Haptotherapy and science

Haptotherapy is a relatively new therapy with little sound scientific research to substantiate its effectiveness on health and well being of the clients. Unbiased and well-controlled research is sorely needed. In this article, a few research-related topics will be discussed with regard to haptotherapeutic treatment. The five topics to be discussed, include, measurement methods, research designs, quality assessment of haptotherapeutic research, (mis-)use of statistical analysis and meta-analysis.

Measurements used to evaluate health effects from haptotherapy must be reproducible and objective. These are prerequisites for reliable measurements. But the most important condition is that the measurement is valid, i.e. it measures what it is meant to measure.

Several research designs are available to investigate the effects of haptotherapy. Quasiexperimental designs can be used if randomization is not possible as is the case in most field experiments. The most adequate experimental design is the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) with randomized intervention and control groups. Thus far, only one RCT has been conducted in the near past (Van den Berg et al, 2006).

In the final two sections, the use of correlations and the advantages of meta-analysis are discussed.

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