Ten Nurses, Five Sessions, No Control Group: How to Read a Qualitative Reiki Study

Key Takeaways

A qualitative study does not attempt to prove that a practice works; it records what participants said about it, which is a different kind of knowledge and needs a different kind of reading.
In this Brazilian study, ten nurses each received five twenty-minute Reiki sessions and were then interviewed, with the sessions delivered by one of the researchers, who was herself a nurse and a Reiki practitioner.
Reading it honestly means holding two things at once: the accounts are real and worth having, and the design cannot separate Reiki from attention, rest and expectation.

Key Terms Explained

質的研究 (Shitsuteki Kenkyū) / Qualitative Research — research that gathers accounts and meanings rather than measurements, and reports themes rather than effect sizes.

手当て (Teate) / Hand Placement — the plain Japanese word for laying hands on or near the body, which is what a twenty-minute session physically consists of.

施術者 (Sejutsusha) / Practitioner — the person giving Reiki; in this study, also one of the researchers, which matters for how the results should be read.

五戒 (Gokai) / The Five Precepts — Usui's daily principles, which speak to the practitioner's own state rather than to any outcome in the receiver.

The Study, In Plain Terms

A paper published in Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem in November 2025 describes an exploratory, descriptive, qualitative study grounded in what its authors call the Complexity framework.

Ten nurses from a twenty-four-hour Primary Health Care Unit in southern Brazil took part. Between April and August 2022, each participant received five Reiki sessions and was then interviewed individually using a semi-structured format. The interviews were analysed using thematic content analysis.

The sessions themselves are described in enough detail to picture. Each lasted twenty minutes. The room was prepared beforehand with relaxing music and an aroma diffuser. The participant lay supine on a stretcher and was verbally encouraged to close their eyes and to visualise positive images and affirmations during the session. One of the researchers, a nurse who held Reiki levels I, II and III, conducted every session. Scheduling was based on participant availability, in an office made available at the unit.

What the participants reported afterwards was change in their feelings, in their self-knowledge and in their self-awareness, which they connected to different behaviours and attitudes when facing the uncertainties of daily work. They described new ways of coexisting with processes the authors frame as order, disorder and reorganisation. And they reported concrete changes in daily life: healthier eating, better sleep quality, more energy for daily tasks, and taking up regular physical activity.

The authors conclude that Reiki proved to be a tool that enhances complex care and supports health and nursing professionals in coping with the disorders experienced in daily life.

Related: What Twenty Years of Daily Practice Did — and Did Not — Do explains this in detail.

What This Kind of Study Is Actually For

I want to be careful here, because the honest reading is neither dismissive nor credulous.

A qualitative study is not a failed trial. It is not attempting to prove causation and then falling short. It is asking a different question altogether: what did this experience mean to the people who had it, and what language did they use to describe it? For that question, ten in-depth interviews can produce more than a thousand questionnaire responses.

So the sentence "ten nurses reported better sleep" is not weak evidence for a claim about sleep. It is strong evidence for a different claim: that ten nurses, asked in depth, described their sleep as better. Those are not the same statement, and the difference is the entire skill of reading this literature.

Where practitioners go wrong is in the translation. A study like this gets summarised as "Reiki improves sleep in nurses," which is a claim the design cannot support. The study never measured sleep. It recorded what people said about their sleep after five sessions in a quiet room with music and an aroma diffuser, delivered by a researcher who believed in the practice.

Related: From Quick-Tempered to Calmer: What One of My Students Noticed After Level 1 explains this in detail.

The Three Things This Design Cannot Separate

Reiki from rest

Twenty minutes lying down, eyes closed, with music, in a room set aside for the purpose, during a shift at a twenty-four-hour clinic. For a nurse in that environment, that is a rare and valuable thing on its own. The study has no way of telling us how much of the reported change belongs to Reiki and how much belongs to twenty uninterrupted minutes.

I say this as someone who has practised daily for more than twenty years. It does not trouble me. But I would rather say it out loud than have a reader work it out and conclude I was hiding it.

Reiki from expectation

Participants were verbally encouraged to close their eyes and visualise positive images and affirmations. That instruction is part of the intervention as delivered, and it is also a well-known way to shape what someone subsequently reports. Again, this is not a flaw the authors concealed — it is written plainly in the methods, which is exactly where it belongs.

The practitioner from the researcher

One of the researchers delivered every session, and she was a Reiki practitioner trained to level III. She then took part in analysing what participants said about those sessions.

In qualitative research this is not automatically disqualifying; the researcher's position is often treated as part of the instrument rather than as contamination. But it does mean the participants were describing their experience to the person who had provided it. Most people soften their accounts in that situation. Whether that happened here is unknowable, and worth naming.

Why I Still Think It Is Worth Reading

If I only cared about proof, I would stop at the design and move on. I care about something else too.

This study is a record of what a specific group of people said about a specific practice, in their own words, in a setting most of us will never see. Ten nurses at a twenty-four-hour clinic in southern Brazil is not a population I would otherwise hear from. The vocabulary they reached for — self-knowledge, self-awareness, coping with uncertainty — tells me something about what the practice is doing in people's lives, even if it tells me nothing about mechanism.

After more than twenty years of daily practice, what Reiki is to me is simple: connecting with the energy of the universe and letting it turn my life in a better direction. Nothing more mystical than that, and nothing less. My own evidence is that my life slowly turned better over many years, which is worth everything to me and nothing to a meta-analysis. These nurses' accounts are the same kind of currency. Real to them, and not transferable as proof.

There is also something specific about nurses that I find worth noticing. The study framed Reiki not as something done to patients but as something received by the people who do the caring. That is a use I would like to see discussed more often. Whatever is or is not happening at the level of energy, a profession that runs on absorbing other people's distress needs somewhere to put it down for twenty minutes.

How to Read the Next One

There will be another study, and someone will send you a headline about it. Three questions sort most of them quickly.

What kind of study is it? A qualitative study reports themes; a trial reports numbers; a meta-analysis pools trials. Each answers a different question, and none of them substitutes for another.

How many people, and were they compared with anyone? Ten participants with no control group is not a weakness in a qualitative design, but it means no comparison is possible, and no claim about superiority to anything else can be made.

Who delivered the intervention, and who analysed the results? If those are the same person, the paper is still worth reading. It just changes how much weight a self-reported outcome can carry.

None of these questions require statistical training. They require reading the methods section, which is the part nearly everybody skips.

FAQ

Q: Does this study show that Reiki helps nurses? A: It shows that ten nurses, after five sessions each, described changes in their feelings, self-awareness, sleep, eating and energy during in-depth interviews. That is what a qualitative design can establish. It cannot show that Reiki caused those changes rather than the rest, the quiet room, the music, the attention or the expectation, because it was not built to separate them and did not try to.

Q: Is a study with only ten participants worth anything? A: For a qualitative study, yes. Depth is the point rather than breadth, and ten semi-structured interviews analysed thematically can yield a great deal about how people make sense of an experience. The mistake is treating that depth as if it were statistical weight. Small qualitative findings are a good reason to look further and a poor reason to make a claim.

Q: Should Reiki practitioners quote studies like this? A: Quote it for what it is. Saying "a 2025 qualitative study interviewed ten nurses who each received five sessions, and they described better sleep and more energy" is accurate and interesting. Saying "research shows Reiki improves nurses' sleep" is not what the paper found, and someone will eventually check. The second version costs more trust than the first version gains.

Key Insights to Remember

The methods section is where the honesty lives. Everything I have said about this study's limits comes from what the authors themselves wrote down: five sessions, twenty minutes, music, an aroma diffuser, visualisation prompts, a practitioner-researcher. Good researchers publish the things that weaken their own claims, and a reader who skips to the conclusion misses the most trustworthy part of the paper.
Different study types answer different questions, and mixing them is the most common error I see. A meta-analysis can tell you roughly how large an average effect appears to be. A qualitative study can tell you what people say the experience was like. Neither can do the other's job, and a practitioner who quotes one as if it were the other will eventually be corrected in public.
Being trusted matters more than being persuasive. There is a version of writing about Reiki that overstates every finding and wins in the short term. There is another version that says "here is exactly what this study did and did not do," and that version is the only one that survives contact with a sceptical reader. I would rather be believed about small things than doubted about everything.