Today, in addition to medical treatments, patients use complementary medicine to relieve many of the problems caused by diseases. Complementary therapies have several types, one of which is energy therapy including Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and Qigong. Reiki is classified as a biofield therapy according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health,and is a non-invasive intervention, derived from the Buddhist religious book. The term “reiki” comes from the Japanese words “rei,” meaning universal spirit, and “ki,” which means vital life force energy. It was created by a Japanese Buddhist named Mikao Usui in 1800. Due to the increasing use and tendency to complementary therapies, they can be used to relieve pain and reduce anxiety and stress in patients. The aim of this study was to systematically review the effect of Reiki therapy on the control of pain, anxiety and stress.

This is a systematic review. A search was conducted on clinical trials published from 2016 to 2019 in national databases such as SID and MagIran and international databases such as Pubmed, Nursing Consult, Elsevier, Scopus, Web Of Science, Embase, and Google Scholar using the following keywords in English and Persian: Pain, Reiki, Anxiety, Stress, Randomized Clinical Trial using the “AND” and “OR” operators. Initial search yielded 154 articles. Of these, 131 were excluded due to not meeting the inclusion criteria, and finally 23 eligible clinical trials were selected for analysis. Inclusion criteria were: 1- being a clinical trial, 2- Use of intervention and control groups, 3- Use of energy therapy intervention to control pain, anxiety and stress 4- Use of scales with acceptable validity and reliability, 5- Having a code of ethics or a clinical trial code, 6- Use of an energy therapist to perform the intervention, and 7- written in English. Exclusion criteria were: 1- Lack of access to the fulltexts, 2- Lack of ethics code 3- not being a clinical trial 4- Unrelated objectives. Jadad scale was used to evaluate and review the articles by two authors. This scale examines clinical trials in terms of the randomization of participants, effectiveness of blinding, and patient follow-up. Its score ranges from 0 to 5. Based on this criterion, articles that received a score of ≥3 were included in the study.

The aim of this study was to review the clinical trials that examined the effect of Reiki therapy on pain relief, anxiety and stress in patients. The results of the present study showed different results among the recipients of the intervention. It seems that, for more accurate conclusion about the positive or negative effect of complementary therapies including Reiki therapy, more studies are needed. Since pain is one of the main reasons for receiving invasive and non-invasive interventions and complementary therapies such as reiki therapy, its evaluation and relief so that the patient can have a significant improvement in performance compared to before experiencing pain, has a significant impact on patients’ satisfaction with medical and palliative care. Because pain, in addition to physical effects and limiting the ability of patient in performing necessary and unnecessary daily activities, can affect their psychological, physiological and functional aspects.

Due to the novelty of reiki therapy and the different culture of the participants in the studies, it is recommended to conduct more studies in different cultures and patient groups with different ages to make better decisions regarding the provision of complementary therapies such as reiki therapy. Due to the greater willingness of patients to receive complementary therapies and the results of the current study, Reiki energy therapy is recommended as a safe, low-cost intervention with no need for special equipment. Further studies in various communities are needed so that such intervention can be used in evidence-based nursing practices for reducing pain, anxiety, and stress in patients with chronic illness, and took a step to improve the experienced conditions of patients and improve their performance.

There were no ethical considerations to be considered in this research.

This research did not receive any grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors. 

All authors equally contributed to preparing this article.

The authors declare no conflict of interest

 

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