Effects of Reiki in Clinical Practice: A Systematic Review of Randomised Clinical Trials

A systematic review by Myeong Soo Lee, Max H. Pittler and Edzard Ernst, published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice in 2008, examining nine randomised clinical trials of reiki touch therapy. Its conclusion, drawn from the trials it could locate, was that the evidence was insufficient to show reiki effective for any condition, citing small sample sizes, inadequate design and poor reporting across the trial base and, in several trials, an inability to replicate the small positive results earlier studies had reported. Its strength is exactly that independence and method: none of the three authors is affiliated with a reiki teaching organisation, and Ernst in particular built a career auditing complementary-medicine evidence on this kind of systematic basis. Its limit is that it can only summarise the trials that exist, and the trial base it summarises is itself small and methodologically weak, which is part of what the review reports.