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.
The other claimed abilities put to the same test: medium, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, psychometry, empathy, astral projection and aura reading.
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. In 1998 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a test designed by a nine-year-old, Emily Rosa, in which practitioners tried to sense which of their hands was near hers; they were right 44% of the time, below the 50% expected by chance.
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 randomised 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 1998 a nine-year-old, Emily Rosa, asked 21 practitioners to say which of their hands hers was near, behind a screen. They scored 44% — below chance. It was published in JAMA, and she remains 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.
What psychology offers instead
Regression to the mean
People seek healing when symptoms are at their worst, and many symptoms ease on their own afterwards.
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.