Reiki versus dogs just being dogs

Reiki is just another way to separate gullible, science averse fools from their money. Albeit in a very spiritually satisfying way.

My water dog informed me that she’s ok with acupuncture for squirrels. She’ll even lend a paw.

The reiki quotes read like poe and I was reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten

Reiki for pets? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?

At least one can attempt to persuade a human that this crazy person is trying to heal him, which may allow for a placebo effect. I would expect no placebo effect in animals (are there any vets here to weigh in on this question?). An animal’s thought process is likely to be along the lines of, “What is this crazy person doing?” And anybody who doesn’t understand why a dog or a cat would prefer petting to reiki should not be a pet owner.

QFT:

I see no reason animals would not be subject to placebo effects, and certainly the observer would.

This gets back to what Orac said about anthropomorphizing our pets. We tend to see in their behavior what we want to see. Added to that is how our behavior affects them and you have the perfect recipe for self-delusion. I recall one couple’s account of how one of them treated their dog with great care and concern, to which the dog responded with displays of submission and “down” behaviors (tail down, quiet, limping). The other member of the couple treated the dog as if it were doing fine, and the dog responded with tail wagging, no limp, etc.

Anyone who subjects a sick or injured animal to woo instead of science-based veterinary care should be bitten.

I’ll volunteer to do the biting, myself.

@ Eric Lund

Placebo in animals? Attention, pet peeve of mine (sorry, lame pun)

There were a few articles on this topic on Science-based medicine website, like this one. Todd was referring to a comment appearing under one of these articles.

My own (amateurish) opinion is simply that for our pets, we are the Provider. God-like for dogs, butler-like for cats, but that’s beside the point.
For our pets, there is a correlation between our presence and the magical appearance of food and water. There is also a correlation between our hands and a feeling of well-being over their skin. Maybe it’s just us training them to respond to our presence, but still: there are expectations from our pets, and we are feeding these expectations whenever we are, well, feeding them.
But suddenly, when they are ill, they become unaware of our presence and are to stupid (or not stupid enough) to expect us to relieve their pain, the same way we relieve their hunger?
It’s not a very plausible hypothesis. Especially in the light that we are keeping our pets in a state of infancy, making ourself something akin to surrogate parents. We are an authority figure, for them. A perfect setting for placebo.
Not to mention that, as Todd and Mephistopheles pointed out, the placebo effect could be in the eye of the beholder (the owner).
Note that our pets don’t have to understand what we are doing to heal them. They just need to realize that we are doing something to them.

I like to point out to clever Hans. The story is seen as an hoax – a horse supposedly able to do calculus – but a lot of people missed the main point: the horse was able to pretend to do calculus by body-reading the people watching him. I have a hard time accepting that a horse can do that, but is unable to feel that we are fussing over his well-being.

Another commenter wrote a good point:
Animals are good at hiding pain, if needs to be. So, if Fluffy is stuck with plenty of needles whenever it shows suffering, it quickly learns not to show pain.

I have friends who has been sucked in my a pet psychic. Why, this woman is so good that she can read and cure over the phone!

Admittedly, my friends did have ongoing issues with, what sounds like, a bad vet. Of course, the psychic read that the dog needed better food to help with allergies.
AMAZING!

In a way, dogs are smarter than humans in that they don’t fool themselves into believing that hand motions are anything more than hand motions.

TV Tropes entry: “Too Dumb to Fool”

At our level of technology, we’re used to the idea of things that aren’t detectable to our built-in senses. So magical vitalist life energy has some plausibility for people who don’t understand the science behind the invisible. Your typical dog doesn’t understand the idea of wifi signals, magnetic fields, and such, so he wouldn’t understand the vitalist concepts behind reiki.

—

As for placebo effect, I think some animals could experience it if they make the connection between their health and vet visits, even if it’s by post-hoc reasoning: “I get sick and my worried human takes me to a man in white who pokes a needle in me. My human gets less worried, and I recover. That’s how it usually happens, therefore, having a man in white poke me makes me feel better.”

They could probably do the same post-hoc fallacies humans do for self-limiting conditions. Sick -> (Ineffective) Treatment -> Better in a few days. Of course, as has been said, the human interpretation of the pet’s reaction adds another layer of self-deception, so there’s still plenty of reason to use placebo controls for veterinary medicine.

@Bronze Dog

Magical thinking was observed, many times, in animals as dumb as pigeons even decades ago. It is an observable fact that pets are susceptible to logical fallacies. Having worked with lab animals in the past (psych experiments, not decapitation and stuff), I can assure you that double blinding is a must. Even lab rats (which are much dumber than their wild brethren) are capable of fooling people. And people are still as great as ever at fooling themselves.

I don’t think Reiki would have been nearly as much help as the vet was with my cat’s two ingrown claws yesterday. She certainly didn’t want anyone laying their hands upon her afflicted toes. Then again, her general dislike of anyone _ever_ touching her feet is the main reason why her claws can grow out like that in the first place. Anybody know of any therapeutic touch-like methods for claw-clipping?

Come to think of it, my hands weren’t anywhere near her when her claws _did_ get clipped yesterday, so I guess that could be considered a hands-free method. Bite- and scratch-free, too.

I’m reminded of Tellingon Ttouch, which is a “therapeutic touch” method developed for animals. Now, anyone who has animals knows that steady, firm slow touch is soothing for them. It’s a nice, comfy massage. But, of course, Ttouch is MORE than that. “[T]he intent of the TTouch is to activate the function of the cells and awaken cellular intelligence.” Because a method to sooth your dog or cat is never enough. They have to pile woo on top of it.

Well, the vets say that dying from renal failure is virtually painless, so if we chose reiki, our cat wouldn’t suffer that much

That strikes me as an odd thing for a vet to say. CRF is eminently manageable, and I did it with my eldest for many years, but toward the end, there’s definitely suffering–there’s a reason cats learn to like sub-Q fluids pretty quickly. (And if your vet doesn’t routinely check CRF patients for hypertension, ask for it.)

@ Bronze Dog

At our level of technology, we’re used to the idea of things that aren’t detectable to our built-in senses.

True, but I would like to point out that our ancestors, all the way back to the cavemen, did have religious beliefs, and religion is basically having the idea of undetectable stuff happening (whether it’s true or not is another debate, please don’t make me the cause for derail). Obviously, advanced technology in not necessary to believe in fairy dust: the idea has been around for ages.

@ Richard Smith

Anybody know of any therapeutic touch-like methods for claw-clipping?

Terry Pratchett proposed a method to fed a cat a pill in “The Unalduterated Cat”. You can try to adapt it for claw-clipping However, his proposed method require to possess at least three hands: one to hold the cat in a towel, one to hold the cat’s mouth open, and one to insert the pill into the cat’s mouth.
Terry Pratchett admits himself it’s not a very effective method. I never said I would give good advice 🙂

More seriously, if your cat was younger, and didn’t already had ingrown nails, I would propose to try offering her a scratching toy. In years past, my family regularly purchased these cheap multi-layered cardboard boxes, with the layers forming a grid to be scratched, with catnip seed embedded at the bottom, to give the cat an incentive to claw (and nibble) its way through the cardboard. it gives the cat something to use its claws on.
However, this toy has two negative sides: a frenzied cat will chew its way through the cardboard and back very quickly, so the toy would only last a few days; and more annoyingly, you are training your cat to sharpen its claws, so be in lookout for collateral damage on the furniture.
Try googling for cat scratching box, although the first hits are going to be for expensive models.
Maybe in your pet shop? (although the pet shops in my area are not much cat-friendly – plenty of things for your clownfish or iguana, but nothing much for cats – don’t know if cats are going out of fashion)
Um, since you cat already has ingrown nails, my advice is not very helpful. Maybe have her claws clipped by a vet, wait a bit for the claws to regrow a bit, and then try to educate her on a scratching box?

Nat Geo, please add a pre-submitting view. It’s urgent.
If only so I can see the wall of text I’m about to submit and have a chance to cut down on my profligacy.

When she was dying, our vet tried to do a renal USG without sedation – and this poor, dying kitty, lying like a rag on the table, bit the vet in the finger, straight into the joint.

Heh. Mine actually required an ultrasound at one point, for which I to travel some distance to a specialty clinic where they didn’t know him. (My own vets knew it was going to take at least three people to do anything with him.) So I’m sitting in this clinic, which was way nicer than my own university medical center, and somebody comes out and says they’re going to take him in to shave his belly. Somehow, this hadn’t occurred to me in advance, and all I could muster was, “I don’t think that’s going to be straightforward.” Oh, no, we do it all the time, no problem.

Ten minutes later, one of the actual partners comes out looking visibly shaken and requests permission to sedate the cat. Sure thing, doc. That cat was as tough as nails–even after he lost his sight to a retinal detachment, he would find ways to sneak out into the park, catch giant insects, and bring them back up to the apartment. It’s part of the reason I persisted until fluids were no longer helping.

“non-science-based woo” implies the existence of another kind.

I took my dog to a regular PT who also does “energy work” on animals. He did some very gentle manipulation of his spine and back legs, and then closed his eyes holding his hands over several locations on the dog’s back and legs. We went to see him 3 times. Before we saw this guy, the dog couldn’t walk up or down stairs, could barely get up off the floor and drag himself around the block for a walk, didn’t have enough stability to lift his leg to pee. Now he’s running downstairs, trotting easily through his walks, pissing on fire hydrants just fine. The dog is old and his progress will not last forwever, but whatever this guy did made a HUGE difference. . The vet had nothing to offer said it’s just a function of genetic hip issues and old age. Call it quackery, hooey, woo, whatever you want. I’m just happy my dog is still enjoying his life.

Just when I thought I was over re-homing my dog…maybe Reiki would have helped? There was me thinking I’d tried just about everything

@ Dreamer

Case in point 15 minutes after you posted…

@ joyrider

I’m glad for you dog. I really am.
But I want to know if it’s true. And not by hearsay.
Because if it really works, I want it too.
And if it doesn’t work, I don’t want to spent my money on it, including my hard-earner tax money. And I want my health insurance to stop peddle it and focus on real treatments.

If you can convince your PT to participate in a double-blind study – all the dogs are examined by a third party vet before and after, half the dogs go to your PT, the other half to a mime artist who doesn’t know sh*t about Reiki.
Plus a specialist in social studies to collect data on the dogs’ (and the owners’) lifestyle to rule out a few confounders, like diet, exercise, dog’s breed…
It will be a self-selecting sample group, which is not the best, but that would be a start.

Yet another anecdote….

I have an 18 year old cat with pretty severe arthritis, but is otherwise fine per her latest blood tests. It’s frustrating for both me and the vet because there apparently aren’t any long-term safe treatments for arthritis in cats – they can’t tolerate the same medications other animals (including people) can, and an ethical vet won’t prescribe “nuclear options” for pain unless it’s either short-term acute or an end-of-life situation. The vet could only suggest glucosamine-chondroitin (Cosequin for Cats), with the caveat that there was some evidence it might help, but in any case won’t hurt. So we dutifully sprinkled it on her food for a couple years. Meh. Just ran out of the stuff and despite knowing with my forebrain it almost certainly isn’t going to help, my hindbrain is still tempted to get some more.

Of course, the cat seems to be adapting to her progressive disability a lot better than I am. For one, she learned to start vocalizing her demands quite musically after 15 years of being almost silent. Manipulative little git….

There was a blog called SkeptVet that addressed lots of woo (including a recent study showing that glucosamine-chondroitin doesn’t really work in animals, same as it doesn’t really work in people), but unfortunately the domain’s reverted to an ad site. 🙁

I don’t know why they call this “Respectful Insolence,” of the two articles I’ve read under this heading, neither has been respectful.

It must be a pretty sad life when you have NO WONDERMENT for anything!! Your articles are condescending BS. You write about things which you have no REAL knowledge. Just because things like Reiki and Acupuncture aren’t fully based in “empirical science” does not mean that they are not amazing healing arts!!

It is my wish for you to get a REAL life, one in which you can be fulfilled for building something up, something positive!! Not trying to tear everything down for which you cannot find understanding within yourself.

Gosh, Rebeecca Petrovic, just what in particular do you object to? Do you have actual evidence that Reiki and Acupuncture work any better than a placebo?

Oh, G-d, not Laura Petrovic, B.S., A.O.S., LMT. Time to fold up shop.

I have a cat I would like her to treat.

For anything, although an attitude adjustment would be a good start.

@ Infuriatingly Moderate:

If you read some of the material I do ** you’ll find that precious little is NOT based on emotional appeals : belief in self-serving theories has nothing to do with data but relies on upon faith in the scenarios that they would PREFER to be true .

So it is easy ( and common) for a person without much background in medicine or psychology to criticise the entire medical establishment about vaccines or about causation of autism or cancer or effecttive treatments for any condition,.The lack of self-criticism allows grand sweeping generalisations about intricate fields that they barely comprehend.
Interestingly enough, this is encouraged by the leaders of these movements who have little academic credentials and appropriate training. but nevertheless, criticise things and people far beyond their ken.

** Natural News, Progressive Radio Network,Age of Autism, Thinking Moms’ Revolution, etc.

@Chris – that’s exactly what my cat does sometimes – we call this “cat trap” and have learnt to recognize it. So we also have a lot of cat toys and when we suspect that she wants to wrestle with our hands, not really be petted, we use the toys.

@ Rebecca Petrovic: I posted a rather “insolent” comment on this blog last year, about Reiki being used to repair household appliances. (If Reiki “works” for humans and pets…why not try “treating” a leaky hot water heater?):

http://scottpearce.com/2012/05/30/reiki-appliance-repair/

I wonder if you would like to comment on this particular method of repairing household appliances 🙂

P.S. I opted for “traditional treatment”; it cost me $1500 to replace the hot water tank.

P.S. I opted for “traditional treatment”; it cost me $1500 to replace the hot water tank.

All you had to do was dilute cold water in lots of, er, water, bash it against a bible, and treat the tank with it. Get with the program.

(If the water stays cold at first, it’s just a sign that the treatment is working, flushing the toxic cold water out of the system. Stick with it.)

I mean rolling on her back.

Speakng of orgone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bnzgOho1QE

@Rebecca Petrovic:

It must be a pretty sad life when you have NO WONDERMENT for anything!!

I have plenty of wonderment in my life. Scientists are finding worlds around other suns. Venus just transited the sun and JAXA took a photograph of the event so good it showed Venus as a globe. AIDS is no longer a death sentence. I can have fresh fruit in the middle of winter. My father can still live an active life (and drive!) in his 80s.

I don’t need elves, ghosts, chi, orgone, or any of the other blither to feel that the world is a wonderful place worth exploring.. I have so much wonderment that I have to ration it to the real world or I’d be overwhelmed.

Truth be told, I think it’s folks who need fairy tales to experience wonderment that’re missing out.

— Steve

<blockquote. Just because things like Reiki and Acupuncture aren’t fully based in “empirical science” does not mean that they are not amazing healing arts!!

You’re perfectly correct–it isn’t that they aren’t based in empircal science that means they aren’t amazing healing arts, it’s the fact that they’ve never been shown to actually heal anyone of anything that means they aren’t amazing healing arts.

Not published in a real journal, so no reason to grant it any credibility at all.

To summarize: mice healed of cancer with “woo woo” healing. Multiple experiments with extraordinary results conducted at accredited post-secondary institutions including medical schools. 87.9% of lab mice injected with breast cancer in 4 separate experiments have full life-span cures.

Oh, man, this is a riot: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089%2F107555304323062194

Marg, that paper is laughable. Did you notice how there are absolutely no statistical analyses done on their results in order to support their conclusions? Do you find that odd?

In one of their ‘experiments,’ 10/11 ‘treated’ mice experienced remission while 7/8 ‘control’ mice experienced remission. Do you see why the lack of statistics might be a problem? How are we meant to estimate how often the observed results could occur by chance alone? The authors claim that this data is evidence that their treatment is “successful in curing mammary adenocarcinoma,” a claim that’s laughable at best. You can’t just throw some numbers on a page and call it evidence.

Of course, this would only be relevant for a properly designed, well controlled, blinded study and this ‘article’ fails hilariously on all counts.

That sounds better than “incompetent researcher”.

I actually think I might keep this paper on file for the next time I teach undergrads…to teach them to recognize subtler fallacies in the published literature it’s often useful to present students with a paper so fallacious it’s impossible to miss.

I think the point is that the true controls are all the mice injected with the same cancer in previous experiments, none of which survived beyond 27 days. None of these mice should have survived, period; not the experimental, nor the control mice. If it were one or two experiments in one place, you could fault the lab technicians. But it’s been done in five different places, all with the same results, which would mean that the lab technicians in five different institutions were all incompetent. Are you prepared to believe that?

@Chris: it appears to have been replicated in the last twelve years:

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2007.6300?journalCode=acm

Here is a guy who is curing cancer in mice in experiment after experiment done at different university labs including two medical schools. He cures induced breast cancer and some kind of sarcoma. The question is not whether some other guy too can do it but what the heck is _he_ doing? Aren’t you guys even remotely curious? Are you going to believe that he is performing some kind of sleight of hand and duping all these experience cancer research lab people all over America, or perhaps open up your blinkers a tad and begin to wonder whether there is something going beyond your philosophy of the world?

@Narad Why are you saying “different results”? It’s not different results. Large percentages of mice survived cancer free in every instance. Where are your different results?

Here is a guy who is curing cancer in mice in experiment after experiment done at different university labs including two medical schools.

Marg, if the untreated control mice in four separate experiments show the same rate of survival as the experimental mice, then he cannot claim credit for curing them. Because he didn’t treat them. So he is doing something wrong.
No, I do not give two tugs on a dead dingo’s dick precisely what he is doing wrong, because I can find enough examples of egregious incompetence closer to home without following the science-fair projects of some sociology Ph.D who wants to play doctors.
For the same reason, I am not interested in the precise form of bullshit he used to persuade students at serious medical schools to take part in his mouse-killing project.

Marg, call us if those studies are replicated by somebody else. In the mean time look up the definition of “independent,”

I admit to a certain amount of envy here. When I mismanage an experiment to the extent that the control group gives nothing like the expected result (and is instead indistinguishable from the experimental group), the editors and the reviewers do not accept my explanation that I have stumbled upon an entirely new spiritual-physical effect. Perhaps I am targeting the wrong journals.

@Marg – because we don’t believe in magic….do you?

So am I reading this right that Reiki is so powerful that it cures cancer in mice that happen to be in the same building as the Reiki practitioner – without being treated themselves?

@Niche Geek
It’s an interesting conundrum, because normally what we test is a substance, and a substance should work universally across the board, no matter who it is administering it. But once you start testing “energy”, you are introducing variability. You are dealing more with physics than with chemistry and biology. I believe Dr. Bengston also did an experiment with geomagnetic probes near the cages of the mice. The geomagnetic probes went from random fluctuation when no healing was taking place to a recognizably organized pattern when healing was taking place. So something is clearly happening. But how do you have unrelated people replicate it? That is a very good question. Maybe the answer is to go from the kinds of experiments biologists and chemists do to the kinds of experiments physicists do. The answer seems to lie more in the realm of physics.

BTW did you know that with all our advanced knowledge we cannot account for 96% of the matter and energy in the universe? We know what 4% of the universe is made of, and the rest is mystery.

@Mephistopheles O’Brien
It’s not Reiki & from what I understand it’s not about being in the same building. Read the second article, the one about Resonance, type 2 errors, and placebo effects.

Hint: Energy and fields are MASSIVELY less variable, and incomparably better understood, than anything in biology.

Where are your different results?

In their results table. What part of “off site” do you not understand?

But once you start testing “energy”, you are introducing variability. You are dealing more with physics than with chemistry and biology.

Given that you have invoked the term, please be so kind as to define ‘energy’.

@herr doctor bimmler
I don’t believe that the point of the controls is to show that you are doing the experiment properly. The point of the controls is to act as a point of comparison. Once the on-site controls were shown not to do that, off-site controls were introduced. In the aforementioned experiments where geomagnetic probes were placed next to the cages of the mice, the same effect occurred next to the cages of both the experimental mice and the on-site controls. No effect occurred in nearby random places where there were no mice.

The odds of ten experiments at five different labs spaced out over decades all going wrong are probably incalculable.

@Narad
The meanings of words are generally humanly assigned. Different groups assign different meanings. Do you mean the meaning assigned to “energy” by physicists? I believe that would be “a unit of work”. And of course it is “dharma combat”. Everything is “dharma combat”. Is the energy that hammers in a nail the same energy that creates the Big Bang?

@Narad, misattributing the quote just goes to prove that I know nothing 🙂 It is in fact Plato, but his “speaker” is Socrates.

“A quote, which becomes a philosophical theme, is said by Socrates in Plato’s Apology from The Trial and Death of Socrates at 21d:
I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”

It is not a “thing”. It is emptiness, but not in the sense of vacuum, but in the sense that everything is empty.

You’re really bad at this.

To medieval and renaissance folks computers and microwave ovens would appear as magic.

It depends. Blaise Pascal created in 1642 a mechanical calculator. No-one threatened to send him to the burning pyre. The concept of mechanical marvels was not that alien to ancient people.

I don’t believe that the point of the controls is to show that you are doing the experiment properly.

Ah? So how do you know what the experience is done properly, if you don’t have a negative control someplace?

The odds of ten experiments at five different labs spaced out over decades all going wrong are probably incalculable.

Actually no, it’s quite common. All you need is something that all labs overlooked or were not controlling properly. When I started my career, my lab and a dozen others across North America tried to replicate the finding of another lab, the isolation of phosphorylated proteins. Because the experience was quite complicated, we all failed quire regularly.
Eventually, commercial kits appeared with standardized solutions and stuff and the protocol is now routine.
Oh, the thing we overlooked? Among other small details, steel parts of our instruments absorbed these phosphoproteins before we could detect them.
However, for all our faults, we never found phosphoproteins in the control samples.

You are not really scientists, you know, you just call yourselves that.
So long as the university is fooled, I’m happy.

@herr doktor bimler
Precisely. It’s all about a pay cheque to most. Somewhere along the way the curiosity that leads to new discoveries gets ditched or lost in the bureaucracy. It’s a shame, really.

@Narad
“Don’t know” is the only appropriate answer, both in dharma combat and science.

“Don’t know” is the only appropriate answer, both in dharma combat and science.

The dog runs after the bone.

Superscript worked for the old blog software, but not this one. Rats! Now all the old comments which had super and subscripts now look lame.

Marg, this computer was designed based on the conventional definition of energy. If what you were claiming was true, then it shouldn’t work.

Superscript worked for the old blog software, but not this one. Rats!

You should be able to use the limited set of HTML entities. Let’s see: &sup2; and &sup3; should make… 10&sup2;&sup3;

It’s a really foolish thing to have overlooked.

So we may have nice scientific definitions for “energy” but we would be fools to think that it explains all that is out there.

Yah, very nice. Why do you persist in using the term, then? Can’t you come up with a new name that doesn’t represent a hopeless misunderstanding of physics? This is very easy. I’m more than happy to help. How many syllables do you think you need to pull off sounding sciencey? Really, I think less can be more. You could call the Reiki force “zang.”

Okay, how did you do that? Substituting square brackets for angle brackets I tried for t-squared: t[sup]2[/sup]

It obviously did not work for me.

Okay, how did you do that?

By exploiting the facts that SGML character entities are a really stupid grab-bag (you know, it’s really freaking important to have an eth and thorn in ISO Latin 1) and we’re at a Barney Fife level of implementation.

What you have is (excuse me if the octothorpes explode) is ¹ and ² and ³ or ¹ ² and ³ and that’s it. However, “I ♣ Baby Seals” should totes be on for the convo.

The octothorpes actually imploded. To get the three available sups, type an ampersand, followed by a pound sign, followed by the decimal identifier (185, 178, 179, repectively; see, e.g., here) followed by a semicolon, all closed up. Or just revert to pseudo-TeX. (G-d save us all from the image rendering that is to be found on W*pedia. It’s a tool, people, not an “enterprise solution.”)

Narad, now show us subscript!

No, I am just a dabbler in HTML and have never heard of SGML. What I did notice was the linked page did not have a row with references to subscript.

I was just hoping for some simple code to make super and subscripts. That way chemical compounds for feldspars wound not look silly, and equations for kinetic energy would not look idiotic (big difference between t2 and t^2… or t with a superscript 2!).

Seriously, without serifs how can you tell the difference between Cl2 and C12? It would be easier if there was a difference between (replacing angle brackets with square brackets) Cl[sub]2[/sub] and C[sub]12[/sub].

(for those who need a guide book, like me after three glasses of wine… the first is supposed to be two chlorine atoms and the second is twelve carbon atoms (which does not seem to exist). Just look them up on Wikipedia.

OK, so that’s decimal entities 8320 to 8329. Allow me to stress that faking semantic markup is a really bad workaround.

@ Beamup:

It seems to me that our visitor is merely mimicking the performance of woo-meisters with the intention of dazzling the audience by discussing…. ( hushed silence) *physics*. It shows how well-versed they are as serious scientists : biology and chemistry are trumped by the ultimate. Thus, we have quantum-this and quantum-that offered as therapy for serious conditions and a myriad of permutations of energy as prefix: energy medicine, energy psychology, energy exchange, energy balancing.

‘Energy’ is used when their theory runs out of ideas to explain exactly how an alt med treatment works ( e.g. using phyto nutrients to fix ‘broken’ DNA): it works somehow like the g-d of the gaps, fills in the blanks, like mediaeval maps which wrote,” Here be dragons” in the spots where they hadn’t a clue about what existed there.

Obviously, in my ‘travels’ in woo-topia, I’ve heard a great deal about physics, as well as a time-worn meme, “Science doesn’t know everything” but even I, who ain’t got much physics- but some from school- can tell that they make up stuff in impress on-lookers. Recently, Mike Adams adds cognitive psych as another impression maker: then I really laugh!

@Denice

‘Energy’ is used when their theory runs out of ideas to explain exactly how an alt med treatment works ( e.g. using phyto nutrients to fix ‘broken’ DNA): it works somehow like the g-d of the gaps, fills in the blanks, like mediaeval maps which wrote,” Here be dragons” in the spots where they hadn’t a clue about what existed there.

This is a very astute observation and supports the idea that Reiki is nothing more than faith healing with g-d replaced by something else. Both “g-d of the gaps” and “energy” are ad hoc explanations somehow more satisfying than “I don’t know” or even worse “I might be wrong.”

@ ArtK:

I thank you for your kind words. Altho’ I observe alt med prevarication as a sideline, I feel that I have a sort of ‘insider’s view”: not that I espouse any of their ridiculous beliefs ( and I never did) but I have watched their nonsense evolve and (infortunately) spread.

You mention a subject near and dear to me: the extra-mundane dimension. I think that if you dig deeply enough into woo, you’ll find spirit, life force, soul and other supernatural notions being esssential as explanatory principles. In fact, I’m close to postulating a rule ( why not?)

Walter’s Law- woo cannot exist without an immaterial essence or spiritual idea to explain how it works.

Because -lord knows- their concepts are not based in material reality. At least not on this planet.

Similarly,those who don’t comprehend emotions/ motivation rely upon spiritualistic/ soul notions. Which they might call ‘energy’.

Marg hasn’t been back since yesterday. I wonder if it means that she choose other places to discuss things or she fell into the darkness which science has yet to explain…

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Shouldn’t the simple HTML for superscript/subscript work?

@Pondfairy1 – say what? Of course it matters how. I freely admit that we can use machines to manipulate energy to help heal people, or chemicals to do the same thing. That’s a far cry from saying that the human mind can do that by wishing.

If you’ve got contrary evidence, please share.

Faith is belief in something.

Pondfairy1, welcome along, but may I suggest this is where you are going wrong? A belief in something does not magically make it real. Rather than belief, you might find evidence to be a more reliable guide to how the universe works.

The mice that were not sacrificed lived out their full life-spans. Some were reinjected with the cancer but it didn’t take. And anecdotally some scientists were going to feed some of the surviving mice to snakes, but Dr. Bengston intervened.

You are all quite ignorant about Reiki and “energy healing” (which is so called because we likely haven’t quite figured out the right word for it yet — “energy” may in fact have nothing to do with it). No, @Orac, Reiki is not like petting animals. Touch is not required. Most animals quite like it even if they are not touched. And guess what, faith is not required either. I agree with you that a lot of Reiki people and healers speak a lot of nonsense about what they do. But whatever words they use to describe what they do, the fact is that it can work. And when it works on animals you can see that it’s not about faith or the placebo effect. I’ve seen interesting effects with animals that cannot be explained by “faith” or “placebo”.

In my humble opinion it is a waste of time to do studies on this, since your lot won’t buy the studies even when they show efficacy. Look at your reaction to the Bengston mice studies. Your whole approach is “this cannot be” therefore let’s find reasons to poke holes in it. BTW Bernard Grad did a whole bunch of studies in the 60s on mice and wound healing that showed that “energy healing” worked. He also did a study that showed that skeptical medical students _delayed_ healing in the same rodents.

But you stay over on your side of the science barrier and I will happily stay on mine. There are indeed many wondrous things in science and nature, and I am happy to wonder at them from arm’s length. But you need to acknowledge that it is a very big universe and there may be wondrous things out there that _you_ know nothing about.

@Judith – do you practice long-distance healing? How much do you have to know about someone to cure them? I have an incurable illness and am in the midst of a rather rough flare. Would love to be an anecdote… ?

It would remain only that, but you might be able to convince one skeptic – it would even be impressive (to me) since the last faith healer (similar practice) proclaimed me possessed when they couldn’t heal me.

Actually, I know a great deal about energy medicine, energy psychology et al …
but I’m having trouble posting
perhaps the ENERGY is opposing me.

Here goes:

there is an assumption of a life energy or essence that can be affected by material reality and spiritual activities. Usually it is assumed that SBM ( drugs, procdures) affect the energy deleteriously whilst natural foods,supplements, meditaion and other arcane methods increase its potency.

Practitioners may augent the natural foods et al with ‘healing’ methods- laying-on-of-hands, reiki, chakra-balancing.One fellow I survey believes that he has pre-cognition about others’ health outcomes and can ‘warn’ them
of dangers inherent in their current lifestyle.

We don’t rule out things we don’t understand. We rule out things that have been repeatedly and emphatically demonstrated to be utterly false. And we acknowledge that a single horribly done study cannot overturn such a large mass of evidence as that which demonstrates not only that reiki can’t work, it in fact DOESN’T work.

Also remember that “we have a mountain of specific evidence AGAINST the proposition that reiki could work” is a statement which bears no similarity at all to “we don’t know how reiki works.” You’re trying to talk about the latter, when the former is in fact the current state of the evidence.

Pranic healing, another form of energy healing, has been demonstrated to protect cell lines against gamma radiation.

*Work published in the prestigious journal “YouTube.”

It has been demonstrated to speed up wound healing, and to improve surgical outcomes and anxiety in hospitalized patients.

Citations desparately needed. Where and by whom, under what conditions? How was performance assessed? How much better did reiki perform as compared to appropriate controls? The devil, as always, is in the details.

The gamma-ray stuff is here, by the way, although the video isn’t working for me. It is on YouTube, though. I don’t have half an hour to sit through it at the moment.

@JGC
You can take all the pot shots you want at Dr. Bengston’s methodology, the fact remains that in ten experiments a bunch of mice injected with cancer were cured. If what he did was bogus then at least in some experiments the mice should have died. Can you really see that many university labs screwing up that badly that not one mouse was properly injected or handled? Did they all get the wrong mice or fail to refrigerate the cancer cultures properly? ALL OF THEM? What does that say about America’s research labs? It would say that none of the research being done anywhere should be trusted.

Just out of curiosity I wonder how many double blind studies supported Thalidomide or Vioxx.

So you admit that there is no such thing as reiki or life energy, and all the handwaving does nothing whatsoever? That’s what it being a placebo implies.

If so, that’s progress. Then we can proceed to how grossly unethical it is to lie to patients and take money from them, for a service you’re not actually performing.

Your first article (PMID 11251731) doesn’t offer evidence that reiki effectively treats cancers, promotes wound healing, etc. In fact, it’s questionable whether it addresses Reiki as you’re advocating it, as it describes it “a form of touch therapy” (i.e. massage). Their study didn’t include a control group of any sort let alone the appropriate one: individuals who were instead treated with another form of “touch therapy” massage (such as traditional Swedish massage).

Ultimately all this paper supports is a claim subjects become less anxious and more relaxed after 30 minutes of massage, which is hardly earth-shaking evidence in support of Reiki’s purported ability to cure cancers or heal wounds.

Re: the second article, I cannot locate a copy of the article (PubMed indexes it but provides neither an abstract nor full text). Can you provide either, or an open link to either? (I must assume you have access to and have read the article yourself, before offering it as evidence in support of your claims.)

Re: the third article (Pubmed Index 9765732, see above: I’m again having trouble locating an abstract or full text article. Can you provide either? I’ll note the limited description of the article I have located makes no message of inclusion of a control arm.

Re the last article: having finally sufficient details to consider we can readily identify serious methodological flaws which render it meaningless: insufficient sample size (n = 16), no blinding of the subjects or the Reiki providers, no independent control group (an appropriate one would have been patients receiving non-Reiki massage or faux Reiki ‘energy manipulation’ in the same manner as the experimental treatment group), etc.

You can take all the pot shots you want at Dr. Bengston’s methodology, the fact remains that in ten experiments a bunch of mice injected with cancer were cured. If what he did was bogus then at least in some experiments the mice should have died.

Mice that didn’t die however appear to include mice in the control group that didn’t receive treatment, remember? If what was done wasn’t bogus why didn’t those mice die?

What does that say about America’s research labs?

Nothing about America’s research labs in general, although it does raise concern about the specific labs conducting these experiments.

Maybe we should be studying placebos rather than drugs

Would you argue that diabetics stop relying on Lantus or Humalog and instead start taking sugar pills? Really?
Recall that although placebo effects can sometimes make ill people feel better and perceive improvement they do nothing to actually address the underlying pathophysiology of their disease.

Marg,

Quick comparison using a very simply pubmed search:

Vioxx: 2463 citations
Thalidomide: 7225 citations

Note that both medications are actually very effective when used in an evidence-based manner. Thalidomide is currently used as a treatment for some cancers.

For comparison, Reiki: 86 citations (When corrected for people and locations that whose names contain the work Reiki)

This does not include the substantial body of evidence that chemicals have an effect on the human body while there is is, to put it mildly, somewhat limited evidence to support a mechanism for vitalistic energy healing.

I most certainly would not advocate that diabetics start taking sugar pills. No one is advocating that one should abandon standard healthcare for ALL CONDITIONS and do Reiki instead. There are conditions for which Reiki helps. There are conditions which seem to respond to sugar pills, as the Harvard study on placebo suggests (they were using them for IBS). Here is an interesting article summarizing the placebo effect: http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebarticle.pdf

JGC, you will shoot down any evidence I send your way, so why bother? To me the most compelling evidence remains Dr. Bengston’s mice. I refuse to believe that lab technicians at 5 different labs at universities across the United States screwed up 10 experiments. That just does not compute. Based on prior experiments every last one of those mice should have died.

You stay away from Reiki if you so wish. Other people can try it if they so wish. I have never forced it on anyone and I have never charged anyone who didn’t experience a change. I cannot speak for other Reiki practitioners, though. I can only speak to my own experience.

One doesn’t feel a particular need to defend it. One does what one does, and one is satisfied with the empirical evidence one sees before one’s eyes. One doesn’t have to save the whole world. It’s really quite simple. When you treat a person, there are two possibilities: there is either an effect or there isn’t one. In my empirical experience there is an effect most of the time. I don’t need studies to prove to me that what I do is effective; people tell me whether it’s effective or not. I suspect most Reiki practitioners feel the same way.

Beamup, enjoy hanging out in your paradigm. I’ll hang out in mine.

One doesn’t feel a particular need to defend it.

One seems to have appeared to do precisely that and started tossing out random assertions that one repeatedly walks away from.

You stay away from Reiki if you so wish. Other people can try it if they so wish. I have never forced it on anyone

Right, but you’re more than happy to “educate the public” with your fantasies at any opportunity.

But I don’t posit an either or proposition. It’s not that mainstream science knows everything or cannot know anything. Your fallacy is believing that you know enough that you can rule out things you do not understand. That is simply intellectual arrogance.

Both your understanding of our position and of the reasoning behind it are flawed. We do not think “we know enough that we can rule out things we do not understand”, and we have never said anything of the sort. What we have been trying to convey is that merely not being able to rule something out is not sufficient reason to rule it in. Extraordinary claims such as reiki require extraordinary evidence before we can start giving them anything more than cursory attention – and Bengston’s experiments are far from being that extraordinary evidence.

Why are we so unimpressed with Bengston’s evidence, despite his results? Because the whole point of experimental design is to eliminate as much as possible all possible sources of error. We already have good reason to be skeptical when an experiment’s design takes insufficient precaution against error. When an experiment’s results prove that error occurred, we have absolutely no reason to believe that the results are giving us information of value. And that is exactly what happened in Bengston’s experiments. If the experiment had been done without error, the control group should have died from the cancer they were injected with. The fact that they did not die, except for one from the experimental group and one from the control group proves the experiment was not done without error. Even if the injection was only supposed to make the mice sick and then recover, there was still no significant difference between the groups. You cannot say “Reiki made all the difference” when there is no difference.

Bengston’s defense of his experiments only makes things worse. There is an aphorism taught to medical students: “When you hear hoofbeats behind you, think horses, not zebras.” Bengston tries to explain the failure of his experiment as proof of his preconceptions by claiming that somehow quantum mechanics works on the fates-of-mice level and quantum-entangled the experimental group with the control group and gave them BOTH the benefits of the reiki intervention – in other words, trying to explain one unproven and dubious phenomenon in terms of another, just-invented-from-buzzwords, unproven and dubious phenomenon. That’s hearing hoofbeats and looking around for a unicorn.

One occasionally wishes to educate the public.

Indeed. [Spock brow-raise]

The one study you cling to so deperately shows that reiki subject-group did no better than the control subject-group. This is not a ringing endorsement of reiki.

Based on prior experiments every last one of those mice should have died.

Which rather argues that the experiment itself is flawed, not that reiki could someonw protect both the subject group and the control group.

I have no objection to people enjoying massages, but I do strongly object to people charging exorbitant fees for those massages while making unproven (and false, so far as we can tell) claims about what these massages can accomplish. *

— Steve

* Particularly in cases where the practitioner uses those claims to dissuade patients from taking whatever treatments have been shown to be effective… though, thankfully, that’s not all the cases.

^ “puts” (or “cats,” suit yourself)

Well, this is certainly not the first time we’ve seen an appeal to ‘other ways of knowing’ – i.e. those non-materialistic intuitions and feelings** that inform alt med providers – why use your five senses when you have a sixth? Why be dependent upon inference and analyses based upon data when you can be creative with all of it?

Calling upon my own law: the woo-ier you get the more you need supernatural explanatory priciples.

** cast adrift on oceanic feelings.

@ Sialis**:

First, many of the practitioners are not medical professionals but are self-styled healers, woo-meisters, nutritionists, yoga teachers- what-have-you.. The one I survey speaks of a long family history of ‘sensitives’ and ‘healers’ in his miserable backwards community. I also witnessed a healer who based her imagery on Christian ( I suppose- Catholic) iconography concerning a female saint and roses. Thus it’s based on sub-cultural ideas. And it’s not established medicine.

Then, people may feel somehow indebted to the healer and would be loathe to report him or her- the healing may fit into their own worldview. In any case, even if there were somehow a direct connection to worsening of illness or death, this might be hard to take to court if the victim was an adult of sound mind.

** -btw- is that a play on ‘Cialis” or is it Gaelic ( *comme* Sian, Sinead, Siobhan etc?)

@Niche Geek
Just curious, did all those citations stop babies being deformed after their mothers took Thalidomide as prescribed, or save all the people who died as a result of taking Vioxx? Strange to measure the importance or usefulness of something through the number of citations it receives while overlooking the harm it caused… Is Vioxx still being prescribed?

Reiki at least doesn’t cause harm through the application but only passively if people are prevented from seeking other treatment — something I do not support.

@herr doktor Bimmler

The fact you all seem to miss that prior to being exposed to “magical treatment” all the mice were given cancer, unless technicians at five labs in ten experiments all somehow managed to screw up injecting mice. The mice grew tumors. Histological analysis of tissue from mice that were sacrificed showed cancer. Hemoglobin analysis and spleen weight analysis showed heightened immune response. So the mice had cancer and then didn’t have cancer. Where did the cancer go? Who the hell cares that the cancer also disappeared in the control group, given that cancer never just disappears?

If you can bring yourself to read Bengston’s “Type 2 errors and placebo effects” paper you will see on p. 324 a graph of the analysis of the spleen weight of sacrificed mice from both the experimental and the control which shows that the same effect occurred with both.

But as I said, enjoy hanging out in your paradigm and keep wearing those blinkers.

Those would be the people wearing the plate-sized blinkers.

@Marg – I am very frustrated. This blog will not let me volunteer my services as a guinea pig if you do long-distance Reiki, too. As someone who is very skeptical, I should be an excellent proof of concept. Cure me and at least you’ll have a stunning anecdote. Faith healers who earlier attempted to cure me declared me “possessed” (they were kind of Christian-ish) when I didn’t immediately get well.

It could even be said, if it succeeds, that Reiki is better than Christian prayer!

Who the hell cares that the cancer also disappeared in the control group, given that cancer never just disappears?

Evidently Bengston started out caring what happened to the control group, since he bothered to create one. Only subsequently did he decide that they didn’t matter after all.

In Bengston & Krinsley, all we know of the mice is that they were supplied by “a disinterested professor of biology” (who apparently preferred to remain anonymous). We are informed that “Host survival in the conventional literature was
100% fatality between 14 and 27 days after injection”… sadly, none of the “conventional literature” is cited. NONE OF IT. So we are given no reason to believe that these were the correct strain of carcinoma cells transplanted into the correct strain of mice to expect a fatal outcome, except hearsay.

The rest of Bengston & Krinsley is a monotonous repetition of broken protocols. The control mice refuse to die on schedule and each time it is revealed that someone has broken the experimental protocol and looked at them. There is so much anonymity and breaking of protocols, it is like a Penthouse Letter to the Editor.

Low level as it may be to a scientific mind, when your friend comes home and she has been batter black and blue, can barely talk, and struggles to swallow because of the pain it is causing her. Then using my hands to scan and find the part of her throat where the most pain is emminating, not by scientific detection by sensation and concentrating the Reiki treatment or energy or whatever name you care to give it to this area. Have her squeal your pulling it through my skin and then ‘it’s has gone’, her voice restored and able to swallow without pain 10 minutes later…. see is believing and until that moment I too was a skeptic. I cannot explain in scientific terms what happened but I know it did. Not everything in life is black and white otherwise we would all be healthy or dead. Sometimes you just know or have intuition on something even when the written evidence doesn’t correlate. So my arguement is does that make me wrong, stupid and blind? Or can you explain what happened to my friend that day. ‘A rose is but a rose by any name, the smell is just as sweet.’

Waving the arms I believe is know as auric clearing, you try it on yourself and I am sure it will make you smile x

Mice are injected with cancer cultures known to grow single large tumor. Mice grow tumor. Histological analysis shows the tumor to be cancerous. Orac’s scientific and rational readers all shout in unison “oh no, that can’t be cancer! Something is terribly wrong! There were grave errors!” Then one of them wisely chimes in with the scientific adage “when you hear hoofbeats don’t expect to see a zebra”.

I m sorry, I was wrong: the blinkers you’re wearing are not the size of dinner plates, but beach umbrellas.

I missed the passing of the law that says science must now dismiss without investigation all interesting new phenomena that don’t fit into its paradigms. Good thing we didn’t pass that law 300 years ago.

You still need to prove Reiki does something. The experiments have to have been flawed. And don’t look to me to blame the lab techs. They did not likely prepare the injectable. They were likely given the material and then they injected it accordingly. So stop trying to make out like we would blame them. We are all looking at the primary author and wondering why the hell this paper would have any traction with anyone.

What’s bigger than beach umbrellas? I’m running out of metaphors here.

@agashem

Yes. The technicians received cultures. The technicians injected the cultures. The mice grew tumors. The tumors when tested showed cancer. So far so good, yes? Then suddenly the cancer cells all decided they were not really cancerous, or they had been improperly refrigerated and committed mass suicide, yes?

Dr. Bengston’s other study, “Resonance, Type II errors and placebo effects” was coauthored by Dr. Margaret Moga, professor of cell biology at Terre Haute medical school. Why indeed would that paper be taken seriously by anyone?

@mrs woo — the something “wrong” you sense is the challenge to your accepted paradigms. The purpose of the study was to see _whether_ the healing worked. How is that not consistent with scientific inquiry?

@everyone else – Kindly go through the two studies and list the “many flaws”. I know of one, which is that Dr. Bengston looked at the control mice. I don’t know in what other study the researcher looking at the control mice would constitute a methodological flaw, but then what do I know.

If Reiki was indeed an effective means of curing cancer and other diseases, one would think that such studies could be easily repeated by other researchers.

It is as Mrs Woo wrote earlier, when the energy and other treatments don’t work to treat the disease, their failure is blamed on the patient.

As Mrs. Woo stated “Faith healers who earlier attempted to cure me declared me “possessed” (they were kind of Christian-ish) when I didn’t immediately get well.” In fact, in connection with the pdf link I provided earlier about treating Lyme disease with psychic surgery in Brazil, the same group of practitioners (Denice: these are US licensed medical providers) lists unhealed karmic trauma as one reason for the patient’s failure to heal.

@Antaeus Feldspar
What you say makes eminent sense. I am all for doing more experiments and I would really like to see someone other than Dr. Bengston successfully replicate his experiments. I am not sure how replicable they are. But in and of themselves they point to the existence of an interesting phenomenon that may or may not be unique to Dr. Bengston and deserves further exploration rather than immediate scornful dismissal, which is what most of the people on this forum seem to be doing.

@Mrs Woo
A photo would be helpful and knowing your general location would be helpful too. I am sorry you are suffering from this ailment and that so far nothing has helped.

Mrs. Woo – As one patient to another, isn’t it nice to see that some doctors are speaking out about these bogus practices? Good luck to you and Mr. Woo.

Interestingly enough, one of the idiots I survey has been harping upon his own *psi* research at the Institute for Applied Biology: supposedly, he first ‘healed’ discarded experimental mice with nutrition then called in ‘healers’ to pray/ meditate over other mice who were given cancer.

Needless to say, he observed spectacular results which were published in esteemed journals whose names he neglects to mention. I wonder why? Currently, he’s having nuns pray over seeds sprouting or suchlike.

About 20 years ago, Larry Dossey created a stir in woo-topia with his research that showed that prayer affected medical outcomes. Woo-mavens love citing him.

@Sialis – is it a 900 number? LOL Is he Reiki?

Does he have a dog? 😀

I have a dog. Since she can open our front door by herself, I’m wondering if she is wise enough to understand the intention of Reiki?

I usually believe that if Reiki would work, prayer should have. The one good thing about Christian faith is that if I am not healed it does NOT have to mean that I am somehow at fault for my lack of healing (except maybe to faith healers who have guaranteed I would be) – it just means that there is purpose to be found within it. I have started an online support group for chronically ill people where I encourage them to post one thing they are grateful for each day and it has been a wonderful thing for them and for me. I’m willing to let Marg try to heal me if she wants since she is assuring us that we just cannot “see,” but really I’m not too interested in pursuing any unproven treatments in any real way. Mr Woo tries to get me to do something or another about once every six months – his latest was to bring home “colloidal minerals from Eden” – when I found several sites that said that analysis of those liquids usually included such yummy things as aluminum, cadmium, lead, etc., he assured me that it wasn’t true and tried to get me to drink it anyhow. So far I’m winning on that argument. I can’t understand why any person thinks they can be healthier drinking a solution from leachate from shale in strip coal mine areas? I grew up in coal country and could have sworn there have been studies that suggest cancer rates are higher in communities that have strip mining and runoff enters water supply…? ~shakes head~

didn’t quantum mechanics (the real kind, not the fates-of-mice kind) seem pretty ridiculous before the evidence showed that it was nevertheless true?

I wouldn’t really say so, as the theory was developed in response to discovered phenomena, such as the photoelectric effect.

@ Judith:

So where’s your data? Anyone can say they can cure people- data is what separates efficacy from claims of efficacy.

OK, so show us data on various measures of improvement – your choice of variables.,

Judith, just post PubMed link or Identification Number (PMID) of the case report. I assume that with such a remarkable recovery you all wrote it up and got it published.

@ Judith:

All of the improvements you mention ( lessening of pain, increased mobility, less need for pain meds, lessened jaundice,& tumour size, iiving longer, better quality of life et al) can be studied and compared to controls. Whether a person dies of the illness- or not- is not the only measure involved here.

And now, I’m off ..

Marg @ 9:45 am 16 June

What’s bigger than beach umbrellas? I’m running out of metaphors here.

Answer: Marg’s faith in magical healing.

You know, Marg, I don’t really mind if you have faith in it, but I do mind if you try to dress your faith in what you are mistaking for science.

And I find it particularly ironic that you are so offended that others do not share your faith.

@Narad
One may publish a case report if one is a doctor or an academic. If one is Joe or Jane Nobody with no letters after his or her name, one doesn’t. I still have the documentation and in fact we did write up a report that we were hoping to publish if we succeeded, so technically it could still be published if someone were interested, but I doubt that anyone is.

Judith, not Jane. My apologies. Clearly I need to focus on one task at a time.

^ Strike that “Remember,” sorry.

Judith @ 1:44 pm: There was no point in writing up a failure.
Judith @ 2.25: in fact we did write up a report that we were hoping to publish if we succeeded,

I am confused.

Tasmanian Devils are facing extinction because lack of genetic diversity leaves them susceptible to a transmissable cancer, akin to allograft cancers in C3H/HeJ mice. Perhaps Dr Bengston can cure them. It would at least make an interesting grant application.

@Nice Geek
I received copies of all the documentation from the patient’s wife

@herr doktor bimmler
That should have been “no point in publishing a report about a failure”. The report was 95% written.

Reich’s disciples reckon that Bengston’s cures are real but he is wrong about the mechanism, which in fact involves Orgone energy:
http://www.hessdalen.org/sse/program/CA-ORAC-V2.pdf

Or was it Reich who was deceived? When he and his disciples cure mammary tumours in C3H/HeJ mice — which Marg assures us are inevitably fatal — perhaps they are invoking Reiki healing vibrations without knowing it.

Anyway, Orgone energy can indeed cause harm:

In the treated mice, however, bleeding while the animal was in the ORAC was so severe that it was the immediate cause of death of all the mice in this group except for one mouse that died by accident.

ORAC turns out to be the abbreviation for “orgone energy accumulator”. Our host has been lying to us about his cognomen! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!

@Judith: Let’s get down to a basic question: can the misapplication of “reiki energy” cause harm? It seems like it would be far easier to get consenting subjects for a test of this. If not, why?

Actually, I was wondering whether to point out to Marg that an explanation for Bergston’s results just as plausible as “the fates of the experimental and control groups got quantum-entangled and so all received the benefit of free energy that came from nowhere” is “all the energy that went into healing those mice was life energy stolen from the researchers, shortening their life span.” That’s the problem with lowering the bar to just “can’t be ruled out”: you can’t limit yourself only to the likeable variants.

That’s the problem with lowering the bar to just “can’t be ruled out”: you can’t limit yourself only to the likeable variants.

I settle for making a rock from reiki energy. Even a little one.

the good Dr. attempting Reiki on the poor Devils

He doesn’t need to travel to Tasmania and apply the healing hands in person. As I understand the rationale for the wellness of the control groups, it is enough if some quantum entanglement occurs between the diseased Devils and some other entity that he *has* handled, and after that the curative effect happens if he just *observes* them occasionally — a purpose surely served by a video link.

Gentlemen:

I believe I have some of this figured out-
1. perhaps the mice are not REGULAR mice- as Mr Adams has taught, sometimes multi-dimensionally trans-splendent beings *disguise* themselves as mice; thus, the numenous g-d like creatures healed themselves..
2. Tasmania:
Do you know how it is when you put on a shirt inside-out so all the seams show? well, Tasmania is on one of the seams of the universe where it meets its inverse. How do I know this? Trust me.

And presumably Tasmania is much like Cornwall in that respect.

About those seams:

If you know where they are, you can save tons of money on airfare…I should have known that 20 years ago.
-btw- the Chunnel and the Battery Tunnel are on the *same seam* as the Ferry Building. But please be careful if you’re a pedestrian- fast moving traffic and boats.

LW – the mice shared an orbital with opposite spins, I suppose. Mice, being fairly small rodents, are more susceptible to quantum effects than, say, beavers or groundhogs.
Getting mice to share an orbit is quite a trick – usually it involves a wide exercise wheel.

Mephistopheles O’Brien @ Jun 17 11:26 am & 8:27 pm

By the power vested in me by fellow scientists at my home laughing after I read your comments aloud , I grant you 1 internetz!

I would also request that anyone who doesn’t understand why they’re funny never use the word “quantum” in a sentence.

And of course we all know that the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42.

So it goes. Mikao Usui is advertised as having been a Buddhist, right? Reconcile for me, if you will, reiki with the Kevaddha.

You know, some people “explain” homeopathy effects by the homeopath and mark — I mean, patient — getting quantumly tangled up.

I’m trying to imagine how that works … close proximity, spinning in opposite directions … giant exercise wheels …

I have been wondering mice can be quantum-coupled since normally they are zero-spin entities

I suppose Bengston can claim to have demonstrated a sort of level-splitting.

The current layout of comment streams makes it difficult to credit other commenters properly when one steals their jokes. Must credit Marg for the inspiration.

Glad you’re all enjoying yourselves.

You folks are easily amused.

I repeat, you folks are easily amused 🙂

As likely it would give you the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound as Reiki handwaving will cure your metastatic tumors, I suppose.

Marg, I’m not amused as much as astounded: the strongest piece of evidence you can point to doesn’t support Reiki’s effectiveness to any degree, yet that isn’t enough to make you consider your faith in Reiki might be misguided?

What you “see with your own two eyes and hear with your own two ears” is not scientific, even if it can be considered empirical by a narrow definition. Certainly it isn’t vaguely reliable.

Bloodletting was obviously highly effective and safe based on what its practitioners and (surviving) recipients saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears. EXACTLY the same effects are in play with your faith in reiki.

shorter Marg:

LALALALALA I CAN”T HEAR YOU

(with hands over her ears)

You shouldn’tenter into a discussion about whether you can trust your eyes and ears on such questions – because you can’t. End of story, nothing to discuss. Equally well discuss whether 1+1=3.

I also find your repeated references to a “paradigm” hilarious, since it really just shows how completely ignorant of science, logic, and rationality you are. Postmodernism has absolutely no place in science. Again, no possible dispute here.

Enjoy your paradigm, Beamup. All you are doing is giving repeated demonstrations of what it is.

Yes, I happily embrace science and facts. While you repeatedly demonstrate that you don’t care one whit whether anything you say has the faintest basis in reality.

Yes, I find the trademarking quite funny. Does that mean no one other than Dr. Bengston is allowed to practice it? Not sure it’s all the same. I’ve known people who could differentiate between the “energy” of different modalities. No theoretical basis for it, though, just observation. Reiki is “light”, qigong is “heavy”. Qigong can feel like millions of tiny magnetic ballbearings vibrating under your skin. Very strange feeling, akin to a mild electric shock. And Therapeutic Touch can produce something that feels like a cool breeze. No one knows why. If your lot were ever willing to accept that it’s something real, we could study it more comprehensively.

Just when I thought Marg couldn’t get any crazier.

Marg @ June 12, 5:13 pm:
All right, if things like reiki haven’t been shown to actually heal anything, what do you make of this?

Marg @ 2:35 pm:
Bengston study did not involve Reiki but another form of energy healing.

Seems to me that if Bengston’s laying-on-of-hands is close enough to Reiki for its results to be counted as evidence for Reiki, then refuting its results also diminishes that evidence.

Marg @ June 15, 1:29 pm:
the fact remains that in ten experiments a bunch of mice injected with cancer were cured.

Bengston & Krinsley report 4 experiments. Bengston and Moga summarise those 4 experiments and report one more. Where do you get the other five from?

if Bengston really does have this dramatically life-saving ability, or gift, or whatever, he is keeping it to himself rather than actually saving lives
That’s not really fair, MSII, In the Bengston & Krinsley paper, Bengston — having learned the mental disciplines of energy manipulation from an established practitioner — taught them to Krinsley, and to several other volunteers, who were as effective as himself. So for all we know, those others could be travelling the world even now, whereever they are needed, curing mice of implanted carcinomas. And now he is teaching the technique to other people, which is (if you posit any value to them) a more effective use of his time than being the only practitioner.

When I was in my teens I read about energy healing and thought I would give it a try. If one of my friends or family was in pain I would suggest that I might be able to help and would hold my hand an inch or so over the painful area. I found that I could sense where the worst pain was by the heat radiating from the area, which of course impressed the patient. I would hold my hand over the area while visualizing healing energy flowing from my hand into the patient, and pain and inflammation flowing from the patient into my hand. To my surprise it worked very well indeed. A woman who could barely stand due to a slipped disk was mobile and pain free after a 20 minute treatment, I apparently stopped a bad migraine in its tracks and had many similar successes.

However, I was more than a bit suspicious that these results were due to suggestion and expectation, and after some experimentation I found that the visualization was unnecessary. What was necessary was an air of confidence, congruence and chutzpah. A furrowed brow, expression of intense concentration and heavy breathing also seemed to help. I suspect that one reason for the apparent effectiveness is that it gets the patient to lie still and relax for a few minutes and to place their attention on the painful area, which tends to increase blood flow. I also suspect that pain often leads to muscular tension, which leads to more pain in a vicious cycle, and that this ‘treatment’ can help to break that cycle. This is most likely what happened in the healing related by Pondfairy above.

Some years later I got interested in hypnosis and found that I could get similar results with people in trance (whatever that is) without any involvement of putative ‘healing energies’. I eventually found that trance is not necessary, that people are generally highly suggestible and that we have far more control over our subjective experience than we usually realize. For example, it is surprisingly easy to manage mild to moderate pain by simply visualizing a ‘volume control’ for the pain that you turn down in your imagination. I have found it is very easy to fool both yourself and someone else when using these kinds of techniques and doubt very much that any kind of unknown energy is involved. The only things I seemed to be successful with were conditions with a large subjective component.

As for Bengston, I have to wonder about the mice, and what would have happened to them if they were given no treatment at all. He says in an article in Edge Science that the tumors had progressed so far he was ready to euthanize the mice, but was persuaded not to and they recovered. As I understand it, in animal experiments with cancer they are very rarely allowed to die of the cancer as this is cruel and unethical, so I have to wonder if in previous experiments the mice were sacrificed when their tumors reached a certain size and that it was assumed they were about to die. Is this what happened to the mice sent to a different city that died? It does seem a lot more likely than magic being real.

If your lot were ever willing to accept that it’s something real, we could study it more comprehensively

Except that when such studies are released showing that this ‘energy’ has no effect whatsoever, you’ll reject them because they’re not part of your ‘paradigm’

I have an honest question for you, Marg. Is it possible to falsify energy healing? What kinds of studies could sufficiently falsify this ‘paradigm’ for you?

I guess another way to ask it would be, hypothetically, what evidence would convince you that your observations are incorrect?

@krebiozen
Have you considered what it means that you felt heat emanating from the person you were treating and that you “knew” where the area that needed treatment was?

And, no, you are entirely wrong about confidence and chutzpah being necessary ingredients. “Let’s see what will happen” also works.

You people go into such contortions to try to explain this away.

Let me see if I’m getting this right–when I asked you for the single strongest piece of evidence for Reiki’s efficacy you said in your opinion it was Bengston’s study which you now insist didn’t involve Reiki at all but some other kind of energy healing instead? That’s really your position?

Marg — if you wish to stop the sneering, post something that makes sense in any known universe.

You haven’t addressed jgc’s point. If What Bengston used was not reiki, what then, in your opinion, is the strongest proof that reiki works?

You are simply afraid that if the mind is strong enough to generate healing it can also be used to generate harm.

No, I’m curious as to the explanation why it can’t. It quite plainly is having a biological effect, right? And it’s “energy.” Why can’t something go wrong? Is it because energy is a misnomer and all this physicsy crap is a put-on?

I suppose I should also address this:

Have you considered what it means that you felt heat emanating from the person you were treating and that you “knew” where the area that needed treatment was?

Yes. Since we know that painful inflamed parts of the body give off more heat than non-inflamed parts it seems likely that I was detecting this heat. Why postulate the existence of an unknown type of energy when there is a known type of energy that is entirely consistent with my experiences?

You people go into such contortions to try to explain this away.

Since I never experienced anything that could not be explained by science I don’t need to go through any contortions. It seems to me that it is you going through contortions to sustain your belief that something paranormal is occurring.

I would love energy healing to be real. It would open up a whole new field of physics and biology, not to mention the possibility of miraculous healings. However, nothing I have experienced and nothing I have read convinces me that there is anything to it other than suggestion and the effects of relaxation. I think a decent massage works far better and doesn’t involve any deception.

There are intriguing studies that might show some effect, but nothing seems to be replicable and consistent. It’s like so many things in the paranormal arena – lots of hints that there is something interesting going on but when it is looked at more closely under controlled conditions it evaporates like the morning dew. I used to have a lot of interest in this area, but you can only chase infuriatingly elusive shadows for so long before it begins to feel like a pointless waste of time.

I often say that woo appeals to those who have poor understanding of biological processes and the more ‘spiritualistic’ concepts appeal to those who lack understanding of psychological processes:
energy healing capitalises upon emotional content and desire for particular outcomes.’ Suggestion and relaxation’ are more parsimonious explanations than postulating new sytems of physics.

I was once informed that my own preference for foods and artwork from Asia was a reflection of my past lives. Also that ‘spirits’ of my ancestors surrounded me and guided my literary endeavors. I think that there are other ways of looking at this altho’ theses ideas might serve well as *metaphors* or poeticisms, but that’s about all.

On a lighter note:
Krebiozen and JGC, it’s the summer solstice- perhaps we should emulate our ancestors- dancing in the groves of sacred trees, enjoying Nature’s in-exhaustible Energy, now at its zenith…
or just have a few drinks.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Mahatma Ghandi

We are somewhere between stage 2 and 3.

Marg throws up a quote about perseverence…

… because quoting asinine bromides about perseverence is an acceptable substitute for providing quality evidence.

Not.

The Disputed and Misattributed section of Wikiquote’s ‘Gandhi’ entry are entertaining.

No scam, Heliantus. Open your mind.

@ Lawrence:

Brian, I think that your comment might be illustrated by Orac’s infamously creepy Bunny-with-the-removable-brain that appears in recent MMS threads.

I’m sure if your roof ever springs a leak you’ll happily pay big bucks for “reiki roofing”, right Marg?

If you think that would be ridiculous, you have an insight into what we think about reiki “medicine”.

Thanks, Marg, for yet another poorly designed, terribly controlled, proper stats-lacking ‘article’ for my files.

I’ll say it again: People who are only interested in themselves do not possess the strength to even consider the possibility they might be wrong.
It takes someone as selfish and amoral as Marg to swindle people out of their hard-earned money based only on the premise that her own observations are infallible.

Or just a sneering igoramus?

Marg
AdamG has only the two choices?

Marg:

So ‘some’ MDs are beginning to think reiki is not ridiculous.

So what?

‘Some’ scientists claim global warming isn’t real because the atmospheric IR trap contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

‘Some’ engineers assert 9/11 was an “inside job”.

‘Some’ lawyers insist Barack Obama is not an American citizen and therefore is not the legitimate President.

Just because ‘some’ people who happen to have professional credentials think or assert something doesn’t make that thing true. All the more so when that something is prima facie ludicrous.

Ciao, ciao, gentlemen.

In a few years we will know who was right.

I happened to get all the jokes, Very Reverend Battleaxe.

In a few years we will know who was right.

More selfishness. It’s not about ‘being right’ vs. ‘being wrong’ Marg. I’m not afraid to be wrong. I learn from being wrong. That’s how science works. This is about a genuine desire to help people vs. selfishly taking people’s money because your observations are infallible.

The fact that that you have yet to respond to this, but keep coming back here to post, indicates that you have no response.
You know it’s true just as well as we do.

Ciao, ciao, gentlemen.

In a few years we will know who was right.

“Goodbye, cruel Thread. Farewell. You shan’t have me to kick around any longer. Time shall bring you the rewards you justly deserve.”

Bah.

Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

@Marg – if you want to continue to live the Middle Ages & believe in hand-waving magic, go right ahead. I, for one, will continue to follow the Scientific Method – which tells me your “magical healing energies” are a bunch of BS.

Gotta to love the arrogance etc.

Gotta love the arrogance.

Is there anything more arrogant than assuming your own infallibility?

Your ego can’t even bear the thought that you might be wrong. It’s sad.

Marg,
Have you figured out how to set up a follow up study to the one you posted back at June 21, 11:52 am? The one I asked you about around this time yesterday. A study which would help the authors solve this problem from their conclusion

It is unknown whether the beneficial effects of Reiki treatment over music stem from the presence of another person, the presence of a person with healing intention, the light touch technique, or a combination of factors

I’m all ears.

Been a long week with lots of extra kiddos (grandkids) and took a lot out of me. Marg has yet to convince anyone?

I was definitely disappointed. Was a terribly rough week with yesterday being a day when I was unable to even stay awake. Did manage to get the pool finally cleaned and set up properly tho. Think that was my own stick-to-it and nothing to do with someone’s shared energies; except maybe my son, his girlfriend and the grandkids.

@Krebiozen – visualization and other types of self-control taught me to shut off all pain from migraine. Unfortunately, the few really bad ones kind of had the halos, light sensitivity and nausea get away from me. Since I hadn’t practiced eliminating those, too, I would still end up with some issues with migraine, just not he actual pain part. I also effectively minimized how bad I ‘felt’ pain moving forward in my life, which absolutely shocked a surgeon once when they started surgery on a messed up ankle and found an extra broken bone (fibula, not weight-bearing; the heel was already broken) that hadn’t showed up in imaging – it was injured running out into the road after my escaped toddler and I knew that I was having surgery in about a week anyhow and didn’t see a reason to be bothered to go to the ER with it. Later when there was too much pain for my body to cope with I once again had issues with other problems related to pain – change of color of skin, sweating, etc., that I could not ‘fix’ by minimizing/ignoring the pain in my body.

I still haven’t figured out how to control those issues, unfortunately…

Never managed to manifest miraculous healing with all of that learned mental stuff either. How often I wish I did have a power like that. No one I met would suffer… no one I loved would be ill or die a painful death from disease!

I would wonder what I would do for a living, but just realized I could at least be selfish enough to heal myself first. 🙂

Somebody seems to have had some trouble sticking the flounce.

Marg,

Fair answer – but if those groups are sufficient then how can we accept Dr Bengtson’s conclusion that his untreated mice were affected despite the absence of a healing intention?

If I may chime in here … Quite likely those groups would not be sufficient. As Marg says, a healing intention is very hard to control for, simply because a healing intention does not need to be conscious. People could swear up and down that they don’t have one, but if they have as much as a smidge of compassion for the patient in front of them, I think a healing intention will co-exist with it. As to Dr. Bengston’s findings, I think for now we can conclude that they are quite unique and stand as a big question mark until someone else replicates them. There are unique individuals who can genuinely heal; and strange effects can occur around them; most of them don’t really know how they do it although they might formulate a theory to try to explain what happens. I think Dr. Bengston is one of those individuals. I know of several others. They are not charlatans, as most of you would seem to believe, but the avant-garde of a new phase of our evolution.

I think the control mice healing was one of those strange effects. I would love to know whether the experiments can be replicated, but even if someone did, and they were successful, I would wonder if Dr. Bengston was somehow involved, perhaps by knowing about the experiment and having an unconscious healing intention.

The problem with this interpretation of the Bengston experiments, Judith, is that when we can construct multiple explanations for a set of observations, we don’t actually just get to choose which explanation we like. We don’t get to choose the explanation that would mean we have a lucrative field of scientific study ahead of us; we don’t get to choose the explanation that would mean the universe is holistic and human-centered and friendly. We have to accept that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true, even if it’s not what we want to be true.

To clarify, “simplest” in this context implies “relying as little as possible on anything speculative, on anything we don’t know to be true.” Despite your assertion that “there are unique individuals who can genuinely heal [merely by having a healing intention; despite any obstacles of time and distance; not even limited by a desire to not exert this healing force]” we actually don’t know anything of the sort to be true. If we did, there would have been no reason for the Bengston experiments to even be done, since they were conducted in order to try and prove a far less ambitious premise, namely “individuals may be able to provide healing to others WHEN they are in reasonable proximity AND actively attempting to provide that healing.” When you try to prove that the loud rustling out in the woods is Bigfoot moving through the trees, and you look over every inch of the soft soil and find no footprints, the proper conclusion is “No Bigfoot was here,” not “Bigfoot was here, and he has an antigravity machine!”

Whether we like it or don’t, the most plausible reason why the experimental group and the control group both survived at the same rates is not some exciting mysterious healing modality but simple experimenter error.

So your actual assumption, Judith, is that there are healers either by training or talent and that these special people are the only ones who can heal? However, they cannot control the healing effects emanating from their bodies and can ‘accidentally’ heal others sometimes at great distance when attempting to heal someone else (please correct me if I’m wrong on this) or if they know someone else is trying to heal someone they can accidentally heal people just through hope that the experiment with the other person works?

If that is so, how come everyone in say, that entire city wasn’t healed at the same time as the mice? Or, when they did healing in hospital settings, why didn’t the entire hospital suddenly end up disease free?

That would definitely be difficult to replicate in any kind of blinding.

See, you would rather say “this is just so mysterious and you are too closed-minded to ever begin to understand why it works” instead of “this might have been coincidence and/or some kind of failure within the trials.”

When it comes to ameliorating suffering oftentimes true concerned touch and care will reduce suffering without any other intervention due to the makeup of the human psyche. It has its limits, but it can work and doesn’t require being made mystical for explanation. As human beings we respond to touch and we respond to a caring heart (the same thing with dogs).

Science is willing to say “we don’t know why the cancer patient lasted longer than we suggested they would, but it was an estimate, not a set-in-stone death date.” They are even willing to say that strong family support extended the life of the patient. One of the reasons that they seem “harder on energy practitioners” is because those people charge for a service with no proven effectiveness, and often their treatment will encourage the patient to delay effective science-based treatment, sometimes to their detriment.

I have no problem with people who say, “Let me put my hand over this painful spot and see if it helps it feel better.”

I do have a problem with people who say, “Waving my hands around in certain ways while mumbling will treat you as effectively as medicine. That will be sixty dollars, please.”

Recently, I’ve scanned internet radio** broadcasts about energy healing and prayer accomplishing wonders; here are some details:

30-odd years ago, a natural health guru took lab rats that were injured by massive doses of radiation in cancer research; he learned that he could heal them by giving them green juices and supplements. Then, he allowed lab rats to run free in his lab and they lived much longer than rats in cages. Finally, going all-out *psi*, he had cancer-ridden rats ‘prayed over’ by various healers- a priest, a rabbi, a healer, a nurse ( a proponent of therapeutic touch) ***. Of course those who were received prayers survived much longer. Then, he compared the effects of different healers on sick rats- he found that ONE woman actually made the rats worse; other healers were more pristinely effacacious. Then we are told that he repeated all of these studies SIX times over with the same remarkable results.
Wowie zowie!

Unfortunately, NOT ONE SINGLE scientific journal would accept his papers about these momentous, paradigm-shifting results! They would bring the entire scientific establishment quivering to its knees! And we can’t have that. can we, now?

Thus, he brings his especial message to those with ears to see to hear and eyes to see: you can follow his protocols through his books, videos and use his supplements. Some of the elect might even get a private consult or stay at his “ranch” and experience hands-on healing by the master himself. Isn’t that grand?

Now, would you care to peruse my catalogue of bridges?

** Progressive Radio Network/ research at Institute for Applied Biology
*** A priest, a rabbi, a healer and a nurse walked into a bar…

Judith:

If peoply really *do* have abilities that vary significantly from the norm, it should be very easy to demonstrate in controlled studies. So far NO one has; I would also imagine that people like this would stick out from their cohort like the proverbial sore thumb because of continued, extraordinary success. Does anyone? Other than the self-appointed and self-promoters like the one I described above?

This is not anything new: people have been discussing this as a scientific question for a LONG time: Freud, Jung and Wm James all talked about studies around the turn of the LAST century. Larry Dossey claimed healing with prayer long ago, where has THAT gone?

Not sure if this is the same Judith, but I found a website for someone who does energy healing for pets, and it’s not only reiki! No siree bob…it’s meridian tapping and bach flower therapy too! A woo salad for pets!

And of course she’ll teach you reiki too, for a price.

http://judithlevywellness.com/pets/energy-practices/reiki-for-pets/

This comes from her bio page:

Judith’s clients often report positive and sustainable outcomes.

Not a very substantial endorsement, and she wrote it herself. “Often” is one notch above “sometimes”. Why would I waste my time, money and potential health of my pet when the practitioner herself says it’s hit or miss if she’ll get results? If this energy thing is real why the uncertainty? And who cares what pet owners “report”? Are there any studies in veterinary journals? No, of course not.

It’s my understanding that reiki really is only one big pyramid scheme. Become a reiki “master” (gag), after a weekend of training, and you’re then eligible to teach others. So the goal is to convert clients to become students. That’s where the real money is, and why so many reiki con artists are willing to give free “samples”.

My sister’s beloved 10 year-old male Maine Coon mix was diagnosed yesterday with cancer and will have to be put to sleep in a few weeks. His little body is riddled with tumours. Not operable and too far gone for chemo. Obviously, the whole family is heartbroken. What would Judith recommend in this case? Could she do something by distance healing?

Judith

Experiments are not the only way to know things. Doctors prescribed aspirin for generations before anyone knew how aspirin worked simply because of the observed effect that willow bark had on pain.

Huh? Did you actually comprehend those two sentences before you posted them?

Try this: “Doctors prescribed aspirin for generations before anyone knew how aspirin worked simply because of the consistently observed effect that willow bark had on pain.”

What’s your take on the concept of a reproducible experimental outcome?

Incidentally, it appears that one of the cats has an anal sac problem yet again. Would distance healing require a photo of the cat from the front, or just the affected region?

Sorry, Narad, can’t do much about anal sacs 🙂 It’s all yours.

@Denice, CHI in a spray container sounds like a riot. I wonder what’s in it. Probably not aspirin.

@MSII Very sorry to hear about your sister’s cat. Losing a pet is heartbreaking.

@MSII

BTW you got the wrong Judith.

Judith@ 12:40 am 24 Jun 12
Are you Marg? The commenter with whom I discussed control groups earlier (yesterday)? Whom I mentioned by name in my comment?
No, you, Judith, posted this:

They are not charlatans, as most of you would seem to believe, but the avant-garde of a new phase of our evolution.

I’m sorry Judith, but I can’t have a scientific discussion with someone who thinks that faith healing has anything to do with evolution. And you know what? Your idea isn’t even original: Stan Lee was writing about X-Men during the 1960’s.

@Krebiozen
It’s been a long time since anyone paid $10,000. Nowadays it’s more like $100 and in the hands of genuine Reiki masters it’s not a scam.

BTW none of you are real skeptics. See this video posted by Dr. Bengston:

This is interesting too:

@MSII
You just showed your absolute bias. Later on in the video people show medical results that show healing and their doctors speak as well. See, you are not a skeptic but a non-believer.

Fine, give me that evidence in a form I can read, like a legitimite clinical report. I’m not sitting through 50 minutes of woo testimonial crackpots who claim they can cure AIDS in four days by hoping it goes away.

And who says any of those people are real anyway? You ever hear of actors? You ever hear of liars? You ever hear of commercials? Think a Big Mac looks as good in person as it does in a commercial?

YouTube is not a scientific journal. Once again, dox or STFU.

Always the last comments of someone who knows they don’t have facts on their side. If you really think this energy healing thing works, then fund the research and get it published. Having worked with many patients over the years, some of them will be healed just by a hot pack on their back. At least in that case there is radiant energy present. By the way, how does this form of energy differ from therapeutic touch?

@MSII

“And what does imagination have to do with science?”

Ask Einstein 🙂

So, still no proof then.

Kreb,

I know this isn’t the same Judith’s website, but here’s a price list from what I imagine is a typical reiki vendor. This one is in Pittsburgh so I’m guessing it’s more expensive in larger cities.

Note that $600 and a weekend of workshops is all that it costs to become a reiki master level III practitioner. I guess you just have to take it on faith that the teacher is really qualified. Might as well start believing in faith early on, because that’s what reiki vendors will be selling later.

And all reiki masters make more money training others than actually delivering reiki services. It’s like Mannatech, or Amway.

Ooops, forgot the link to the price list:

http://judithlevywellness.com/people/purchase/

Imagination – to be more concise, speculative and hypothetical thought- does have *something* to do with science AND it also is involved in writing fiction and poetry, creating fantasies, designing uildings or artwork and creating myths out of whole cloth. Pseudo-science relies upon imagination as well. Imagination isn’t the only thing we need.

Science speculates based solidly on the ground of established FACTS, constrained by what is already known and guided into discovery of new realms by LAWS- when I last looked there were quite a few of those around. Even if the research is quite novel, we still have the laws of probability and fq distribution to consider.
-btw- innovators build upon the work of others, they refine rather than demolish the entire structure. Newton wasn’t wiped off the map, you know.
You can’t just do anything and say anything.

@MSII
I too have a quarrel with Reiki about this. You really have no guarantee about the quality of any individual Reiki practitioner — and that will continue to be a problem even if Reiki is proven to be effective.

@MSII
James Randi is insane 🙂

Good mature, intelligent answer. Just as mature as using smiley faces that makes you seem like you’re 12 years old.

Hey, the $cientologists also believe in energy healing. They call it “touch assist”. They show up at disaster sites in bright yellow T-shirts (like 9/11 and Haiti), and interfere with the real emergency aid workers. Police usually have to escort them out. Maybe they should start offering reiki at their empty Idle Morgues to raise some more money.

And why does the reiki industry insist on capitalizing “reiki”? Is it to give it a veneer of credibility? Real scientific fields, like surgery, psychiatry, oncology, etc. are never capitalized (unless at the beginning of a sentence, of course). On the other hand, religions ARE capitalized: Catholicism, Judiasm, Presbyterian, etc. So it seems the reiki industry is trying to align itself more with religion than science.

Just some random thoughts on energy healing, since Judith is so full of random thoughts (and full of a lot more…SMILEY FACE!!!)

Isn’t there an skeptic rule that as soon as the ‘opposition’ cites quantum physics they lose?
And to quote Bohr, anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

Maybe you should read more skeptical literature. I think I am right but it doesn’t have a name. Seriously, you don’t understand quantum physics nor do you understand how the body heals

@Agashem
Interesting article on James Randi:
http://stevevolk.com/archives/952

Judith Schutz, is that you?
Well, nice meeting you. Some interesting reading on the interwebs. Don’t believe a word of it myself, but I can see how long you have been immersed in this stuff so no wonder you are fighting so hard.
If you ever climb out of the rabbit hole, let us know.

Judith,

Do you really mean to suggest that when energy healing is really tested all the positive results happen in some alternate reality? What makes that any better than not working at all? Does the treatment help, or do you just have to hope you’re on the right timeline?

erratum:Shame on me! *ITS*

Judith

2:34 pm

@Agashem
I was punning on MSII’s name.
@everyone else
Why healing may be difficult to prove in the lab:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

See, Judith, this just demonstrates perfectly that you have no clue as to what you’re going on about. The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is just that—an interpretation. Nobody disputes the experimental results of QM, just what kind of picture we should be able to build up of reality based upon them. In the case of Reiki, it’s exactly the “experimental” “results” we dispute. All indications are it’s bullshit. Therefore we are under no obligation to “interpret” its integration into our world-picture.

Think a Big Mac looks as good in person as it does in a commercial?

Yes, yes it does.

No, it doesn’t. The patties are far smaller, and the assembly is less than artful. It is a flavor-delivery device, that flavor mainly being salad dressing and beef scraps. (Which is not to say that I don’t like one every now and then.)

@ Mephistopheles O’Biren:

One never knows do one
– probably one of the cousins- we all look alike.

@ Mephistopheles :
Pardonnez le typo, s.v.p.

Maybe i should just attribute any errata to my alternate world self… useful idea, that!

rather than attempting to prove it is a broad spectrum cure right off the bat

Well, abscessed feline anal sacs have already been taken out. I’m really interested in the theoretical interpretation here, but I’ve to get it.

Narad,

I am not an energy healer, so can’t be sure. I suspect energy healing won’t be attempted on abscessed anal sacs because the practitioner would have to visualize them, and that would be icky. However, that is only one view of one incident, and there haven’t been proper studies done.

Narad
Sadly your cat is presently deceased in another branch of the universe. However, you may take consolation in the fact if your cat were to cease living in this dimension, it will be alive in another branch…

I read a fascinating piece recently online about commercial studios that do nothing but food commercials, namely fast food and chain restaurants. The amount of food styling and manipulation is astounding.

There is the practical matter of working under pretty hot lights. That square of cheese just ain’t gonna hold.

Suggestion for controlling healing intent

Start with a group of untrained potential therapists. Half are trained and attuned by ‘genuine’ Reiki masters, half are trained and attuned by actors playng the part of Reiki masters (coached to get significant portions of the training sufficiently wrong that there’d be no chance of ‘accidental’ attunement). Include a third group of therapists that receives no training whatsoever, but instead are told the study investigates the ‘latent healing ability we all possess’ to get a baseline for natural healing ability. Randomize which group the potential healers are assigned, and of course include a group of subjects that recieve no treatment.

Then run a standard animal study with a hard (not self-reported) endpoint–something like collagen induced arthritis in mice, with reduction in % paw edema as the readout for efficacy. Compare results across groups.

Healing intent should no longer be a confounder, since all three healing groups will presumably have the same intent while only the genuinely attuned group have the ability to implement it effectively.

Mice are relatively cheap–shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive to achieve sufficient subject numbers to get robust statistics.

Of course, the real question is what out will the Reiki advocates seize upon when it turns out genuinely attuned Reiki practiticioners are no more effective than the untrained or improperly trained healers?

And since sans-serif fonts make “r”+”n” indistinguishable from “m”, my twee little joke was wasted. Seriously, Sciblogs—sans-serif fonts cause brain damage!

Typically % edema (relative to baseline) is determined by measuring foot thickness with a micro-caliper, before and after collagen injection. Another objective and quantifiable read out could be substituted.

Do you think anyone with sufficient money to conduct large scale studies is interested enough in energy healing to throw the kind of money at it that proving it would require?

If there was credible evidence suggesting that it worked people with sufficient funds would be interested in funding such research, just as they now invest in science based research and development which offers potential returns on their investments. The lack of any real evidence energy healing works at all (much less that reliably enough to be a useful and meaningful addition to existing therapies) is the obstacle to getting studies funded.

Convince venture capitalists there’s something real there and they’ll come calling with their checkbooks open and pen in hand..

Oh dear. Typed too quickly. That should be “or whether the act of learning” and “no one ever did”.

@Antaeus Feldspar
You are dealing not with a substance here but with mind. Mind, unlike substance, can be non-local. This is not something you inject the mice with, or put in their food. It is much more difficult to limit or control. FYI you are committing a “type 2 error”.

I’m just pointing out that if we judge Bengston by the same unforgiving standards that you want James Randi to be judged by, the fact that he failed to make his control group an actual control group means we can’t trust him in anything.

As for your explanation of why Bengston should be forgiven, obviously you didn’t read my June 23 comment to you or couldn’t understand it. If we already had scientific proof that “mind, unlike substance, can be non-local” and can exert healing power that is not limited by distance or even by the fact that the experimenter should be trying like hell NOT to exert that healing power on the control group, there was no reason for Bengston to waste his time on the experiment. If we actually have no evidence for this mysterious healing power that works non-locally and without even anyone’s conscious volition (which happens to be the case in this reality) we sure as hell can’t accept that postulated non-local healing power as the true explanation for events. As I said in the June 23 comment you shut your eyes to, not finding Bigfoot’s footprints in the soft soil does not lead to the conclusion that Bigfoot and antigravity devices are real.

The purported non-locality of the purported healing power and the purported ability of the healing power to transcend any obstacle except, curiously, skepticism, makes it a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Are you naive enough to think this is a good thing? It is not. It means that no matter how false your hypothesis is, your experiments will keep giving you the same incorrect answer that your hypothesis is supported.

And if you think that’s a good thing, think again. All unfalsifiable hypotheses are equally supported by the evidence. So if I tell you that my explanation for the results of Bergston’s experiments is that he’s an energy vampire whose powers to drain life energy from helpless victims and transmit it to whichever subjects it suits his purposes to heal is unaffected by distance or contact, and that every one of those mice that lived when it was supposed to have died represents a human victim whose lifeforce was drained by Count Bergstonula, you can’t tell me I’m wrong. My hypothesis fits the data exactly as well as yours does, and is more plausible to boot: we see human beings all the time, but you show me one person who’s ever seen the “universal source.”

Antaeus: I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that “non-locality” is yet another physics concept that Judith uses as an incantation without having a ghost (in the machine?) of an idea of its meaning.

Something that’s been bugging me since Mrs. Woo posted about being able to control her pain, yet not heal her disease.

How come the miraculous anecdotes of mind/energy/whatever tend to be attributed to gifted healers, but not to the patient? How do you control for the possibility that some of the patients themselves were “subliminally” gifted self-healers, who just didn’t know it until they heard a hint of a rumor that energy healers were around and their brains just went “Shoot, if they can do that”……

It’s just turtles all the way down. And my head hurts.

The issue for venture capitalists is probably more likely is that there is no money to be made there. How do you get a return on your investment?

Same way the people who funded the development of LASIK eye surgery, liposuction, gastric bypass for morbid obesity, etc., generated a return on their investment.

So your control group of untrained healers could easily have people with such latent ability in it.

Which is why that group is included as a control. If the principles of Reiki are valid, the genuinely attuned group must perform better than a completely untrained random sampling of the population, even when that sampling includes “latent” healers. If it only performs as well, we cannot assign any positive results the attuned group generates to the Reiki training rather than normally occurring latent healing ability.

(of course, if it performs worse, we’ll have to conclude that Reiki training inhibited that group’s previously existing latent healing healing ability.

Judith,

Just curious: what would you do, as a reiki practitioner, if a client came to you with cancer? Or AIDS? Or rabies?

The scene you describe above sounds like what Peter Popoff and Benny Hine do. Ever see their healing videos? Do you believe those two men can do the same thing you do?

@MISS
Rabies — keep away from me. Cancer or AIDS, I would treat you, but I wouldn’t tell you not to have medical treatment. We have treated people with cancer. Their quality of life improves. Many hospitals have volunteer reiki practitioners on-site to treat people who are receiving chemotherapy or radiation.

Don’t know about John of God. Oprah had an interesting feature about him in which an MD went to Brazil to investigate him and the MD didn’t come away condemning him as a charlatan. Have you seen Wayne Dyer’s video interview about his experiences with John of God?

So you don’t actually think you’re curing cancer or AIDS–you’re just offering an adjunct to medication, chemo and radiation? How do you improve their quality of life and how do you know you’ve done that?

I merely observe that they were healed

It is selfish and amoral to charge people money for a ‘treatment’ that is solely based on the premise that your observations are infallible.

@AdamG
We’ve covered that in previous posts. Read the thread.

Also, there can be no rational argument that makes me jump to the conclusion that I magically healed them. I merely observe that they were healed, whereas they weren’t healed before either by medicine or physiotherapy.

I must presume no one has yet bothered to explain placebo effects, or confusing correlation and causation to you. Might want to look into that.

“I would like to know how they were healed and what correlation, if any, there was between what I did and them getting better.”

I’m confused–I understood you to be insisting that energy healing can be effective, while here you’re stating that you don’t know if there is even a correlation, much less a causative relationship, between what treatment and their reported improvement?

I would study that.

Hopefully long enough to have actual proof that your treatment causes the reported improvement, before charging anyone for your services.

Ask cancer patient prior to treatment what their level pain is from 1 to 10; ask cancer patient after treatment what their level of pain is from 1 to 10. We have seen it go from 10 to 2, with pain relief lasting for about a day and a half.

And you’ve excluded the possibility that this represents a placebo effect how, exactly?

He lived ten more weeks, able to take walks and to go to the cottage, where he even barbecued. His doctor and oncology nurses were quite impressed and commented that had never seen anything like it.

And you’ve established that this was a direct result of the treatment you provided how, exactly?

<blockquote.There are many anecdotal reports out there of Reiki helping with the side effects of chemo and radiation too.

Always necessary to recall that the plural of anecdote isn’t ‘evidence’.

@AdamG
Furthermore, neither physiotherapists nor doctors have any compunction about charging people for treatment that didn’t work.

Ture–as is often pointed out vaccines aren’t 100% effective at generating protective antibody titers (contributing to the importance of herd immunity.)

However, the fact that even science-based treatments are not 100% effective in all patients does not justify charging for treatments where there’s no evidence to suggest they have any efficacy at all.

The part we covered is that I don’t charge most of the people I treat. And it is not MY observation that the patients were healed but their own observation that they were a heck of a lot better after I treated than they were before. They couldn’t help but notice that their knee no longer hurt or that they could bend it whereas they could not bend it for months or years before. In fact with some of them even their doctor noticed that for some inexplicable reason they no longer needed surgery or pain killers. Go figure.

I don’t know how effective Reiki is. I know what happens to the people I treat; whether or not they see changes; whether or not they say they got better. If they do, something worked. Don’t trust my observations to mean that Reiki works because my observations obtain to my own experience and don’t prove anything about Reiki practitioners as a group. Even if you proved in a lab that Reiki worked, it still doesn’t mean that the Reiki practitioner down the street is effective. Just accept that there is something interesting going on that deserves further study, not the kind of study that tests the efficacy of medications, but the kind of study that explores the mechanisms by which they work. I guess I mean the kind of research that goes on when medications are being developed, prior to them being tested.

I guess I mean the kind of research that goes on when medications are being developed, prior to them being tested.

So you’re saying we should do preliminary research on Reiki’s effectiveness, but at the same time you continue to practice regardless of the completion or results of such studies. Why bother to study it at all then if the results won’t affect what you already do?

I’ll ask again in a different way. What evidence would convince you that your ‘healing’ has no effect on the patients you treat, even when they report an improvement?

Here’s an interesting parallel:
I play tennis with many people who have knee, wrist or back problems which usually resolve on all their own sans surgery; sometimes even their doctors are surprised that there is so much improvement. Now I *certainly* would never attribute this to my own beneficial presence or capacity as a channel for divine power – but perhaps I do radiate healing energy .
One never knows do one.

You all should look at the history of the development of penicillin.

We’re all well aware of the history of penicillin. Even if we weren’t it has no bearing on the discussion here. Just because something was proven to be effective doesn’t mean all things will be proven to be effective.

You’re avoiding the point though. What evidence would convince you that your ‘healing’ has no effect on the patients you treat, even when they report an improvement?

My point about the development of penicillin is that it was a very off the wall approach and you can see people rolling and eyes and saying “curing infections with bread mold? tell me another one” and looking for other reasons why the bacteria in the petri dish might have died, because surely it was a mistake.

Can someone tell me about all the double-blind studies done on heart-transplants before the first heart-transplant operation?

Science does not progress through rigid adherence to orthodoxy, but through openness to following up on happenstance through experimentation.

My point about the development of penicillin is that it was a very off the wall approach and you can see people rolling and eyes and saying “curing infections with bread mold? tell me another one” and looking for other reasons why the bacteria in the petri dish might have died, because surely it was a mistake.

Of course, that’s not quite how it went down, now is it? As opposed to, say, being made up out of whole cloth.

Can someone tell me about all the double-blind studies done on heart-transplants before the first heart-transplant operation?

This is a non sequitur.

Science does not progress through rigid adherence to orthodoxy, but through openness to following up on happenstance through experimentation.

There is no “happenstance.” It’s in the wrong order.

@ Judith

My point about the development of penicillin is that it was a very off the wall approach[…]

Maybe, maybe not.
As the story is told, Fleming was initially more peeved than interested in the phenomenon – he wanted to study the bacteria in the Petri dish, not the mold form inside his nose.
However, he, and other scientists, did show that their observations were reproducible, and eventually someone isolated the molecule at the origin of the bactericide effect.
That Fleming didn’t do was to pick up “bread mould” and start selling it as a cure-all.

According to the Wikipedia entry, it seems that some sort blue mould have been used as folk medicine since medieval time, but of course, records of its efficiency will be difficult to assess, given the distance in time of medical vocabulary. Still, by Fleming’s time, the idea that simple organisms like mould can produce toxic substances was not that far-fetched.
Getting the substance in a form amenable to human use and proving that it will be effective were the next steps, which the scientists had to do.
This, and getting people interested in taking care of the mass production and commercialization.

Can someone tell me about all the double-blind studies done on heart-transplants before the first heart-transplant operation?

You are talking about surgically moving an organ which working principles are known, using and improving known surgical procedures, to treat life-threatening conditions.
It’s quite different from using a treatment whose effectiveness is unknown, and is based on concepts which contradict established science.
We are going into false analogy territory again.

Plus, if I remember correctly, the first transplants quickly ran into graft rejection issues. In the context of the urgency of the patients’ conditions, it was an accepted risk, but still, it is not exactly a model we would like to apply to any new treatment. Big Pharma regularly run into troubles when they try to cut corners.

I would also like to point out to the extended training the surgeons got through, on dogs, pigs or the like. Some animals have to survive the operation, before the surgeon is being deemed capable of doing human organs transplantation.

Science does not progress through rigid adherence to orthodoxy, but through openness to following up on happenstance through experimentation.

Well, yes. And how do you propose to experiment to confirm the happenstances you believe you witnessed?

@AdamG
If people start telling me in droves that they don’t feel anything when I treat them and that the treatment has no effect, I will believe them. Right now they are telling me the opposite.

You all might want to read Rupert Sheldrake’s “Science Delusion”.

One question: do you all read the latest double blind studies on bacon and eggs before you have breakfast?

Judith, that’s not an answer to the question I asked. I suspect you know this. Let me repeat it with emphasis.

What evidence would convince you that your ‘healing’ has no effect on the patients you treat, even when they report an improvement?

do you all read the latest double blind studies on bacon and eggs before you have breakfast?

You do not understand how skepticism works. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Energy healing qualifies as such a claim as its tenets violate basic laws of biology, chemistry, and physics.

@ Judith

do you all read the latest double blind studies on bacon and eggs before you have breakfast?

For most of us, we don’t need to. Bacon and eggs have a long established tradition of being edible. That they are nutritious is a different question, but thankfully tradition got it right.
For some of us, we may have to. Food allergy is not a trivial matter, and sufferers have to keep up-to-date.
Take lactose intolerance, for that matter. Not a food allergy, just adult humans losing their ability to digest lactose, with some detrimental effects. A few decades ago, we had no idea what it was. Nowadays, especially if you have Asian ancestry, you will do good in learning about it.

Just found out that energy healing can be used to keep rice from spoiling

You know what this means, of course. Reiki can kill. The rice, being long since dead already, was not amenable to healing.

@Infuriatingly Moderate

I know quite a bit about Sheldrake. He’s a woo-peddler of the highest order, been around since the 80s. Of particular note: Sheldrake is the individual who first came up with the nonsense that is ‘morphic resonance’ and ‘morphic fields,’ a hypothesis too blindingly stupid to describe here at length.

His latest bloviations, including the book referred to above, are all centered around tired old ‘God of the gaps’ style arguments that we’ve seen Marg and Judith espouse here…”We don’t fully understand [insert natural phenomenon here], therefore it’s obvious that [insert particular brand of woo] must be plausible!”

Whenever Sheldrake and his nonsense comes up, I am always reminded of the words of the late John Maddox, former editor of Nature, who said of Sheldrake’s nonsense:

It’s unnecessary to introduce magic into the explanation from physical and biological phenomenon when in fact there is every likelihood that the continuation of research as it is now practiced will indeed fill all the gaps that Sheldrake draws attention to.

Do you really think that no patient could ever be mistaken about more subjective matters, such as “is my pain better or worse than before?”

It’s even worse than that. All of Judith’s observations come from individuals who sought her particular brand of ‘treatment’ and are therefore more suggestible as to its efficacy.

People who seek out reiki are more likely to attribute any change in their condition, be it physical or psychological, to the reiki ‘treatment’ itself. Why is this so hard for Judith to understand?

Infuriatingly Moderate: it’s got a wonderfully loony pace and melody too. It’s from the album “Pyramid” (the third album by “The Alan Parsons Project”, which isn’t exactly a band but more of a collaboration, different each time). The whole album is great.

Sorry, delete “is” after “it’s not”.

@ Judith:

And why, pray tell, are such miraculous cures not properly documented and published to demonstrate the supposed efficacy of reiki?

Oh right, it’s because when they’re actually examined properly they don’t actually support the claims being piled on them. Either there was real treatment at the same time, or it’s completely consistent with the normal course of the condition, or the supposed benefit has been exaggerated, or it’s due to reporting bias/selection effects/etc. which disappear when rigorously tested.

Judith, you’re still avoiding the question.

What evidence would convince you that your ‘healing’ has no effect on the patients you treat, even when they report an improvement?

This shouldn’t be a hard question to answer. Why can’t you?

@scottynuke
No one is compelling you to read anything I write.

@JGC
Physiologic effects for energy healing _have_ been demonstrated. The mice Dr. Bengston wrote up in “Resonance, Type II Errors and Placebo Effects” showed increased spleen weight and hemoglobin levels consistent with increased immunological activity as their tumors (which histological analysis showed to be cancerous) healed. You could also take a look at http://www.centerforreikiresearch.org for the most up to date information on Reiki research.

And yes, people have “inherent confidence [in] Ibuprofen, or Enbrel, or Benadryl, or Claritin, or Cialis, or Humalog”, but they also had inherent confidence in Vioxx, Thalidomide, and Avandia before they died from taking stuff or before their babies were born missing limbs.

@Chemmomo
Most of the time I am able to follow up with my random people. I totally understand why it would be difficult for you to share my confidence (not belief) in the efficacy of what I do. Please understand that I started from a place of curiosity and skepticism. When I went to my first Reiki training I plunked my money down figuring that it was money wasted. It came as a big surprise to me that it wasn’t. Not only did I distinctly “feel” the attunement, I also felt the “energy” afterwards, and there was nothing subtle about it. It felt like a freight train. For the first six weeks or so I kept waking myself up at night because anywhere my hands touched my skin they felt like a furnace. I stress that I had no expectation of this; in fact if anything it was rather annoying. Healing effects came later, when I tentatively decided to try to see if Reiki did anything at all. I had no expectation that it would. In fact if you take a course with Dr. Bengston, you will find that he teaches that expectation and belief get in the healer’s way and decrease his or her effectiveness.

I must also stress that a true skeptic has an open mind. A true skeptic is willing to change their position on available evidence. For all of you the only acceptable evidence is in the form of double blind studies created by other skeptics like yourselves. I submit that first-hand experience also counts. Take a Reiki course as a true skeptic (not as as a an absolute non-believer) and try it for yourself.

@AdamG
I responded to your question. I would have to see repeated evidence with my own two eyes that outweighs the evidence I have seen so far. BTW I am no great believer in the infallibility of scientific studies, and I seem to have company:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483509a.html

Judith @ 3:59 pm 28 Jun
You said:

A true skeptic is willing to change their position on available evidence.

I’m not sure that you actually have all the evidence.

Would you be willing to consider that you are an excellent provider of the placebo effect? Would you consider that some of your success might be people telling you what they think you want to hear?

Would you be willing to test that out? Would you be willing to spend some time keeping records of all the people you treat – including all who did not respond and thank you – and then handing those records off to a distinterested party who will do the follow up on them?

P. S. The only way I’d consider taking a Reiki course would be if it were offered for free. I hate wasting money. I suspect you hate feeling like you’ve wasted money too.

What you DON’T seem to have heard is that, without the careful application of the scientific method, what you’ve seen with your own two eyes proves absolutely nothing.

Ah Judith, the strength of your convictions, that you have. Also, what Adam G is trying to get you to see is that you are not willing to see the evidence against your beliefs. You call us close minded skeptics, but we (I think we all, but I should really speak for myself) have looked at all the evidence and are willing to change our minds if the evidence is there. It’s not.
I bet most of us here – skeptics – at one time had alternative beliefs, I know I did. But as I looked and listened I saw the errors of my ways and became the skeptic I am. You keep seeing the same things in the same way and expect us to change. You actually have the closed mind.

BTW I am in Rupert Sheldrake’s camp. And Larry Dossey’s. And Wayne Dyer’s.

What, no Koot Hoomi?

And does she preface her treatments with any kind of information to allow the patient to give informed consent? I can’t see any patient in the hospital without telling them what I am going to do and making sure they understand. IF I were to engage in some pseudoscientific nonsense, my college regulates that I have to first inform the patient that what I am about to do is considered controversial and is not backed up by medical studies.
(I know, I wanted a much stronger worded regulation, but the woo-ists won out).

Consciousness matters?
Oh, I thought it “loads the dice”.

Be that as it may, if I had not been burning the candle at both ends this past week and preparing for a flight, I might address the *other* C word.

Woo-meisters and other mysterians like to toss the word about to instill awe in their audience because obviously NO one understands this most intimate of unknowns: they often treat it as a cherished outcropping of the divine spirit within- gushing power soulfully. Well, it ain’t magick.

Psychologists study consciousness and its fruits all the time .And not just physiologically but the simple, mundane awareness of awareness. What you think, recall, feel, remember, attend to, how you envision problems, choose a word, see things in your mind’s eye, imagine impossibilities, rehearse your next interaction, learn.

Infusing the everyday with an air of mystery is a way to convince others that you are someone special, gifted, above the commonplace.

@Agashem

Yes, I do tell people what it is that I am doing and I seek their permission. I tell them it may not work and that they will know in very short order whether it does or not.

@Infuriatingly Moderate

I joined the discussion because I felt that people were commenting from a biased point of view based on insufficient information. I tried to provide some. It appears the information I brought to the discussion did not persuade people, even the scientific studies, which were summarily pronounced to be invalid.

I do not believe scientists and skeptics are blind and I am not looking for scientific validation of my experience. I was trying to get people curious about the phenomenon of energy healing rather than reflexively condemning, as Orac is.

I watched a video of a talk by Rupert Sheldrake yesterday on his book _The Science Delusion_. In it he says that to some scientists science has become a religion with an orthodoxy that views all dissenting views as heresy. He says such scientists heap great erudite scorn on anyone who does not follow the orthodoxy. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist with a PhD in biology. James Oschman, the author of _Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis_, is a scientist, also with a PhD in biology. Claude Swanson, author of _Life Force: The Scientific Basis_, has a PhD in physics. The many scientists involved in the Society of Scientific Exploration also have PhDs and day jobs at respected universities, and yet the orthodoxy heaps great scorn on the SSE as a woo organization. Mehmet Oz, Larry Dossey, Depak Choprah, Norm Shealy are MDs. They too get their share of scorn. I would like to see people go past the scorn and begin to ask what it is that these unorthodox scientists/MDs see.

If one person scratched their head and said “hmm, interesting, I didn’t know that” about anything I wrote here, the discussion from my point of view has been worthwhile.

@AdamG
Can do.

Judith

I would like to see people go past the scorn and begin to ask what it is that these unorthodox scientists/MDs see.

In the case of Deepak Chopra, the opportunity to get rich and stroke his own ego by spouting vacuous crap.

In the case of Mehemt, Oz the opportunity to have his own TV show and make way more money with less effort than he made from doing surgery.

For all them, a lucrative market peddling their ideas to a gullible audience who do not ask for any proof beyond stories rather than having to meet more rigorous standards of proof.

Given the huge number of people with PhDs in Physics and Biology, it is not surprising to find a few kooks and charlatans among them. The tobacco industry has no trouble finding a few PhDs to deny the harmful effects of tobacco smoke and the Fossil Fuel industry has no trouble finding a few PhDs to deny climate science. You seem to place great stock in the scientific credentials of the tiny number of people who share your viewpoint while disregarding the credentials of the overwhelming number of scientists who consider it to be nonsense.

As for “day jobs at respected universities”, there is this thing called tenure. There was a psychologist or psychiatrist at Harvard who believed that people who claimed to have been abducted and probed by aliens actually had been abducted and probed. He even treated them for the psychological trauma. The university couldn’t get rid of him because he had tenure.

I watched a video of a talk by Rupert Sheldrake yesterday on his book _The Science Delusion_. In it he says that to some scientists science has become a religion with an orthodoxy that views all dissenting views as heresy.

Robert Sheldrake?
The guy who denies that DNA codes for morphological traits?
The one who believes…
From wiki

…that there is a field within and around a “morphic unit” which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity. According to Sheldrake, the “morphic field” underlies the formation and behaviour of “holons” and “morphic units”, and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts. The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group, which has already established its (collective) “morphic field”, will tune into that “morphic field”. The particular form will read the collective information through the process of “morphic resonance”, using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through “morphic resonance”, a feedback to the “morphic field” of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience, resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the “morphic fields” as a universal database for both organic (genetic) and abstract (mental) forms.

I think I first came across Sheldrake’s “hypothesis” on a Creationist/ID website.

My memory is a bit vague at present. Judith perhaps you can help me? How does Sheldrake explain away the dramatic (starting with something simple and fairly well known) morphological changes that arise from knocking out genes in flies?

How does his/this morphological field operate under those circumstances?

There you go all go, heaping scorn again on the heretics.

Luc Montagnier may be right. Rupert Sheldrake needs to be read more thoroughly than what’s on Wikipedia or creationist websites.

None of you seems willing or able to look beyond what you were taught in school.

Rupert Sheldrake needs to be read more thoroughly than what’s on Wikipedia or creationist websites.

So here’s your chance to explain why that is. Have at it Judith.

None of you seems willing or able to look beyond what you were taught in school.

Taught in school? No I’m coming from the experimental evidence produced from the number of transgenic experiments I’ve personally conducted…starting back in my first year of uni.

As I said Judith…have at it.

There you go, @Mephistopheles, the great power of the mind. If we could harness it, it would beat chemo hands down. Just sayin’.

@Sauceress, you are being lazy : )

@Shay

… proving my point once again …

Judith:

There you go, @Mephistopheles, the great power of the mind. If we could harness it, it would beat chemo hands down. Just sayin’.

Your inability to comprehend nervous system function would be touchingly naive if you weren’t an apologist for rank quackery.

Rupert Sheldrake needs to be read more thoroughly than what’s on Wikipedia or creationist websites.

OK, let’s look at his very own FAQ.

“According to the Hypothesis of Formative Causation, morphic fields also contain an inherent memory given by the process of morphic resonance, whereby each kind of thing has a collective memory. For example, crystals of a given kind are influenced by all past crystals of that kind, date palms by past date palms, giraffes by past giraffes, etc.”

Oh, great, it’s a cosmic Dewey Decimal System. Are all coffee cups influenced by all cake doughnuts that have gone before, or is it the other way around?

Good night, one and all. Sweet dreams.

Hmm.. I left out one of the most common pseudoscience tactics in my comment at #11:10pm..
(4) Switch to tone trolling.

@Judith,

There you go, @Mephistopheles, the great power of the mind. If we could harness it, it would beat chemo hands down. Just sayin’.

I’m perfectly willing to believe that, just not on your say so or any of the evidence that’s out there so far. Got any data? You’ve said you have no interest in proving that energy healing works, so I’d guess not.

I’ve also seen politicians convince people to give them money so that the politician can get a high paying job. I’ve seen people convinced that fortune tellers provide more than a few minutes dubious entertainment. I’ve seen people who think that psychics can talk with the dead and that well known scams are real signs of the afterlife.

Is that the great power of the mind too?

I know/know of several MDs who offer Reiki or some form of energy healing in their offices as part of their service to patients. More often than not the service is offered out of the recognition that many conditions are caused by stress (I read the statistic that about 80% of medical visits are somehow relatable to stress) and it is offered as an adjunct to regular medical care. Sometimes it is offered if the medical option doesn’t work. How many of you doctors out there can say that a patient walked in to see you bent over with backpain and walked out straight and pain free? Since you are already being scathing in your responses, I will infuriate you further by adding that sometimes I feel sorry for you because you have to rely on your pill kit to offer your patients relief. How long do you talk to them? How quickly do you send them off for diagnostic tests? How many of you give last-ditch chemotherapy or radiation knowing that it will likely not do any good and only hasten the patient’s death? How many of you prescribed Vioxx or Avandia fully ignorant that it could harm/kill your patient? How many of you had a patient die, or know of a patient who died, due to a prescription drug reaction, a drug mix-up, a surgical error, or an untreatable hospital-acquired infection? Medicine is not harm-free, even if about 20 or 25 per cent of what doctors do is backed by science. Just because a medication is shown to act a certain way in a certain number of patients in a handful of experiments, it doesn’t mean that it will act that way in everyone in the population at large once it’s on the market. The effects of longterm use or use in combination with other medications are seldom tested. And I have to laugh every time I hear the side effects rapidly listed at the end of pharmaceutical commercials, especially when I hear that one of the side effects of the drug prescribed is the symptom it is being prescribed for. More chilling are the oft-repeated “kidney failure and death”. The whole system is nuts, and you are the purveyors of it, and you sneer at anyone who tries a different route.

I still want to know what’s up with this Sheldrake “of a given kind” routine. Something tells me he doesn’t mean space groups. Of course, Judith hasn’t answered the coffee-mug question yet.

@Judith.

You have no point. I’ve been reading this thread since the inception and you’ve said nothing except “I know I’m right, I know, I know! I don’t have to prove anything because I’m right.”

I must say that your footwork is impressive. You must have been great at dodgeball when you were a kid.

Blockquote fail. Not sure how that happened seeing as the first time I used the tag was when quoting wiki on the Baramin entry!

le sigh…

@Sauceress
I see you are very adept at mining Wikis. I read Rupert Sheldrake a number of years ago. The reason I proposed that you read him yourself is because he builds an interesting incremental argument. In order to summarize it I would have to re-read the whole thing myself. You were the one who asked the question, so you should be the one doing the work.

@everyone else
From http://www.reikicouncil.org.uk/Research/tabid/76/Default.aspx

“Can you measure Reiki in some way?
Reiki is often regarded by practitioners as being a ‘hot’ energy. They feel extra heat as Reiki flows. The University of Arizona has used an Extra Low Frequency meter to see if it could pick up heat changes in the body. When practitioners reported that they were flowing Reiki, the ELF (extra low frequency) meter picked up significant increases in emissions from e.g. the palms of the hands. The emitted energy was more marked in people who had studied to third degree/master level. Researcher Melinda Connor said: ‘We have discovered a number of things: First, that master healers seem to be emitting at the same time in the extra low range from 20Hz – 1000Hz, in the ultra violet, the visible light, the infrared, the gamma and x-ray and at the 3 GHz range. I do not have the equipment to map more ranges yet. So it turns out that potentially millions of frequencies are being emitted from a single cell.”
Arizona University recruited only highly regarded and experienced Reiki practitioners for its research who also were regularly giving Reiki. (Communication from Melinda Connor, 2006)

This is a response to similar questions to yours from Pamela Miles, a Reiki master who has been working hard for years on getting Reiki accepted by the medical establishment:

“The problem of sham Reiki is a real problem in research. I was at a 2-day research conference at the NIH on just that question: what is an appropriate control? The answer is…It depends, and there is no perfect study design for multifactorial practices that cannot be realistically reduced to a design that is well suited for an intervention that has a linear action aka a pharmaceutical.
….
the sham practitioner has been used but is also criticized. After all, what we are really doing then is comparing Reiki to touch. The acupuncture studies have also been criticized in that needling itself may have therapeutic value, regardless of the accuracy of the points used.

Controlling for placebo is a very knotty puzzle when researching practices that elicit complex responses from the body. Additionally, Reiki practice is not complaint or condition-specific. Rather, Reiki practice seems to influence the body toward balance, optimizing its own ability to self-heal, and there is some data to support that. So we could conceptualize the benefit of Reiki being that it reminds the system how to rest effectively and thereby heal itself. This seems to be happening through a vagus nerve activation, but science does not yet have a clue what the mechanism of action for that to occur might be.”

@Sauceress:

Most distinctively, originally the term “kind” was used by creationists to refer to “kinds” of animals that were present on the Ark.

I very nearly settled on this analogy before settling on the Dewey Decimal System, and I do not follow creationists in any way, viz., I hadn’t heard it before.

I’m guessing Sheldrake is also a fan of Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine) who is credited with coining the term “holon”. (philosophical context)

I’m pretty sure I still have a copy of The Roots of Coincidence lying around here, and of course Wholeness and the Implicate Order. The former is better than the latter as I recall, if only for being able to focus in some fashion. It’s still not very good.

The point, of course, is that the attempt at taxonomy is just abysmal. It makes the Dublin Core look like revealed mystical widsom. Speaking of which…

@Judith:

They are mutually co-arising.

Perhaps you’d like to clarify whether you’re referring to crystals or S&sup1; × S&sup1;, as this might very well be taken to be complete mush suggesting that “morphic resonance” doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe you’re trying to drag Buddhism into it, beats me.

@Sauceress
That just shows your bias. When @Mephistopheles suggested I read Sagan’s book on the scientific method I didn’t willy-nilly refuse to read it on the basis that it would be a waste of my time. Your suggestion that reading Sheldrake would be a waste of yours is nothing more than evidence of a closed mind.

And Judith, keep in mind that, as expressed by Sheldrake, this is a temporally linear chain of memories conveyed between objects and apparently mediated simply by names, so it has to be possible to trace backward.

Judith
I read enough of Rupert Sheldrake (from his own writing) back when I came across his name being pimped by creationists.

I have enough developmental biology, genetics and molecular biology under my belt to know when someone is manufacturing pseudoscience in those areas. Unlike the groupies that peddle it…obviously.

Oh and Judith..
I take it from your silence on the issue that you didn’t find any errors on those quoted wikis? Did you even bother looking?

@Judith – thanks for thinking of me, but it was AdamG who suggested Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan was a scientist of considerable accomplishment who was also able to explain concepts clearly to non-scientists. I can’t say that the same is true of Sheldrake.

I can’t believe this discussion is ongoing. Judith, so much of what you have described is known to us in the medical field. You should really watch Penn&Teller Bullshit episode about alternative medicine and watch real people feel better with oven mitts and magnets. They really walk with less pain. Watch for yourself and see if you don’t recognize the type of people you are ‘treating’. What you fail at doing is recognizing when you are genuinely helping someone or when you are not.

What has that got to do with what you are claiming? Everytime a question is posed to you, you drag out another alternative theory.
I am aware enough to know that what I do can invoke placebo effect. All of us in medicine know this. The question is, how to study it? Often telling someone you are studying the placebo effect destroys that effect. But I am sure you know this being so well informed.
The point of Penn and Teller was for you to watch ordinary people in a mall feeling better with no intervention other than suggestion. That you might have seen yourself in there is obviously too scary. I have seen this with my own patients. And I believe it was Dr. Novella who pointed out that if someone is ‘healed’ that fast then it calls into question the origin of the problem. That is what you don’t get.

Probably no one has commented because it hasn’t been published in a peer reviewed journal yet and so is considered speculation at this point. I will say I don’t have knowledge of low frequencies etc to really comment myself.
That there may be alternative mechanisms going on in the body is rank speculation. Where is the evidence?
Further, you still haven’t acknowledged what I said. You need to recognize that the ‘miraculous’ healings you are seeing are quite likely not what you think they are. Until you can acknowledge that, there is really no point in discussing things with you further. And no, it is not that I can’t argue my corner, it is just that you are walled up in yours and are unreachable.

This is the issue.
You describe someone bent over for many months seeing you and in one session, they are not stooped any more. This is abject bullshit. If they had been stooped for that long it would take much more time to straighten out than that. Or if someone hasn’t been able to raise their hand over their head for a long time and one session with you they can, then they were lying to you or themselves. Tissues tighten, shorten and do not comply that rapidly to being supple again. Simple physics, no need for photons (BS). Try it for yourself, don’t raise your hand over your head for a month. I mean, no reaching in cupboards or on shelves, barely able to wash your hair, and then after that month, if you are truly honest and keep your hand below the 90 degree flexion mark, try lifting your hand above your head. There is an experiment you can do on your own, no double blinding needed. You will then see how impossible these ‘miracles’ are.