The current state of custom care: Where Reiki, ancient wisdom, and emerging science meet
By Valerie Briggs
For generations, modern medicine became increasingly skilled at separating the body into systems, structures, diagnoses, and data. That precision has saved lives. It has also left many people feeling that the most meaningful parts of healing have been placed outside the room. Spirituality is seen as separate and distinct from evidenced based medicine. “God saved my life” is often acknowledged after the medicine has been given, often with a shrug from the medical providers.
But what if the divine was invited to your exam, procedure, operating room, or your overall health history?
The human body has physical symptoms and consciousness: nervous system, beliefs, memories, relationships, intuition, spiritual life, and personal sense of what has happened to the body. A person recovering from cancer, stroke, surgery, or chronic swelling does not experience the body as a collection of unrelated parts. There is one life, one soul, one conscious being through one body.
Spirituality and medicine are converging again to provide whole person care. Reiki, prayer, meditation, sacred ritual, skilled touch, embodied awareness, and the ancient systems that understood health through energies are being explored with modern technology. Modern research is beginning to study pieces of this terrain through spiritual experience.
Medicine is beginning to remember the whole person again
Spirituality in healthcare is offered as a prayer. Leading researchers in spiritual care have argued for a deeper understanding. Christina Puchalski and colleagues define spirituality through the ways people seek and express meaning, purpose, connectedness, and relationship with the significant or sacred (Puchalski et al., 2009, 2014).
A major JAMA review led by Tracy Balboni examined hundreds of studies and concluded that spirituality has meaningful associations with serious illness and health (Balboni et al., 2022).
The gap between belief and practice remains striking. In a 2026 survey of 670 oncology and palliative care professionals across 55 countries, 90 percent considered spiritual care essential and 92 percent believed spiritual distress could affect outcomes. Only 13 percent reported always screening for spiritual concerns, and 9 percent always took a spiritual history. The most common barriers included limited time, unclear professional roles, and insufficient training (Ripamonti et al., 2026).
There is a gap between spiritual offer and spiritual care. Patients have not lost their spiritual lives. Healthcare has lacked the language, time, and structure to meet them there. But the good news is that it’s changing every day.
Reiki is wholeness
Reiki emerged in Japan through the work of Mikao Usui in the early twentieth century. People describe Reiki in many ways. Some feel warmth, tingling, spaciousness, emotion, imagery, deep stillness, or a sense of movement. Others simply rest. A session does not require a particular belief, a dramatic sensation, or a prescribed spiritual interpretation.
Within Reiki practice, healing has a wider meaning than symptom removal. It may include physical comfort, emotional release, renewed inner steadiness, spiritual connection, or a feeling of returning to oneself. Many people seek Reiki when they are searching for relief and for relationship. Reiki evidence supports a grounded, Reiki positive conclusion. People receiving Reiki have reported and demonstrated improvements across outcomes that matter in real life, including pain, fatigue, anxiety, comfort, and quality of life. The average effects are generally small to moderate, and some studies remain limited by sample size, comparison design, and inconsistent reporting.
Touch, attention, and the biology of being received
The nervous system responds to touch as sensation, emotion, context, and prediction. The meaning of touch is shaped by consent, relationship, culture, expectation, and the person’s prior experience. We can explain touch with science. We are beginning to understand intentional energetic ‘touch’ as well.
In a 2026 randomized study of healthy adults, a light osteopathic approach delivered with attentive touch produced an immediate improvement in postural stability compared with nonattentive touch and no treatment. More than 90 percent of participants in the attentive touch group improved under both eyes open and eyes closed conditions. Attention within touch may be part of the intervention itself (Bettoni et al., 2026).
Reiki offers a form of care in which receiving is central. The Reiki therapist does not claim personal power, only a conduit for conscious attention from the universal source. The session creates space for the person’s own experience to unfold. This is one reason Reiki can feel powerful even when very little appears to be happening from the outside.
Fascia, fluid, and the intelligence of living networks
Western anatomy once treated fascia mainly as packing material. Contemporary research describes a continuous connective tissue network involved in force transmission, sensory input, movement, inflammation, vascular and neural relationships, and communication across body regions. A 2024 review described fascia as a regulatory system whose integrity is interdependent with nervous, musculoskeletal, vascular, endocrine, and immune function (Slater et al., 2024). The lymphatic system lives within this same moving landscape. Lymphatic vessels interact with breathing, skeletal muscle activity, arterial pulsation, tissue pressure, and the extracellular environment. Fascia, interstitial fluid, nerves, blood vessels, and lymphatics participate in one embodied ecology.
The collision of spirituality and medicine is already happening. It appears whenever a patient prays before surgery, feels unexpected peace during Reiki, or likes one providers “bedside manner” better than another (that is attention and intention in a manner).
The next era of whole person care:
Bioelectricity and the body as organized intelligence
Michael Levin’s work on developmental bioelectricity has shown that cells coordinate through endogenous voltage patterns produced by ion channels and gap junctions. These bioelectric networks help organize growth, repair, and large scale anatomical form. Cells participate in collective decision making, responding to more than a genetic blueprint alone (Levin, 2021).
Mitochondrial research adds another layer. Mitochondria transform nutrients and oxygen into usable cellular energy, respond to stress signals, influence inflammation, and communicate with other parts of the cell. Living tissues also emit extremely small amounts of light known as ultraweak photon emission. Their role as a communication system remains an open question (Bódis et al., 2026).
Spiritual experience has a physiology without losing its sacredness
Andrew Newberg’s work in neurotheology asks how spiritual and religious experience relates to brain function. Lisa Miller has studied neural correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences. Their work demonstrates that experiences of unity, transcendence, devotion, and sacred connection are embodied experiences with measurable neural correlates (Miller et al., 2019; Newberg, 2025).
A 2026 systematic review examined 105 studies across Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Spiritist, and other traditions. The studies included meditation, prayer, chanting, recitation, worship, retreat, mystical experience, and mediumistic trance. The authors reported practice specific patterns involving attention, regulation, positive reward with evidence of neuroplastic change in some long term practitioners. The diversity of practices and methods made a single pooled estimate impossible, which is appropriate for such a broad field (Husain et al., 2026).
Helané Wahbeh and researchers at the Institute of Noetic Sciences have taken another important step by developing methods to study noetic experiences. These are experiences in which a person feels they have directly encountered knowledge, unity, sacredness, or connection beyond ordinary sensory analysis. The Noetic Signature Inventory gives researchers a structured way to study experiences that conventional questionnaires often miss (Wahbeh et al., 2022). People often report experiences that change how they understand life, death, illness, and healing. This measurement tool is a valuable assessment in my clinical setting in examining these experiences.
Hermetic principles as a language of relationship
Hermetic philosophy offers another way to think about wholeness. Historian Wouter Hanegraaff has shown that late ancient Hermetic spirituality was deeply experiential. It involved disciplined transformation, altered states of knowing, spiritual rebirth, and the pursuit of gnosis, a direct knowledge of divine reality (Hanegraaff, 2022).
The familiar seven Hermetic principles come most directly from The Kybalion, published in 1908, rather than from a single ancient Hermetic text. The popular Twelve Universal Laws are a still more recent synthesis and historical clarity strengthens their use. These teachings search and give us modern outlines for the patterns that connect consciousness, nature, and transformation.
Mitch Horowitz has helped carry esoteric and New Thought traditions into modern public conversation by asking people to test ideas through lived practice rather than inherited certainty. His work on intention, mind power, and personal agency speaks to a desire many patients know intimately: the desire to participate in one’s own healing (Horowitz, 2018).
Martha Rogers offered nursing a visionary framework in which human beings and environments are understood as inseparable, dynamic fields. Her work created conceptual space for nursing practices that attend to pattern, relationship, and the whole person (Rogers, 1970). That lineage remains especially meaningful for Reiki because nursing has often been willing to study forms of care that medicine initially considered too relational, too subtle, or too difficult to standardize.
The next era of whole person care can be both discerning and expansive. It can measure outcomes carefully and listen deeply. It can distinguish evidence from hypothesis and still protect mystery. It can respect ancient wisdom without forcing it into premature scientific claims. Some people come seeking less pain or fatigue. Some want calm before surgery. Some want to feel present in a body that has endured more than words can express. Beneath those goals is often a deeper longing: to feel whole, connected, and able to participate in life again.
Reiki and the other approaches discussed here are complementary and are intended to accompany appropriate medical evaluation and treatment.