Energy healing

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.

The most cited scientific test of energy healing was designed and carried out by a child. In 1998, Emily Rosa, then eleven years old, published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association testing practitioners of Therapeutic Touch, the system developed within nursing by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz, on a simple claim central to the practice: that a trained practitioner could detect the presence of another person's energy field with their hand, without seeing it, through a screen that blocked vision of the person's hand but not of the practitioner's own. Twenty-one experienced practitioners were asked, across repeated trials, to say which of their own two hands, held beneath the screen, was closer to the investigator's hand on the other side, and their success rate came out at almost exactly the level chance alone would predict, well below what the practitioners themselves had expected to achieve, a result the paper's authors, including Rosa's mother and a physician, argued undermined the specific mechanistic claim the therapy rests on regardless of whatever benefit patients report from the sessions themselves.

The study became unusually prominent partly because of Rosa's age at the time of the work and partly because it targeted a testable, falsifiable claim rather than the harder to test general notion of a subtle energy, and it is still cited on both sides of the debate: by critics as decisive evidence against the field-detection premise of Therapeutic Touch specifically, and by practitioners and defenders who argue the test measured only one narrow claim and that the therapy's reported benefits, chiefly relaxation and reduced anxiety, do not depend on that particular ability being real.