Reconnective Healing

Founder's account and dating

An Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) summary states that Reconnective Healing (RH) was established in 1993 by Eric Pearl, a chiropractor, who described having an ability to connect with energy and work with it. A later peer-reviewed review dates its development more loosely to the early 1990s. The IONS summary also lists Pearl's 2001 Hay House book, titled The Reconnection, among its references. Dates for the method therefore rest on the founder's own account as relayed by these secondary sources, not on independent historical records.

The IONS summary reports Pearl's theory that the acupuncture meridian system of the body is enhanced and reconnected with so-called axiatonal lines, a grid system of the universe, allowing an influx of energy, light and information. A critical article by the physician Harriet Hall (2010) reports that, in Pearl's own published story, the term axiatonal lines came from a fortune teller he met at Venice Beach, California. These are claims about origin as told by Pearl and by a critic, and the sources reviewed do not verify them historically.

Spread through seminars and professional take-up

The method is taught through seminars and workshops run by The Reconnection, which a 2017 review describes as offering several levels of training. The review cites Pearl, by personal communication, as saying that more than 20,000 mainstream healthcare providers, including physicians, chiropractors, physiotherapists and nurses, have trained in RH across five continents. That figure comes from the founder, was not independently audited, and says nothing about how many of those people use the method in practice.

A 2013 trial states that all practitioners are trained by instructors following a prescribed syllabus that is the same worldwide. This indicates a single, centrally controlled curriculum, which the sources reviewed do not describe in further detail. The organisation's own pages could not be opened for this draft, so its account of its history and training was not checked at first hand.

Reconnective Healing and The Reconnection

The name Reconnective Healing is used in the research literature, where it is abbreviated RH. The IONS summary refers to the same practice as The Reconnection process, the title of Pearl's 2001 book, and the organisation that trains practitioners is called The Reconnection. The terms are used interchangeably in the sources reviewed, although the two names may carry different emphasis in the organisation's own materials, which were not opened.

Energy, light and information

Published studies quote the practice as being not just energy healing but a more comprehensive spectrum of healing composed of energy, light and information. The IONS summary uses the phrases reconnective frequencies and Reconnective Healing Frequencies for what practitioners say they work with. This wording distinguishes the method from other energy practices in how its proponents describe it. It is a statement of the founder's framework, and no source reviewed shows that such frequencies have been measured independently.

Biofield language in research

Researchers who study the method group it with biofield therapies. Rubik and colleagues (2015) describe the biofield as a proposed organising energy field of living systems, present it as an emerging area of study, and use energy medicine for interventions involving low-level signals, including those of energy healers. The 2017 RH review also discusses practitioners accessing environmental fields and entrainment, meaning synchronisation of resonant frequencies. These are hypotheses used to frame studies, not established mechanisms.

Setting and practitioner role

The IONS summary describes an attunement process performed once in a lifetime by a facilitator who never touches the person throughout the session, with the facilitator's hands held about 30 centimetres from the body. It states that the recipient is preferably lying on their back, with space for the facilitator to move around a bed or table, that the room should be free of music, incense and scents, and that a session can last between 10 and 60 minutes. It adds that further procedural detail is not widely published, since the technique is taught in workshops.

A 2013 trial describes the practice as mainly hands-off, with practitioners working with their hands to sense biofields, and notes that, unlike Reiki, it has no specific centring process. The practitioners in that trial were experienced instructors from The Reconnection teaching team.

What practitioners and recipients describe

The 2017 review reports that practitioners are taught to concentrate on hand sensations, which are described as strengthening as the hands move away from the body, like stretching a rubber band. Visible responses that practitioners attend to include fluttering of the eyes, rapid eye movement and twitching of the fingers or toes. The sources reviewed do not report what recipients themselves commonly experience, so no outcome should be expected from this description.

Claims made by the founder and practitioners

The IONS summary states that RH practitioners claim the technique acts physically as well as on emotional and mental states. Hall's 2010 critique reports that Pearl has described treating a wide range of serious conditions, naming cancers, AIDS-related diseases, epilepsy, chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis. These are the founder's and practitioners' claims. Hall states that they rest on testimonial evidence without blinded, controlled testing.

Uses that have actually been studied

The studies in the published literature are narrower than the claims. They examined limited shoulder movement with pain, autonomic nervous system markers such as heart rate variability in practitioners, and physiological responses in groups at workshops. No source reviewed reports a controlled study of RH in cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis or any other serious disease. The sources also do not document why people seek the practice in everyday life.

Randomised trial in restricted shoulder movement

The only randomised controlled trial identified is a 2013 study of adults with limited arm elevation. Participants were assigned to physical therapy, Reiki, RH, sham healing or no treatment, and most were blinded to which active or sham treatment they received. After a single 10-minute session, mean range of movement rose by 26 degrees with RH, 20 with Reiki, 12 with physical therapy, 0.6 with sham and 3 with no treatment. RH, Reiki and physical therapy each differed from sham, which did not differ from no treatment, on this measure.

Self-reported pain fell by 23.9 per cent with RH, 10.1 with Reiki, 11.5 with physical therapy, 15.4 with sham and 0 with no treatment. Sham treatment reduced pain significantly more than no treatment and did so as much as the active treatments, which the authors regarded as a placebo effect. Heart rate variability did not change. Ninety people were recruited and 78 completed the study. The trial tested one short session with no follow-up. It was funded by The Reconnection and Canyon Ranch, and the RH practitioners were instructors from The Reconnection.

Physiological studies of practitioners

A 2012 controlled study measured 50 experienced Reconnective Healers, 31 Reiki masters and 32 control participants during self-practice. Heart rate variability fell more in Reconnective Healers than in controls, which the authors read as reduced parasympathetic activity, contrary to their expectation that practitioners would be more relaxed. Finger blood perfusion rose by 6.5 per cent in Reconnective Healers and 13.7 per cent in Reiki masters relative to controls.

A 2014 systematic review of biofield practitioners' physiology found 22 eligible studies of 67 identified. It judged them of moderate to poor quality, found EEG changes inconsistent and not specific to biofield therapies, and noted that heart rate variability results suggested an aroused physiology for RH. It concluded that little robust evidence of unique physiological changes had emerged. These measures describe practitioner physiology, not benefit to recipients.

Integrative review and independent replication

A 2017 integrative review searched five databases to July 2016 and found five peer-reviewed RH papers: a single-person case study, two device-based workshop studies, the 2012 physiological study and the 2013 trial. Its authors said the studies were extremely varied in design and that firm conclusions about general effectiveness could not be reached. They called for blinding, control treatments and larger studies. They noted that gas discharge visualisation cameras used in some work lack a standardised basis for interpreting findings.

The review discloses that it and the 2012 and 2013 studies were partly funded by The Reconnection. The sources reviewed identify no independent replication, no trial in a condition other than restricted shoulder movement and no long-term follow-up. Searches for this draft covered PubMed (Reconnective Healing; Pearl with The Reconnection) and general web searches.

Reported harms and gaps in reporting

The 2017 review does not report adverse events associated with RH across the five studies it assessed. The 2013 trial text does not discuss adverse events or the reasons for its 12 dropouts. A lack of reported harms in small, short, single-session studies is not evidence that no harms occur, and the sources reviewed give no systematic harm data for repeated sessions or for people with serious illness.

Delay or replacement of care

The main concern raised in the sources is indirect. Hall (2010) argues that claims of treating serious conditions offer false hope and may lead people to forgo conventional care. That is a critic's judgement and no source reviewed documents a specific case. As with any practice that makes claims about serious illness, it should not delay or replace assessment or treatment that a doctor has advised, and urgent symptoms need prompt medical attention.

Training and regulation

The sources describe training through seminars run by The Reconnection to a single syllabus, with several levels, and give no external accreditation, professional register or code of ethics for practitioners. No statutory regulation or independent training standard was found in the sources reviewed, and requirements may differ by country. Consent, privacy and the right to pause or stop a session are not covered by the sources reviewed.

Critical commentary on claims and mechanism

Hall (2010), writing on the Science-Based Medicine site, argues that the claims rest on testimony, that no blinded, controlled test of the founder's claimed abilities had been done, and that Kirlian photography is not meaningful evidence. She attributes reported effects to psychological factors such as suggestion and misperception. The article predates the 2013 trial and the 2017 review and is one author's opinion, so it does not assess those later studies.

Limits of the published studies

The published work is small, short and partly funded by the organisation that teaches the method. Several measurements, such as imaging cameras, lack standardisation. Some reports appeared in a specialist journal rather than a mainstream medical one, and the authors of the 2017 review acknowledge that no mechanism is postulated for some findings. In the one randomised trial, sham treatment matched RH on pain, so the pain outcome cannot be attributed to the method itself.