American Health & Medical Research Association
Energy & alternative therapies

Reiki’s hardest problem is who delivers the fake version

In most sham-controlled Reiki trials the fake session comes from someone untrained, which shapes what the results can mean; here is what the strongest trials found.

By the Health Research USA editorial team

Published Last updated October 2026

Written from the sources listed below; links checked October 2026. It touches on medicines, doses or health conditions and has not yet been reviewed by a licensed clinician, so use it to prepare for a conversation with yours. How we research and review

Sources27, listed below Reading time16 minutes
On this page
  1. What Reiki Holds, in Its Own Terms
  2. The Fake Session Problem Specific to Reiki
  3. What the Best-Controlled Trials Found
  4. What the Reviews Say, and Why They Disagree
  5. Hospitals, Credentials and a Church's Position
  6. The Harm Record, Stated Plainly
  7. Grading the Claims
  8. The Takeaway

In a trial at an outpatient chemotherapy center, 189 patients were randomly assigned to one of three things during their infusions: a Reiki session, a sham session made to look like Reiki, or ordinary care. Patients who got Reiki reported more comfort and well-being afterward. So did patients who got the sham. The ordinary-care group did not change.

The nursing researchers who ran it, from Sonoma State University, drew a conclusion that fits much of the Reiki literature. What helped, they wrote, was a nurse giving one-on-one support, “with or without an attempted healing energy field.” The benefit was real enough to measure. What produced it is the open question.

That question is unusually hard to answer for Reiki, and the reason is built into how most of its trials are designed. This article explains that design problem, then reports what the best-controlled trials and the major reviews found, graded claim by claim on the five-verdict scale this collection uses. It also covers what Reiki holds in its own terms, what training levels and registries certify, a church’s institutional position, and the harm record, which is short.

What Reiki holds, in its own terms

On a page last updated in December 2018, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health explains that Reiki practitioners rest their hands gently on a person or hold them just above the body, aiming to direct energy that supports the person’s own healing. NCCIH describes the practice as based on an Eastern belief in an energy that supports the body’s innate healing abilities.

Accounts of its origin differ. A 2009 document from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops says Reiki was invented in Japan in the late 1800s by Mikao Usui, who was studying Buddhist texts. A 2022 review by psychologists at Bond University in Australia places its development at the end of the 19th century, with Usui of Kyoto. The background section of a 2015 Cochrane review calls Reiki a 2,500-year-old treatment, a figure that matches neither account and is best read as the practice’s own lore.

Becoming a practitioner is described in the practice’s own vocabulary. The bishops’ document says a student must receive an initiation, or attunement, from a Reiki Master, and that there are said to be three levels of attunement, with some teachers adding a fourth. A 2026 review from researchers at the University of Arizona and elsewhere describes the practitioner’s role as a passive channel for a healing energy. The UK’s voluntary register for complementary practitioners lists person-to-person attunement, also called initiation or reiju, among its training requirements.

On the energy itself, NCCIH is direct: “There’s no scientific evidence supporting the existence of the energy field thought to play a role in Reiki.” That is a statement about the explanation. It does not decide whether a session leaves someone feeling better, which is a separate question and one trials can test. Keeping those two apart is the only way to read the research fairly.

The fake session problem specific to Reiki

To learn whether Reiki does anything beyond touch, attention and a quiet half hour, a trial needs a convincing fake. The general argument over what a fake treatment can and cannot prove is made at length in the acupuncture piece. Reiki has a version of that argument all its own.

A 2026 scoping review in Complementary Therapies in Medicine, by Baldwin of the University of Arizona’s physiology department, with co-authors from the City University of New York and University Hospitals Cleveland, counted the designs. Of 154 Reiki studies the reviewers screened, only 35, or 22 percent, were randomized trials with a sham Reiki group that met their criteria.

In 28 of those 35, the sham copied the Reiki protocol except that the person giving it had no Reiki training. In 12 of those 28, the sham group itself improved significantly. In the 6 trials where the sham giver had some connection to Reiki, only one showed a sham effect.

The 22 percent figure matters too. Studies without a sham arm compare Reiki with usual care, no treatment or another therapy, and those comparisons cannot fully separate Reiki from the attention that comes with it.

Consider what that standard design means. A patient lying with eyes closed can be kept from knowing which session they got. The person standing over them cannot. The trained practitioner believes they are channeling healing energy, and the untrained stand-in knows they are not. Any difference in results could come from the energy, or from differences in confidence, warmth, expectation and care that no protocol fully scripts.

The review’s authors read their pattern as placebo effects showing up most when the sham closely resembles Reiki and its giver has no link to the practice. Someone skeptical could read the one-in-six figure as a sign that people who know Reiki deliver a fake differently. The data cannot tell those readings apart. It is worth knowing who is reading: Baldwin co-wrote a 2023 reporting guideline for biofield trials, and one co-author is first author of an evaluation of a Cleveland hospital system’s Reiki program.

What the best-controlled trials found

Two trials did the most to separate Reiki from everything around it, and both came out the same way.

Fibromyalgia, 2008. University of Washington researchers randomized 100 adults with fibromyalgia in Seattle into four groups, crossing who delivered the session, a Reiki master or an actor, with whether the session used direct touch or no touch at all. Sessions ran twice a week for eight weeks, with follow-up to week 20. Participants, data collectors and analysts were all blinded. Neither Reiki nor touch affected pain or any secondary outcome, and the four groups looked nearly identical throughout. The design also tested touch on its own terms: had touch helped, the two touch arms would have pulled ahead, and they did not.

The actor arm uses the untrained-stand-in design described above, whose usual worry is a misleading positive result. Here there was no difference to explain.

Chemotherapy comfort, 2011. The Sonoma State trial described at the top found that sham matched Reiki. The measured comfort gain was genuine. It just did not belong to Reiki specifically.

A 2025 trial from a Florida State University lab adds a newer data point. It randomized 164 adults with knee osteoarthritis to Reiki, a sham version the authors called Feiki, mindfulness meditation or a waitlist, with four weekly 30-minute sessions. Reiki beat the waitlist and mindfulness beat the sham. Clinically meaningful improvement was reported by 55 percent in the Reiki and mindfulness groups, against 20 percent with the sham and 13 percent on the waitlist. The published summary, however, does not report a direct statistical test of Reiki against the sham, so it cannot yet be read as Reiki beating a fake.

Smaller trials tend to land differently. A recent run of single-center studies, many from Turkey, report Reiki outperforming sham on short-term pain or anxiety, including a 2022 trial of 159 patients before upper digestive endoscopy and a 2026 trial of 60 patients on mechanical ventilation in intensive care. Both were single-blind, and in the ventilator trial the sham was given by a person with no Reiki certification and no intent to transmit energy. That is the 28-of-35 design again.

An early systematic review, from Lee, Pittler and Ernst at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, gathered nine randomized trials in 2008, including one showing no effect on the pain of diabetic nerve damage. It found the trial data for any single condition scarce, flaws common, and the evidence insufficient to call Reiki an effective treatment for anything.

What the reviews say, and why they disagree

Cochrane’s 2015 review of Reiki for depression and anxiety, with searches through November 2014, found three eligible trials. The relevant subgroups held 25 people with anxiety, 17 with depression and 20 with one or the other. The reviewers found no evidence that Reiki was either beneficial or harmful in this group, and concluded the evidence was insufficient to say whether it helps people over 16 with these conditions. An inconclusive Cochrane verdict is the ordinary outcome for treatments of every kind, as this collection’s article on evidence verdicts documents, so that result says more about the trials than about Reiki.

Later reviews split along a predictable line. A 2022 review from Jena University Hospital in Germany covered 21 studies with 1,375 cancer patients across Reiki, therapeutic touch, healing touch and polarity therapy. Most found no effect. There were short-term gains in quality of life, pain and nausea but no lasting differences, and the higher-quality studies found no difference between these therapies and either active or passive comparison groups. Only lower-quality studies showed significant effects.

The same year, the Bond University psychologists reviewed 14 placebo-controlled trials of Reiki for mental health symptoms and rated the evidence high for clinically relevant stress and depression. They also wrote, in the same paper, that each area held only a few studies, that findings were inconclusive, and that most studies carried some risk of bias. Even so, they suggested Reiki might reasonably be added to psychotherapy for these symptoms.

A 2024 meta-analysis that included non-randomized studies found a sizable reduction in anxiety, with less consistent results before surgery and in cancer-related anxiety. A 2025 meta-analysis of randomized trials with 661 participants found a small improvement in quality of life that only just reached statistical significance.

Cochrane has looked at Reiki for one more named indication. Its 2020 review of complementary therapies for pain after a caesarean section found a single Reiki trial, of 90 women, and judged the evidence too low in quality to say whether Reiki changed pain.

The pattern is the one the sham problem predicts. Reviews that admit weaker designs find benefits, and the review that weights study quality most heavily finds them disappear. Even a well-blinded positive trial cannot settle the question while the person giving the fake knows it is fake.

Two Cochrane reviews that once looked relevant have been withdrawn, for different reasons. A 2008 review of touch therapies for pain pooled 24 studies with 1,153 participants, three of them on Reiki, and found pain about 0.83 points lower on a zero-to-10 scale. It noted larger effects from more experienced practitioners, mostly in the Reiki studies.

Cochrane withdrew it in November 2013 because it was out of date. A separate review of therapeutic touch for healing wounds came down in August 2016 because Cochrane’s editors doubted that its underlying trials could be trusted. Neither can be cited as current, and that wound review, along with therapeutic touch generally and the wider biofield idea, is taken up in the companion report on energy healing.

Hospitals, credentials and a church’s position

Hospital programs

Reiki is offered in some American hospitals. Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston has run a Reiki volunteer program since July 2009, coordinated by a board-certified chaplain who is a Reiki Master. University Hospitals in Cleveland evaluated 392 sessions given to 268 patients in two infusion centers between 2022 and 2024. Those evaluations compare patients’ scores before and after a session with no comparison group, so they can show that patients liked it, not that Reiki caused the change.

How many hospitals offer Reiki is unknown. A widely cited 2010 survey by a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association and the Samueli Institute drew 714 responses from 5,858 hospitals, a 12 percent response rate, and its press release does not single out Reiki. Responding hospitals most often named patient demand as their reason for offering such therapies. KFF Health News reported in 2011 that 85 percent of responding hospitals named patient satisfaction as their main measure of success. Percentages for Reiki that circulate online could not be traced to a verifiable source.

Training levels and registries

Training standards are thin in the United States. Reiki levels and master titles are conferred by teachers, with no federal or state standard found in the research for this article. New Hampshire’s massage law names reiki among energy practices that fall outside massage licensing, provided they are not presented as massage, a mention that exempts rather than regulates. Weighing training claims for practices nobody licenses is the subject of a later article in this category.

The United Kingdom offers a contrast. The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, a voluntary register, requires at least 240 hours of study over at least nine months, 75 documented treatments of others, 100 hours of treatments received and 10 case studies.

The body that accredits that register, the Professional Standards Authority, wrote in February 2023 that assessing efficacy is not its role. Its decision summarizes evidence the register submitted, including a 2017 review by David McManus of the Australasian Usui Reiki Association. That review counted 13 placebo-controlled studies, found 8 favorable to Reiki and concluded that together they gave reasonably strong support for Reiki over placebo. The decision also notes that some of the studies point to the practitioner’s time and attention as a possible source of benefit, and it ordered the register to tighten its checks on advertising.

On the four-bucket scale used for credentials across this collection, a Reiki level or master certificate issued by a teacher sits in the undefined bucket, and the UK register is a private third-party standard that verifies training and conduct. Neither certifies that the therapy works.

The Catholic bishops’ guidelines

On 25 March 2009 the Committee on Doctrine of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued guidelines on Reiki. The document says Reiki has not been accepted by the scientific and medical communities as an effective therapy. Its main grounds are theological: that for Christians access to divine healing comes through prayer to Christ, and that Reiki’s worldview has origins in Eastern religions. It concludes that Catholic institutions, including health care facilities and retreat centers, and people representing the Church, such as chaplains, should not promote or support Reiki.

That is a religious body setting rules for its own institutions, on mixed theological and scientific grounds. It is not a scientific review, and it predates most of the trials described here.

The harm record, stated plainly

No documented case of direct harm from a Reiki session turned up in the research for this article. NCCIH says Reiki has not been shown to have harmful effects. The UK register’s curriculum says there are no known contraindications when Reiki is used on its own, a qualifier that says nothing about Reiki used in place of care. The 2022 Jena review called side effects relatively unlikely, and the 2015 Cochrane review found no evidence of harm. A lack of reported harm is not proof of safety, but there is no case to point to, and this article will not invent one.

The risk worth naming is indirect: a session standing in for diagnosis or treatment. No dataset isolates Reiki on that question, and the cost of delay is documented in the substitution report.

Some symptoms need a clinician whatever else you are trying. Pain that is new, severe or steadily worsening needs a diagnosis. So does low mood or anxiety that lasts most days for weeks, disrupts sleep or work, or comes with thoughts of harming yourself; in the United States, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline answers by call or text. For anyone in cancer treatment, fever, uncontrolled nausea or pain belongs with the oncology team the same day.

Grading the claims

  • Reiki relieves fibromyalgia pain. Tested and not supported, in a blinded four-arm trial of 100 patients.
  • Reiki itself, rather than attentive company, improves comfort during chemotherapy. Tested in one trial and not supported. The comfort gain was real, and the sham matched it.
  • Reiki treats anxiety or depression as clinical conditions. Insufficient evidence to assess. The trials are too few and too small, which makes this an untested claim rather than one too vague to test.
  • Reiki eases short-term anxiety and pain around hospital procedures. Positive trial evidence, contested interpretation. Many small trials beat sham, but the person giving the sham cannot be blinded, and the highest-quality cancer studies found nothing.
  • An energy field explains the effects. A mechanism, not a measured outcome, so it is not graded here. NCCIH says no scientific evidence supports the field’s existence.
  • A master level or register listing shows the therapy works. Credentials certify training and conduct. The UK accreditor says outright that judging efficacy is not its job.

The Takeaway

Reiki sessions are associated with short-term gains in comfort and calm that patients report and researchers can measure. Whether Reiki causes them, or the attention that comes with any session does, remains unresolved, because the standard test cannot blind the person giving the fake. The two trials that did the most to isolate Reiki found the sham did just as well. When you read a Reiki study, the most useful detail to check is who delivered the sham, and whether Reiki beat it or only beat no treatment.

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