Gloria A. Gronowicz doesn’t believe in mysterious powers or healing from afar. That leaves her with a dilemma.
Results of a vigorously designed three-year study that she conducted suggest that test-tube cells grew better when people trained in reiki touch therapy passed their hands over the containers.
They did not touch the test tubes, or warm them, or affect them physically in any known way, Gronowicz said.
She was stunned. And puzzled.
The tightly controlled study suggests that patients could physically benefit from some sort of energy emanating from the skilled human hand.
“This is quite astonishing to me,” Gronowicz said. “How do humans interact with biofields?”
The University of Connecticut Health Center study was financed by the National Institutes of Health center for complementary and alternative medicine, and published in the Journal of Orthopedic Research.
Gronowicz presented the study this spring during an NIH meeting in Austin, Texas. A professor of surgery at UConn with a doctorate in molecular biology from Columbia University, she was one of the last people who expected to find evidence of human non-touch therapy.
In reiki, the hands of the practitioner never touch the patient. Rather, the hands are believed to manipulate “ki,” or “life energy.” The technique was developed long ago in Japan and become popular in the U.S. in the 1970s as patients searched for alternatives to regular medicine.
The therapy is not part of any religion. Practitioners must be certified at one of several reiki institutes and centers.
According to a 2007 NIH survey, “energy-healing” therapy is used by more than 1.2 million adults and 161,000 children annually.
“Clients may experience a deep state of relaxation during a reiki session. They might also feel warm, tingly, sleepy or refreshed. Reiki appears to be generally safe and no serious side effects gave been reported,” the NIH concluded.
Studying people is difficult, because the presence of a person could raise the patient’s spirits and ease his pain. So Gronowicz used cells in discarded bone chips, and from skin and tendons.
The cell cultures received two 10-minute treatments a week for two weeks.
One set of treatments was performed by people trained in reiki. The other set was carried out by untrained people.
When all of the hand waving was done, Gronowicz examined the cells.
The results showed that reiki had no effect on bone cancer cells, but that the process improved bone cell growth by a statistically significant percent. Skin and tendon cells also grew under the reiki regimen.
“We saw a dose-response curve,” Gronowicz said, an effect noted in tests of drugs and other conventional therapies.“The practice of energy medicine has been around for thousands of years,” she said. Most previous studies of reiki were small and “under-powered,” but did show a slight effect, she said.
Nonetheless, response to the work has not been overwhelmingly positive. Reiki is already available at Yale-New Haven, Waterbury, Griffin, Hartford and the University of Connecticut Hospitals. All offer reiki as part of an overall treatment plan.
“If the mind-body effects balance health, why not use it?” she said.
Gronowicz said she has come to accept the idea of biofields and would like to collaborate with a physicist to study them.
So far there are no takers.
“Are there receptors? There must be a biofield that affects health. Maybe I’ve lost it, but what if it’s true? That would represent a whole new avenue of medical treatment,” Gronowicz said.
Gronowicz has spent 25 years researching bones, and has published about 50 papers. The reiki paper has prompted doubt and scorn among some scientists, but she is not worried.
“I feel like I ought to be doing risky science at this point in my career. Science requires risks. I would urge others to do the same tests,” she said.
“I would like to spend the rest of my career working on this,” she said.