Tuning Forks

Tuning fork therapy is a sound-based practice in which a practitioner strikes calibrated metal forks and holds them near the ears or body, or touches them to points such as the sternum, sacrum, or acupuncture points, so you hear and feel a steady tone. Forks range from lighter ones that are held in the air to weighted ones that are placed on the body, and sessions are usually done fully clothed on a massage table.

Practitioners describe it as a way to support relaxation, ease of tension, and a calmer nervous system, and some people use it to help with stress, sleep, or muscle tightness. Others use forks for biofield tuning, a method that regards the space around the body as an energy field that can be adjusted with sound. These ideas come from the practice itself and have not been tested in controlled trials. Related sound practices, such as singing bowl meditation, have small observational studies that report less tension and better mood afterward, which is not the same as showing that forks do anything specific.

It helps to separate this from medical uses of tuning forks. Doctors use forks to check hearing and vibration sense, and reviews have examined fork tests for suspected fractures. Those tests are diagnostic tools and do not show that forks have any treatment effect. Tuning fork therapy is generally low risk, is not a medical treatment, and is best used as a complement to ordinary care.

The tuning fork itself dates to 1711, when the British court musician John Shore, a sergeant trumpeter and lutenist, invented it as a way to hold a steady pitch. Medicine adopted it in the nineteenth century. Doctors still use forks, usually at about 512 Hz, for the Rinne and Weber hearing tests, and lower forks, usually at about 128 Hz, to check vibration sense in a nerve examination. Researchers have also studied fork tests for suspected fractures, and a 2014 systematic review in BMJ Open, summarized in the Journal of Athletic Training, found them useful for ruling out some fractures but not reliable enough to confirm one.

Therapeutic use is a separate, much later development. Tuning forks appear in alternative therapies such as sonopuncture and polarity therapy. The best known recent method is Biofield Tuning, developed by the American practitioner Eileen Day McKusick, who says she began using forks in her massage practice in 1996, spent about ten years experimenting, and later taught the method she once called sound balancing. In her own book she advises practitioners to say that an area may relate to certain parts of the body, because she has no scientific proof of her biofield ideas. Today forks are used by massage therapists, sound practitioners, acupuncturists, and other complementary practitioners, with no single curriculum, governing body, or standard of training.