Research on healing at a distance

In brief

Reviews that look at dozens of studies together find a measurable positive effect of healing at a distance. The effect holds up when you look only at the best-designed studies. Healing by a practitioner shows results in particular. In two studies of external qigong for chronic pain, pain fell on average 36 points more than with usual care, on a scale of 0 to 100. For prayer at a distance the picture is less clear. Because healing is hard to capture in a laboratory, the scientific conversation is still going on. My conclusion: there are serious indications that something is happening. Proof by the standards of medicine does not exist yet.

Reviews

A review puts the results of many separate studies side by side. That makes it more telling than any single study.

What stands out: studies of healing by a practitioner (such as qigong, Reiki or Therapeutic Touch) show an effect more often than studies of prayer. That may be down to the form of treatment, but also to how the studies were set up.

Notable individual studies

Patients with AIDS (Sicher, Targ et al., 1998). In this double-blind study in the Western Journal of Medicine, half of 40 patients with advanced AIDS received healing at a distance. That group had fewer new AIDS-related illnesses and shorter hospital stays. It later emerged that the original main measures, such as mortality, showed no difference, and that other outcomes were only looked for afterwards. That weakens the conclusion. A later, larger study with 150 participants, completed after Targ’s death in 2002, found no difference in survival or symptoms.

Heart patients (STEP, Benson et al., 2006). The largest study of prayer at a distance included 1,802 patients undergoing bypass surgery. Prayer made no difference to complications (52% versus 51%). The group that knew they were being prayed for actually had slightly more complications (59%).

External qigong in the laboratory (Yount et al., 2004). Qigong practitioners tried to influence the growth of human cells. The first experiment showed an effect, the repeat did not. The researchers call for more, and more careful, research. This study shows well how hard replication is.

Intention and chance (PEAR, Princeton, 1979–2007). Engineers at Princeton University spent nearly thirty years studying whether people could influence machines that generate random numbers through intention. They found small but consistent deviations. Researchers in Germany could not repeat them. This was about intention rather than healing, but it is often cited in books on healing.

The research in China

In the 1980s and 1990s China saw a wave of enthusiasm for qigong, the ‘qigong fever’. Universities and hospitals studied external Qi (wàiqì, 外气): the Qi a practitioner emits. Prominent scientists supported this, such as the physicist Qian Xuesen, the father of China’s rocket programme. A well-known example is the research with qigong master Yan Xin (严新).

In 2004 the researcher Kevin Chen reviewed these studies. They measured the effects of external Qi with physical, chemical and biological methods, and with the human body itself. His conclusion: the studies show measurable effects, but no one has yet unravelled what external Qi is or how healing with it works. Western researchers point out that many Chinese studies lacked a proper control group and were rarely repeated independently.

Around 1999 this wave came to an abrupt end, when the Chinese government cracked down on qigong movements. The historian David Palmer describes the whole period in Qigong Fever (2007).

The Huaxia Zhineng Qigong Centre is part of this history too. Pang Ming founded it in 1988. It became known as the ‘medicine-less hospital’, where thousands of people practised together. The figures on recovery there come mainly from sources within the Zhineng movement itself. They are observations, not controlled studies.

Widely read books

Lynne McTaggart. The journalist wrote The Field, The Intention Experiment (2007) and The Power of Eight (2017). She gathers research on consciousness, intention and healing at a distance, and links it to the zero-point field from quantum physics: an energy field that, in her view, connects everything. She also runs intention experiments with groups herself. Her books are an accessible way into the research. Her explanation through quantum physics is her own interpretation, though; physics itself does not draw that conclusion.

Bruce Lipton. The American cell biologist wrote The Biology of Belief (2005). He argues that our environment and beliefs, more than our genes alone, determine how our cells function. He draws among other things on epigenetics: the field that studies how the environment switches genes on and off. Epigenetics is established science. Lipton’s conclusion that beliefs control our biology goes further than research has shown so far, and mainstream science has paid it little attention. His work concerns the influence of the mind on the body, rather than healing at a distance specifically.

Why is it so hard to study?

Effects of healing are hard to repeat in a laboratory. They involve people, intention and circumstances, and those are difficult to pin down:

• A healer is not in the same state every day. Concentration, tiredness and the connection with the recipient vary.
• The setting matters. In Zhineng Qigong the Qi field of the group is important, and a laboratory is a different field from a practice hall.
• Healing is tailored to the person, while a study needs everything kept the same.
• The effects are often small. Measuring a small effect reliably takes many participants.

There is another side too. Critical researchers point out that studies with a positive result are published more often, and that a favourable outcome is sometimes sought after the fact, as in the AIDS study above. In mainstream psychology and medicine, too, a large share of studies is hard to repeat. This is known as the replication crisis.

How I see it

To me the research is an indication that something is happening that we do not yet understand well. It is not proof yet, and that is why I do not promise healing. You do not have to believe in it. You can experience it and notice for yourself what it does for you. Please also read the disclaimer.

Sources

• Roe, Sonnex & Roxburgh (2015). Two meta-analyses of noncontact healing studies. Explore 11(1).
• Lee, Pittler & Ernst (2007). External qigong for pain conditions: a systematic review of randomized clinical trials. Journal of Pain.
• Astin, Harkness & Ernst (2000). The efficacy of “distant healing”: a systematic review of randomized trials. Annals of Internal Medicine 132(11).
• Roberts, Ahmed & Davison (2009). Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health. Cochrane.
• Sicher, Targ et al. (1998), Western Journal of Medicine; background and criticism: Elisabeth Targ (Wikipedia).
• Benson et al. (2006). Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP). American Heart Journal.
• Yount et al. (2004). In vitro test of external Qigong. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 4:5.
• Chen (2004). An analytic review of studies on measuring effects of external qi in China. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 10(4).
• Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), Wikipedia.
• Palmer, D.A. (2007). Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China. Hurst.
• McTaggart, L. The Field; The Intention Experiment (2007); The Power of Eight (2017).
• Lipton, B. (2005). The Biology of Belief.

Last updated: 7 November 2026