Energy healing is a broad family of practices founded on the belief that a subtle life-energy flows through the body, that illness and distress arise when this energy is blocked, depleted or unbalanced, and that a practitioner can restore health by channeling, manipulating or rebalancing it, often through the hands, held on or near the body, and sometimes at a distance. The idea of a vital energy pervading and animating the living body is very old and appears across many cultures under different names, the qi of Chinese thought, the prana of the Indian traditions, and others, and modern energy healing draws, often loosely, on these older conceptions. Contemporary forms include Reiki, which originated in early twentieth-century Japan and in which the practitioner is understood to channel a universal healing energy through the hands; therapeutic touch, developed within nursing; and numerous other modalities, alongside the ancient laying on of hands practised in religious healing.
Energy healing is widely practised within the contemporary complementary and alternative health field and is valued by many who receive it for the relaxation, comfort and sense of care it provides. Its central claims, however, the existence of the specific healing energy it posits, and the practitioner's ability to detect and manipulate it, are not supported by scientific evidence: controlled studies have generally failed to find effects beyond those attributable to relaxation, attention, expectation and the placebo response, and the postulated energy field has not been demonstrated. The scientific and medical consensus is accordingly that energy healing has not been shown to have specific therapeutic effect on disease, while acknowledging that the caring attention and relaxation involved may bring genuine subjective comfort. The practice thus sits at the contested boundary between traditional and religious conceptions of a vital force, the real value people find in attentive care, and the evidentiary standards of modern medicine.