What the Research Is Showing About Chronic Pain and Energy Healing

If you live with chronic pain, you already know the thing nobody likes to say out loud. You have tried the medication. You have tried the stretches, the heat, the rest, the pushing through. And some days the pain is still there when you wake up, waiting for you like it never left.

So when someone mentions energy healing, I understand the hesitation and eyerolling. You have been told before that something would help. You want to know if this is real, or if it is one more thing that asks for your hope and gives nothing back.

Here is the honest answer. The research is more serious than most people think.

In 2015, a team of researchers published a review in Global Advances in Health and Medicine looking at the whole body of clinical studies on biofield therapies, the family of hands-on and hands-near practices that includes the work I do. They were not gentle reviewers. They went looking for weak studies and called them out. And still, this is what they found.

Across more than thirty clinical trials on pain, they concluded there is strong evidence that hands-on biofield therapy reduces self-reported pain intensity. Not just in one small group. In varied patients, including older adults and people living with chronic pain. Several of those studies showed large effects, the kind that are not only real on paper but big enough to feel in a body.

An independent Cochrane review, which is about as cautious as research gets, reached the same place.

Biofield therapies reduced pain beyond what a sham treatment or no treatment produced.

And then the line I keep coming back to. The researchers concluded it is unlikely these effects are placebo alone. The relief people felt held up even when compared against people who thought they were getting the same thing. Something was actually moving.

I want to be clear about what this does not mean. It does not mean the field is finished proving itself. The same reviewers were direct about the gaps. The studies, like a lot of pain research, were often small. The field still needs bigger, sharper trials.

Your pain is not in your head, and the relief is not in your imagination. There is a real, measured signal here, and it is strongest for exactly the thing you are carrying. Pain.

This is why I built a chronic pain offering. Not to replace your doctor. Not to ask you to believe anything you cannot feel. But to work with your body the way it is actually asking to be worked with. With hands. With breath. With attention that does not look away from what hurts.

Pain has a way of making the body feel like enemy territory. Like something to manage, override, get through. The work I do is the slow return. Learning to be in your body again, not bracing against it.

If you have been waiting for permission to try something that the science is finally catching up to, this is it. You are allowed to want relief. You are allowed to come home to your own body.

This Works Alongside Your Doctor, Not Instead of Them

This is meant to be done in conjunction with Western medicine, not in place of it. Keep your doctor. Keep your treatment plan. Keep the people who run your tests and read your scans. The work I do is not a replacement for any of that, and I will never ask you to walk away from care that is helping you.

What I will tell you is what I have seen with my own eyes with real people. In my experience, this work holds its own. It has eased pain that medication was only partly touching and opened up healing possibility that western medicine can't replicate. It has given people relief on the days the prescription was not enough.

The two are not in competition. Your doctor tends the diagnosis. I tend the body that is carrying it. The best results I see come from people who do both.

I am trained in a number of modalities, and I do not reach for the same one every time. Breathwork, to move what words cannot reach and bring your nervous system out of its bracing. Somatic listening, to follow what your body is actually showing me instead of what I assume is there. Biofield therapies, the hands-on and hands-near work the research above points to. Pain is not one thing, and I do not meet it with one tool. I read what is in front of me and work with what your body asks for that day.

Ready to Experience It for Yourself?

Reading about the biofield is one thing. Feeling your own energy soften and settle is another.

When you are ready, there are two ways to begin.

If you want the full depth of this work, a 1:1 session offers sixty minutes built entirely around your intention. Light touch, deep listening, and Spirit guiding where the energy wants to move. The session unfolds at the pace your body asks for.

The Healing Room is my live group breathwork experience, where breath and energy move together. There is something sacred about settling your whole field in a room full of people choosing to come home to themselves at the same time.

Wherever you start, you do not have to do this alone.

Book a private session here, or reserve your spot in The Healing Room.

Your body is wise. Your energy knows the way home.

Reference: Jain S, Hammerschlag R, Mills P, et al. Clinical Studies of Biofield Therapies: Summary, Methodological Challenges, and Recommendations. Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2015.