Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a relatively new Alternative Medicine emotional therapy, developed in the mid 1990s. It is not at all like the practice of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, or any kind of conventional talk therapy. EFT has been described as acupuncture for the emotions, except that needles are not used – only the tapping of fingertips applied to specific acupuncture points to affect a change in the way a person feels about a previously stressful memory or situation. As such, EFT is best categorized in the new field of energy psychology. There is much current interest in EFT because of it growing reputation as a fast, simple and rather successful therapy that often succeeds with emotional problems that are non-responsive to years of traditional treatment.

For this reason, more scientific scrutiny is being cast on EFT, especially concerning its effectiveness. In this early phase of medical research, two very important projects have already investigated the ability of EFT to address phobias or irrational fears. When Steve Wells, an Australian psychologist, and his associates decided to study EFT, they chose to evaluate its clinical effect on specific phobias to small animals that are often universally distressing to humans (mice, rates, and insects such as spiders and cockroaches).

What is now being called the "The Wells Study" has been published in a leading peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Clinical Psychology. In this study, Wells and his group compared the effects of EFT against those of a standard deep breathing technique that is often suggested to control fears, such as those associated with small animals and insects. In this study, Wells suggested a deep breathing method that included identical reminder phrases and most other parts of the standard EFT protocol. Intentionally, the only difference between these two techniques was the fact that during EFT the participants tapped on meridian end points, while in the comparison treatment the subjects did not tap at all.

The Wells Study supports the idea that deep breathing, by itself, is a beneficial in treatment of small animal phobia; in fact, it was so successful that its results made it difficult for EFT to surpass it in the clinical results of this study. Even so, the clinical results of EFT were better than this simple and effective breathing technique, as determined by four of five measures used to evaluate beneficial effects on the body, while the differences between these two techniques were markedly better and significantly higher in a statistic analysis.

In the most important test to assess effectiveness of these two techniques, in which a measurement was made to determine how close each participant would walk up to their feared animal object after treatment, it was those who were treated by EFT who sustained their loss of fear and sense of comfort with that animal than those treated only with deep breathing, when retested at six and nine months post test treatment in the research study. In fact, those individuals who were less fearful immediately after being treated with EFT continued to be less fearful even after a prolonged time during which EFT was not used again to support or sustain that benefit. Further, all 35 participants received only a single 30-minute EFT therapy session, or a single 30-minute diaphragmatic breathing session. Neither group was retrained, re-treated or re-exposed to their treatment method before undergoing the six and nine month re-testing. This suggests the beneficial effects of EFT to reduce phobic fears of small animals is remarkably long-lasting.

The Wells study demonstrated that Emotional Freedom Technique is an effective and long-lasting treatment for small animal phobias, in spite of the therapy being applied once, for only 30 minutes.

Re-testing of the Wells Study

The scientific community is traditionally skeptical of new research information until this new data can be re-tested by a different laboratory and/or group, usually by attempting to reproduce the results of the first study. When reproduction of the initial test results can be obtained, it suggests that it was not merely luck, bias or factual manipulation that influenced the first results.

Thus, A. Harvey Baker, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Queens College, New York City, and his co-author, Linda Seigel, retested the Wells Study, closely matching and often making stricter the conditions of the Wells Study. Their study is entitled, "Can a 45-minute session of EFT lead to reduction of intense fear of rats, spiders and water bugs – a replication and extension of the Wells et al. (2003) laboratory study."

However, Dr. Baker applied even more stringent research controls than were used in the Wells Study. His research also included a non-treatment control group, against which comparison could be made; his study participants sat in a laboratory for 30 minutes either studying or reading magazines provided that did not deal with the fearful animals. Additionally, the study used a more common method to treat fears than is the deep breathing technique used in the Wells Study. The other fear treatment method closely resembled a nondirective counseling approach developed by Carl Rogers; they called it the Supportive Interview.

Of the 31 people in this new evaluation Baker-Seigel Study, three groups were randomly placed into an EFT, Supportive Interview, or resting group. This new evaluation process also included a feature in which the person testing each subject was "blind" to which group the person belonged. Dr. Baker did not instruct the EFT group to practice or use EFT again during the waiting interval before the re-testing would be done. Lastly, to increase the testing measure, instead of a six and nine month re-testing interval, the Baker-Seigel Study used an interval between the initial treatment and testing, and the final testing, of 1.38 years. In this way the final re-evaluation of longevity of benefits occurred at a point that was almost twice as long as used in the first Wells Study.

On almost all measures evaluated, the significant therapeutic effects of a single EFT therapy session persisted after a considerable time, and were clearly superior to therapeutic results achieved by the two comparison groups. The most striking aspect is that only a single EFT therapy session could still sustain its beneficial effects after 1.38 years – this is a rare achievement of few therapeutic interventions in the field of standard psychology.

The results of the independent Baker-Seigel Study, as well as the initial Wells Study, both suggest that EFT has both immediate and long-term effectiveness in treating small animal phobias, when independently studied in different parts of the world in which culture and custom are markedly different.