The term energy healing has become so broad and misused that, depending on who you ask, it can mean anything from Reiki to crystals to sound frequencies to someone waving their hands around your body and telling you your chakras are f*cked. Which isn't helpful. Especially because underneath all of the marketing, mysticism, skepticism and questionable use of the word quantum, there’s actually a much more interesting conversation to have.

Humans have been working with the idea that health involves more than the physical structure of the body for thousands of years. Different cultures developed different languages for it - qi, prana, vital energy, life force - and different practices intended to influence it. Modern science doesn’t validate all of those traditional explanations. It also hasn't answered every question surrounding them. And that's where I think this conversation gets interesting.

So What Do We Mean by Energy Healing?

At its most simplest form, energy healing is an umbrella term for practices intended to influence, balance or interact with what practitioners understand as the energetic systems of a living being. Reiki, Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch and forms of qigong are common examples. Researchers often group practices like these under the term biofield therapies.

Even the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health recognizes “energy healing therapy” as a category of complementary health practice, describing it as an approach in which healing energy is believed to be directed through a practitioner to restore energetic balance. Notice something important there, though: Recognizing that a practice exists isn’t the same thing as proving the explanation for how it works. That's a pretty important distinction that we're going to make a lot around here.

Because “Energy” Is Where Things Get Messy

One of the biggest problems in conversations about energy healing is that we use the word energy to describe a whole bunch of different things. Sometimes we're talking about something measurable. Your nervous system communicates through electrochemical signals. Your heart produces electrical activity. Your brain produces electrical activity. Cells maintain electrical charge across their membranes. You aren’t metaphorically electrical. your literal biology actually involves electricity. But (and this is a big f*cking but) that fact doesn’t automatically prove every claim anyone has ever made about energy healing.

You can’t jump from the human body uses electrical signals to I can clear your ancestral trauma by transmitting a frequency through Instagram. There are too many missing steps in that argument. This is where conversations about energy healing often fall apart. One side takes legitimate biology and stretches it until it supposedly proves every metaphysical idea imaginable. The other side sees those exaggerated claims and decides that the entire subject has to be nonsense. Neither approach to the conversation leaves much room for curiosity, and I think curiosity is exactly what this subject needs and deserves.

What Does Science Actually Say?

The answer is a lot less exciting than either side of the internet would probably like: We don't actually know. Energy-healing practices have been studied, but the evidence is mixed and the research has a lot limitations. A large 2025 review of the subject mapped 353 studies of biofield therapies, including 255 randomized controlled trials, but researchers still concluded that problems with study quality, methodology and consistency make it super difficult to draw legit conclusions about effectiveness for specific conditions.

Reiki gives us a good example. The NCCIH currently states that Reiki hasn’t been clearly demonstrated to be effective for health-related purpose and that there’s no scientific evidence proving the energy field exists like it’s proposed in traditional Reiki explanations. At the same time, research hasn't just stopped either. A 2026 review and meta-analysis of Reiki in surgical care found potential improvements in postoperative pain and anxiety, but the researchers rated much of the evidence moderate-to-low and specifically called for larger, better-designed studies before anything could be further stated or explained. That's not proof that Reiki energy exists, but it's also not proof that nothing happened either. It's an unanswered question, and we have to learn to be perfectly okay and comfortable with unanswered questions.

Please also keep in the back of your mind without going full conspiracy and needing your tinfoil hat, that science and the medical world stand to lose a lot if the energy world is proven to be true. We are currently at a particular crossroads where the meet-point between science and spirituality is happening naturally. The next step in medical science technology is energy based. And the energy world will continue to be given legitimacy as new science reveals what our ancestors knew to be true.

But People Experience Something

This is the part I don't think we should skip over and dismiss just because the scientific mechanism hasn’t been proven or established. People often describe feeling warmth, tingling, heaviness, emotional release, relaxation, sleepiness or changes in their internal state during different forms of energy work. Those experiences are real as experiences. What caused them is a different story.

Maybe we're looking at nervous-system changes. Maybe our expectations and perception of the experiences contribute to our own understanding of what energy work actually is. Maybe focused attention and human connection matter more than we actually realize. Maybe future research will identify the mechanisms we currently don't understand.

Several things can be true at once. That's why I don't think we need to choose between: “Energy healing scientifically cures everything.” and “If science hasn't been able to explain it, then everybody experiencing something must be imagining it. Those are both very lazy conclusions.

Energy Healing Doesn't Have to Replace Anything

This might be the most important part of it all. Energy healing belongs in the category of complementary practices. Complementary means alongside of, not instead of.

If you break your leg, please don’t Reiki the shit out of it instead of going to the hospital. You can Reiki the shit out of it after someone has put the bone back where the bone belongs, but never should you just trust that the energy work will be enough to correct that kind of problem. There’s no prize for rejecting appropriate medical care in favour of proving how spiritual you are. The same applies in the opposite direction too. Using conventional medicine doesn't mean you're banned from exploring practices that help you relax, reconnect with your body, feel supported or experience your healing process differently. These things don't need to be at war which each other, they need to be balanced out and unified.

Maybe We've Been Asking the Wrong Question

The question people usually ask is: “Is energy healing real?” I don't like that question. It's too broad. Which practice are we talking about? What outcome are we looking for? What do we mean by energy? Are we asking whether someone feels different afterwards? Whether scientifically measurable physiology actually changes? Whether symptoms improve? Whether an invisible energetic field exists? Whether a specific spiritual explanation is actually correct?

All of those are completely different questions, and when we separate them, this subject becomes much more interesting. Because there are things about the human body that are measurable and well understood. There are also things we're just beginning to understand - the brain for instance. There are traditional systems that humans have used for thousands of years that science interprets very differently. And there are claims being made in the modern wellness and woo-woo world that deserve a raised eyebrow and a lot of follow-up questions.

We're going to talk about all of it. Not because everything called energy healing is legitimate, and not because everything unexplained is mystical and woo-woo. And definitely not because adding the words frequency or quantum automatically makes something scientific. We're going to talk about it because the relationship between the body, the nervous system, our environment, our perception, our beliefs, and what humans have historically called energy work is genuinely fascinating to me. And I think it's worth exploring without needing ourselves to choose between blind belief in something “cool” and automatic dismissal of something that the scientific world can’t explain.

Because sometimes the most intelligent answer isn't a yes or a no. Sometimes it's: We don't completely understand this yet, so let's keep researching.

NEXT UP: Your Body Is Electrical: What That Actually Means

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What Is Energy Healing, Really?