In July 2012, ACEP submitted another application and was quietly informed four months later that this application had been approved. ACEP can now offer courses in energy psychology.

Why the reversal? In a word, evidence. While the APA no doubt did not miss the passion in the applicant’s convictions, its CE Committee was not persuaded by the empirical support ACEP presented in its earlier applications. In the four years between ACEP’s previous application and the one that was recently accepted, 39 of 39 studies or reports published in peer-reviewed journals investigating EFT or Thought Field Therapy (TFT) found positive clinical outcomes (Feinstein, 2012). The same literature search produced a total of 51 peer-reviewed papers, but only 12 of them had appeared in peer-reviewed journals prior to ACEP’s earlier application in August 2008.