The Controversy Around Tapping Therapies
Tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), has become an increasingly popular alternative therapy technique. The practice involves gently tapping on specific acupuncture points on the body while focusing on a problem or negative emotion. Proponents claim that tapping can help relieve stress, reduce food cravings, improve sleep, and more. However, tapping remains controversial among some health professionals.
Understanding the Claims Behind Tapping
The theory behind tapping originated from the concept of energy medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Practitioners believe tapping helps restore balance in the body's energy system by stimulating meridian endpoints linked to certain emotions or sensations. For example, tapping under the eye may target grief while tapping on the side of the hand addresses anger.
During a tapping session, the client repeats verbal affirmations that relate to their issue, like saying "I deeply accept myself" while tapping. This aims to counteract negative thought patterns. The tapping purportedly sends signals to the amygdala and other parts of the limbic system involved in stress and emotional reactions.
Criticisms and Concerns About the Safety of Tapping
While many tapping enthusiasts rave about the technique, it still faces skepticism due to the lack of rigorous scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness for medical or psychological issues. Here are some of the main criticisms surrounding tapping:
- Limited research - Few large, well-designed studies confirm tapping works better than a placebo or other therapies for anxiety, PTSD, weight loss, addiction, pain relief, and more of its purported uses.
- Overreaching claims - Proponents often assert tapping can treat or cure a huge range of conditions from phobias to cancer without solid proof.
- Safety concerns - Tapping on sensitive meridian points could possibly disrupt the energy flow in harmful ways for certain individuals.
- Distraction from proven treatments - Seeking tapping instead of traditional care could delay improvement or allow conditions to worsen.
The Risks of Avoiding Conventional Medical Care
Practitioners typically market tapping as a complementary technique to reduce stress and negative emotions. However, critics express concern that some promoters inappropriately claim tapping can remedy physical illnesses and mental health disorders without proof.
This raises significant issues around ethical patient care. When presented as an alternative therapy, tapping practices may encourage people to avoid or delay science-backed treatments, such as:
- Counseling
- Psychiatric medications
- Surgery
- Chemotherapy
- Proven physiotherapies
Without these conventional interventions, conditions often worsen over time. Patients may lose opportunities for early treatment when the prognosis is better. This avoidance of proper medical care heightens the risks of permanent disability and even death in some cases.
The Lack of Reliable Evidence on Tapping
So why do claims about tapping persist despite the lack of large rigorous studies confirming its effectiveness and safety? A few factors help explain this disconnect:
The Allure of "Energy Healing"
Concepts like chi, meridians, and chakras appeal to many people's desire for therapy techniques grounded in ancient wisdom. Tapping meshes with a worldview of the body having an invisible energy system that modern medicine fails to appreciate.
However, science has yet to verify that this energy system even exists. And very few robust studies confirm tapping actually impacts any "life force energy" in ways that could influence wellbeing and health.
The Placebo Effect in Action
Like many complementary and alternative techniques, tapping may elicit short-term subjective improvements mainly thanks to the placebo effect and other non-specific mechanisms.
The meditative nature of tapping could have calming effects. Discussing problems brings catharsis. Receiving attention and human touch while tapping also aids relaxation. But these mechanisms likely drive most benefits - not any mysterious energy forces.
Anecdotal Evidence and Confirmation Bias
The spread of positive but anecdotal reports through tapping circles and social media bolsters confidence in its effectiveness. However, people commonly misinterpret natural fluctuations or regression to the mean in symptoms as proof their treatment worked.
Confirmation bias also leads individuals to remember and trust experiences that align with prior beliefs about tapping's powers while discounting evidence that contradicts them. This creates an impression tapping achieves incredible results despite a lack of statistical evidence.
Lack of Research Funding and Intervention Studies
Another reason few high quality studies exist is that large clinical trials on tapping cost significant time and money that the alternative therapy field lacks. Other kinds of research, like mechanistic studies probing tapping's effects on stress biomarkers, receive little funding support.
Absent government research funding for promising but unproven approaches, rigorous investigation and definitive answers lag behind anecdotal enthusiasm in the tapping space.
Recommendations on Tapping: Proceed with Caution
So where does this leave tapping? Is it an innovative stress relief technique backed by ancient wisdom or unsupported pseudoscience?
Based on the balance of available evidence, appropriate conclusions about tapping fall somewhere in the middle. Potential benefits may exist, but claims clearly race ahead of what current science validates.
Have Realistic Expectations About Effects
Rather than view tapping as a miraculous cure-all, expect that subjective stress or emotion relief serves as tapping's likely primary effect due to placebo, meditation, and relaxation mechanisms.
Tapping deserves further study, but more robust proof is necessary before truly deeming it therapeutic for most mental and physical conditions. Maintain perspective that, for now, it ranks as an unproven novel therapy.
Apply Tapping Mainly for Self-Care
Given uncertainties around efficacy and energy manipulation concerns, applying tapping methods only to oneself currently rates as the most prudent and ethically appropriate approach.
Using it daily as a self-care ritual to enhance overall wellness differs substantially from administering tapping clinically or instructing clients to tap for conditions like PTSD, cancer, infertility or other issues lacking evidence.
Don't Replace Proven Treatments with Tapping
Be very wary of any coach or practitioner recommending tapping to fix diagnosed psychological or medical problems before pursuing counseling, medications, needed surgeries and other clinically-indicated conventional therapies first.
Tapping remains experimental and should not replace or delay proven treatment options where mainstream best practices exist backed by robust data and consensus expert recommendations.
Use tapping as an add-on without forgoing standard care backed by stronger empirical support.
The Future of Research on Tapping
Better designed trials with larger sample sizes, recording of side effects, long term follow-ups, appropriate controls and standardized procedures would help elucidate the true effects of tapping on psychological and physiological parameters.
Measuring biomarkers like cortisol and heart rate variability as they change pre and post tapping sessions could uncover mechanisms and metrics to track assumed impacts on the proposed "energy system" underlying this alternative therapy.
Until quality evidence expands greatly, tapping lacks adequate scientific validation. For now, let the buyer beware and proceed carefully with tempered expectations.
FAQs
What exactly is tapping/EFT?
Tapping, also called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), involves gently tapping with the fingertips on specific parts of the body while mentally focusing on an issue or negative emotion. Proponents believe this taps into energy meridians to restore balance and treat conditions.
What benefits does research actually show for tapping therapy?
Limited evidence suggests tapping may help reduce subjective, self-reported distress, anger, cravings and some pains. But many overstate its scientifically validated abilities to truly “cure” medical diseases and mental illnesses.
Are there any risks to using tapping therapies?
No serious risks are known currently besides the opportunity cost of spending time/money on unproven tapping rather than mainstream healthcare. Critics argue tapping should not replace proven treatments. Doing so risks worsening medical conditions.
Can tapping really manipulate energy fields in the body?
There is zero credible evidence demonstrating that the energy meridians and chakras tapped during EFT actually exist. The origins rely on spiritual beliefs rather than science. So claims around physically altering energy involve pseudoscience.