The subject of Reiki can be approached with fists or with a light touch. Reiki’s interventions, based on energy not measured with scientific instruments, provide a punching bag not to be missed for skeptics who want to beat down absurdities. A study on the effect of soda on the chakras? Is it true that Reiki masters perform distance healing with stuffed animals? But I will suppress my cynicism and focus on the claims and history of Reiki, and asking whether its spiritual descendants such as therapeutic touch pass the smell test.
A starved brain causes hallucinations
Reiki is a Japanese technique that followers believe promotes healing. Reiki presupposes a certain life force energy, which when depleted results in illness. Reiki masters believe that by placing their hands on or over the client’s body, they are channeling divine energy to heal the client.
There have been many versions of Reiki in the past, but the most common is called Usui Therapy, named after its founder, Mikao Usui. Born in 1865, Usui was a Japanese man who was part of a group hoping to develop psychic powers, climbed a mountain, fasted for 21 days, and experienced visions. If this story had happened just a few years ago, one wonders whether Reiki would have been taken seriously in academic health centers.
The history of therapeutic touch, or Reiki under the nurse’s hat, is similarly hinged on anecdotes. In 1971, a nurse named Dolores Krieger was dejected after seeing a young patient dying of gallbladder disease. So she decided to try something she had learned over the past few years: a treatment taught to her by two spiritual healers, Dora Kunz and Oscar Estebany. Pleased with the results, Krieger began teaching the method to other nurses.
According to the International Association of Reiki Practitioners (IARP) website, Reiki doesn’t cure anything. But it “gets to the root cause of symptoms” and helps create the best environment for the body to heal. Does this not sound like a treatment? “Indeed,” the text continues, “if you address the root cause of the symptoms, the symptoms and physical condition will certainly be alleviated, but in a way that treatment does not.” Is this “pretzel logic” compelling, or does it sound like someone who doesn’t want to be sued for practicing medicine without a license?
Many highly theorized mechanisms have been proposed to explain how shaking hands heals (or rather, “helps the body heal itself”), but none of these mechanisms make scientific sense. Some believe that trauma is stored in cells and that therapeutic touch can restore communication between cells (a claim that cell biologists would no doubt frown upon). Others say that iron in the blood creates an electromagnetic field as it circulates, and that this aura can be manipulated. Finally, Reiki traditionalists claim that one simply channels the divine energy of a god. With such immense power at their disposal, it is puzzling that Reiki masters advertise stress reduction and mood improvement. Why can’t limbs regenerate?
Death by Scientific Paper Cut
It is hard for me to take these energy healing choreographies seriously from a scientific point of view, and the problem is that Reiki and its descendants have moved beyond spirituality into the realm of medicine, making health claims and armed with scientific literature.
Take a look at this review published in 2017: “Reiki is superior to placebo and has broad potential as a complementary health therapy.” Can we trust this conclusion? Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (This raises some skepticism.) Written by a chemical engineer turned Reiki Master. (The review ends with an acknowledgement of “the guidance and wisdom of Reiki Masters” and the support of a Reiki Society “dedicated to shining the love of Reiki into the world.” Indeed, many Reiki studies end in similar spiritual terms. I wonder how seriously a cardiovascular research paper would be taken if it talked in the acknowledgements about shining the love of cardiology into the world.)
The individual studies listed in this review, and most papers testing Reiki, are an instructive compendium of bad science. Often they involve just one Reiki session with no follow-up, testing small groups, resulting in noisy data that looks positive by chance alone. Some test Reiki on rats with implanted telemetry transmitters, and measuring too many things, one of which is bound to produce a favorable signal. And speaking of sloppiness, the authors of the aforementioned 2017 review used Google Scholar rather than searching the literature as thoroughly as scientists would.
What these papers rarely mention is that a young woman named Emily Rosa once devised a clever way to test whether Therapeutic Touch practitioners could actually feel their patients’ energy. She tested 21 patients in a blinded experiment, and the result was no different from a coin toss. A starved brain can hallucinate, but even a well-fed mind can convince itself that it can feel things that are not there.
Studying the unbelievable
Should we be investing money and time into researching such an impossible claim? What if I fasted on a mountaintop and hallucinated that I could massage your organs with my thoughts, and a whole bunch of happy campers showed up who thought my mind-healing had calmed their colons? Should governments, with their limited resources, fund research into my claims?
There is no doubt that Reiki and its imitations can relax and improve your mood. But the danger is that its adherents are not satisfied with just relieving stress. Can you blame them? If you can channel divine energy, how can you do more than just feel good? The IARP website tells the story of a Japanese woman who was “seriously ill” and “in need of surgery” in 1935. She is said to have followed her intuition, avoided surgery, and been cured with Reiki. The Canadian Reiki Society newsletter mentions using Reiki symbols for ear and sinus infections, and that excessive fatigue, sudden strong desires for sexual gratification, and hearing voices can actually be symptoms of “spiritual attack.” These assertions are reckless and false, and may lead people away from real treatment.
It pains me to write that Reiki is offered at top medical centers like Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins, because I feel like if it was called “Jedi Healing” I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Take home message:
– Reiki and Therapeutic Touch are interventions that claim to help the human body heal itself by modifying the body’s so-called energy field.
– Reiki was invented by a man who claimed to have fasted for 21 days and had visions.
– Studies of Reiki and other energy healing therapies tend to be of low quality, and while these interventions can be relaxing, there is no solid evidence they can treat any illness.
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