353 Studies Later: What the Evidence on Energy Healing Actually Shows
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She's been told, more than once, that energy healing isn't scientific.
Maybe by a GP, kindly but firmly. Maybe by a family member who worries she's chasing something that won't help. Maybe by the careful, skeptical part of her own mind — the part that wants to know before it commits to anything. That part isn't wrong. It's actually right. It's asking a fair question.
So here is a fair answer.
In January 2025, the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine published the most comprehensive clinical evidence map ever created for biofield therapies. Researchers reviewed 353 studies — including 255 randomised controlled trials, 36 controlled clinical trials, and 62 pre-post study designs. They covered every major form of biofield therapy: Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Healing Touch, external qigong, distant healing, and others. They examined outcomes across a wide range of conditions — pain, cancer, cardiovascular health, mental health, and more. The results are worth sitting with.
What the Review Found
Of the 353 studies reviewed, 172 — nearly half — reported positive results in favour of the biofield therapy for all outcomes being measured. Ninety-five reported mixed results. Seventy-one reported non-significant results. Three reported negative results.
Across 353 peer-reviewed studies, the evidence produced roughly sixteen times more positive findings than negative ones.
The researchers were careful and honest in their conclusions. They noted real methodological challenges across the field — inconsistency in how interventions were standardised, variation in outcome measures, smaller sample sizes in some studies. They called for higher-quality, better-controlled research going forward. This is the language of rigorous science: acknowledging what the evidence can and cannot yet establish, while being clear about what it does show.
What it shows is that the evidence for biofield therapies is not nothing. It is, in fact, substantial.
What a Biofield Is
For anyone coming to this idea for the first time: a biofield is the electromagnetic field generated by and surrounding a living body. Every cell in the body produces electrical activity. Aggregated across trillions of cells — in the heart, the brain, the nervous system — that activity generates a measurable field that varies with health states, emotional states, and physiological conditions.
Biofield therapy is any approach that works intentionally with that field — whether through a practitioner's focused attention, the application of sound, specific movement, or direct hands-on work. The underlying premise is that the field can be influenced from the outside, and that those influences interact with the body's physiology in ways that support wellbeing.
It is not a universally accepted premise in conventional medicine. But the evidence map from 353 studies suggests it is a premise worth taking seriously — particularly for people who have found the conventional answers incomplete.
Why This Matters if You're on the Fence
Kanika and I grounded You're A Freq in the emerging science of the biofield because this is precisely the territory where women with unresolved health questions most often find themselves — beyond the reach of what standard diagnostics can confirm, but not beyond what the body is experiencing. The 353-study review is not proof that every biofield therapy works for every person under every condition. But it is evidence that the idea deserves to be treated as a serious question rather than a category to dismiss. - Order The Book Here
The honest answer, if you're sitting on the fence, is this: the claim that energy healing does nothing is not supported by the research. The claim that it might do something, for some people, under some conditions, is — and substantially so.
That's enough to make it worth exploring. Especially when the thing you've been doing instead — returning again and again to an answer that hasn't worked — has a much weaker record.