Reiki complementary therapy in nursing practice

Abstract

Reiki is a therapy performed by placing hands on specific points in the body and using energy transfer to provide a natural well-being. The Nursing also presents within its specific interventions, an essential part based on the touch to the person to whom it cares, being therefore important to have correct knowledge on these techniques. Thus the study intends to evaluate the knowledge that the nurses have about Reiki and to identify determining factors in this knowledge. It is a cross-sectional, descriptive and correlational study, carried out in a non-probabilistic sample by convenience, consisting of 49 nurses with a mean age of 38.96 years, working in health institutions in the central region of Portugal to whom was applied a questionnaire to evaluate knowledge about Reiki, which was developed for this purpose by the researchers. We found that 59.1% of the Nurses had reasonable knowledge, 38.6% had high knowledge and only 2.3% had low knowledge. Knowledge was higher in nurses who had already received Reiki treatment (p = 0.032) who had differentiated care (p = 0.019) who were holders of the master degree (0.040) and had a higher professional category (p = 0.016). We conclude that the knowledge of nurses about Reiki is moderately positive and these are clearly superior in the group that performs functions in differentiated care when compared to those of primary care. On the other hand we found several factors that correlate with this knowledge and on which it is important to intervene in order to improve knowledge