272 Patients, No Difference: Reading the Largest Reiki Trial That Found Nothing

Key Takeaways

• A randomised trial gave 136 open-heart-surgery patients twenty minutes of Reiki plus manual therapy for three days, and gave 136 others twenty minutes of quiet time.
• On depression, anxiety, sleep, post-operative pain, atrial fibrillation, length of stay and thirty-day readmission, the two groups came out the same.
• This is the largest and best-designed Reiki trial I have written about here, and it found nothing — which is worth saying plainly rather than explaining away.

Key Terms Explained

• 靈氣(Reiki) / Universal Energy — The traditional Japanese practice of connecting with universal energy so that life settles.
• 手当て(Teate) / Hands-On — The ordinary Japanese word for placing a hand on someone, and the root of how Reiki is given.
• 気付き(Kizuki) / Noticing — Becoming aware of something that was already there.

The Study I Would Rather Not Have Found

I look for Reiki research every week, and I will be honest about what that usually means: I am hoping for something interesting, and quietly hoping it is positive.

This one is not.

A randomised controlled trial tested whether adding Reiki plus manual therapy after open heart surgery improves outcomes, compared with quiet time. Two hundred and seventy-two patients took part, 136 in each group. Their average age was 62.2 years and 75.4 per cent were men.

The treatment group received twenty minutes of nurse-delivered Reiki to five body areas, plus manual therapy to the head and feet, for three consecutive days. The control group received twenty minutes of quiet time, for the same three days.

After adjusting for whether patients had undergone coronary artery bypass grafting, the researchers found no significant differences between the groups on depression, anxiety, sleep, post-operative pain, atrial fibrillation, intensive care or hospital length of stay, or thirty-day rehospitalisation. Adjusted thirty-day readmission probabilities were low in both groups.

The authors concluded that further research on different intervention methods is needed.

I read that and sat with it for a while.

Related: Reiki Tested in an Intensive Care Unit: An Honest Read of a Sham-Controlled Trial on Ventilated Patients explains this in detail.

Why This Result Carries More Weight Than the Others

Over the past week I have written here about three other studies: a sham-controlled trial in intensive care, a dialysis trial where the comparison was usual treatment, and a small Japanese pilot with no control group at all.

Each of those had a limitation I could name. Small numbers. No comparison group. Self-selected participants. Those limitations are real, and naming them is part of reading honestly.

This trial does not give me that option.

Related: Reiki in the ICU: An Honest Reading of a 2026 Sham-Controlled Trial on Ventilated Patients explains this in detail.

The Numbers Are Large

Two hundred and seventy-two participants is substantial for this field. Most published Reiki studies involve twenty to sixty people. A study of this size can detect a real effect that a small study would miss.

When a small study finds nothing, the usual explanation is that it was too small to see the effect. That explanation is much weaker here.

Related: The Same Practice, Tested Two Ways: What a Dialysis Trial Without a Sham Arm Can and Cannot Tell Us explains this in detail.

The Comparison Is the Fairest One Yet

This is the part I find most interesting, and the part that makes the result harder to set aside.

The control group did not receive a fake treatment, and they were not simply left alone. They received twenty minutes of quiet time, for three days, at the same points in their recovery.

Think about what that isolates. Both groups got: a set period of rest, at a set time, in a hospital where rest is otherwise interrupted. What only one group got was the hands and the practice.

Every other design leaves open the possibility that what helps is simply stopping. This one closes that door. And when the door closed, the difference disappeared.

The Outcomes Were Both Kinds

The measures included psychological outcomes — depression, anxiety, sleep — and hard clinical ones: atrial fibrillation, length of stay, readmission within thirty days.

The Japanese nurses pilot I wrote about found psychological measures improving while physical ones did not, and I said at the time that this was roughly what I would expect. Here, with a fair comparator and a large sample, the psychological measures did not move either.

What I Actually Think

I am going to try to do this without the two moves that practitioners usually make when a study comes out like this.

The first move is to attack the design. There is always something: the practitioners were nurses rather than long-term practitioners, three days is short, hospital settings are not ideal. Some of those points may even be fair. But I notice that I only reach for them when the result goes the wrong way, and a standard you apply selectively is not a standard.

The second move is to retreat to unmeasurability — to say that what Reiki does cannot be captured by these instruments. I find this one worse, because it is unfalsifiable by construction. If no possible result could count against the practice, then no result can count for it either, and every positive study I have ever cited becomes worthless by the same logic.

So here is what I think this trial supports, stated plainly.

For clinical outcomes after cardiac surgery, adding Reiki to standard care does not appear to do anything that twenty minutes of quiet does not already do. That is what was tested and that is what was found.

What it does not tell us is whether the quiet time itself was doing something for both groups. There was no third group receiving neither. It is entirely possible that both groups benefited from being given a protected pause, and that the trial simply shows the hands added nothing on top of that.

That reading is available, and I want to be careful: I find it appealing partly because it is comfortable for me. But it is also a genuine limitation of a two-arm design, and it would be there whichever way the result had gone.

My honest position after reading it is close to where I already was. Twenty years of practice have shown me people getting up calmer than they lay down. It has never shown me anyone's atrial fibrillation resolving, and I have never claimed it did. A trial confirming that Reiki does not change post-surgical clinical outcomes is not evidence against what I do. It is evidence against a claim I do not make.

Where it does land is on the softer end. I would have expected the anxiety and sleep measures to shift, and they did not. That is worth holding onto rather than filing away.

My background before Reiki was in engineering, and there is a habit from that work that I have kept: when the result contradicts what you expected, the first thing to check is your expectation, not the measurement. I am checking mine.

FAQ

Q: Does this study mean Reiki does not work? A: It means that in this trial, adding Reiki plus manual therapy after open heart surgery did not change the measured outcomes compared with twenty minutes of quiet time. That is a specific finding about a specific setting, a specific population and a specific set of measures. It is not a general verdict, and it does not speak to what people report from a session in ordinary life. But it is a real negative result in a large, fairly designed trial, and it should be read as such rather than explained away.

Q: Why does the quiet-time comparison matter so much? A: Because it removes the most likely alternative explanation. If the control group had received nothing at all, any benefit in the Reiki group might have come simply from being given time to rest. By giving both groups the same protected twenty minutes, the trial isolates the practice itself. That is a harder test, and it is the right one.

Q: Should this change whether someone tries Reiki? A: Reiki is not medical care and is not a treatment for any condition, so this trial does not change the basis on which anyone would try it. What it should change is what people expect. If someone is hoping a session will shorten a hospital stay or prevent a complication, this study says clearly that they should not expect that. All medical decisions and post-operative care remain entirely with the people managing them.

Key Insights to Remember

• A negative result from a well-designed study is more informative than a positive result from a weak one, and it deserves the same coverage. If I write about the trials that support the practice and quietly skip the ones that do not, then everything I have written becomes advertising rather than reading, and a reader who notices that has no reason to trust any of it.
• The comparison group is where a study's honesty lives. Rest, attention and a protected pause are powerful things, and any design that does not control for them cannot tell you about the practice itself. This trial gave both groups twenty minutes of quiet and the difference vanished — which is exactly the kind of finding that a weaker design would have hidden.
• A study can only argue against the claims you actually make. This one found no effect on post-surgical clinical outcomes, which is not something I have ever claimed Reiki does. But it also found no movement in anxiety and sleep, which is closer to what I do say, and that part I am sitting with rather than setting aside.

Sources

• Randomized Controlled Trial of the Psychological and Clinical Outcomes of Reiki Plus Manual Therapy After Open Heart Surgery — Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing
• Clinical and Hospital Stay Effects of Reiki and Manual Therapy After Open Heart Surgery (NCT05853250) — ClinicalTrials.gov
• Reiki: What You Need To Know — National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)