Measured over twenty years
Twenty years of hospital Reiki, evaluated.
Most of what is written about Reiki is description. This page is what happened when a hospital counted.
From 1998 to 2019, my colleagues and I evaluated Hartford Hospital’s Reiki Volunteer Program — sessions delivered, volunteer hours, and referral patterns across departments. We presented the assessment at the Society for Integrative Oncology annual conference in 2019.
74,795
Reiki sessions delivered
12,737
Physician referrals in the medical record
45,852
Volunteer hours logged
163
Reiki volunteers trained and active
Referrals came from across the hospital — Medicine, Cardiology, Surgery, Orthopedics, Obstetrics, Oncology, Neurosurgery and more. Reiki is now delivered on the floors of Hartford Hospital, in dialysis units, the ambulatory surgery center, the Bone and Joint Institute, and the Hospital of Central Connecticut.
Gopal P, Moore A, Kuhlberg J, Secor ER Jr. Hospital-Based Reiki: Program Assessment and Establishing Best Practice. Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute, Department of Integrative Medicine. Presented at the Society for Integrative Oncology annual conference, 2019. Program-level data, 1998–2019. No individual patient information is collected, stored, or shared. Individual results vary.
These sessions helped me survive the anxieties of radiation, and calm my mind enough to endure the treatments.
— Hospital patient
Reiki has provided me with a level of relaxation that I do not get from a massage.
— Hospital patient
At the end there are always feelings of calmness, a sense of wellbeing, a feeling of lightness. Sometimes a focused clarity.
— Hospital patient
An honest note
What this evidence does not say.
Numbers tell you a program was used, referred to, and sustained for two decades. They do not tell you Reiki cures anything, and I would not claim it does. What follows is the caution I give every patient and every student.
Prescription medicines are nothing short of miracles. But when overused, or used as a blanket solution for something that calls for more than a pill, they end up getting in the way of health.
In the same sense, if Reiki — or any spiritual practice — becomes an escape from facing the challenges of life, or becomes food for the ‘spiritual ego’, it can too get in the way of physical, mental and spiritual health. I would go on to extrapolate this concept to the emerging use of AI as well.
The mindset underlying the use determines the good and the bad in everything.
— Punyapriya (Benu) Gopal, MD
Bringing Reiki into your institution?
Program design, staff training, and documentation practice for hospitals and clinics.