Qigong · medical qigong · CRP

The protein climbed in the sitting arm.

JM Thomas · 17 August 2026

A twice-weekly standing class in a cancer ward moved the FACT sheet. The sitting arm's protein climbed.

A twice-weekly standing class in a cancer ward moved the FACT sheet. The sitting arm's protein climbed.

I kept chasing qi as a vibe I could raise on the couch.

I copied the reel and called it qi

A 17 August 2026 thread in r/qigong started with a reel, and the writer copied a few moves until the joints loosened, then asked which basic set to run now.

Joints loosened.

Three days earlier a longer post asked how to clear energy while stuck inside with a chronic load that had already kept the writer home for years, and one reply named Ba Duan Jin as a daily set while another named a seated YouTube hour for the days the body would not stand.

YouTube already holds that hunger. A 20-minute morning stretch from Qigong Meditation sits at 2,736,538 views, and a 7-minute beginner set from Qigong For Vitality sits at 1,061,957.

The manifestation blogs this summer sold the same hour as the missing engine. Onenergy posted that piece on 24 June 2026, and I wanted that engine without ever booking a ward class.

Concord stood them for ninety minutes

Oh printed the sit in Annals of Oncology, volume 21, issue 3, pages 608 to 614, DOI 10.1093/annonc/mdp479, after 162 adults with a confirmed malignancy walked into three Sydney teaching hospitals and got assigned to a standing class or to the care they already had.

Seventy-nine stood.

Eighty-three sat with usual care, mean age 60 years with a spread of 12, ages 31 to 86, breast cancer the most common primary at 34 percent and colorectal at 12 percent, 48 of 79 women in the class and 45 of 83 in the wait-room arm.

About half had already finished anticancer treatment, the rest were still in it, and randomization was stratified on that split before the first class.

They recruited in two waves of 81, first a waiting-room ask from July 2006 to August 2007, then a letter from the oncologist through August 2007 to May 2008, and they ran nine programs with 7 to 20 people in a room.

Each class lasted 90 minutes, twice a week, for 10 weeks, with home practice asked at half an hour a day and a diary that only 50 percent brought back.

The instructor was the first author, with more than 20 years of qigong and a mind-body clinic block at Harvard Medical School.

They stood for half an hour along the energy channels the syllabus named. The rest of the ninety minutes sat, first a seated stretch, then a seated meditation that named breath as part of the hour.

Completers showed up to 8 of the 10 scheduled classes. Dropout sat at 32 percent in the class and 35 percent in usual care, and they also wrote a 76 percent completion line in the discussion, so I am leaving both numbers on the page.

No one reported an adverse effect to the instructor.

They had already run a 2008 pilot in the American Journal of Chinese Medicine with eighteen people, and they said that room was too small for a hard claim, which is why this file is the powered follow-up.

The FACT sheet moved nine points

Baseline FACT-G total sat even, 78.93 with a spread of 16.16 in the class against 79.21 with a spread of 18.21 in the wait-room arm, p = 0.918.

At week 10 the class had gained 8.86 points on that sheet, 95 percent CI 6.41 to 11.32, while usual care moved -0.13, CI -2.48 to 2.22, and the gap between arms was 9.00 points, CI 5.62 to 12.36, regression t(144) = -5.761, p under 0.001, after they controlled for the week-0 score.

Physical well-being rose 3.06 in the class and 0.98 in usual care. Functional well-being rose 2.46 in the class and fell 0.13 in the wait-room arm.

The social and emotional rows moved the same direction. Those t values sit in the Sydney card.

They called a 5-to-10 point FACT-G shift clinically important, and the discussion also wrote that the class sat 8.23 points higher than usual care at week 10 even though Table 3 printed 8.86 and 9.00, so both lines stay.

Fatigue on FACT-F rose 6.34 in the class, CI 4.38 to 8.30, and 0.64 in usual care, a between-arm gap of 5.70, t(153) = -5.621, p under 0.001, and they said a change over 3 points counts as a real fatigue shift, so 6.34 cleared that cut and they treated the rise as less fatigue.

Total mood on POMS fell 8.73 in the class and rose 1.91 in usual care, between-arm gap -10.64, t(122) = 2.346, p = 0.021.

Tension fell.

Vigor came back, anger missed the cut at t(104) = 1.359, p = 0.177, and confusion sat at p = 0.056.

They powered the room for a 0.5 standard-deviation FACT-G gap, 64 people per arm, then asked for 84 after dropouts and a small cluster tax. They enrolled 79 and 83.

The sitting arm's protein climbed

Baseline CRP sat even, 9.90 mg/l with a spread of 23.78 in the class against 12.25 with a spread of 25.71 in the wait-room arm, p = 0.616, though only 110 people had a baseline number.

At week 10 the class CRP had moved -3.60, CI -9.03 to 1.82, while usual care had moved +19.57, CI 5.37 to 33.76, and the gap was -23.17 mg/l, CI -37.08 to -9.26, regression t(99) = 2.042, p = 0.044, on a log transform.

That is the picture I came to write.

The sitting arm's protein climbed.

They named the miss in the discussion: usual care was the control, with no sham class and no blind, so extra attention could have carried the FACT sheet even if the blood protein is harder to flatter.

They planned a later attention-controlled sit. This file is the first powered RCT they claimed for medical qigong in cancer.

Missing rows were filled by multiple imputation, then the week-10 scores were run against the week-0 scores, and CRP used a log in the model, which I am leaving on the page.

The Sydney numbers