Reiki Benefits: Evidence-Based Research on Pain, Anxiety, Depression & Sleep
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
If you are wondering whether Reiki could really help your pain, anxiety or sleep, here is what the research shows. Which benefits rest on randomized trials, which on hospital data, how sham Reiki works, and where evidence is weak.
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What Does the Overall Evidence Base for Reiki Benefits Look Like?
Imagine you are recovering from surgery, or your anxiety has been loud for months, and someone you trust mentions Reiki. You look it up and land in two camps: one says it is proven, the other says it is nonsense. You just want to know if it is worth your time and money.
The short answer: the research is consistent in direction and weak in strength. Reiki trials almost always report improvement, clustered in the same four areas: pain intensity, anxiety, depressed mood and sleep quality. What is missing is a large, well-powered, independently replicated trial of the kind that settles questions in medicine.
The literature is small and uneven: a few dozen randomized controlled trials, most with fewer than one hundred people, plus a much larger body of uncontrolled hospital outcomes data and a handful of cautious systematic reviews.
Strongest evidence beyond expectation: the Bowden 2010 randomized controlled trial. It included a sham Reiki arm and found the real Reiki group improved more than both the sham and the untreated groups.
Largest single dataset: Hartford Hospital's clinical outcomes study of more than 1,100 patients. It recorded a 78% reduction in pain, an 80% reduction in nausea and a 94% reduction in anxiety, but had no control group and cannot separate Reiki from everything else happening on a hospital ward.
Weighing Reiki fairly means holding both of those facts in your hands at once.
It helps to sort the research into tiers, because the word "study" covers wildly different levels of rigor. Think of it as a ladder.
Bottom rung: anecdotal reports and practitioner case notes. They generate hypotheses and prove nothing.
Next: pre-post outcomes studies, measuring patients before and after Reiki with no comparison group. Hartford Hospital's data sits here. They cannot rule out natural recovery or regression to the mean, but show the reported outcomes are large and consistent in real clinical settings.
Higher: randomized trials with a wait-list or standard-care control, which rule out natural recovery but not expectation.
Top of the current literature: the few sham-controlled randomized trials.
Systematic reviews pool across these tiers with careful wording: promising results, methodological limitations, further research warranted. That is not a dismissal. It accurately describes a literature that has never been given the funding or sample sizes pharmaceutical research routinely receives.
Which Reiki benefit has the strongest research support?
Anxiety reduction, which shows up across trial designs, populations and outcome instruments. Hartford Hospital recorded a 94% improvement in anxiety, the Bowden 2010 trial found stress reductions exceeding sham treatment, and systematic reviews name anxiety as the most consistent signal in the literature.
Anxiety also has the shortest path to a plausible mechanism, since lying still under gentle hands for 30 to 60 minutes reliably shifts the autonomic nervous system toward parasympathetic dominance.
How large are the effect sizes reported in Reiki trials?
Widely, and the variation is telling. Uncontrolled hospital outcomes studies report the largest changes, often 70% to 90% symptom improvement, because they capture everything that happens to a patient, not the Reiki alone.
Randomized trials with sham or active comparisons report much smaller, modest but statistically significant advantages for the Reiki arm. So Reiki sessions are followed by large improvements; the part that belongs specifically to Reiki, rather than rest, attention and expectation, is small to moderate.
Has any Reiki study found no benefit at all?
Yes. Several trials, especially those measuring physiological endpoints such as blood pressure, immune markers or wound healing rather than self-reported symptoms, found no significant difference from controls. Very brief single sessions also tend to show weaker results than weekly treatments over four to eight weeks.
Null findings are a healthy sign in any literature. A body of research where every study succeeds usually points to publication bias, not a robust effect.
What Does the Research Say About Reiki for Pain Relief?
If pain is what brought you here, the research has something real to offer, mostly from people recovering after surgery.
Pain is the second-strongest strand after anxiety, resting mainly on post-surgical trials rather than chronic pain studies.
Hartford Hospital: its outcomes study of more than 1,100 patients recorded a 78% reduction in pain on visual analog scales.
Vitale and O'Connor: a randomized controlled trial published in Holistic Nursing Practice found that women recovering from abdominal hysterectomy who received Reiki reported lower pain and needed less analgesic medication than controls. That matters because medication use is an objective behavioral measure, not a self-rated score.
Thrane and Cohen: their review of the Reiki pain literature concluded that Reiki shows promise as a complementary approach, while noting the small trial sizes.
Targeted hand positions and mechanism theory for long-term pain conditions are covered in Reiki for Chronic Pain: Mechanism Theories, Targeted Positions & Research.
Post-surgical pain is where the literature is methodologically strongest, for structural reasons. Patients arrive at a known baseline, the pain path after a given procedure is predictable, hospitals control timing and duration tightly, and analgesic use is charted whether or not the patient thinks about it.
That last point carries real weight. Self-reported pain scores bend to expectation in a way that milligrams drawn from a patient-controlled analgesia pump do not, so a trial reporting reduced medication use is making a stronger claim than one reporting only lower pain ratings. It is the difference between saying you feel richer and showing your bank statement.
Do Reiki trials report reduced pain medication use?
Yes, in several trials, one of the more persuasive findings because consumption is recorded objectively. The Vitale and O'Connor trial of post-hysterectomy patients found the Reiki group used less analgesic medication than controls, and Hartford Hospital's clinical data also indicated reduced analgesic need.
Any actual reduction in a prescribed regimen should be made with a physician rather than independently, since abrupt changes to opioid or neuropathic pain medication carry genuine risk.
Which pain conditions have actually been studied with Reiki?
Fewer than practitioners treat. Research focuses on post-operative pain, particularly after abdominal hysterectomy and cesarean delivery, cancer-related pain in oncology settings, and general pain in mixed hospital populations. Fibromyalgia has been examined in at least one randomized trial.
Migraine, arthritis and chronic low back pain have far less dedicated trial evidence than the confidence of practitioner claims suggests. If one of those is your pain, keep that gap between what is studied and what is claimed in mind.
What Is the Evidence for Reiki Reducing Anxiety and Stress?
If your mind races and your shoulders live near your ears, this is the part of the research most likely to speak to you.
Anxiety reduction is the most consistently replicated finding in Reiki research.
Hartford Hospital: more than 1,100 patients, with a 94% improvement in anxiety, the largest single effect in their dataset.
Bowden 2010: a randomized controlled trial that found Reiki reduced stress and anxiety beyond what the sham Reiki arm produced. That is the exact comparison needed to rule out expectation.
College students: a study in the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine found a single 30-minute session significantly reduced anxiety and improved mood.
McManus: a systematic review identified consistent anxiety-reducing effects across the studies assessed.
Anxiety is usually measured with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and Reiki's effects show up more strongly on the state subscale (how you feel right now) than the trait subscale (how anxious you tend to be), which is what a session-based intervention would predict.
For calming hand positions and guidance on when Reiki is not a substitute for therapy, see Reiki for Anxiety & Depression: Calming Positions, Research & When to Seek Therapy.
Anxiety research is sturdier than other endpoints largely because of measurement. State anxiety responds within one session, so a trial can get a result in an afternoon instead of eight weeks. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory is short, validated across decades, and sensitive to change.
Anxiety can also be cross-checked physically, so the better studies pair self-report with heart rate, blood pressure, salivary cortisol or heart rate variability. When a subjective score and an autonomic marker move together in the same session, the finding becomes harder to dismiss as reporting bias.
Did the Bowden 2010 study use a proper control group?
Yes, which is what makes it notable: a sham Reiki control group, not just a no-treatment comparison. The sham arm got sessions from unattuned people with no Reiki training, copying the hand positions and session structure.
This holds constant the resting time, the quiet room, the practitioner's presence and the participant's expectation of benefit. The real Reiki group did better than the sham group, which is the strongest single argument in the literature against a pure placebo explanation.
Do Reiki anxiety studies measure cortisol or only self-report?
Mostly self-report. A minority add physiological measures, most often salivary cortisol, or heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, skin conductance or heart rate variability.
These results are less uniform: some studies find significant autonomic shifts, others none despite clearly lower reported anxiety. That divergence is one of the open puzzles of Reiki research and a reason systematic reviews stop short of firm conclusions.
How Effective Is Reiki for Depression and Mood Improvement?
If you have been living under a grey sky for a while, you deserve a straight account of what has and has not been shown here.
This evidence is smaller than for anxiety but includes the longest follow-up in the Reiki literature.
Bowden 2010: statistically significant reductions in depression, measured with the Beck Depression Inventory, after six weekly sessions. The Reiki group outperformed both the sham arm and the no-treatment arm.
Shore 2012: published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, it found Reiki improved psychological wellbeing with effects still present at one-year follow-up. Earlier work by Shore found reduced depression and hopelessness in a community sample.
Hartford Hospital: its outcomes data showed mood improvement alongside the pain and anxiety findings.
Mood is usually measured with the Beck Depression Inventory or the Profile of Mood States. Proposed mechanisms include lowered cortisol, better sleep feeding back into daytime mood, and the effect of consistent compassionate contact on the isolation that comes with depressive states.
Reiki is not a replacement for care. If low mood is heavy or lasting, a doctor or therapist is the right first call, with Reiki alongside if it helps you.
The one-year follow-up in the Shore work matters, because durability separates a mood lift from a treatment effect. Nearly every wellness intervention lifts mood scores short term; almost none are measured a year later.
Differences lasting twelve months suggest either a structural change in how a person handles stress, or that participants kept practicing after the study, entirely plausible since Reiki recipients often take Level 1 training and self-treat. The research cannot yet tell those apart, a real gap.
What makes the Shore study significant for depression research?
Its follow-up and its population. It measured psychological wellbeing in a real-world community sample rather than a convenience sample of university students, which helps the results generalize.
It followed participants for a full year, longer than almost any other Reiki trial, with benefits still present. And it looked for the presence of positive functioning, not just the absence of depressive symptoms.
What Are the Benefits of Reiki for Sleep Quality?
If you lie in bed with a body that is exhausted and a mind that will not switch off, the sleep findings may feel familiar.
Better sleep is well replicated, with the strongest result from the Bowden 2010 randomized controlled trial, which used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, a validated instrument covering sleep latency, duration, efficiency, disturbances and daytime dysfunction. After six weeks, the Reiki group improved significantly compared with both the sham and no-treatment groups.
Hartford Hospital's outcomes data listed sleep improvement among the most frequently reported patient benefits, alongside pain and anxiety reduction. Oncology studies looking at Reiki within quality-of-life care have also reported better sleep.
The proposed mechanism centers on hyperarousal. Chronic insomnia is understood as a state of raised physical and mental activation that blocks the slide into sleep, like an engine left idling too high. The parasympathetic shift during a Reiki session is thought to counteract that state.
Reiki for Sleep: Hand Positions, Evening Routine & Research on Insomnia Relief covers the evening protocol and nightly self-treatment routine.
The sleep findings matter more than their size suggests, because sleep is a transdiagnostic factor. Poor sleep worsens pain sensitivity, amplifies anxiety, deepens depressive symptoms and impairs immune function, so improving it appears to improve everything downstream.
That leaves a puzzle. If six weeks of Reiki improves sleep, pain and mood in one trial, did Reiki act on three separate systems, or on one system whose improvement cascaded into the other two? Mediation analysis could answer this, but Reiki trials have generally been far too small to run it.
Do Reiki sleep studies use objective sleep measurement?
Rarely, a genuine weakness. Polysomnography, the laboratory standard recording brain activity, eye movement and muscle tone overnight, is expensive and rarely used here. Wrist actigraphy, which estimates sleep from movement and costs far less, appears occasionally but not systematically.
People who expect a therapy to help rate their sleep more kindly regardless, so without objective measurement these findings stay open to expectancy.
What Hospital-Based Research Supports Reiki Benefits?
If you are a patient, or sitting beside one, it may comfort you to know Reiki is already offered in some of the hospitals you have heard of.
Hospital research is the largest volume of Reiki data, a different kind of evidence from randomized trials, not a weaker version.
Hartford Hospital: the most-cited clinical outcomes study, treating over 1,100 patients with widely differing diagnoses and documenting a 78% reduction in pain, an 80% reduction in nausea, a 94% reduction in anxiety, and improvements in sleep and overall wellbeing.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: research found Reiki reduced anxiety, pain, fatigue and nausea in cancer patients undergoing treatment.
Columbia University Medical Center: examined Reiki for recovery after cesarean delivery and found reduced pain and anxiety.
Others: the Cleveland Clinic offers Reiki in its integrative medicine program, Yale New Haven Hospital has integrated it into cardiac surgery care, and Johns Hopkins includes it in its integrative medicine services.
What this gives you is pragmatic evidence. Not proof of mechanism, but a demonstration that Reiki delivered in real clinical conditions, to unselected patients, by ordinary practitioners, produces measurable and consistent symptom improvement.
Explanatory trials and pragmatic studies answer different questions, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion. An explanatory trial asks whether the specific ingredient works under ideal conditions with a uniform population and tight protocol. A pragmatic study asks whether it helps in routine practice, with the messy population that actually shows up.
Hartford Hospital's data is high-quality pragmatic evidence and low-quality explanatory evidence, both at once. For a hospital administrator deciding whether to fund a Reiki volunteer program, the pragmatic question is the one that counts; for a researcher asking whether ki exists, it is not.
Institutional adoption follows that pragmatic logic closely. Reiki needs no equipment, no consumables and no sterile field, so the extra cost of a bedside session from a trained volunteer is close to zero. Adverse events are effectively absent from the literature, and patient satisfaction scores tend to rise where such programs run.
Why does an outcomes study without a control group still count as evidence?
It is evidence about size and consistency, though not cause. Hartford Hospital's data across more than 1,100 patients shows improvements after Reiki are large, span many diagnoses rather than one favorable subgroup, and replicate across many practitioners rather than one gifted individual.
What it cannot do is credit those improvements to Reiki rather than recovery over time, the attention of an extra caregiver, or expectation. Reading it as suggestive, not conclusive, is correct.
Do hospital Reiki programs track their own outcomes?
Many do, and most Reiki statistics in circulation come from this data. The standard approach is a brief before-and-after rating on a 0 to 10 scale for pain, anxiety and nausea, collected by the practitioner at the bedside. Hartford Hospital's widely cited percentages come from exactly this kind of routine collection across a large patient volume.
It produces large datasets cheaply, but the person giving the treatment is also the person recording the score, a bias a research trial would design out.
Are there documented adverse effects of Reiki in clinical settings?
Essentially none in the research literature, which is unusual and worth saying plainly. Reiki involves no substance, no needle, no tissue manipulation and no restriction of movement, so the physical risk is close to zero.
The recognized risk is indirect: a patient delaying or declining necessary medical treatment in the belief that Reiki is handling the problem. Responsible hospital programs guard against this explicitly by positioning Reiki as complementary and never as an alternative to diagnosis or treatment.
How Can You Tell a Strong Reiki Study From a Weak One?
The next time someone sends you a headline about Reiki, you can judge it yourself with five quick checks.
1. Is there a control group? 2. What kind? 3. How many people enrolled? 4. Are the outcome measures validated instruments? 5. Did the people scoring outcomes know who was in which group?
Control type: a sham Reiki arm ranks highest, controlling for resting time, practitioner presence and expectation at once. A wait-list or standard-care control ranks lower, unable to separate Reiki from simply being cared for. A pre-post study with no control ranks lowest for proving cause, however large.
Size: most Reiki trials have between 20 and 100 participants, which reliably detects only large effects. So a trial of 30 people finding no significant difference has not shown Reiki fails, only that the trial was too small to tell.
Measurement: named instruments such as the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Beck Depression Inventory, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Brief Pain Inventory carry far more weight than a study's own ad hoc questionnaire.
Blinding is a special problem for Reiki. In a drug trial, patient, clinician and assessor can all be kept unaware of who got what. In a Reiki trial, the practitioner must know whether it is real or sham, because the whole difference lies in their training and intent. Full double-blinding is impossible in principle, not just hard.
Better studies use assessor blinding: an independent researcher unaware of group assignment gives and scores the questionnaires.
Participant blinding works for people new to Reiki, since a sham feels the same from the receiving end, but fails with anyone trained who can feel whether energy is moving. That is why the strongest trials recruit participants with no prior Reiki experience.
What does a sham Reiki session actually involve?
An unattuned, untrained person goes through the visible motions: same positions, same durations, same quiet manner, with room, table, lighting and session length matched.
Researchers commonly ask sham practitioners to keep their minds busy with a task such as counting backward, specifically so they do not unintentionally direct healing intention. Participants are not told which condition they are in.
Why are small sample sizes such a problem in Reiki research?
They cut both ways. A trial of 30 people lacks the power to detect a modest but real benefit, so its null result tells you little rather than counting against Reiki.
And small trials that do reach significance tend to overestimate the effect, because only unusually large differences clear the bar. Together that produces exactly the literature Reiki has: scattered positive findings with inflated effect estimates, and null findings that settle nothing.
What does it mean when a systematic review calls Reiki evidence inconclusive?
The studies were too few, too small or too varied to support a firm conclusion, not that they found Reiki ineffective. Reviews routinely note differences in session length, number of treatments, practitioner training level, patient population and outcome instruments, which makes pooling them into a meta-analysis statistically unsound.
Inconclusive is a verdict on the state of the research, not on the therapy. It accurately describes a field that has never received funding for a definitive trial.
What Are the Strongest Criticisms of the Reiki Evidence Base?
You deserve to hear the skeptics' best case too, so you can decide with your eyes open.
The four strongest criticisms are the lack of a demonstrated mechanism, reliance on self-reported outcomes, a shortage of independent replication, and the lack of large trials.
Mechanism: the most fundamental. No measurement technique has detected the energy field Reiki theory describes, and controlled tests of whether trained practitioners can perceive such a field have not produced positive results. Critics argue that with no identified mechanism and effects mainly on questionnaires, expectation, attention and the natural course of symptoms explain it best.
Self-report: this has real force, since expectancy shapes how people rate pain and anxiety, and Reiki trials rarely include objective endpoints.
Replication: many findings come from single studies by single research groups.
A fair reading: these criticisms weaken the case for a specific energetic effect considerably, while leaving the observation that Reiki recipients feel better largely untouched. That observation does not depend on the mechanism being what practitioners say it is.
There is a more interesting version of the placebo criticism. Calling Reiki "just placebo" treats placebo as a synonym for nothing. Yet placebo responses in pain and anxiety are among the most robustly demonstrated phenomena in clinical research. They involve identifiable neurochemical pathways, including endogenous opioid signaling, and produce measurable changes in the same brain regions active analgesics affect.
If Reiki reliably triggers these responses through ritual, touch, sustained attention and an explanatory framework the recipient finds meaningful, it is doing something a leaflet about relaxation does not. The useful clinical question then shifts from "does the energy exist?" to "does this format produce better symptom outcomes than the alternatives, at what cost and what risk?"
The tradition itself tells a different story entirely: ki flows through the practitioner to where it is needed, rather than being generated or directed by them. What Is Reiki Healing? Complete Guide to History, Principles & Practice sets out that framework as practitioners understand it.
What would a definitive Reiki trial need to include?
Several hundred participants across multiple independent sites, a sham Reiki arm using untrained practitioners, blinded assessors, a specified and fully reported dose, and at least one objective endpoint alongside self-report.
Candidates include analgesic use recorded from medication dispensing, actigraphy or polysomnography for sleep, salivary cortisol sampling, and length of hospital stay. Follow-up would need to run at least six months to show durability. No such trial has been run, and cost is the main reason.
Do Reiki practitioners overstate what the research shows?
Some do, in a recognizable pattern: calling Reiki scientifically proven, citing the Hartford Hospital percentages as if they came from a controlled trial, presenting animal or cell-culture studies as evidence of human clinical benefit, and claiming effects on conditions that have never been studied.
The accurate version is available and still favorable: Reiki has consistent evidence for reducing anxiety and post-surgical pain, is offered in hundreds of hospitals, has no documented adverse effects, and has an evidence base that is genuinely promising and genuinely incomplete.
What claims are Reiki practitioners not permitted to make?
Reiki practitioners are not permitted to diagnose medical conditions, to claim that Reiki cures or treats any specific disease, or to advise a client to stop or alter prescribed medication.
In most jurisdictions Reiki is not a licensed healthcare profession, so practitioners operate outside medical scope of practice, and consumer protection regulators can act against health claims that cannot be substantiated. Professional Reiki associations set the same boundary in their codes of conduct. Describing Reiki as supporting relaxation and wellbeing alongside medical care is defensible; promising to shrink a tumor is not.
What Other Health Benefits Has Reiki Been Associated With?
You may have seen longer lists of Reiki benefits online, so here is how the rest of them actually stand.
Beyond pain, anxiety, mood and sleep, smaller studies and clinical observation link Reiki to more, without robust trials.
Nausea: the best supported of this group, at 80% improvement in Hartford Hospital's outcomes data, and especially relevant during chemotherapy.
Immune function: explored in preliminary work. A study by Wardell and Engebretson reported significant changes in immunoglobulin A levels after Reiki treatment.
Blood pressure: reductions observed in several small studies, consistent with the parasympathetic activation Reiki sessions produce.
Cancer-related fatigue: improvement appears across multiple oncology studies.
Wound healing: examined in animal models, including work by Baldwin reporting faster healing in mice receiving Reiki. That is notable because animals cannot hold expectations about a treatment.
Quality of life: the broadest documented benefit, and the outcome most often used as a primary endpoint in oncology settings.
This range raises a key question: is Reiki a specific treatment for specific conditions, or a general regulator of the stress response, showing up wherever stress makes things worse?
The data leans toward the second. Reiki does best on conditions with a large autonomic and emotional component and worst on fixed structural damage, as you would expect from something acting on arousal rather than tissue. Think of a thermostat rather than a spare part.
That reading makes a testable prediction: bigger benefits in people with high baseline stress, smaller ones in already-relaxed people, and heavy overlap with other relaxation-based interventions. The traditional Reiki account reaches a compatible conclusion by a different route, holding that the energy goes where it is most needed rather than treating a named disease.
What does the animal research on Reiki show?
It matters more than its size suggests, because animals cannot form expectations and so cannot produce a placebo response in the human sense. Work by Baldwin looked at wound healing in mice receiving Reiki and reported faster healing than in control animals, and related studies have examined stress-induced physical damage in rodents.
The findings are interesting, but the literature is thin, the experiments are hard to blind since the handler knows the condition, and handling itself is a variable in rodent research.
Which claimed Reiki benefits have essentially no research behind them?
Naming them is more useful than repeating them. Claims that Reiki detoxifies the body, corrects hormonal imbalance, improves fertility outcomes, resolves specific digestive diagnoses, or changes the course of any disease process fall into this group.
Some are plausible extensions of the stress findings and may be studied one day. None has trial support, and presenting them as established goes well beyond the literature. If you hear these promised, let that be your cue to ask more questions.
Questions people ask
Is Reiki scientifically proven?
Not by the strictest medical standards, though multiple trials found statistically significant benefits for pain, anxiety and depression. Hartford Hospital documented improvements across more than 1,100 patients, and the Bowden 2010 trial found effects beyond sham. Critics fairly cite small samples, inconsistent blinding and little independent replication. The NIH classifies Reiki as a complementary health approach with promising but insufficient evidence.
What are the most well-documented Reiki benefits?
Anxiety reduction, pain relief, better sleep quality and reduced nausea. Hartford Hospital's clinical outcomes data recorded a 94% improvement in anxiety, a 78% reduction in pain, and an 80% reduction in nausea. The Bowden 2010 randomized trial found significant improvement in mood and sleep quality. Anxiety has the strongest support because it shows up across trial designs and populations, not just in one study.
How many randomized controlled trials of Reiki exist?
Published randomized controlled trials number in the low dozens, not the hundreds available for established drug treatments. Most enroll between twenty and one hundred participants, enough for large effects but underpowered for modest ones, and most come from nursing research programs and integrative medicine departments rather than large multi-center consortia. Enough to suggest a pattern; each too small to settle it.
What is sham Reiki and why does it matter in research?
A research control where an untrained, unattuned person copies the hand positions and structure of a session. It separates the claimed energetic part from everything else: quiet time lying down, an attentive person, warm resting hands, and the expectation of feeling better. If real Reiki beats sham, something beyond those general factors is at work. The Bowden 2010 trial used a sham arm.
Why is Reiki hard to study rigorously?
Dose standardization, practitioner blinding, and no truly inert control. With no agreed dose, one trial's single 20-minute session and another's six weekly hour-long treatments are not comparable. The practitioner always knows whether the Reiki is real or sham, so full double-blinding is impossible in principle. And any credible control still means resting quietly with an attentive person, which is itself therapeutic.
What outcome measures do Reiki studies use?
Mostly validated self-report instruments. Pain is typically measured with a Visual Analog Scale or the Brief Pain Inventory, anxiety with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, depression with the Beck Depression Inventory, sleep with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and mood with the Profile of Mood States. Some studies add heart rate, blood pressure, salivary cortisol or heart rate variability. The reliance on self-report is a known weak spot, since expectancy shapes how people rate their own symptoms.
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