do you take it serious, and if not, why not ?

There is an entry in Wikipedia which gives an unbiased report of EFT(Extracted on 12 March 08) . Three studies were done. Interesting is that in the second study, three groups who used EFT did better than the 4th group , who did something totally unrelated to EFT. This study is questioning the validity of the statement that tapping on meridians is doing the trick. Even more interesting is findings of study three where there is a statistically significant decrease of distress in subjects, which held up to the 6 months follow-up test. The point of this report is that EFT works but nobody knows exactly how. But does it really matter ? Call it pseudo science or witchcraft, if it helps people leading a normal life it can’t be all bad and is worth trying if everything else fails. See more for the full report of click on the site (Wikipedia)

Effectiveness
EFT has been the subject of three peer-reviewed publications as of 2007.The first study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2003 (indexed in the Medline database) and funded by the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, involved 35 patients with a phobia of small animals receiving a single treatment with EFT. The authors concluded that:The findings are largely consistent with the hypothesis that EFT can reduce phobias of small animals in a single treatment session. However, due to methodological limitations in the present study, firm conclusions about the efficacy of EFT must wait for confirmation from future studies.[1]This study seems to put EFT into the category of a “Probably Efficacious Treatment” (as opposed to “Well-Established Treatment”) for specific phobias according to the APA Division 12 criteria. However, the APA Division 12 has not officially classified EFT in this manner.The second study, published in The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice in 2003 (indexed in the PsycInfo database), was conducted by Waite and Holder on 119 University students who reported specific fears or phobias.[2] This study compared four groups: A group that received a single-round regular EFT; a second group that received the same treatment except that they tapped on points in the arm that are not part of the standard EFT protocol; a third group that received the same treatment except that they tapped on the corresponding meridian points on an inanimate object (a doll) and a fourth group that was asked to make a toy. The participants were asked to self-report their fears before and after treatment on a SUDS scale.The first three groups did statistically better than the fourth group, but there were no significant differences between the three tapping groups. That is, the groups that tapped on sham points and on the doll did just as well as the EFT group, but all three groups did better than the no-treatment group. Since the group that used the doll was not tapping on meridian points yet still benefited equally, the authors suggested this as a falsification of the theory that EFT works because of the body’s energy meridian system.The third study, published in Counseling and Clinical Psychology in 2005 (an erratically published journal not included in either the PsycInfo or Medline databases), a psychological test called the SA-45 was used to test the levels of psychological distress on 102 participants of an experiential Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) workshop and to examine the long-term effects. The SA-45 was given before the workshop, after the workshop, 1 month after the workshop, and 6 months after the workshop. There was a statistically significant decrease in all measures of psychological distress as measured by the SA-45 from pre-workshop to post-workshop which held up at the 6 month follow-up.[3]. This study, however, does not show that EFT in isolation yielded positive effects, and lacked valid controls.
Criticism
EFT has been labeled as pseudoscience in The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, based on what the journal describes as its lack of falsifiability, reliance on anecdotal evidence, and aggressive promotion via the Internet.[4] Gary Craig, the developer of EFT, has argued that tapping anywhere on the body will manipulate “energy meridians”. Skeptics have asserted that such an argument renders EFT untestable via the scientific method, and therefore a pseudoscience.[4][5] This argument is also addressed by the Waite and Holder paper, in which the participants tapped on a doll, rather than themselves. Waite and Holder have suggested that EFT’s successes are likely to stem from “characteristics it shares with more traditional therapies”, rather than manipulation of energy meridians via tapping.[2] A recent article in the Guardian suggested that the act of tapping parts of the body in a complicated sequence acts as a distraction from, and therefore can appear to alleviate the root distress.[6]