Reiki and energy healing

What it is

A family of practices in which a practitioner channels or manipulates a healing energy, generally with hands on or just above the recipient's body.

Reiki (霊気, "spiritual energy") is the best known. The practitioner acts as a conduit for a universal energy, directed through the hands in a sequence of positions, using symbols received during initiations called attunements. Practice is organised in three degrees, the third conferring the ability to attune others.

Therapeutic Touch is a related Western practice developed in a nursing context, in which the practitioner assesses and "unruffles" the patient's energy field, usually without physical contact.

Others in the family include Healing Touch, Pranic Healing, Quantum Touch and Johrei.

Where it came from

Reiki was developed by Mikao Usui in Japan in 1922, following what he described as a transformative experience during a twenty-one-day fast and meditation on Mount Kurama. He founded a society in Tokyo and taught until his death in 1926. His student Chūjirō Hayashi systematised the hand positions, and Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman treated by Hayashi's clinic, brought the practice to Hawaii in the late 1930s and to the wider West afterwards. Western Reiki descends almost entirely from her teaching, and differs in several respects from Japanese lineages.

Therapeutic Touch was developed in the early 1970s by Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, with the Theosophist Dora Kunz. It spread widely through nursing education, which matters: it entered hospitals through a professional curriculum rather than through the alternative-health market.

How it is done

Reiki: the recipient lies clothed while the practitioner places hands in a sequence of positions on or above the body, holding each for a few minutes, sometimes drawing symbols mentally.

Therapeutic Touch: the practitioner passes their hands a few inches above the body to assess the field, then makes sweeping movements to smooth or rebalance it.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the central claim has been tested directly, and the test is one of the best stories in the history of scepticism.

In 1996 Emily Rosa, then nine years old, designed an experiment for a school science fair. The reasoning was exact: Therapeutic Touch practitioners claim to detect a human energy field with their hands, so ask them to do it.

She seated practitioners at a table with a screen between them, through which they placed both hands palm-up. She flipped a coin, hovered her own hand a few inches above the practitioner's left or right hand accordingly, and asked which hand her hand was near. Twenty-one practitioners, most with years of experience, made 280 attempts.

They were correct 44 per cent of the time. Chance is 50.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April 1998, with her mother, a statistician and a physician as co-authors. Emily Rosa was eleven at publication and is generally identified as the youngest person to have published research in a major medical journal.

Practitioners objected on various grounds — that the setting was not therapeutic, that the child had no healing intent — but the design tests the specific claim being made, which is the ability to detect the field. If it cannot be detected under conditions where the answer cannot be inferred any other way, the assessment step of the practice has no basis.

The wider literature agrees. Systematic reviews of Reiki and touch therapies consistently find weak, inconsistent evidence, dominated by small trials with poor blinding and high risk of bias. No review has established an effect distinguishable from expectation and attention. Attempts to measure the energy have produced nothing.

And we can say why people nonetheless feel better, without any of it being fake. A Reiki session involves lying still for an hour, in a quiet room, receiving the undivided, unhurried, kindly attention of another person who believes they are helping — often with touch, which is therapeutically undersupplied in modern healthcare and demonstrably affects pain, anxiety and mood. Those are real inputs with real effects. What is not established is that anything is being transmitted.

Safety. The practice itself is non-invasive and direct harm is rare. The risk is the one this site returns to: treatment sought instead of, or delaying, something that would help. Reiki presented as a complement to care is a different proposition from Reiki presented as treatment, and the article on medical harm sets out where that line falls.

We cannot say practitioners are dishonest. Nearly all are sincere, and the Rosa experiment is notable partly because twenty-one of them volunteered to be tested by a child, which suggests they expected to pass.

Further reading

• Rosa, Rosa, Sarner and Barrett, "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch" (JAMA, 1998) — three pages, freely available, and a model of experimental design.
• Systematic reviews of Reiki by Lee and colleagues (2008) and vanderVaart and colleagues (2009).