Biofield Tuning

Eileen McKusick and the method's origins

The method is associated with Eileen Day McKusick. Her own website says she holds an MA in Integrative Education, that she has researched the effects of sound on the body since 1996, and that Biofield Tuning has trained more than 2,000 students worldwide since 2010. These are statements from the founder's organisation and were not checked independently. The method's website describes its Biofield Anatomy Map as a compilation of more than 25 years of her observations, and the pages reviewed give no further account of how the method developed.

Publications and the research institute

The founder's website lists a book, Tuning the Human Biofield, and a second book, Electric Body, Electric Health, published by St. Martin's Press in January 2021. It says she developed weighted tuning forks and related accessories, and it describes the Biofield Tuning Institute as an organisation that conducts grant-funded, IRB-approved, peer-reviewed studies. The published papers reviewed here list McKusick as an author with an institute affiliation, so the method's developer has taken part in its published research.

The biofield concept before the method

The word biofield is older than the method. Rubik and colleagues (2015) report that it was coined by an ad hoc committee of the US National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine at a 1992 conference in Chantilly, Virginia, which defined it as a massless field, not necessarily electromagnetic, that surrounds and permeates living bodies and affects the body. The same paper traces earlier field-based ideas in biology, naming work by Alexander Gurwitsch and Robert Becker. The sources reviewed do not say whether Biofield Tuning draws on that earlier literature directly.

Biofield as a term

Rubik and colleagues use 'biofield therapy' for healer-based interactions with biofields within and around living systems, and they distinguish it from 'energy medicine', which they describe as the application of extremely low-level signals to the body. They call biofield science nascent. The 1992 definition says the field is not necessarily electromagnetic, whereas the method's website describes working with the body's electrical system and the magnetic field around it. None of the sources reviewed shows that a field of the kind described has been measured.

Biofield Tuning as a named method

Biofield Tuning is the name of one specific method, and the research papers abbreviate it as BT. It is not a general term for sound work with tuning forks. Practitioners describe areas of resistance, turbulence or dissonance in the biofield. These are terms internal to the method and not measured biomedical constructs. The inter-rater study uses the word perturbations for the locations that practitioners identified.

Related labels

The published papers variously call the method biofield-based sound healing, distance healing and virtual care, and the title of the anxiety study uses the phrase sound healing. That phrase covers a wider and loosely defined group of practices. Findings about other sound practices should not be applied to this method, and the reverse also holds.

A typical session

The method's website says a client lies fully clothed on a treatment table while the practitioner activates tuning forks and scans the biofield, starting about six feet away. The practitioner listens for changes in the sound of the fork and feels for resistance and turbulence. Where such an area is found, the fork is held there so that, in practitioners' explanation, the body's organising intelligence can use a steady, coherent vibration to correct itself. Sessions can also be delivered remotely, and a series of three weekly sessions is usually recommended to begin.

Forks and research protocols

The pages reviewed do not give fork frequencies. The founder's site says she developed weighted forks. In the inter-rater study, practitioners used an activated 174 Hz unweighted fork to comb four sites per volunteer. In the 2023 anxiety study, five certified practitioners gave three weekly one-hour sessions over a month by video call. These are research protocols and not a standard session.

Training pathway

The method's training has four levels that must be completed in succession: Foundations, Practitioner, Advanced and Mastering Artistry. The site says that after the second level a person has the knowledge needed to open a practice. It names physicians, nurses, psychotherapists, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, Reiki practitioners and coaches as people who add the method to existing work. The page does not state training hours, prerequisites beyond the sequence, or which body certifies practitioners.

Claims made by the method's organisation

The method's website presents it as supporting resilience, balance and awareness. It also describes physical, mental and emotional problems as dissonance that the method can alleviate and even eradicate, while acknowledging that some conditions respond well and others less so. These are statements by the organisation that teaches the method. They are not research findings and are not specific to any condition or outcome.

Uses that have been studied

The published outcome studies concern anxiety. The 2023 feasibility study recruited adults with moderate to high anxiety on the GAD-7 scale (score of 10 or above) and described them as meeting criteria for generalised anxiety disorder, and a companion paper reports what participants said spontaneously about their sessions. The inter-rater study concerned the assessment procedure and not any treatment outcome. None of the sources reviewed studied pain or any other condition.

One-group anxiety feasibility study

A one-group, mixed-method study delivered over video call during the COVID-19 pandemic enrolled 15 adults with a GAD-7 score of 10 or above. Five certified practitioners gave three weekly one-hour sessions across a month. Two participants dropped out after one session, an attrition of 13.3%. In intention-to-treat analyses, scores on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, a negative affect scale and the Perceived Stress Scale were lower afterwards (p < 0.001 for each). The authors call the method feasible and say the data will be used to power a randomised trial.

There was no comparison group, so the study cannot separate an effect of the method from expectation, time, attention or natural change in anxiety. The authors' description of the reductions as clinically significant is their own wording.

Participant experiences

A qualitative paper from the same pilot reports 30-minute interviews with the 12 participants who completed them (13 completed the quantitative measures). Participants were surprised by how much they felt and by changes they heard in the forks. They commented on the accuracy of the practitioners' perceptions and described positive shifts in how they saw themselves and their surroundings. These are self-reports from a small sample and do not test whether the practitioners' perceptions were accurate.

Inter-rater agreement on the assessment

Three practitioners each identified the locations of the four or five strongest perturbations along four sites for the same ten adult volunteers, using a 174 Hz unweighted fork. Agreement within two inches was 33%, and a Monte Carlo analysis supported the conclusion that agreement was poor. The authors note that the procedure is incompletely understood and that an earlier assessment may affect later ones. The method's website reports that the work was funded by a foundation grant and that its result led the founder to prioritise practitioner training.

What has not been found

Searches of PubMed for biofield tuning with tuning fork, for the founder's name with the method name, and for tuning-fork therapy systematic reviews returned two, three and no records respectively. They identified no randomised controlled trial and no systematic review of this method. The method's website says a three-year study with 60 volunteers and a control group is funded, and its status was not verified here.

Status of the biofield concept

The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states, on its Reiki page, that there is no scientific evidence supporting the existence of the energy field thought to play a role in Reiki. That statement concerns Reiki and not Biofield Tuning, but it indicates how the underlying idea is viewed by a national agency. A 2014 review of trials of non-contact biofield therapies (external qigong, Healing Touch, Johrei, Reiki and Therapeutic Touch) found 18 higher-quality trials, 12 of which reported at least one significant primary outcome. Its authors said the pilot nature of the trials precluded robust conclusions. Biofield Tuning was not among the therapies reviewed.

A 2014 systematic review of physiological measurements in biofield practitioners found 22 eligible studies of moderate to poor quality and little robust evidence of unique physiological changes in the healing state.

Design limits and independence

The studies of the method are small, have no control group and rely on self-report. The anxiety study used certified practitioners of the method, and McKusick is an author of all three papers, which carry affiliations with the Biofield Tuning Institute and a research initiative that worked with it. Funding was not stated in the records reviewed except for the inter-rater study, which the method's website says had a foundation grant. These facts do not show bias, but the evidence is not independent of the method's organisation.

Cautions published by the method's organisation

The organisation publishes a cautions and guidance document (version 1.3, 2024). It says the content rests on anecdotal experience and not on organised research, and it advises asking a doctor if uncertain. It lists active cancer, end of life, acute or advanced illness, pregnancy, electrical medical implants, recent concussion, controlled seizures, morbid obesity and metal toxicity as circumstances for caution. It advises avoiding firm pressure with weighted forks over large varicose veins, recent fractures and dental anomalies. Much of the document explains these cautions through a belief that sessions trigger a detoxification response, a view that the sources reviewed do not test.

Medication, mental health and care boundaries

The same document suggests that clients work with their prescribing provider to monitor medication needs and that practitioners work as part of a support team for severe or long-term depression and addiction. It says forks may interfere with electrical implants and advises waiting at least three months after a significant head injury before work on or near the head. It reports that very few adverse reactions have been noted in group audio sessions, without giving numbers. The published studies reviewed here, as abstracts, do not report adverse-event data. A session does not replace assessment or treatment of anxiety, new symptoms or any urgent condition.

Training and regulation

Certification is offered by the method's own organisation, and the training page reviewed does not state hours, a certifying body or any external accreditation. No statutory regulation or independent training standard for the method was found. Some people who add the method to their work belong to other professions, and any register or code of ethics of those professions applies to that wider work and not to the method itself.