Energy Healing

Vital-force and field concepts

Ideas of an energy or force that animates living bodies recur in several traditions. A 2015 review by Rubik and colleagues cites qi in Chinese medicine, ki in Japanese medicine and prana in Ayurveda as terms that practitioners draw on, traces the notion of a vital force in European science to the 1600s, and says experimental electrophysiology had displaced it in biology by 1850. Rosa and colleagues compare the human energy field of Therapeutic Touch with the magnetic fluid proposed by Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century, and say aspects of mesmerism were revived in the nineteenth century by Theosophy. That comparison comes from a review critical of Therapeutic Touch and does not establish a continuous lineage.

Named methods in the twentieth century

In a World Religions and Spirituality Project entry, Justin Stein dates Usui Mikao's founding of the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai in Tokyo to April 1922 and his death to 1926, and notes gaps in early documentation. Hawayo Takata studied with Hayashi Chūjirō in 1935 and 1936, took the practice to Hawaii, and by 1951 was teaching on the North American mainland. A separate entry by Beeler and Jonker dates the Reiki Alliance to 1982 and the return of Reiki to Japan to 1985, where Stein gives 1984. It says Western Reiki underwent conceptual change under Takata and now has hundreds of styles.

Rosa and colleagues state that Therapeutic Touch was conceived in the early 1970s by Dolores Krieger, a nursing faculty member at New York University, with Dora Kunz, president of the Theosophical Society in America from 1975 to 1987, regarded as its co-developer. Krieger first named prana as the active agent, and the method later became linked to Martha Rogers's nursing theory that people are energy fields. Anderson and Taylor describe Healing Touch as a biofield therapy that arose in nursing in the late 1980s.

The term biofield and institutional adoption

Rubik and colleagues report that the term biofield was proposed in 1992 by an ad hoc committee of practitioners and researchers convened by the newly established Office of Alternative Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health, at a conference in Chantilly, Virginia, to group diverse energetic healing practices under shared terminology. In 1998 Rosa and colleagues reported proponents' claims that more than 100,000 people had been trained in Therapeutic Touch and that it was taught in over 100 colleges and universities in 75 countries. These are proponents' figures, cited by critics and not independently checked here.

Energy healing, energy medicine and biofield

The sources reviewed give no single standard definition of energy healing. Rubik and colleagues use energy medicine for the application of extremely low-level signals to the body, including energy healer interventions and bioelectromagnetic device-based therapies, and define the biofield as a massless field, not necessarily electromagnetic, said to surround and permeate living bodies. They also call the biofield a metaphor that guides research. In clinical research, biofield therapies is used for external qigong, Healing Touch, Reiki and Therapeutic Touch, as in the 2023 reporting guidelines by Hammerschlag and colleagues.

Usage by a UK practitioner register

The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) in the United Kingdom uses Healing as a discipline name with its own core curriculum, separate from its Reiki curriculum. The Healing curriculum describes the practice as the transmission or facilitation of a natural healing energy and lists the healer as a channel, facilitator or conduit. This records the register's framing and is not a tested mechanism. Rubik and colleagues add that local and distant healing are often performed by the same practitioner, for example in Reiki, so touch and non-touch methods are not clean categories.

Distinct methods under one label

The label covers methods with different histories and theories. Reiki, Therapeutic Touch and Healing Touch have documented twentieth-century founders and organisations, while external qigong is grouped with them in research reviews. Similar vocabulary does not show that the methods are equivalent, and this page does not describe Reiki or qigong in detail.

Hands on or near the body

The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) describes Reiki as a practice in which practitioners place their hands lightly on or just above a person, with the goal of directing energy to help facilitate the person's own healing response. A 2014 review by Hammerschlag and colleagues treated trials that used only nonphysical contact as a separate group, which shows that some biofield methods are delivered without touch. Rosa and colleagues report that by 1998 nearly all Therapeutic Touch practitioners used only the non-contact form, although the method as first developed involved touch.

Steps described for Therapeutic Touch

Summarising published practice guides, Rosa and colleagues describe three steps. In centring, the practitioner focuses on the intent to help. In assessment, the hands sweep over the body from about 5 to 10 centimetres away to sense changes. In intervention, the hands are said to repattern the energy field by removing congestion or replenishing depleted areas. This is one described method, and other biofield methods differ.

Training content and boundaries

The CNHC core curriculum for Healing lists learning outcomes that include attunement, focusing, intention and centring, relaxation and meditation for the healer's own development, informed consent, confidentiality, professional boundaries, and the importance of not diagnosing or making curative promises. Typical session length, intake procedures and what recipients experience are not documented in the sources reviewed, so this page does not describe them.

Claims by practitioners and founders

Rosa and colleagues report that Therapeutic Touch practitioners claim to treat many medical conditions by manipulating a human energy field, and they quote a 1995 interview in which the method's founder said there should be no limitation on what healing can be accomplished. The CNHC curriculum for Healing takes a narrower position. It says research is minimal and mostly indicates a relaxation response, that anecdotal reports describe a sense of wellbeing, peace and stillness, and that some people experience a connection to the spiritual or transpersonal. It applies only to healing that makes no claim to a specific outcome that cannot be substantiated.

Uses that have been studied

NCCIH says Reiki has been studied for pain, anxiety and depression. Reviews of biofield therapies more broadly have examined pain intensity, anxiety in hospitalised people, behavioural symptoms in dementia, and fatigue and quality of life in people with cancer. A 2026 scoping review examined touch-based, biofield and hypnosis interventions for pain in conditions such as fibromyalgia, temporomandibular disorders, knee osteoarthritis and chronic back pain. These are research targets. The sources reviewed do not document why people seek energy healing in everyday life.

Reviews covering several biofield therapies

A 2010 best-evidence synthesis by Jain and Mills reviewed 66 clinical studies of biofield therapies such as Reiki, Therapeutic Touch and Healing Touch. The authors rated study quality as medium overall. They reported strong evidence for reduced pain intensity in pain populations, moderate evidence for pain in hospitalised and cancer populations, moderate evidence for reduced negative behavioural symptoms in dementia and for anxiety in hospitalised people, and equivocal evidence for fatigue and quality of life in cancer. These are the authors' own synthesis categories, not GRADE certainty ratings, and the review predates later trials.

A 2014 systematic review by Hammerschlag and colleagues identified 90 randomised trials of biofield therapies in humans, of which 28 (1,775 participants) used only nonphysical contact. Ten were excluded for low quality, and twelve of the remaining 18 reported at least one statistically significant beneficial primary outcome. The authors state that the pilot nature of these trials, shown by low sample sizes, precludes robust conclusions, and the trials varied in conditions, treatment duration and control groups. A 2023 reporting guideline was developed partly because reviews had called for more transparent reporting of such trials.

A recent scoping review on pain

A 2026 scoping review of 14 studies with 1,001 patients grouped touch-based interventions, biofield therapies and hypnosis for pain. It reported potential improvements with touch-based and biofield approaches, but said heterogeneity and variable quality limit definitive conclusions and that safety and effectiveness evidence remains preliminary. The abstract does not separate biofield findings from the other approaches.

Reiki trials and reviews

The Cochrane review by Joyce and Herbison, with searches to November 2014, found three randomised trials of Reiki in adults, with subgroups of only 25 people with anxiety, 17 with depression and 20 with either. Results were reported narratively and showed no evidence that Reiki was beneficial or harmful in this population, with unclear or high risk of bias in most domains. The authors concluded that evidence was insufficient.

A 2022 systematic review of 14 randomised placebo-controlled trials of Reiki for mental health symptoms in adults reported a greater effect than placebo for some outcomes. The authors graded certainty as high for clinically relevant stress and depression, moderate to high for anxiety, and low to moderate or low for other outcomes, while noting few studies in each area, some concern about risk of bias in most trials, and inconclusive findings. The two reviews differ in date and scope and reach different conclusions. NCCIH states that Reiki has not been clearly shown to be effective for any health-related purpose, that most research has not been of high quality, and that results have been inconsistent.

Tests of the energy field and practitioner physiology

The most direct test of the central claim of Therapeutic Touch was a blinded experiment reported in JAMA in 1998. Twenty-one practitioners with 1 to 27 years of experience tried to say which of their hands the investigator's unseen hand hovered above, and were correct in 123 of 280 trials (44%), close to chance. The authors concluded that practitioners could not detect the field. The experiment was designed and run by a sixth-grade student, and its authors were affiliated with groups critical of Therapeutic Touch. It tested field detection only, not clinical outcomes or other methods.

A 2014 systematic review of 22 studies that measured physiology in biofield practitioners during healing found moderate to poor study quality, inconsistent EEG changes not specific to biofield therapies, and heart-rate-variability changes for some methods but none for Reiki or Therapeutic Touch. The authors found little robust evidence of unique physiological changes. NCCIH states that no scientific evidence supports the existence of the energy field thought to play a role in Reiki, whereas Rubik and colleagues describe biofield science as an emerging field that offers a basis for further research.

Limits of the evidence base

Across the reviews cited, the main limits are small pilot-sized trials, varied conditions, treatment schedules and comparators, and few studies in each area. Reviews by researchers active in the field and the Cochrane review reach different conclusions. The sources reviewed do not allow a verdict on energy healing as a whole, and a result for one method, condition or outcome should not be carried over to another.

What the sources report about harms

NCCIH states that Reiki has not been shown to have harmful effects, and the Cochrane review found no evidence that Reiki was harmful or beneficial in adults with anxiety or depression. Neither statement shows that harm does not occur. The Cochrane review rested on three small trials with unclear or high risk of bias, and the sources reviewed contain no systematic data on adverse events across energy healing methods or on the consequences of relying on it instead of conventional treatment.

Care boundaries in practitioner standards

The CNHC core curriculum for Healing, published in December 2024, expects registrants to recognise when a medical referral is essential and when healing may not be appropriate or helpful alongside other care. It lists pacemakers, diabetes, epilepsy, mental health issues and the effects of medication or medical treatments as contraindications or areas of concern, without giving reasons. It also covers informed consent, including for children and people with limited capacity, and the importance of not diagnosing or making curative promises. These are one UK register's training standards.

Training and regulation

For the Healing discipline, the CNHC curriculum sets a minimum of 200 hours of total qualification time, including 100 hours of guided learning and at least 16 hours of supervised practice, and states that there are no regulated qualifications for the healing sector. Applicants for CNHC registration must have completed training that meets the relevant core curriculum. Equivalent minimum levels are given for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland and Scotland. Requirements differ by country, and the sources reviewed do not cover statutory regulation or other jurisdictions.

Complementary use and when to seek care

The CNHC curriculum frames healing as a complementary therapy. This information is educational and is not individualised medical advice. Persistent, worsening or alarming symptoms need assessment by a qualified health professional, and prescribed treatment should not be stopped or delayed on the basis of an energy healing session.