New Study… Can Intention Influence Healing?
A rigorous look at attention, consciousness, and pain regulation
**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
A person with chronic knee pain enrolls in a clinical study.
Nothing about their knee changes in any conventional way. No surgery. No injections. No new medication. No structural repair that would normally explain what happens next.
And yet, weeks later, their pain is meaningfully lower. Not just during the intervention, but after it ends.
That result doesn’t ask for belief.
It asks for a better explanation of how pain actually works.
The Big Idea
Phrases like “where attention goes, energy flows” hang around because they point at something real while explaining almost nothing.
Attention isn’t energy. Intention isn’t a force. But attention does play a regulatory role in the nervous system, and the nervous system determines how sensory input becomes experience.
If we want to understand why certain non-pharmacologic interventions reduce pain, we have to move past metaphors and look at mechanisms, even when those mechanisms are uncomfortable for existing models.
The Breakdown
In 2025, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial examined Reiki and mindfulness meditation as treatments for chronic knee osteoarthritis pain:
Hanley, A. W., et al. (2025). Complementary therapies for chronic knee pain: A placebo-controlled randomized controlled trial of Reiki and mindfulness.
What made this study worth paying attention to wasn’t the inclusion of Reiki. It was the design.
Participants were randomized into four conditions: Reiki, mindfulness meditation, a waitlist control, and a sham Reiki condition designed to mirror everything except one internal variable. Time, movements, setting, and practitioner behavior were matched. The only thing intentionally disrupted in the sham condition was the practitioner’s directed attention, achieved through a cognitive distraction task.
Initially, the sham condition worked. Participants improved, which is exactly what we would expect when care, expectation, and therapeutic context are present. But when the intervention stopped, those improvements faded.
That’s where the pattern changed.
Participants in the Reiki and mindfulness groups continued to improve even after sessions ended, showing clinically meaningful reductions in pain. This doesn’t prove what Reiki “is,” and it doesn’t need to. What it shows is that trajectory matters. Placebo effects often decay. Something here didn’t.
What Pain Science Already Knows
Modern pain research has been converging on the same conclusion for years. Pain is real, and it is not a direct readout of tissue damage.
Pain is constructed by the nervous system. It reflects how sensory input is evaluated against threat, memory, expectation, and meaning. Attention plays a central role in that process, shaping how predictions are formed and how strongly signals are weighted.
From a clinical standpoint, pain can be influenced across multiple interacting layers. Physiological regulation affects autonomic tone and inflammation. Perceptual processing affects how sensations are interpreted. Identity-level organization determines whether pain becomes a defining feature of the self or an experience that can loosen its grip.
Shifts at any of these levels can alter suffering without altering tissue integrity.
Where “Biofield” Enters the Picture
In research contexts, “biofield” is a provisional term. It doesn’t describe a single mechanism or imply a specific explanatory model. It simply acknowledges that biological systems exchange information in ways that are not yet fully mapped.
That’s why mainstream institutions such as MD Anderson Cancer Center have explored biofield-related therapies. Not as endorsements, but because low-risk interventions showing potential benefit warrant careful investigation.
[Unverified] Members of the research team have publicly discussed preliminary neurophysiological observations suggesting changes in attentional networks and somatosensory processing during sessions. These findings are not yet fully published and should be interpreted as exploratory.
If they hold up, they would align with existing predictive processing models rather than overturn them.
Practical Takeaway
This study doesn’t settle debates about Reiki. It reframes the conversation.
The more useful questions moving forward are clinical, not ideological. Which individuals respond to attention-based interventions? Under what conditions do perceptual shifts produce durable symptom change? How does identity stabilization around pain interfere with recovery? And how can low-risk tools be integrated into care without overstating what we know?
Those questions are harder than belief or dismissal. They’re also more productive.
Closing Thought
“Where attention goes, energy flows” isn’t an explanation. It’s a pointer.
Attention may not move energy in a literal sense. But attention does reorganize how the nervous system predicts, prioritizes, and assigns meaning. When those reorganizations persist, experience changes.
That relationship is no longer philosophical. It’s measurable. And it’s far more interesting than arguing about whether something is “real” or not.
PS: If you’re ready to break free of surface-level fixes and become the kind of person who can create real, lasting change at the identity and biology level, explore my Next Level Human coaching program today. Spots are limited… don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching
References:
Hanley, A. W., et al. (2025). Complementary therapies for chronic knee pain: A placebo-controlled RCT of Reiki and mindfulness. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 95, 103278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2025.103278
Jade, this is a critical distinction between masking a signal and reprogramming the receiver. The fact that the "Sham" group (distracted practitioner) saw their results decay proves that the mechanism wasn't just the theater of the appointment, it was the specific quality of the attention.
You are describing the editing of the "Mental Blueprint." Pain is often a "stuck" prediction loop. It seems intention doesn't just soothe the alarm; it recalibrates the sensor itself. If the nervous system stops predicting the threat, the pain signal loses its utility. A fascinating evolution of the data.
Dr Tom Kane
Thank you for this insightful summary of the recent study on intention, attention, and healing. It beautifully illustrates how focused intention—through practices like Reiki or meditation—can influence the nervous system's predictive processing, effectively lowering entropy in the information flow and reshaping subjective experience. This aligns precisely with My Big TOE: consciousness evolves by reducing fear-based patterns and choosing love over fear, leading to real physiological and perceptual shifts. Encouraging more such open-minded research!