Phenomena – Episode 02

Original Airing: 5/26/2026

Produced by Sounds True Studios.

Music composed by Dan Baboulene.

“Reiki versus Fakey: A Clinical Trial on Reiki and Chronic Pain at Harvard and the University of Utah”

Adam Hanley: Something about the Reiki treatment continued to improve symptoms after treatment ended. To me, that's a really incredible finding — that two hours of treatment can durably and significantly change people's experience of pain. I honestly didn't expect to see anything here. And so now I feel like I'm on the back end, scrambling to try to figure out what actually happened.

Ivy Ross: We are in a time of convergence. Throughout history, almost every culture in the world has used what we now generally call energy healing to help ease suffering. But modern medicine pushed these practices — these phenomena — to the margins, and stories of energy healing became just that: stories.

I'm Ivy Ross, and as a business leader and artist, my life has always been about navigating these two very different worlds: the solid ground of hard data and the undeniable power of the invisible. At heart, I'm a child of wonder. I'm curious about the forces that connect us all, and so I invite you to join me as I explore this new frontier in medicine and healing with astonishing stories, compelling science, and an open mind and heart.

This is Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing.

The poet Anne Carson once wrote, "A primary characteristic of pain is its demand for an explanation." For people living with chronic pain, many times that explanation never comes, and the not knowing adds its own kind of suffering. 

Previously on Phenomena, we looked at research on energy healing and cancer. Biofield therapists were working with pancreatic cancer cells at MD Anderson, but that research is still in the early stages, studying cells and mice. In this episode, we take the leap from Petri dishes to people — the largest rigorous clinical study ever done on Reiki for chronic pain. First, I want you to meet Rick.

Rick Axelson: I'm Rick, and I grew up in Minnesota.

Ivy Ross: Rick spent his career in academics, in something that would become surprisingly relevant to his own healing journey.

Rick Axelson: I worked at the medical college at the University of Iowa for seven years, and at various other universities, and my specialty was research methods. I actually worked in a medical college where I was helping people evaluate evidence and do diagnoses and things like that.

Ivy Ross: Rick taught research methods at medical colleges, but even longer than that, Rick had suffered from chronic debilitating migraines — pain so severe that at one point it sent him to the emergency room.

Rick Axelson: I had migraines most of my life, and they were getting more and more serious. They got even worse when I tried to do work with computers toward the end of my career. Most of the time I could handle that through medications, but they were fairly severe migraines. It got to the point where I couldn't continue to take the medications they had given me because I was having cognitive trouble.

In 2018, I had this attack of just terrible vertigo. I was in my office, and all of a sudden my head started spinning. I ended up getting on the floor. It's the worst kind of feeling — it was like there are cats in your body trying to get out, and you can't find a place to be safe. With that episode, I started vomiting and my buddy in the hall called 911. They thought at first it was a heart attack or a stroke of some kind.

Ivy Ross: Rick had been fighting this condition for decades, and now it was escalating. He was also dealing with something else at the same time.

Rick Axelson: I also had prostate cancer at the time. They were treating me for that.

Ivy Ross: So Rick did what anyone with his background would do. He went to one of the most respected medical institutions in the world.

Rick Axelson: I went to the Mayo Clinic. The neurologist looked at me, and they got teams together and were analyzing all these different hypotheses about what could this be. They think it's a vascular disease. They think, "This may be your cancer spreading to your brain." But then when they did tests, they said, "No, it doesn't look like that. We're not finding anything that we think could be causing this."

Ivy Ross: For many who suffer from chronic pain, this is a familiar story — and that lack of explanation hurts even more.

Rick Axelson: This last time, the neurologist, when I came into the office, said, "I saw your MRI, and I can't believe it's your MRI. I thought it would be like your father's MRI — it's so bad. You have so much inflammation in your brain. We've got to do something. We can't let you be out there walking around with all the inflammation you have. You've had mini strokes."

Ivy Ross: It was around this time that Rick attended an online seminar hosted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization dedicated to exploring consciousness and human potential. One of the speakers was a Reiki practitioner named Natalie Dyer.

Natalie Dyer: My name is Natalie Dyer. I am from Canada, born and raised.

Ivy Ross: I'll let Natalie explain what a Reiki practitioner is.

Natalie Dyer: Reiki is a form of energy medicine, or a biofield therapy as it's sometimes called, that originated in Japan in 1922. It was developed by Mikao Usui, who was essentially a Buddhist monk. The general idea with Reiki is that you're tuning in to a state where you bring yourself into balance — really putting your ego aside, putting the persona, the subjective self, all of that aside, and being a channel for this life force energy. Any kind of imbalance in that energy will eventually lead to health problems, whether mental or physical. So as the practitioner, we're working to balance that energy out so that there are no condensed areas of energy and no areas that don't have enough energy.

Ivy Ross: But to say that Natalie is a Reiki practitioner is only half of the story, because Natalie also has a PhD in neuroscience.

Natalie Dyer: I'm a research scientist. My background is neuroscience — that's what my PhD is in. And somewhere along the way of my academic education, I stumbled into Reiki, and that really shifted everything.

Ivy Ross: Natalie has two post-doctoral degrees from Harvard, so she is a kind of bridge between these two worlds. I want to get to Rick and his healing session with Natalie, but before I do, let's talk geography.

Rick is in Iowa. Natalie is in Canada. How in the world does a Reiki practitioner heal someone in a different country? Most people think of Reiki as something that is done in person — the practitioner stands over the patient with hands out, sensing energy blockages and clearing them. But as with many energy healing practices, Reiki has a wide range of definitions and approaches.

Natalie practices in person as well as at a distance, like John Lavack from our previous episode. Either way, she employs the overall approach of Reiki. So let's hear what that's actually like. After consulting with Natalie, Rick decided he wanted to receive a healing session with her.

Rick Axelson: I contacted her and set up an appointment. It's a distance appointment, and we start off with Zoom, so I just talked a little bit, and then she said, "Okay, I'm going to just prepare. Just lie down."

Natalie Dyer: It's hard to even explain how this comes about. Sometimes you get visions. Sometimes you get feelings. I was just shown a little fleck — like a black fleck — somewhere right in the middle of his brain, deep in the brain. And I just wanted to get this thing out.

Rick Axelson: For a few minutes when I was lying down, I just felt this kind of presence — warmth over my body — and it was a very calming, loving presence. I'm not sure why I felt that, but it was kind of an intuition that there was energy there, right there with me.

Natalie Dyer: It took me — I think it was 40 minutes — and eventually I was able to pull it out of his left ear. It was like I had to just pull it out through his left ear. And then it was gone. And I Reiki'd his head to make sure that everything was going smoothly. It's hard to explain how I even know — it's just a feeling, a vision, a sensation. It's all different ways that this information is communicated to me.

And he told me some interesting things afterward — that he had had this sensation before. He never told me this before the session. He told me after that he had felt this, like, hot poker in his ear. He was feeling heat and fire in his left ear.

Rick Axelson: I thought that was interesting, because I had also had this problem with my ear at the same time — periodically getting these episodes where it felt like a hot iron poking in my ear canal. So I was amazed when she told me she had pulled it out through my left ear.

Ivy Ross: In the moment, Natalie is sensing energy blockages and connecting to Rick on a level that's focused on love, consciousness, and healing. And yet her other side — her neuroscientist side — has another possible explanation.

Natalie Dyer: When we think of things like inflammation, it's too much energy going there, so we're wanting to calm that out. And we do see that Reiki reduces inflammation and increases the parasympathetic nervous system, which down the line also reduces inflammation — and that's important for nearly every disease.

Ivy Ross: Whatever was happening, Natalie worked on Rick for about 45 minutes, and when the session was finished, his headache was gone — and it stayed gone.

Rick Axelson: I just felt fine afterward, and I haven't had a migraine since.

Ivy Ross: We talked to Rick several months after his session with Natalie, and his migraines — which had been both frequent and debilitating — still hadn't come back. The relief Rick felt was real.

Rick Axelson: It's just an incredible amount of joy. Now I'm back to being able to take courses online. My brain's working better. I think I'm actually healing more as this goes on, and I started to also do some Qigong. There's a lot with energy medicine that can help.

Ivy Ross: Rick's story is remarkable. A man with decades of migraines, brain inflammation, multiple strokes documented on MRI, and vertigo episodes that sent him to the emergency room — and one distance Reiki healing later, the migraines are gone.

Was this placebo? Was it coincidence? Was Rick just ready to heal and Natalie happened to be there at the right moment? These are fair questions, and they're exactly the questions a team of researchers at the University of Utah and Harvard decided to answer with the most rigorous study of energy healing for chronic pain ever conducted. What they found surprised even them.

Stories like Rick's are powerful. They're also easy to dismiss — one person, one healer, one remarkable outcome. We hear these stories and we want to believe them or we don't, and either way, we're operating on faith rather than evidence. So let's turn to the evidence. What if we could test this? What if we could take Reiki into a controlled laboratory setting with rigorous methodology, proper controls, and measurable outcomes?

That's exactly what a team of researchers set out to do.

Adam Hanley: I'm Adam Hanley.

Ivy Ross: Dr. Adam Hanley came to this research through an unexpected door — through studying altered states of consciousness in medical settings.

Adam Hanley: I had been doing brief mindfulness-based interventions, plugging them into routine care pathways for knee and hip replacement patients. In two separate studies, we found that if we could get somebody into a self-transcendent state a few weeks before surgery, they would have less opioid use in the first month after surgery, less pain in the first month after surgery, and better physical function at the six-week follow-up visit.

Ivy Ross: Dr. Hanley was discovering that when patients experienced what he calls self-transcendence, their medical outcomes actually improved.

Adam Hanley: Self-transcendence is like this profound sense of oneness or union with all things — this sense of being home or connected. The sense of self kind of fades away, and there's just this emanating feeling of goodness that flows there.

Ivy Ross: Dr. Hanley had data showing that transcendent states from mindful meditation predicted better outcomes. And then a question occurred to him: could Reiki produce those same states? And if so, could it produce the same results?

I first heard about this study at a conference in upstate New York in 2025. I joined some of the world's leading researchers, doctors, and healers at a retreat in the woods for five days, where they shared the latest findings, theories, and developments in energy healing. Adam's partner from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Robert Edwards, presented in person while Adam called in over video.

Rob Edwards: Thank you again for having me. Although I should note — don't think of me as me today. I'm actually channeling Adam Hanley, so younger, handsomer, that sort of thing. Feel free to picture.

I'm going to present the results of a Reiki trial — a randomized controlled trial of Reiki therapy in patients with knee osteoarthritis pain. Knee OA pain is a fairly large problem in the US and around the world. It's a leading cause of pain and disability in older adults — a really common, debilitating, and costly public health condition.

This is a four-arm randomized controlled trial looking at the effect of Reiki, with several controls, on pain among 164 adults with knee osteoarthritis pain. People were randomized to one of four different conditions: Reiki; a sham Reiki condition, colloquially known as "fakey" — that name has stuck, so you'll hear it a lot; a wait list control condition; and an active comparator condition, a known efficacious non-pharmacologic treatment, which is mindfulness.

Ivy Ross: Working backwards in that list: the mindfulness group, what Dr. Edwards calls an active comparator condition, received a compressed version of an eight-week program already proven effective for pain. The wait list group received nothing — they were the baseline showing natural disease progression. Then there's fakey and actual Reiki, in this case the kind of in-person Reiki most people are familiar with.

But it's the fakey group I want to focus on for a minute, because this is where the study gets really clever. The fakey practitioners were carefully trained to mimic all the movements of real Reiki, but they weren't actually doing Reiki.

Rob Edwards: There's a mimicking of the gentle movements that you get in a Reiki session. The fakey providers were instructed to mentally count backwards from a thousand by sevens, so that they were concentrating and exerting mental activity during the session — and also hopefully to avoid any unintentional energy transfer while performing the fakey movements.

Adam Hanley: There's this idea that there are natural healers, and if some natural healer comes into a room and just sits focusing on a person in pain, this healing process may just naturalistically emerge. To guard against anything like that, we had them do this serial sevens task — you start at a thousand and count backwards. So they wouldn't be focusing on the person, and they also wouldn't be focusing on healing.

Ivy Ross: I love this detail. The researchers were worried that the sham practitioners might accidentally heal someone, so they gave them a mental task to occupy their minds and prevent any unintentional energy transfer.

Rob Edwards: A really rigorous sham control condition — of the sort that's often hard to get with these non-pharmacologic treatments.

Ivy Ross: Each person in the active treatment groups — Reiki, fakey, or mindfulness — received four weekly sessions of about 30 minutes each, roughly two hours of treatment total.

Adam Hanley: We decided on two hours of treatment because there's a whole lot of emerging evidence suggesting that two hours of treatment can durably shift chronic pain symptoms.

Ivy Ross: So what happened?

Adam Hanley: We saw some pretty interesting patterns. Across all the treatment conditions, symptom severity decreased from baseline to the end of treatment — even in the wait list control group. The mindfulness group and the Reiki group continued to improve; their symptoms continued to decrease. Whereas the folks in the wait list control group and the fakey group — their symptoms kind of returned over that one-month follow-up period.

Rob Edwards: The mindfulness group looks best in terms of having the lowest pain and symptom severity. The Reiki group is not far behind, and then you've got wait list and fakey shortly after that. Reiki was statistically significantly better than wait list, not surprisingly. And the difference between fakey and Reiki was approaching statistical significance. We didn't quite hit the less-than-.05 threshold, but it's on its way there. This is a solid sample size for this sort of study, but you can imagine that if we had 60 or 70 participants in each group instead of 41, this is the sort of group difference effect size that would certainly be significant.

Ivy Ross: Sit with that for a moment. The group getting fake healing felt better during treatment — and then the month after treatment ended, that improvement faded. They went back to where they started. But the real Reiki group? They kept getting better.

Adam Hanley: Something about the Reiki treatment continued to improve symptoms after treatment ended, whereas fakey folks just kind of went back to how they were feeling before. It's a really fascinating data pattern that has me pretty intrigued to try to untangle this a little bit more.

Ivy Ross: Something in real Reiki produced an effect that outlasted the sessions themselves. The fakey group couldn't replicate it. But what exactly was the size of that effect?

Adam Hanley: Reiki was about 30% from baseline to follow-up — a 30% decrease in symptoms. Mindfulness was 38 or so. And you typically see 30% decreases for opioids in pain when they're working. To me, that's a really incredible finding — that two hours of treatment can durably and significantly change people's experience of pain.

Ivy Ross: More specifically, the study showed a 32% reduction in pain, and according to Dr. Hanley, opioids typically show around a 30% decrease in pain — roughly the same amount. Two hours of treatment, no drugs, no surgery, no side effects. The Reiki group achieved that same level of relief and held onto it after just four half-hour sessions.

As I pointed out earlier, when Dr. Hanley helped design this study, it was without any particular investment in Reiki working. He was a research psychologist who studied altered states. If anything, he was skeptical.

Adam Hanley: I came into this project not knowing anything about Reiki, not really knowing anything about biofield therapies. I approached this project like a mindfulness study, where we had two active control arms, because I had no context for this stuff. I wouldn't say I'm a convert at this point. But there's enough data here that it's hard for me to say something didn't happen in the Reiki condition that wasn't beyond placebo.

Ivy Ross: More research is needed to confirm the results, which I'll talk about in a minute. But I find it fascinating that the researcher who designed the study was now struggling to explain his own results.

Adam Hanley: I honestly didn't expect to see anything here. And so now I feel like I'm on the back end, scrambling to try to figure out what actually happened.

Ivy Ross: There's one more piece of this research I want to share, because it points toward something even more profound than pain relief. Remember, Dr. Hanley's earlier research found that when patients experienced self-transcendent states during treatment, they had better outcomes — outcomes independent of what was happening in the patient's own experience. The patient's state of consciousness seemed to affect the patient's healing.

After Dr. Edwards and Hanley's presentation at the conference, during the Q&A, one of the other participants summed this up nicely.

Jason: To me, one of the more interesting findings about this study is: we've known about the mind-body effect for a while, and the fact that meditation can influence a number of things physiologically. What's interesting to me is that in one of the very first pieces of rigorous research on Reiki — a transpersonally mediated modality, meaning someone else's consciousness is influencing your physiology — it comes up roughly comparable to your own mind influencing your body. Someone else's mind influencing your body comes out roughly comparable to your own mind influencing your body. To me, that's the very interesting punchline: they come out roughly comparable, in the very first study, right out of the box.

Ivy Ross: Of course, we still don't know the mechanism for how this all works. If you'll recall from our episode on MD Anderson's cancer studies, mechanism is difficult to pin down. But Doctors Hanley and Edwards have continued their research and have a paper in the works that investigates the brain data they recorded during these experiments. When it's publicly available, we'll link to it on our website at phenomenahealing.com. Natalie Dyer brought up mechanism in our conversation too.

Natalie Dyer: I think of the antidepressant world — they didn't even know how antidepressants worked. They didn't know the mechanism, and the mechanism they thought was shifting was actually a lot slower than how quickly the patients were feeling better. So we don't need to know the mechanism to give medication, apparently.

Ivy Ross: The science is compelling and, frankly, still evolving. It seems to point to the fact that something is happening. We might not know why or how, but both this rigorous study and Rick's personal story strongly suggest that there's a healing effect — whether at a distance or in person. The question is what to do with this knowledge. How do we think about healing when consciousness itself might be the active ingredient? And what would it take to build a healthcare system that takes this seriously?

As always, I want to invite my good friend and researcher, Meredith Sprengel, to help me unpack all of this. Meredith has spent more than 15 years working in integrative and complementary medicine research. She thinks carefully about what research can and can't tell us, and she's exactly the right person to help us process what we've heard today.

Meredith, welcome back.

Meredith Sprengel: Thanks, Ivy. Happy to be here.

Ivy Ross: You've spent years evaluating research in this space, and the researchers found that Reiki and fakey look similar during treatment, but only Reiki's effects persisted a month later. What do you make of that divergence?

Meredith Sprengel: I think it's really fascinating, and it also follows trends with other integrative health and complementary healing modalities such as mindfulness and meditation. It's not uncommon in a research study that we engage in expectancy effects — your belief and expectations about a treatment start to create this container that can also feel very health-promoting. At the end of the study, you only saw significant differences between wait list and mindfulness, and they all kind of hovered around the same decreases in pain and functionality.

And then over time, both the mindfulness group and the Reiki group continued to see decreases in pain. For the wait list and the sham Reiki group, you saw them go back up to the pain levels they had at the beginning of the study. This happens because once the container of the whole research process and the expectations aren't continuing to be supported, you're going to see the pain levels go back up.

Ivy Ross: What's fascinating to me is that Reiki must have actually done something — if it produced less pain a month later.

Meredith Sprengel: And something I find also really interesting, Ivy, is that the mindfulness intervention has been codified and studied for 15-plus years, whereas the Reiki intervention is new. So what's really interesting here is you're still seeing that something that hasn't been totally refined by research was almost as effective as the mindfulness intervention.

Ivy Ross: And would it be helpful in the future to not only have more participants, but to check in beyond just one month to see how pain levels are holding?

Meredith Sprengel: Yes, absolutely. I think that anecdotally, in a lot of the qualitative research I've done with people who've received healings, the healing just continues to create an added benefit over time. Obviously these are individuals, and we're talking about something that hasn't been studied in research, but as you start to change behaviors and look at yourself and the world differently, you start to change — and that change isn't within one or two sessions, but over time.

I note that there have been other studies that have looked at not necessarily energy healing, but things like pain reprocessing therapy. One of them followed people five years out, and they were still receiving benefit from that therapy.

Ivy Ross: Rick is a perfect example. The Mayo Clinic couldn't crack his headaches, and so far they are gone. Chronic pain is so hard to treat with conventional medicine. And now we have this rigorous study showing it works as well as opioids for pain. What does it take to move from that to formal integration, do you think?

Meredith Sprengel: There are many things that will take. Of course, we always need more research. When you're approaching new research — especially when you're trying to understand if an intervention works — you're not just going to ask "does it work?" You're going to ask "how does it work?" Those are the two main hypotheses you tend to try to test when thinking about integrating a new treatment into a medical system.

Pain seems to be one of the hardest things to treat, and a lot of pain is what they call nociplastic pain — there isn't any origin in tissues or nerves, but it's a total sensitization of the nervous system. So it's going to take different things than pain medication to treat, because it's a whole-body response to the pain, not necessarily just a place where it resides. I think there needs to be a lot more research into pain and specific pain disorders that are very hard to treat.

Ivy Ross: Like we talked about in the first episode, this is really about both/and, not either/or. It's not about replacing conventional medicine. Rick went to the Mayo Clinic, and he should have done that. And then he also lay on his floor with a Reiki practitioner a thousand miles away. Both can be true. You and I both agree this needs to be a symphony of influences. That's what healing often is.

Meredith Sprengel: Yes. One of the reasons that a lot of these integrative health modalities are so good for pain is that they play on what is traditionally thought of as the placebo effect — but could be thought of within this new context as the meaning effect. The meaning effect is a response induced not only by the actual interaction of the treatment, but by your expectations, your belief, the context, and the interpersonal relationship you have with the healer or the therapist.

A lot of times, because people are so sensitive — because they've developed this nociplastic pain that creates a whole syndrome of an overactive response to stimuli — putting them in a context where they can give meaning to what is happening can sometimes have biological effects, such as decreasing sympathetic nervous system activity. There's also research showing effects on dopamine pathways and some endogenous opioid activation. So even in these integrative medicine contexts, even if there isn't necessarily an active mechanism we understand, ritual may be a biologically active process that helps contribute to being able to receive the healing and to start to heal yourself.

Ivy Ross: And that brings us to set and setting. It seems like that's a whole area that one could research with these healing practices — how that affects the results.

Meredith Sprengel: Yes. That is something that definitely needs more time and attention because, as you and I both know, it isn't just a healer walking into a room. It's the whole context in which the healing is delivered — and that context enables you to receive it. If I'm comfortable, I'm more able to engage in something. Those are really key factors.

And so is what is termed in traditional research as the therapeutic alliance — feeling like you can trust your practitioner, that you have shared goals, that there's some sort of collaborative bond. It's all the things that make you feel like someone is actually in your corner. Research has consistently demonstrated that therapeutic alliance is a very strong predictor of therapeutic outcomes.

There's also some really interesting research where people with cancer were given different types of communication by their doctors. Some of the communication was very warm and empathetic; on the other hand, some doctors' communication was very focused on symptoms only. Those whose physicians asked how they were doing and gave them support had fewer symptoms, and they actually reported that the symptoms they did have weren't as bad as those in the group where doctors only focused on symptoms. This demonstrates that just the way we communicate can have a real, measurable impact.

Ivy Ross: And something that's consistent between this episode and the others is something you said: that agency is key, and that when you take yourself away from being a victim, you feel like you have the capacity to do what you need to do to get better. I keep hearing that theme over and over again. I remember Natalie actually told Rick after his session that he could do some things himself to keep himself healthy — she taught him a bit, and he reports it's been successful. Is that a coincidence, or how much do you think agency plays into how this all works?

Meredith Sprengel: A good healing encounter is one where, as you said, you develop your own capacity to have agency and not be the victim. So in a case like with Natalie and Rick, she was really enabling him to reach his full capacity by putting him in a place to feel better. Integrating your pain, or if you have pain relief, keeping it at bay — those are really important. A good healing encounter transforms you so that you can re-relate to your pain and also integrate the practices you need to continue to feel better.

Ivy Ross: Natalie talked about first getting into a state of loving kindness, and in our other episode, John Lavack with the Bengston Method does something to occupy the cognitive mind by bringing forward positive images — really to get the ego out of the way and open the energy. Do you see that as a common thread?

Meredith Sprengel: That's a great question. I'm actually in the process of doing a really big qualitative study, talking to healers about how they heal and how they put the person into a position to receive the healing. And a lot of people let go of the ego, or push the ego away, by connecting to what they refer to as a higher source — a higher energy, the universe, God — to put the ego away.

From what I've seen — and I'm not done analyzing the data, but this is my anecdotal take — it seems like when they put themselves in that place to start giving the healing, a lot of times they're connecting to something bigger than themselves.

Adam talks about this a lot. When someone is invited into a healing space, when you reach those transcendent states and there's a dissolution of the self or the ego, it can help people decouple from the idea of "I am a person with chronic pain." Sometimes they call it a narrative self. A lot of times what you find in the research is that when you have these transcendent states, they can reduce your perception of pain and also reduce pain catastrophizing — two key components of these chronic pain disorders.

But remember, we've also found that there's a physical component to this. Our mind and body are connected, and this does show up in your brain and your physiology. So Adam and Rob are continuing to analyze brain data from the Reiki study to look at a biologically based mechanism.

I also think it's good to remind everyone about Lorenzo Cohen's findings in the first episode, where they actually demonstrated something happened at a cellular level. There's a lot we can start to understand about mechanism — both at a psychological level and a biologically based level.

Ivy Ross: I love that healing is relational and about being intentional and about consciousness, and that the quality of the practitioner-recipient relationship matters in ways that science is beginning to measure. And I know we'll go deeper into that in future episodes — so excited to learn more.

Meredith Sprengel: I think we're going to be hearing from Vitaly Napadow, who is an incredible researcher at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center, which is a part of Harvard University. He's spent a lot of time measuring both healers and healees within the acupuncture context to look at whether their relationship is key to pain reduction. I won't spoil it, but it seems that therapeutic alliance plays a huge role when the acupuncture is being delivered.

Ivy Ross: Can't wait to hear more about that.

Meredith Sprengel: And something really interesting — which Adam did not talk about because the paper isn't published yet — is that one of the really interesting things he found about the energy healing modality versus the mindfulness modality is that after the healing, people were extra sensitive. But then a few weeks later, their sensitivity went back to a normal state. So there might be something about opening your boundaries during these energy healing experiences that's helping you kind of reintegrate the information.

Ivy Ross: Because you get in a different state of consciousness, and I think once your body and mind feel that, you're more prone to gravitate back there. So it is a gift that keeps on giving. And being able to talk to you is certainly a gift that keeps on giving — I look forward to our next conversation.

Meredith Sprengel: Same, Ivy. It's always a pleasure.

Ivy Ross: In the end, all of this is trying to figure out how we can ease human suffering. Nearly one in four American adults lives with chronic pain. In fact, according to a recent NIH study, new cases of chronic pain occur more often than new cases of diabetes, depression, and high blood pressure combined. And since underlying causes can be hard to pin down, chronic pain sufferers are often left without the explanation their pain demands.

What I take from stories like Rick and Natalie's, and from the research, is that Reiki is one more tool we can use to help ease this suffering — one that trades the risks of opioids for the rewards of loving kindness. And for Rick, and many like him, energy healing seems like it can provide meaning to the experience, a way of explaining pain through the process of healing. Maybe not in terms of a medical diagnosis, but something deeper — something that, for Rick, healed his chronic pain for good.

Next time on Phenomena, we will explore one of the oldest forms of energy healing in the world: Qigong, a practice with roots going back thousands of years in China, built on the concept of Qi — a life force energy that flows through the body and that practitioners believe can be cultivated, directed, and shared. We'll hear from scholars who have spent their careers studying the history and philosophy of Qi and Qigong, and we'll look at the current science, the data, and the emerging research that might be starting to reveal how Qigong actually works inside the body. The answers are older and more surprising than you might expect.

You can learn more about energy healing at our website, phenomenahealing.com, where you'll find resources, links to the research we discussed, and information about the documentary series also called Phenomena. If this episode moved you or challenged you, share it with someone. These conversations matter. We're at the beginning of something — a new understanding of what healing can be — and the more people who engage with these questions, the faster we'll find the answers.

I'm Ivy Ross, and this has been Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing.

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