Touch therapies (Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch and Reiki) for the treatment of pain relief for adults

Touch therapies (Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch and Reiki) have been found to be useful in pain relief for adults and children. Pain is a global public health problem affecting the lives of large numbers of patients and their families. This review aims to evaluate the effectiveness of touch therapies for relieving pain, and determine the possible adverse effects of touch therapies. Although the lack of sufficient data means that the results are inconclusive, the evidence that does exist supports the use of touch therapies in pain relief. Studies involving more experienced practitioners tend to yield greater effects in pain reduction. It is also apparent that studies with greater effects are carried out by highly experienced Reiki practitioners. Further investigation should be conducted on whether or not a more experienced practitioner or a certain type of touch therapy provides better pain reduction. The claim that touch therapies reduce analgesic usage is substantially supported. The placebo effect has been also widely explored. No statistically significant placebo effect has yet been identified except through one study on children. The effect of touch therapies on pain relief in children requires further investigation. No adverse effect has yet been identified. This review suffers from a major limitation: the small number of studies and insufficient data. As a results of inadequate data, the effects of touch therapies cannot be clearly declared. This review shows that there is still a need for higher quality studies on the effectiveness of touch therapies in pain relief, especially studies on Healing Touch and Reiki. Future studies should make a concerted effort to systematically document side effects and report the experience of the practitioners to allow for the evaluation of the relationships between treatment effect and experience of practitioners. Future experiments should also follow the CONSORT statement when reporting in scientific journals, which helps to substantiate the reliability and validity of quality assessments.