The famous palmists across the world have considered palmistry as the science which is used only to predict the happenings of future. It is not a miraculous science. According to their opinion, it is easy to avoid an accident if its prediction is done before. If you know about the hurdles coming in your path before you start your journey, then one can reach the destination safely. But, skeptics are completely in disagreement with this argument and they include palmistry in the list of techniques called cold reading.

Palmistry - Relationship with Science

Scientists are completely against the reference of palmistry as a science. They argue that science is a branch of knowledge based on a set of relevant principles which can be verified anywhere in the standard conditions. But, the rules of palmistry are not same everywhere and for everyone. Hence, it cannot be referred as a science.

It is said that many claims about the longevity were found false in the study of British pathologists who examined the hands of 100 dead bodies in a hospital mortuary. This study supported the fact that the life line has no relation with the longevity of a person.

A study by Dr.Joan Coates, a former wall-street broker, compared the profit of the traders with their finger-length for the period of 20-months. They found that the length of ring finger was correlated with the success of the stockbrokers. A number of papers were published in 1970’s to 1980’s showing a correlation between palmer creases and pathologies of various diseases like trisomy, intrauterine methadone exposure, leprosy etc. But, these studies were criticized widely and were not considered useful for medical diagnosis.

Criticism of Palmistry

Critics include palmists on the list of psychics who practice a technique called cold reading. According to them, it is a technique based on wild guesses used by psychics or fortune-tellers to tell the details of a person. The other cold-reading techniques include techniques like shot-gunning, the Forer effect etc. They argue that a practiced cold reader can quickly obtain a lot of information about a person by analyzing the body language, age, clothing, fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, family background, place of birth of a person etc. Then, they quickly reinforce the facts by relating their guesses to the happenings of the life of the subject.

The widely accepted researches establish a connection between lines on a palm and a person’s character. Palmistry can therefore be called as a statistical technique of character analysis based on few widely observed trends. But, there is no conclusive data to support a relationship between lines on a palm and life expectancy.

Palmistry - the ancient art of telling fortune through the hand