'Distance reiki' - quack or what?

[mackthepony]

Mate has started doing reiki.

She's now offering 'distance reiki' - same as normal reiki but feels your energy online. And yes, there's a charge for it.

🙄

Is it just me? Wtf?

What do you think about people who believe in an invisible god that no one has ever seen, that no one has actually met? And yet billions of people believe in what is essentially hear say, and pray to this invisible god. Surely that’s even more strange then any reiki or crystal healing?

Yes, it definitely is even more strange! Well... it's strange that humans carried on believing in such things once they had developed beyond the primitive 'What's that big orange ball in the sky? I must worship it' point.

@saraclara damn right!

@MasterBeth Each to their own! My waste of time and yours are very different 🥰

Happy ending?

Yeah, you can't nick their wallet over Zoom, can you? 😁

My mum broke her arm and had very limited mobility in it. She was given Reiki on the NHS (many years ago). She said the practitioner was waving his arms about over her and rotating his hands & she was stifling titters. Her arm became hot & moved up spontaneously. She regained her mobility to around 80%. Call it placebo or faith? I've had Reiki & felt amazing the first time & awful, faint & headachey the second time. I didn't have to pay as it was done by freinds.

Reiki is sometimes available on the NHS via charitable funds to cancer patients

is a more accurate description of what happens in cancer centres. There aren't permanent Band 7 Reiki Master posts - the business case would be laughed at.

All classic placebo effect, and no the fact that your mum was giggling doesn't mean it wasn't. Again, do you really think that if it worked big companies wouldn't have been exploiting it for cash many, many years ago?

Yes, if some 'minister' claims to heal, which again is pure jiggery pokery
Direct us to some randomised controlled trials of reiki, and which have undergone meta-analysis, and we might believe is is a method of healing

@SlightlyGeorgieJohn You learn in stages, like GCSES, ALevels, degrees. Just a thing. Like hairdressers learn in stages. Or tree surgeons. Whatever you like.

At some point, you reach a level when there is nothing left other than experience and you become a university lecturer, say. You get a masters degree. I got a masters. It is real qualification. I'd recommend you look into it, it's very fascinating. Really makes you think.

Anyway, that's how it is. As I said, we all have different beliefs and understanding. And that's great. But £200 distance healing is just not on!! Or any healing for any price.

Don't fall for faith healing, reiki, spiritual healing unless you know or have a recommendation and not paid for.

And here ends my sermon!! 😆

Just don't pay for it, is all! It is effective very effective.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5871310/
Here you go! Yeah, a bit woolly and rubbish but, hey...not all that daft!

If Reiki worked beyond the placebo effect, it would be able to be shown in Randomised Controlled Trials.

If people want to pay for it, I guess that is up to them.

It gets unpleasant when vulnerable and desperate people fall subject to 'alternative' medicines.

As Tim Minchin said, ' Do you know what we call Alternative Medicine that works? Medicine!'

Inclusion criteria was set at studies with more than 20 participants and only 13 studies made it through. I only quickly flicked through, but did not see the total number of participants in all studies. However, with the inclusion criteria on number of patients being so low, I suspect the total number of participants is also very low. You need quite large scale studies, and meta analysis to draw conclusions that an intervention of his nature actually works.

20 participants - that's like the sample size in 'research' that is cited on the side of your shampoo bottle.

Not happy endings or being robbed.

I have chronic pain, I've had 3 years of hospital procedures, some very invasive procedures in my back, tried 8 different set of drugs. What's finally working for me is calming down my nervous system, doing the curable app exercises, hypnosis and reiki. I'm able to enter a really deep relaxation state that I just can't get into at home as I have a child with additional needs that makes it hard to focus. I don't think it's "healing" in some voodoo sense but it's healing for me in that it reassures my nervous system that I'm not in danger and the pain signals reduce.

Each to their own but it's been phenomenal for me and I'm off opoids as a result.

I also have some friends who use it on their autistic children to calm them before bed and promote better sleep. It's a soothing experience that's similar to massage.

My friend's mum used to send her reiki over the phone.

It worked for them. Whether it's real or placebo, doesn't really matter.

But if you are sceptical but can't gently take the Mickey out of your mate for doing it, are you really mates?

There's nowt wrong with not believing the same thing, but you should be able to talk to each other about it.

How many weekends years does it take to become a Master?

Took me six years to become a master. Levels one and two took a year odd each, final took four years.

I was practicing every week under my guide plus actually practising with family and friends if that makes sense. I've never charged for treatment and wasn't charged to learn.

Its not about belief. You don't do what you pretend you do. It's fraud. Your friends are con artists.
There's a good chance they are deluded enough to actually believe they are doing what they think they are doing, but that's not the point.

I think you will find that most religious organisations have brainwashed most of their believers into giving them money consistently, throughout the ages. The Catholic Church’s total wealth and it’s assets, as led by the Vatican, are almost impossible to calculate because there’s so much wealth there - probably in the billions if not more! A lot of the money comes from investments but a shit tonne has come from the people, throughout centuries as they are always encouraged to give, give, give and the good lord will approve.

What about those Christian mega evangelical churches that are making billionaires out of its pastors? Where does the money come from, ultimately? The people are duped into giving money, for the “Lord’s cause” or whatever. And there are many other examples throughout all the faiths and denominations, getting money from their followers. So you see, many religious leaders do end getting money from their followers, promising them heaven, eternal life or what ever, promising something that has never, ever been proven to exist.

God ... think what you could have actually learned in that time.

My ex-DH and his new wife are "reiki masters" offering distance healing on humans and animals. They're into crystal healing and all sorts of other guff. Trying to co-parent with these sorts gives me so much rage it makes me want to smash my face in with a spade

How dismissive of you. You may not believe in this, and of course that’s fine, but this person clearly does and takes a great interest in it and it enriches her life in some way. Not everything is black and white.

I believe in it, and have benefited from reiki in the past.

I think you will find that most religious organisations have brainwashed most of their believers into giving them money consistently, throughout the ages. The Catholic Church’s total wealth and it’s assets, as led by the Vatican, are almost impossible to calculate because there’s so much wealth there - probably in the billions if not more! A lot of the money comes from investments but a shit tonne has come from the people, throughout centuries as they are always encouraged to give, give, give and the good lord will approve.

Well yes, obviously. But I was responding to this:

We all have different beliefs. No need to be nasty and say we practitioners are all quacks and scammers. Do you say the same thing to people who are actively religious?

And no, I don't call individual religious people scammers, because the individual religious people I know do not scam people (though arguably they've been scammed in a way). I'd happily tell the Catholic Church that I think they are quacks and scammers, but I don't think they'd take much notice tbh!