Placebo and relaxation
Calm attention, touch and expectation genuinely reduce pain and stress, whatever the explanation offered.
Tested at scale, no benefit found
Psychic healing
Psychic healing is the claimed ability of improving health by intention, touch without contact, or prayer at a distance. Status: tested at scale, no benefit found.
- Status
- Tested at scale no benefit found
- Word in use since
- 1922
- Key test
- 2006 The STEP trial, Benson and colleagues, Amer…
Studies and word histories as set out below.
What people describe
Psychic or energy healers describe sensing blocks or imbalances in a person's energy field and moving healing energy through their hands — sometimes touching, sometimes holding the hands a few inches away — or healing at a distance through intention or prayer.
How it entered the record
Reiki was developed by Mikao Usui in Japan in the 1920s; therapeutic touch was developed in the United States in the 1970s and taught widely to nurses.
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The experiment
The STEP trial, Benson and colleagues, American Heart Journal, 2006
Read the paper: Benson et al. (2006), “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)”, American Heart Journal 151
How it was run
Cardiac bypass patients were randomized into three groups: prayed for and told they might be, prayed for and told they were, and not prayed for. Prayer was performed by congregations who received first names only.
Sample
1,802 patients across six hospitals — the largest trial of its kind
Result
No difference in complications between prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups. Patients who were told with certainty that they were being prayed for fared slightly worse — 59% complications against 51%.
Therapeutic Touch has its own famous test: in 1996 and 1997 Emily Rosa, who began it at nine, asked 21 practitioners to say which of their hands hers was near, behind a screen. They scored 44% — below chance. JAMA published it in 1998, when she was 11, making her its youngest author.
Claim
Improving health by intention, touch without contact, or prayer at a distance
Status
Tested at scale, no benefit found
Where the word comes from
Modern forms — Reiki 1922, Therapeutic Touch 1972 — are twentieth-century inventions, not ancient traditions.
Of the 8 key tests on these pages, the one for psychic healing is the third most recent.
What psychology offers instead
Regression to the mean
People seek healing when symptoms are at their worst, and many symptoms ease on their own afterward.
Unblinded trials
When both healer and patient know who is being treated, expectations shape the results.
How to test it fairly yourself
Test whether the healer can detect a field at all: screen the healer's view and ask them to say, over many trials, which of their hands is near another person's, with the side chosen by a coin toss.
Sources
Statements of fact on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. How we choose and check sources: editorial policy.
Cite this page
AstroHot. “Psychic healing: The Claim, the Experiment and the Result.” Accessed October 30, 2026. https://astrohot.com/psychic/healing/
For Wikipedia
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