Reiki invades an operating room

As a medically qualified anaesthetist (or anesthesiologist as I would be called in North America), I agree that Reiki Doc sounds completely flaky. I was initially tempted to believe that his blog was a parody but it seems too sustained. If he worked in my department, I would want him watched very closely. People this bonkers may not be safe near patients.

One small niggle with your post though. The practice of anaesthesia is more than just pharmacology and does require a fair degree of skill and judgement.

My thoughts on reading this was if his focus on Reiki would distract him from what he ought to be doing (or would cause him to do something he ought not to). I’d want my anaesthetist to be focusing on the job at hand.

I can understand why he’s using a pseudonym. If the sh!t hits the fan, and he loses a patient under anesthesia – and it’s due to him being focused on the rainbow chakra of loveliness and purity being chased by the puffy unicorns of hope and charity – he’s going to get his arse sued, and rightfully so.

I wouldn’t want a reiki anyone in charge of my anesthesia if I’m in the hospital – that’s not why I’m paying you to put me under. Pay attention to ME not your faith healing.

Well, from his persepctive (that reiki actually works), he is being highly unethical.

It would be remiss to leave something clearly in need of treatment, untreated, when we have the ability to treat it at the same time that other work is being done.

Unless it is something life threatening and neither the patient nor family can be consulted on how to proceed, treating the “something” would be grounds for assault, if I’m remembering my law correctly.

Maybe Orac could weigh in on this. As a surgeon, if you discovery something that needs treatment but is outside the scope of the planned surgery, do you just go ahead and treat it right then and there?

If only the California Medical Board (or whatever it’s called) had the power to subpoena Blogspot and ID this dangerous fool… Or at least let the relevant hospital know.

Reminds me of the Homeopatic ER skit… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0&sns=em

Ethical quirks aside, the fact that this twit has lost his mind ought to be enough reason to fire him. Just don’t tell anyone you heard Me say so.

I know that at my hospital, the nurses are very prone to woo thinking. We have one that reads palms – at the drop of a hat. I haven’t let her touch me yet, but it would be hilarious I’m sure. Many believe in ghosts, Dr Oz and various and sundry supplements to lose weight, etc….So that this dr has nurses lining up to see him doesn’t surprise me at all. My feeling is that many nurses want to feel superior/different than doctors and go to the woo side that doctors don’t embrace. Lilady I am sure will correct me…..

I don’t think he is doing anything unethical, since he is effectively doing nothing at all

Look at it from the perspective of someone who believes in a different supernaturalist system. Practicing sorcery on an unconscious victim could be seen to be extremely objectionable and perhaps even to require some sort of purification afterward, only now the misdeed is hidden.

Or suppose that you’re not bound by the Patient Self-Determination Act and you have on your hands a homeless person who, say, has been the victim of a vicious street beating and is now brain-dead and on a respirator. After the fact, this person’s scrambled heap of possessions is found to include a living will instructing against being kept alive on a ventilator. Further suppose that your own religious sensibilities find such a desire to be a danger to the eternal soul of the patient. Is it unethical to ignore the document? After all, you’re doing nothing at all.

I keep seeing references to this person as being a “he”. Perhaps I am overlooking something, but it seems to me that his blogger is a female.

http://reikidoc.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-negativity-and-negative-entities.html

For years I was ‘floaty’ and used to try to find big strong men in relationship to help me ‘ground’.

The kids are with their dad.

The blogger refers readers to Margaret. Therefore, it would seem that Margaret McCormick, a Southern California healer knows the blogger.

8. be sure to call or email Margaret. Tell her I sent you! She is the only one that can help long-term.

As referenced in her post below, there is a Glen Ivy Spa at the tip of Southern California in Corona, CA, and Corona Medical Center is nearby.

I blog. I am on Facebook. I am on Twitter. Someone today at the nurses’ lounge shared they added the reiki feature for twenty bucks to their spa treatment at Glen Ivy tomorrow–they know about me. And today, at their request, I gave salt pellets in pretty sheer drawstring bags to the Charge Nurse and the Nurse Educator to Feng Shui their office. (and to suck up negativity!) The night scrub tech who knows I am ‘highly clairvoyant’ is waiting to hear about my experience with the ghosts of Victoria, BC!

A quick Internet search of anesthesiologists that practice at this facility includes two women, one of whom advertises herself as an alternative medicine provider.

I wonder if the Reiki doc’s employer condones the use (and perhaps billing) of OR time for such purposes as this,

I showed her how to use a pendulum by herself right in the middle of the O.R.

Perhaps she is trying to have her employment terminated. According to the S.T.A.R. Clinic, a Quantum-healing Collective, this doctor was intending to quit the world of HMOs and prescription pads in September 2012 and move into multidimensional work.

In that case, yes you are; you are ignoring a document, behaving differently on the basis of your beliefs, and the outcome for the patient is quite different as a result.

Given that the patient is never going to know anything ever again in either case, I’m not seeing how the outcome is meaningfully different.

I wouldn’t want to outlaw thought-crime, it seems more than a little Orwellian to me.

I understand your point, but I’m trying to find a line involving what the ethical demand is regarding respect of a patient’s beliefs.

I understand your point, but I’m trying to find a line involving what the ethical demand is regarding respect of a patient’s beliefs.

I get where you’re coming from. I tend to take a pragmatic view that only acknowledges real world consequences, whether people know about them or not. Also, the patient could have a long-lost relative who comes in and sues the hospital for ignoring his views. I’m not concerned about metaphysical things that can’t be detected (except of course by trial by ordeal), so a patient (or putative relatives) has no way of finding out whether or not their wishes have been respected.

Something doesn’t add up, if the anesthesiologist is performing reiki but no one in the room knows it, then how are people requesting his services? Why would patients be reporting back to the anesthesiologist that they feel no pain, days later? Wouldn’t they be reporting that to their surgeon or doctor? The pieces just don’t fit together. Either the staff is aware and possibly the patients too, and you have to assume some confirmation bias/placebo effect, or this person is telling tales.

I also feel like this whole reiki thing is a means for the anesthesiologist to take credit for other people’s hard work. I’m not sure why. Anesthesiology is an important part of surgery and requires great skill and experience. But if you feel your positive energy is the reason the patients and doctors do well then you might need to reconsider your motives.

Personally, it doesn’t impact me if people pray or send their reiki rays at me, any more than it impact them if I think uncharitable thoughts about them, but it calls into question the individual’s understanding of science and medicine and that definitely doesn’t sit well with me.

She asked me for my contact information, exchanged hers, and asked me to find out what his past life trauma was, and fix it.

I also had the same thought as Sophia8

Also, what Narad said about the patient’s own religious beliefs that might consider Reiki sorcery. It is quite possible that patient will find out afterwards from someone who recognizes what the addled anesthesiologist is doing.

This is absolutely unethical. Reiki Doc is doing something that s/he sincerely believes has an effect on the patient, without the patient’s knowledge or consent. The fact that RD thinks it will only help is irrelevant. So is the fact that all of us agree that Reiki is bogus.

To think otherwise is to revert to the mindset that enabled some of the worst medical atrocities of the past. “It’s OK to do this to the patient without telling them. It won’t hurt them so they don’t need to know!”

Pardon me, I just had a horrifying thought: as some of us know all too well, a nearly-90 day old thread @ RI has attracted Reiki artists -and more than1600 comments –and and and THIS ONE is brand new and NOT about to expire and can be active for a REALLY LONG time.. so when the other one DOES … oh no…oh save us…

@Lilady, not trying to fight. I am neither a doctor or a nurse. I do work closely with both (physical therapist in a hospital setting). Nurses have told me things without me asking, I can tell you. One tried to tell me that cabbage could cure both ulcers and sore shoulders. Another told me green coffee extract – see Dr Oz – was helping her lose weight (not evident to the rest of us). Also the nurse who reads palms apparently does so at the drop of a hat. I have heard nurses argue that vaccines are bad – in a hospital on an internal medicine floor where the average age of a patient is over 80. So, I have worked with some incredible nurses who are so clever and put my knowledge to shame, but there are a lot of nurses out there, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that some are woo inclined. They just seem to ‘come out’ to me maybe?

Reiki Doc is female (she refers to herself as someone’s “niece” in one post).

I perused some of her musings and really wondered how this woman can function in a science-based field. On the one hand, she does acknowledge that reiki is not a substitute for actual medicine, but goes on about how wonderfully fabulous it all is anyway.

And for those who reject reiki? Well, clearly you are just under the influence of mind control. So speaketh Reiki Doc, so it must be so.

@ Krebiozen:

If you commented in detail I can only imagine that it would serve ultimately to DISCOURAGE whimsy-based actiivities. We have to think long term and bear the contemporaneous nonsense.
Go ahead. I might do the same.

Denice,
OK, here goes. I know a number of people who have some very bizarre beliefs who function perfectly well. One of my relatives, a highly intelligent person, a retired teacher, actually believed that David Blaine could really levitate after seeing a documentary about him, and a couple of years ago was confidently expecting a UFO to materialize over the USA, though she had forgotten about this when I asked her about it after the event failed to materialize. Despite her extreme gullibility she doesn’t seem unwell in the slightest, quite the opposite if anything. Perhaps some delusions are good for us, and have survival value as you suggested.

Personally, I DO wonder how in touch with reality people might be if the general trend of their thought allows them to accept impossibilities as the standard of day-to-day life.

I have been wondering about this recently, specifically about Marg and Judith on another thread who are absolutely convinced that ‘energy healing’ works, to the extent of discouraging people from having conventional cancer treatment, even palliative treatment. How does someone maintain a belief system that seems to me, and presumably the great majority of people, as not just barking mad, but dangerous? I have a friend who is currently dying of kidney cancer, and he has some unusual beliefs about past lives and such-like, but even he went straight for conventional treatment with no hesitation.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that they as they are both ‘energy healers’ they interpret everything they experience as supporting their beliefs, and anything that contradicts them is simply discarded as somehow faulty. Anything from Big Pharma can safely be discarded, for instance, and any patient who doesn’t respond to their treatment has a death wish, or is too fearful or sought help too late. Even the patient with pancreatic cancer who suddenly died just ten weeks after diagnosis is hailed by them as a success.

When you can edit out your failures for what appear to be rational reasons, you are left only with your successes. Benjamin Rush, who was in most respects a great man, did just the same thing with bloodletting, and was convinced it was a panacea his whole life, in the face of evidence that it wasn’t. Human diseases and illnesses are messy, noisy things, full of random variation, subjective assessments and vulnerable to suggestion and expectation. Given our natural propensity for seeing patterns where there are none it’s no wonder so many people manage to fool themselves in that area so spectacularly. Even sportsmen and women can become convinced that their performance is improved by a particular pair of socks, a hologram around their wrist or a pretty colored bandaid on their skin.

For the first time in human history (as far as I know) we understand this flaw in human perception and have developed tools, such as statistics, probability theory and the scientific method to alleviate it. The sad thing is that there are still plenty of people who think they are somehow immune, and refuse to accept it affects them and that their intuition is superior to reason.

@S

Damn, but that was a scary post to read. “My ineptness is your fault, patient!” Definitely would not want her anywhere near me.

Hey – Doesn’t this PROVE that Reiki WORKS – Even on anesthetized patients? It just can’t be the placebo effect!

For some great laughs, go to the link posted by “S” (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb9985980.htm)
and scroll though the brochure at the bottom.

I wish Orac could number or time stamp his comments so we could readily reference some of the many great responses here.

But someone suggested woo might have been selected as a survival mechanism.

My humble opinion. Yep. It sure has. We, as a species have been killing, exiling and shunning ‘non-believers’ for a long time.

We are all generally descendants of believers and/or sycophants.

ALL Reiki practitioners are nuts. No exceptions. Functional maybe, but nuts none-the-less.

Every person on the flyer linked above by “S” is also nuts.

But so entertaining. Good for a chuckle.

LindaRosaRN:
my own budding scientist wants to meet your daughter (although it hasn’t occurred to mine that yours has grown up by now).

From that Wikipedia link I posted:

“According to the New York Times, Lisa Oz’s mother “believed fervently in New Age approaches like homeopathic remedies and meditation” and Lisa introduced husband Mehmet to the worlds of “alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism” which he integrates into his advice programs.”

I just had to do this one follow-up on my prior post. Below is a quote from the brochure listing the Reiki Doc as a participant. I found it amusing. Am I just an arrogant free thinker or is this stuff funny…? Disturbingly so.

“Ascension codes trigger physical memory for the body to hold, integrate and interpret light to transform your cellular structure into a crystalline configuration; activate your multi-dimensional memory to connect with your higher self /soul essence; release and restore ancient wisdom from other star systems and Gaia herself; bring advanced light technologies and knowledge into conscious awareness on individual and collective levels; and help humanity remember that we are part of a cosmic family, source energy and that we are Divine.”

A pox on you Narad. I just located Reiki Doc’s other blog….

http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/blogs/reiki-doc

It’s actually an interesting question in medical ethics. Is is ethical to do reiki on a patient without informed consent, given that reiki is nothing more than magical thinking and does nothing?

Yes, it is unethical because the reiki doctor is not doing ‘nothing:’ he or she is making up stories in their heads about their patients and their patients’ health. Such storytelling is bound to influence treatment, evaluation, and how you work with different patients.

THIS one has balanced chakras and will do well; this one has too much vital energy and will give problems. I expect someone with a black aura to respond poorly to medication — and they did! Those who are spiritually sympathetic always need less meds, I see it all the time .

Someone who makes medical judgments on the basis of reiki pseudoscience/spirituality is inventing ways to be biased for or against patients based on nothing at all. Asking whether this is unethical is like wondering if it’s unethical for a racist to have their own separate way of evaluating health care based on skin color. At least you can SEE skin color.

And the reiki doctor can see the patients before they “see” the healing energy. She’s probably making snap judgments on level of spirituality and type of personality based on instinct and then translating that into what she discovers and experiences in the “energy” system. It’s an insidious form of bigotry.

Would you want this person on a jury? They can tell if you’re guilty or not by looking at your aura. Spectral evidence doesn’t belong in court, and it sure as hell doesn’t belong in an operating room.

Reiki Doc can *sense* who among us are vampires!

http://reikidoc.blogspot.com/2012/07/energetic-self-defense.html

“What are some tip offs that someone or something you encounter is not of the light?

1. The eyes. The eyes are dark and without life. This can be in a picture or in life. You just can’t look at it.

2. Your breath. I feel a breathlessness and pressure in my chest. I saw another shopper in the crystal shop was a vampire this way. Oddly enough, my Light bothered him just as much as his dark bothered me. We spoke not a word to each other, only brief eye contact, and auric fields interacted across the store.

3. That vague sense that something terrible happened here. I just read a list of satanic locations, and was surprised at how accurate my ‘creep you out’ detector had been. The Pentagon was the worst. I was only at a metro stop and I wanted to bolt out of there! Incidentally, any establishment with lots of tunnels built under it is where these kind of places are. My first job was at one of them, and recently when I saw a picture of the founder I had my detector go off. Turns out this individual was a Thirty-third level Mason. I won’t say who because you wouldn’t want to know, probably. Here is a link if you want to know. It is in the very back, after the information about Monarch Slaves.”

See other *secret knowledge* about the *Illuminati*, etc.

Ok, this is too much to absorb. Is this for real? Just to recap, she claims she sees such evil dark sides in people that she feels the other person may be a “vampire”. She reads about satanic locations, and thinks the Pentagon is among the worst satanic locations.

I fear hearing of how she may proceed in an attempt to rid the world and her patients of the evil powers of satan. There have been other physicians who tried to impose their beliefs of good and evil, god and satan in their patients, and to my knowledge these freakin lunatics never served their patients well. Her twit, I mean her tweet, says “Science and religion are one”.

She is on Twitter and Facebook.

In response to her comments that science and religion are one. Science and religion are NOT one and they must be held separate! This nonsensical approach to the practice of medicine must stop. Instilling these bogus beliefs into ill patients can certainly be damaging to their mental health and well-being. This doctor is doing an injustice to her patients.

My heart detects she’s several sandwiches short of a picnin and advises my soul never, ever let her near me in any capacity, personal or professional.

And it must be right–my quiet inner knowing says so.

@ S:

She shares a common belief prevalent amongst alt med advocates: it’s what I run into everyday at woo-ish websites like Natural News, PRN, AoA, TMR…

On the other hand, “I don’t know when the Event is coming. It is sometime between now [July 15] and December 21.”

Change is coming. It is on the way. It is not a choice exactly, but a matching of vibration. Gaia is raising up Her Vibration. Anyone who is compatible with it, and of the Light, will get a chance to stay. Everyone else, who lives in a fear-dominated reality (our society as we know it), will get the chance to excuse themselves and reincarnate (die), or travel to another third dimensional world to progress.

So, it seems as though there’s some sort of deadline on here.

Regarding experience with reiki, I had one recently. I was visiting an escort at her place (one’s gotta have a sex life from time to time) and the escort was specializing into reiki-sex. I was having the frame of mind that reiki was worth nothing in an health care standpoint but it might have some entertainment value….I was disappointed; it didn’t give me any satisfaction.

When discussing with the woman, she asked me if I believe in spirits (nope), miasma (nope), god (not even) and I told her it was unlikely to believe in these unless there’s some good evidence that they exist.

I take that experience as a lesson not even to try implausible modality.

Alain

A quick Internet search of anesthesiologists that practice at this facility includes two women, one of whom advertises herself as an alternative medicine provider.

You know, this press release is quite odd. There are two people by that name licensed in California, and the description matches the one who isn’t the anesthesiologist.

I wonder if she plants Holy Handgrenades in the OR, just in case. They are, apparently, “very effective for minimizing the deadly orgone fields around nuke plants”. That makes me snicker, even without the Monty Python association.

Today, the anesthesiologist is pretty much a procedural artifact, present for those 1 in a 1000 cases where things don’t go as planned, replaceable by a trained chimpanzee or a machine. As such RD spends day in day out in an operating room, with zero interaction with patients other than “count to 100”, and looking forward to another day where the good part was that no one really needed the anesthesiologist.
In comes the woo, and now she’s actively “helping” the patient. She’s no longer a machine, she’s again a healer contributing to the recovery. That it’s all in her head doesn’t matter.
I can only hope that her mechanical skills stay unaffected by her chakra handling, and that she continues to stay the unknown (to the patient) member of the team.

“Perhaps she is trying to have her employment terminated. According to the S.T.A.R. Clinic, a Quantum-healing Collective, this doctor was intending to quit the world of HMOs and prescription pads in September 2012 and move into multidimensional work.”

Forgive the jibe, but you’d hope (s)he already works in a multidimensional space – the three-dimensional one you and I live in. (Presumably she means beyond three dimensions.)

I won’t say who because you wouldn’t want to know, probably. Here is a link if you want to know.

Robert Mondavi? This person is a Disinformation Operative. Why would she be covering up for “Bartles & Jaymes”?

I spent all that time studying 4D metric tensors for nothing?

Should’ve stuck to Golden Dolphin Activation Matrices, man. Or solid state, I suppose.

I can ‘tell’ when soul permission is not given: the Reiki won’t go in.

Not only is it medical experimentation, it’s medical experimentation directed from Sirius B. Across another dimension. This is setting up to be the Black Lectroids all over again.

Gaia is raising up Her Vibration.

Would that be the one she keeps in her bedside table?

Regarding experience with reiki, I had one recently. I was visiting an escort at her place (one’s gotta have a sex life from time to time) and the escort was specializing into reiki-sex.

Alain, you’re killing me here. I’m sorry you didn’t get your monies worth but the reiki should have been a dead giveaway. I can only imagine it was something out of Barbarella and “make love by consuming exaltation transference pills, and pressing their palms together when their “psychocardiograms are in perfect harmony”.”

Wow, this person really needs to not be in charge of maintaing anybody’s life, ever.

(S)he believes in auras, (s)he believes (s)he sent magic woo to hurricane Sandy and protected everyone (I guess all those people that dies were vampires then). (S)he believes in aliens, auras, angels, pendulum magic, talking trees, talking fruit and vegetables, mediums, remote energy healing (for pets too!)….

Seriously hope this person doesn’t work in medicine any more.

@ Science mom

No it involved real sex too, I made sure of that but the premium was definitely not worth it.

Alain

Disturbing, is the only word that comes to mind. Reading This I am compelled to comment here for the first time.

If I had prior knowledge of this individual prior to my surgery, I would ask that I be sedated by someone else.
His blog is filled with unbelievably crazy stuff. Example, “As Reiki Doc, I am a Karuna Reiki Master. Because of this, my access to the Higher Dimensions is open.”

He’s batshit loony, and should be banned from getting near anybody. Who knows how this stupidity is going to inform his decisions at some critical moment. NO, fucking, thank you.

I use “he” because he has posted an image of himself in comments on this website “Galactic Free Press”, of course.
http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/content/intraoperative-reiki-case-report

If you know this guy, he deserves nothing less than public ridicule.

@ Science Mom:

You know, a guy I know is always trying to get me to go to tui na therapy in which a Chinese fellow supposedly adjusts your Qi back into harmoniousness by rubbing.
I always wonder what he rubs.

Just got down to this clear spot. Yikes! Orac found a Live One. Big Kahuna Reiki Master. And my Killjoy friends weighing in from their pesky real world. This year the mushrooms are scarce but very good. Chanterelles, I assure you.

I have a few considerations to present.
First, I disagree mildly with DrBollocks on one point. I’d not want to watch the “professional” (he lost the respect of not being considered in quotes with the Reiki bit and energy flows lunacy), I’d want that person gone from the profession! No telling when some unimportant thing, like PO2 is unimportant in favor of energy flow)! Nope, that “professional” masquerades as such and is indeed not at all.
I agree completely with DrBollocks in his objection to Orac. The anesthesiologist has a delicate balancing act to perform that is beyond the mere technician with an MD, the surgeon. So, you know where to cut, what to cut. So does a butcher. You know how to handle blood loss. So does an EMT, though with less technical equipment and training. Though, you have greater training, know how to sew better than Goodie Grandmother, that is substantially different than handling physiological idiocracies in problematic patients!

I’ve worked in medicine in the military. I’m not a professional, but I can discuss medicine with pharmacists, I can discuss medical issues to complex degrees with physicians, I can diagnose a patient with complex issues quite well and refer the patient to the professional and not get a response back that I was incorrect in my diagnosis. I was trained as an SF medic and have committed acts of surgery (committed, as one does not PERFORM surgery in a forest clearing or a desert, one has not even a CLEAN field to work with, no OR, no OR personnel, only the paltry tools in one’s medical kit to perform an emergency anastomosis or pack significant abdominal bleeding until the MEDEVAC arrives some 16 hours later or more.
I have the greatest respect for medical professionals and surgeons, but I respect the anesthesiologist even more.
For, when I had a lousy anesthesiologist once, I was AAOx3 throughout abdominal surgery. Recalling skin opening, muscle opening, blunt dissection, retraction and the remainder of the procedure. As well as OR small talk about the game and personal conversation.
Said anesthesiologist was subsequently terminated for cause, incompetence, before I could make my report.
At least the idiot managed to keep my PO2 to reasonable levels and not leave me brain dead. Or *REALLY* screw up and leave me locked in.

@Narad,
” I’m trying to find a line involving what the ethical demand is regarding respect of a patient’s beliefs.”

It’s my understanding, from a few Christian friends who have worked in such settings, that hospitals very strongly discourage anything that could be considered an attempt to “convert” a patient to one’s own religion. Evidently, even official chaplains are restricted in what they could talk about. On the other hand, if a staff simply performs a ritual that’s unseen by the patient, that would be hard to argue as anything but individual exercise. It also makes sense that some “magic” rites might proliferate among surgical staff independent of any strong or specific religious beliefs, the same way “good luck” superstitions do among actors and athletes.

David N. Brown
http://www.exotroopers.wordpress.com
http://www.evilpossum.weebly.com

Grant…It looks like the same study that Orac blogged about here,

https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2010/07/16/too-much-vaccineautism-monkey-business-f/

45 Everbleed; USA; November 12, 2012:

I wish Orac could number or time stamp his comments so we could readily reference some of the many great responses here.

Your comment is number 45, as of right now (2012-11-13 T 0113 [blog time]). I find that by selecting View → Page Style → No Style in Firefox. YMMV for other browsers.
The blogging software is capable of giving timestamps for comments – when NatGeo took over ScienceBlogs, it was on. In their glorious wisdom, NatGeo has disabled that function — it’s not ORAC’s decision.

@Cremnomaniac –

I use “he” because he has posted an image of himself in comments on this website “Galactic Free Press”, of course.
http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/content/intraoperative-reiki-case-report

The only picture (of a human) that I see on that page, is clearly a woman.

Hdb – that’s the impression I got from a lizditz article that I skimmed before I asked here; good to get confirmation.

“Past life trauma” sounds like a short distance to full blown thetans…

Reiki Doc is also flaunting

HA! Minus-10 Pedantry points for Narad!

No, Narad got this one right. ReikiDoc is flaunting the oh-so-high professional standards of hand-wavers, even if that’s flouting the professional standards of mainstream medicine.

Wow, as a doctor, as a scientist, you don’t do research on the topics you write about first? What kind of scientist does that? I think that instead fits the description of an inside the box emotional thinker. Your emotional reaction to Reiki is what dictated your article here. You clearly do not have any of the facts of Reiki, nor do you have much (if any) experience with it. You are the type of physician I avoid, because the care you can give is so limited by your mind.

Ha ha. I love it when one your own becomes on of ours. Years ago in a Reiki magazine a woman ER doctor wrote that she too used Reiki in the ER and that when she did, patients needed fewer intrusive interventions. I know of several doctors who use Reiki in their practice and publicly say so.

Most doctors go into the profession because they want to heal people. Soon enough they find out that they are in fact paid pharma shills (or as a former reformed pharma rep put it, “pharma whores” — apparently that was the term used in the pharmaceutical company she worked for) and pencil pushers for the insurance companies. It’s not very satisfying. Reiki adds the element that’s missing, both for the doctor and the patient.

Having said that, one thing I would object to in ReikiDoc’s manner of proceeding is the lack of informed consent. When I learned Reiki we were taught to ask for permission.

@ OM:

“I know we have an energy field.”

Prove it.

“There is more to us that a body.”

Prove it.

“Our body makes every drug we need,we need to learn to access it.”

Provide the list of the “drugs” our bodies need and how we access these “drugs”.

Approxinmately 24 hours ago, I made a prediction on this thread ( see above) about our friend Marg perhaps making an appearance here.

It came true. Does that mean that I exhibit pre-cognition or that I simply understand people through plain, old cognition?

I don’t understand how people who believe there are human energy fields which cause noticeable effects explain the fact that physicists apparently aren’t interested. This is their area, it’s hot, and they are filled with passion for it.. A discovery like this ( a new form of energy!) would be monumental. Exciting. Ground-breaking in a competitive field. And yet … it stays in medicine.

That makes no sense.

A strange inconsistency like that ought to give them pause.

Linda G. – if you have any studies that show reasonably conclusively that Reiki works (that there’s some “there” there), please share. So far I’ve only heard personal experiences, and these are subject to individual biases (if not self deception) as I’m sure you’ll agree.

If there’s a good study that shows statistically significant benefits from Reiki as compared to a suitable placebo, please share.

@Mu,

Today, the anesthesiologist is pretty much a procedural artifact, present for those 1 in a 1000 cases where things don’t go as planned, replaceable by a trained chimpanzee or a machine. As such RD spends day in day out in an operating room, with zero interaction with patients other than “count to 100″, and looking forward to another day where the good part was that no one really needed the anesthesiologist.
In comes the woo, and now she’s actively “helping” the patient. She’s no longer a machine, she’s again a healer contributing to the recovery. That it’s all in her head doesn’t matter.
I can only hope that her mechanical skills stay unaffected by her chakra handling, and that she continues to stay the unknown (to the patient) member of the team.

I once had an outpatient procedure done under sedation. I remember a physician standing beside my recovery room bed and badmouthing me for my being too anxious about the procedure, and how it was now affecting my recovery. I was gasping for air and it felt like I was drowning, but I couldn’t physically move, speak or even open my eyes. It was like I was paralyzed, except for the gasping and suffocating feeling, and my ability to hear every single insulting and demeaning insult he commented about me to whoever else was in the room. All I wanted was for him to give me the oxygen mask, but I couldn’t speak or move to request it.

So even if anesthesiologists have limited interaction with patients, there are times, albeit rare occasions, but there are times when the patient can overhear what the doctors are saying. If I heard someone like Reiki Doc talking about dimensional travels and karmic trauma, or was aware that she as a doctor was swinging pendulums over people’s heads, it would absolutely deter my experiencing a relaxed, pleasant procedure and recovery process as I would not feel that I was safe under the care of competent, rational medical professionals.

@Narad,

There are two people by that name licensed in California, and the description matches the one who isn’t the anesthesiologist.

Yes, there are two people by that same name licensed in Southern, CA. One is a recently retired family practice physician from Vista, CA and has the middle initial of “G”, and the other is an anesthesiologist in Corona, CA.

The PRWeb article appears to have blended information about the two doctors into one. The photograph on the PRWeb article is definitely of the retired family practice physician from Vista, not the anesthesiologist. PRWeb seems to have copied the photograph from the website of the medical practice where the recently retired family practice doctor used to work.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb9985980.htm

Therefore, it would seem that Reiki Doc is the one who is a licensed anesthesiologist and has the middle initial of “S”. http://www2.mbc.ca.gov/LicenseLookupSystem/PhysicianSurgeon/Lookup.aspx?licenseType=GFE&licenseNumber=67880

I certainly hope the medical board is investigating this matter.

It is a slippery slope when we interchange the words religion and spirituality. Are you applying I am religious because I believe in a Higher Power than man? I see religion as a man-made institution which is more in the business of controlling the masses with its creeds and dogma based in fear. Where Spirituality is the understanding of the nature of who we truly are… with no creed and fear based dogma … we are free to fearlessly explore and question everything. So to answer your question regarding reiki being a form of spiritual healing, I concur. with Orac in that it baffles me to no end how when something happens to a patient such as an “unexplainable healing” the response I have heard from medical specialist has been ” Well…the patient MADE it happen.”) First off, those that practice Reiki are only a channel for this energy. The healer is the person receiving as it is not only my belief but the belief of many… that WE CAN heal ourselves.. that the human body has the capacity to repair itself given the right circumstances. My belief is that Reiki simply assists the body bring itself back to a state of balance where it can do its most natural job… to heal itself.

Again, I try always to maintain a sense of logic and common sense… but sometimes we experience life in ways that defy all logic.. and test our limiting beliefs.

I hope I have given a new perspective to this conversation. If anyone you like to know more about me or my life experiences which have altered my belief system I am open to that discussion.

If one of us attempts to detonate an explosive in the middle of Times Square, but we fail, because the bomb is fake, have we done something unethical (or illegal)? After all, we didn’t actually do anything. I think the answer here is, clearly, yes. This would be an unethical act. There was intent to do something unethical.

Reiki Doc believes she is knowingly and willfully violating the code of ethics (or even the law). To me, this seems very analogous to the hypothetical situation above. There is intent to do something unethical.

Reiki has the capacity to activate the relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system (borborigme is an indicator of this). It should be noted that each practitioner of Reiki is an individual and may incorporate their own spiritual beliefs into their practice which can in turn have a detrimental impact on their credibility and effectiveness in conventional medicine.

As a practitioner that does volunteer work in a clinical setting I find his thoughts to be disturbing. I volunteer upon request of in-patients and four time slots once a month for hospital staff. I view Reiki and describe it as a way to calm the nervous system. One can also liken Reiki to a form of meditation for the client/patient.

There is a great deal of research supporting the integration of Reiki into conventional medicine as a form of complementary care I will provide a link at the end of my comment.

I can also attest to the importance of patient consent and HIPPA. There are forms that must be filled out every time I go to work with a patient including patient surveys. There is also a contractual agreement in place that I signed stating that I shall not use any terminology within the hospital that is not medical. I wouldn’t want to.

Reiki is a phenomenon and it does deserve study time. There have been a number of studies that demonstrate increased blood flow to the hands of the practitioner during a treatment as well as demonstrating borborigme as a result of the relaxation response being activated shortly after a treatment has begun.

What Reiki does not demonstrate:
“intentions or visualizations”
“New Age trendy faith healing”
“guiding by spirits” or “funneling the universe”
Reiki does not make people “psychic”

Reiki does demonstrate: Balancing the nervous system via activation of the relaxation response as mindfulness meditation would. Keep in mind there are several ways to activate the relaxation response.

Now about reikidoc:
I personally think that the man in question was inappropriate and unprofessional in terms of anesthesia and Reiki. He breaches HIPPA and patient confidentiality, and in his own words he had no permission to give a treatment to anyone.

As a practitioner myself I am disappointed that someone currently involved in their medical career wouldn’t take either practice more seriously. Especially when people on both sides of the scalpel are counting on him to be present with the task at hand.

http://reikiinmedicine.org/pdf/jacc.pdf
Effects of Reiki on Autonomic Activity Early After Acute Coronary Syndrome. Rachel S.C. Friedman, Matthew M. Burg, Pamela Miles, Forrester Lee, and Rachel Lampert J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 2010;56;995-996.
This is study performed in Yale.

Linda G wrote:

So to answer your question regarding reiki being a form of spiritual healing, I concur. with Orac

Thank you for the honest answer.

And the second part of my question — would you say that the science in support of reiki is less important than an attitude which accepts spiritual truths? In other words, must someone first believe in a spiritual Higher power BEFORE the evidence is looked at in order for them to find the evidence convincing? Approach it willingly and at the personal level …

I ask this because science assumes a neutral stance. The evidence has to be strong enough to persuade skeptics.

Just to make one thing clear: This one guy isn’t the basis for my disbelief in Reiki. He’s just the latest example. My disbelief is based on:

A) the lack of high quality evidence,

B) the scientific implausibility of some exotic kind of energy that can be manipulated by humans but has yet to be discovered by physicists,

C) the fact that it’s got some outdated pre-scientific ideas in its premises, like vitalism,

and D) its defenders typically to resort to logical fallacies, propaganda tactics, and so on instead of presenting good evidence.

About chaplains in the hospital. In the northeast area of the United States, it has been my experience that all hospitals have chaplains (on call). I’ve been in hospital chapels and in non-sectarian hospitals, they do not have religious symbols displayed.

If you indicate a religion when you are admitted to the hospital, you will be visited by a chaplain or a lay chaplain. If you state *none* to the admission clerk…you will not receive pastoral services.

My son was hospitalized numerous times (he was a *frequent flyer*), and the Protestant chaplains/lay ministers were just very nice people…who were not intrusive.

BTW, I had two awful experiences with a Roman Catholic priest. My husband was hospitalized for some complicated renal testing and an officious obnoxious priest was quite nasty. Within hours of his birth, I requested baptism for my son. The Protestant chaplain was unavailable and the Roman Catholic priest refused to baptize him; the NICU nurse baptized him. The nurses in the NICU, all of my son’s doctors and I knew that there is ONE Christian baptism, that is recognized by the Catholic church and mainstream Protestant sects.

Both times I lodged complaints with the hospital administration and with the Catholic diocese.

I myself have experienced healing my finger after I accidentally burned my tip of my index finger with a soldering iron… the pain was gone in 15 minutes, the next morning I had not blistering not any sensitivity in the area of the burn.

That’s happened to me twice in the 7 times I’ve burnt myself on a soldering iron.

I’m not a reiki practitioner.

That’s simply not rare for soldering iron burns.

That’s happened to me twice in the 7 times I’ve burnt myself on a soldering iron.

Indeed. What’s the tip of a pencil iron, about 500 C? That’s a prompt deep burn. I would bring up the old restaurant trick of relieving pain from a superficial burn by making it worse. I have a scar on my right forearm in the shape of the end of the handle on a Sitram skillet, a crescent about an inch and a half long and half an inch thick, that I gave myself about a month ago at 450 F. Scarcely hurt at all.

“Our body makes every drug we need,we need to learn to access it.”

Oh those ignorant diabetics. Why won’t they just learn to grow new insulin-secreting cells?

I love Orac, and I love this blog, but I’ll just point out: OF COURSE the surgeon thinks anesthesia is pure pharmacology.

And I’m sorry to say, many of these people who believe in energy healing eventually start posting wishes that people who disagree with them will die a horrible death, typically by poison or by a terrible disease. I trust you won’t go down that route; to the best of my knowledge it hasn’t affected anyone in any serious way yet.

Lawrence,

I have to admit it takes me great effort to not quote Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda when discussing Reiki. I also avoid references to duck (duct?) tape.

As an aside – the term “duck tape” was a pet peeve of mine until I read several sources that indicate that this is, in fact, the original spelling as it was made from cotton duck cloth. More, apparently it is not good for sealing duct-work as it leaks too much and falls off too easily. The things you learn …

I have touched hot items, including soldering irons, frying pans, a knife etc and experienced the very thing described by Linda G

I’m a reiki master

Me too but I just thought it was because I have such a high midi-chlorian count.

ah so, Padawan am I

re comment # 121; My money would be on pre-cognition but such a highly placed minion of Lord D is probably controlling the future. A few more demonstrations & it will be time for the stock market scheme.

OMG…I finally went through the “Master’s” info, and that woman is full bat-shit crazy…..how does she still have a job?

@ THS:

As much as I appreciate your encouraging interest:
1. there is no such thing as pre-cognition ( although some of us often appear to have it)
2. there will never be a stock market scheme. I have enough work ( and money) as it is.
3. Lord D is a figment of Uncle Stabby’s extremely vivid imagination. I sometimes wonder if I am also.
Nope, I’m real.

Mom of3
The Yale study concluded . . .

“It is unknown whether the beneficial effects of Reiki treat- ment 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. Further understanding of the mechanisms involved in Reiki’s impact on autonomic activity requires comparison of Reiki with other control groups, including non-Reiki light touch and nontouch intentional human interaction.”

There’s your answer. Placebo.

@Jake
I like point no. 9. It especially applies to this crowd.

I like point no. 9. It especially applies to this crowd.

Well, Marg, given that you’ve been nattering on here for some time, you are “this crowd.” Furthermore, the mirror-image in your case for “falls out of his range of experience” is in fact honest scientific appraisal. For crying out loud, you’ve been reduced to moronic sniping after having to call Judith back in to try to make your own efforts basically go away.

@ Pareidolius:

You bring tears to my eyes with your beautiful comments about life and death. Thank you.

Wow, I did it…and it worked!

Do I have to run through those functions every time I open up this blog? I am so not computer technical savvy.

@Jake:

[CITATION NEEDED]

@Linda, Marg, random “mom” person, and all other Twoo Believers:

You are deluding yourselves. Maybe your mind was grief-roasted by the tragic death of a loved one, maybe you have no idea how science works, or maybe you were never good at anything, never had any talents or anything to show for your life, never felt special, but calling yourself a ~Reiki Master~ makes you feel accomplished. Whatever your motivation may be, tragic back story or mid-life crisis, it isn’t real.

Reiki is just another placebo like acupuncture, crystal healing, homeopathy, Bach Remedies, chiropractic adjustment, etc.

It’s not real. It’s not a “healing modality” or a mystical mastering of a “universal energy source”. It’s a way to make yourself feel better about experiences and processes where you have no control.

Oh, and WRT burns – the shallower the burn, the more painful it is. Serious, even deadly full-thickness burns have burned through the sensory nerves, removing the ability to feel pain.

Burns to the surface of the skin, even very minor ones, cause us to immediately jerk away from the heat source, before we even realise we’re hurt. The heat source causes pain which can seem totally out of proportion to the size/depth of the burn, because the nerve-endings are just under the surface of the skin. However, the pain dissipates quickly, and rarely leaves a mark.

Partial thickness burns offer the worst of both worlds – agonising pain and tissue damage. Overnight Reiki-healing a partial thickness burn would be more impressive.

Oh, and whoever was talking about it, in an attempt to look all legit and sciencey, it’s borborygmus, and the plural is borborygmi. For the uninitiated, the growling noise made by intestinal gas.

However, despite the ~Reiki Warrior~ claim that it’s indicative of relaxation? Nope.

Hunger, problems such as lactose or wheat intolerance, coelhac disease/sprue, IBDs and IBS, incomplete digestion of food (especially food very high in fibre) and swallowing air because you’re eating or drinking too quickly. They’ll make your tummy rumble. Being relaxed? That would make intimate activities such as sensual massage or sex, turn into a veritable orgy of rumbling gut gas.

@169 THS November 14, 2012: Thanks for the report.

@170 lilady November 14, 2012:

Do I have to run through those functions every time I open up this blog?

I generally keep each active article open in its own tab, so I can track where I was last reading in that article. I click on the tab, check the last comment number, refresh the tab, and go from the next comment. I close a tab when the last comment is three days old. (When I spot a comment in RI Returned that I’ve closed the tab for, I just open it back up and scan for the date break.) The three-click incantation I use sticks to the tab, so everything in the tab is No Style. Google and Wikipedia look really funny in No Style, by the way.
I don’t know your RI reading habits: I have my habits, as described above. You might just open the RI Home page and go from there, clicking on articles and comments (from the Insolence Returned list): for this habit, switching to No Style on the RI Home page might do the trick for all the articles and their comments.
If you drive your reading from the RSS feed, you might need to perform the three mouse-clicks much more often. It gets much easier, with practice — almost automatic.

Is it accepted practice for doctors to be texting during a surgery?

At work, while juggling a propofol pump that kept beeping every ten minutes, a needy surgeon (raise the table! Lower the table! Tilt the table!) I was texting and coordinating.

ReikiDoc is doing reiki sessions on her son and herself while she has a patient in front of her on the O.R. table.

So, in the O.R., while the patient was stable, doing my ‘speed version’ , I drew the Distance Symbol with my eyes. I opened my son’s aura. I picked up congestion, and throat chakra blockage. His father has been telling him ‘you eat like a pig’ and even kicked him under the table for his lack of manners at a restaurant. My boy does not want to spill, and bends close to the plate. This reiki session helped me piece the clues ‘Thank God!’ he exclaimed, when I said my sister the therapist would be someone to talk to about that and get help to feel better.

And then I turned the Reiki on myself. I realized he knows I love him. And one day he will understand how I was coordinating care while a case was in progress. I am doing a good job.

Slightly off topic: I thought that whole left brain/right brain stuff related to maths, science and arts had been debunked?

@Johanna, and @Lilady

Thanks – I suspected they wouldn’t just turn up, but a recent TV ad on a show about hospital chaplains seemed to imply that they were doing more than counselling people of their own faith. I think I should probably watch the show now before getting any wrong ideas from the ad alone.

@Narad

I have a scar on my right forearm in the shape of the end of the handle on a Sitram skillet, a crescent about an inch and a half long and half an inch thick, that I gave myself about a month ago at 450 F. Scarcely hurt at all.

At the risk of this being taken the wrong way… you people are bonkers! 😉

@MOB

More, apparently it is not good for sealing duct-work as it leaks too much and falls off too easily.

Having some experience with this, yes cloth tape is terrible. What you need is the industrial strength ‘gaffa’ tape.

@Pareidolius

Come on in Marg, the reality’s fine!

Oh that’s good, I’m stealing that.

@Lilady and other computery people

Get yourself Firebug for Firefox. It allows you to right-click a particular part of the page and see the source. No searching through the source for the right bit of code; just right-click a comment and you’ll see the ID number. Far easier than keeping tabs open and having to change page styles constantly. It takes me one click to find a comment ID.

@Jake,

But, to dismiss the entire concept of energy healing based on this one persons statements would be the same as saying all surgeons were killers based on one persons failure in the ER.

This is, I believe, an inaccurate assessment of the situation. People aren’t rejecting energy healing because of a few comments from a few of its practitioners; they’re rejecting it (or at least asking hard questions and looking at it very skeptically) because there’s not any good evidence that it works. Most of the items that people have brought to the discussion in favor of energy healing can be more easily explained as perfectly normal occurrences that people assigned excess importance to. Quite likely they believe they’ve seen evidence of energy healing because of wishful thinking, philosophical considerations, or ignorance of the normal progression of events. In some cases it appears people are willing to modify the term “works” as needed to meet the situation.

However, if you can provide high quality data showing that any mode of energy healing controlled by direct mental action (e.g. wishing, prayer, hand waving) provides better results than a suitable placebo, please share.

“Throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.

Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-f00king-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?

Isn’t this enough?

Just this world?

Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?”

Tim Minchin sums it up almost as well as Pareidolius!

It would be magical thinking and very unscientific to discount something being observed since known history.

What observations, exactly, are you referring to here? We certainly haven’t observed energy healing to effective at curing illness or injury since ‘known history’. In fact, if we had, why would a need to develop effective science based treatments, instead of continuing non-invasive magical hand waving, arise?

What’s the difference in stress reduction that reiki offer over yoga?

Alain

elburto Posted

“Oh, and whoever was talking about it, in an attempt to look all legit and sciencey, it’s borborygmus, and the plural is borborygmi. For the uninitiated, the growling noise made by intestinal gas.
However, despite the ~Reiki Warrior~ claim that it’s indicative of relaxation? Nope.
Hunger, problems such as lactose or wheat intolerance, coelhac disease/sprue, IBDs and IBS, incomplete digestion of food (especially food very high in fibre) and swallowing air because you’re eating or drinking too quickly. They’ll make your tummy rumble. Being relaxed? That would make intimate activities such as sensual massage or sex, turn into a veritable orgy of rumbling gut gas.”

When the human body experiences the stress response of the sympathetic nervous system the digestive systems slows down to save energy for “flight of fight.” When the body switches from stress response to relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system digestion begins again. Hence the borborigme.

A quote from an interview with the leading pioneer in Reiki research with 20 years of experience researching Reiki in conventional medicine alongside researchers at Harvard and Yale:

“We need more research showing that reiki treatment optimizes the body’s self-healing, such as documenting a shift from sympathetic nervous system dominance to parasympathetic nervous system dominance” (Heneberry, 2012).
Yes, indeed borborigme could very well be one sign of this shift from the sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system. Here is the link to the whole interview,
http://www.abmp.com/textonlymags/article.php?article=61

A little more information on the stress response:

” Stressors good and bad set off a series of events within the body’s neuroendocrine system. Often called the “fight or flight” response, these events are triggered by the brain, which alerts the body’s autonomic nervous system to prepare all systems to react to an emergency. The autonomic nervous system sends a message in a split second through nerve fibers, which signal all the other body systems.
During this alarm period, many different hormones are activated with many dramatic effects on other body systems. The heart beats faster, blood pressure is raised, and blood vessels dilate (open wider) to increase blood flow to the muscles. The pupils dilate to aid vision. The digestive system slows down so that the body’s resources and energy can be used wherever else they are needed, and the production of saliva decreases. The bronchi dilate to aid breathing. The skin sweats to cool the body, and the liver releases its stores of glucose, the major fuel of the body, to increase the person’s energy level. The body stays in overdrive until the brain tells it that the emergency has ended” (Human Disease and Conditions, n.d.).
Source website: http://www.humanillnesses.com/Behavioral-Health-Sel-Vi/Stress.html#ixzz2CDpeGvn6

Mom_of3:

I agree that reiki, like other forms of relaxation such as yoga or massage, can put people into a relaxed state.

Now all you have to do is show us evidence that the manipulation of energy specific to Reiki is what causes this relaxation.

Otherwise, why not just use massage or yoga?

Alain Asks:
“What’s the difference in stress reduction that reiki offer over yoga?”

Both Reiki and yoga offer a form of relaxation. The difference would be in how the rest is acquired. In a Reiki treatment a client or patient is either seated or laying in a relaxed prone position while a set series of hand positions are used. During a yoga practice various poses are preformed and varying level of intensity according to the individual practicing. Both can offer self home practice.

So the obvious differences are that yoga (with Yin and Restorative forms as potential exceptions) is a moving meditation while Reiki is stationary. In hospital settings where patience have a lack of mobility Reiki is much more effectively administered than yoga.

Please keep in mind that relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system can be activated by any meditative activity including walking, knitting, cooking, anything that soothes the individual so that their system can switch from stress to non-stress feeling more comfortable and relaxed in the moment.

So for some yoga is the stress reduction practice for them, for others it is jogging, walking, biking, mindfulness meditation and Reiki among many more.

Here is a link to an interview with Dr. Herbert Benson, who coined the phrase, “relaxation response.” http://www.nexuspub.com/articles_2011/interview_ja_2011_Benson.php

Thank you for your question. I hope I have provided you with a satisfactory answer.

Please keep in mind that relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system can be activated by any meditative activity including walking, knitting, cooking, anything that soothes the individual so that their system can switch from stress to non-stress feeling more comfortable and relaxed in the moment.

Once again you fail to address the actual issue. WE AGREE that people can ‘feel relaxed’ due to a reiki session. But why dress up relaxation with energy woo and bizarre handwaving when simple meditation and guided imagery exercises are just as, if not more, effective in relaxing people? Either can be done laying down.

That’s one thing that irritates me about a lot of woo. They make big claims, like energy medicine talking about vitalist forces that can heal major problems, and when confronted, their claims suddenly shrink to relaxation and “harnessing” the placebo effect.

@ Bronze Dog, al kimeea – all the healing energy gets used up by their furious backpedaling.

JGC,

Certainly no one–even Lance Armstrong, who could make a case for it if anyone could–has ever argued biking cures cancer, but a lot of Reiki afficionado’s (such as our own marg) claim that reiki can.

Funnily enough I saw a documentary recently which argued that the bicycle had a dramatic effect on human evolution. In the days when many people lived and died within a smalll community it extended the range within which people found mates, and significantly increased genetic diversity. Other forms of transport have since continued that trend.
You could argue that since inbreeding may lead to increased risk of cancer, the humble bicycle prevents cancer. It’s a great deal more plausible than Reiki doing so, anyway.

Research funds are not available, therefore, the Reiki practitioners claim that they are not able to evidence their curative treatments in the customary treatment trials.

Heaven knows, Reiki is such an expensive procedure!

Calli Arcale,

watching “Doctor Who” (well, that destresses me, anyway)

You have to be careful of which episode you watch if you want to relax. I found myself all emotional after David Tennant’s final episode.

Calli Arcale Posts:

“Mom_of3:

Please keep in mind that relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system can be activated by any meditative activity including walking, knitting, cooking, anything that soothes the individual so that their system can switch from stress to non-stress feeling more comfortable and relaxed in the moment.

So you agree it is nothing more than generic stress relief. Why, then, should we tolerate the promotion of it as some form of mystical healing or manipulation of psychic energies? The studies show it is not superior to yoga, knitting, prayer, a nice walk in the forest, bubble bath, watching “Doctor Who” (well, that destresses me, anyway)…. But yet its promoters describe it as something much more than any of that. If it is a form of relaxation, it should be intolerable to promote it as the manipulation of energy currents by a trained (and paid) practitioner to adjust your energy fields and create healing. Because that’s not promoting as relaxation. That’s duping clients and relying on the relaxation effects to give the appearance of an affect.”

Thank you for your thoughts.

I agree that Reiki activates the relaxation response as does many other activities. The relaxation response is generic and necessary for healing. Anyone who is stressed knows that too much stress only makes things worse, headaches, backaches etc… By relaxing we can let go of that stress and the body’s systems have an easier time of making necessary repairs to damaged tissues.

If the big concern is the promotion of Reiki as psychic energy manipulation then know just as no two people are alike, no two practitioners are identical in their approach to Reiki.

As practitioners it is professional behavior to be courteous and tolerant of other practitioners, but there is also the understanding that not every practitioner is credible. Not every practitioner market, portrays, or views Reiki that way. I think this is understandable

Also understand that each client or patient experiences Reiki as an individual, no two sessions are alike. These experiences are subjective and for the client or patient alone.

Just know this credible practitioners will not market themselves in the ways you have described.
And if anyone is ever interested in receiving a treatment I encourage them to do the research and to not subject themselves to a practitioner who does not conduct themselves in a professional manner.

A credible source of information about Reiki is
Reiki: A Comprehensive Guide by Pamela Miles.

I am including a few more studies here and I encourage others to find studies on their own. It would be interesting to read studies in which Reiki didn’t demonstrate effectiveness in reducing stress symptoms in some way.

http://www.advancesjournal.com/adv/web_pdfs/miles.pdf
http://www.reikiinmedicine.org/pdf/research_letter.pdf
http://www.reikiinmedicine.org/pdf/schiller.pdf
Literature Review:
http://www.reikiinmedicine.org/pdf/alt_therapies_reiki.pdf

To AdamG. The only research offered currently discusses the efficacy of Reiki in various circumstances. They do demonstrate the efficacy of Reiki helping relieve stress, anxiety, chronic pain, depression and insomnia. All of these conditions being related to the nervous system. In other words, we can document and collect data providing evidence only on what we can test.
There is no research currently that offers answers to your question.

A credible source of information about Reiki is
Reiki: A Comprehensive Guide by Pamela Miles.

The foreword to your very source contradicts your statement that reiki is not “funneling the universe,” unless you think there is some distinction from “accessing” the “universal pulsation.”

Mom of 3,

Can you prove that reiki relieve depression?

Alain

Mephistopheles — for me, that was very much offset by how ridiculously long it took him to die. As the Oodcasters put it, “Russell T Davies achieved the impossible — he actually made me want the Doctor to die.” I mean, he tells us he’s dying, but gives absolutely other indication of that for *twenty minutes* while he wanders around, visiting companions, seeing the sights, doing who knows what all, seeing Ood Sigma one more time, and then this catastrophic regeneration into Matt Smith. It was way too far over the top, and the goofiness of that offset it to me. But when i want to destress, I pull out a classic. If I’m in a hurry, I’ll go for one of my favorite modern episodes — a goofy one like “The Unicorn and the Wasp”, or a really good one like “The Doctor’s Wife”. (Hey, didja know Neil Gaiman’s written another one? And it’s got Cybermen! He became a fan of them in the 60s, so it’ll be *classic* Cybermen, I’m sure.)

Anyway.

Mom_of3: “If the big concern is the promotion of Reiki as psychic energy manipulation then know just as no two people are alike, no two practitioners are identical in their approach to Reiki. ” This is actually a large part of my concern. If reiki is so wildly unstandardized, how can a consumer expect to have the slightest clue what to expect? Are you going to get someone who will be honest with you about the limits of their capabilities? Or not? Plus, I have yet to see evidence of anyone advertising reiki purely for relaxation, without any suggestion that it enhances healing by manipulating energy fields. I mean, that’s like saying chiropractors don’t adjust subluxations. Take away the bizarre energy field claims, and what is reiki? Soothing words given a totally unnecessary name that suggests mystical healing powers?

If reiki is just relaxation, then there is no reason to use the word reiki at all because that’s misleading.

@thenewme – I’m with you.

Momof3 – I hope neither you, nor your three children, ever become ill. I mean really ill, not something self-limiting.

Your frankly disgusting assertion, akin to that brand of bullsh¡t known as “The Secret”, that “relaxation” heals, and depression or sadness somehow impedes healing, is a slap in the face to people with actual health problems.

No amount of mystical hand-waving will prevent or fix traumatic brain injury, or alleviate depression in a 34 year old imprisoned in her home after SACD causes rapid onset bilateral spastic diplegia.

Hard to be cheery when you’ve been sat in the same bed for a year, even if the magic happy mind-rays will magically heal the nerve damage.

I’ll take science any day. And no, borborygmi still isn’t caused by Reiki-induced parasympathetic relaxation.

I am very grateful to have had this opportunity to share a little information with you all.

Thank you very much for the thoughtful conversations and although it was a heated debate that will most certainly continue for some, I hope you feel certain in what you want for yourselves. That is what is most important, know yourself. If you want to try Reiki, try it. If not, then don’t. If you want to step outside of your box, then do so! If you are happy right where you are then don’t move a muscle! Be authentically you.

I have learned a great deal from everyone’s postings. Some were genuinely curious, others furious and some just wanting answers. It wont be the last time I encounter these attitudes. So truly thank you.

I am one person passionate about medicine and the opportunity to integrate complementary methods into the allopathic field. It is exciting! I work with many professional who feel the same way.

It is okay to be upset and want questions answered, by all means ask, use your critical thinking skills! Don’t settle for anything less than you deserve. Research, research, research. Don’t forget that science has an open mind, researchers do not make it habit to conduct studies thinking they already know the answers, they search for them.

Be Well.

borborigme 😉

Mom of 3:

I am one person passionate about medicine and the opportunity to integrate complementary methods into the allopathic field. It is exciting! I work with many professional who feel the same way

Sure, tell me how reiki can alleviate that reduction of blood leaving the heart because of the obstruction before the aortic valve due to obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Especially when a complex migraine mimics a both a stroke and a heart attack. Which is what we dealt with a bit over a year ago.

Gah! The worried well can imagine how their little “good thoughts” can cause miracles. Until a real medical emergency occurs.

You are as bad as the insurance company nurses who want to give advice to my 24 year old son to prevent further heart issues. Like growing an extra inch of muscle* in his heart was somehow preventable (hint: it is a genetic disorder affecting at least one in a thousand).

* It was removed during open heart surgery, but there are still issues with scar tissue. Real medical issues cannot be removed by happy thoughts or magical hand waving.

There seems to be some confusion about my identity and I wanted to clear it up.

I am not Pamela Miles. Reikiinmedicine.org is not my blog. I don’t have a blog. I reference her because she has 25 years of experience and she is one of the leading researchers of Reiki. Peace.

@Mom_of3

“It is unknown whether the beneficial effects of Reiki treat- ment 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”

You think the study is saying it’s beneficial over music. However, what it’s clearly saying is they can’t tell whether the benefits they saw were from other factors. In other words, there’s no confirmation of anything except that something sometime caused benefits. The ‘further study’ bit is about them saying they’d need more experiments to see what other factors they can disentangle from these ‘effects’.

Pareidolius was right, it’s placebo.

I would encourage you all to phone your local hospitals and wellness centers to see if Reiki services are offered in your area.

Take advice from a ‘mom’ on the net instead of my local doctor? No, I don’t think so. Especially when there isn’t any proof that it does work and makes absolutely no sense given what else we know about the world. (Aimed at Nita too)

This is a very non-answer answer to the question of why promote it as energy healing.

These experiences are subjective and for the client or patient alone.

AKA it’s not based in science.

They do demonstrate the efficacy of Reiki helping relieve stress, anxiety, chronic pain, depression and insomnia. All of these conditions being related to the nervous system

Bull hockey. Whilst relaxation can help many emotional disorders, it doesn’t cure them – at best it makes you more able to manage them.

And can you at least link to stuff on Pubmed by the way?

We have amazing bodies that reproduce cells constantly, that is very much fact.

Ah the old “healing body” fallacy. Yeah, if the body self heals so well, why do we need reiki (or medicine) in the first place?

If you want to try Reiki, try it. If not, then don’t.

And the “what’s the harm fallacy”.

Mom_of3 seems to have fallen for the integrative medicine fallacy. Also the “all disease is stress” fallacy.

Our stomach cells are replaced every three days, the body “heals” itself.

Except when it doesn’t. Like when you have cancer. Or ALS. Or occluded coronary arteries. Or diabetes. Or schizophrenia. Macular degeneration. MS. Rheumatoid arthritis. Acute appendicitis. Glaucoma. COPD. Congestive heart failure….

Well, you get the picture.

gotta get Krebiozen’s preview…

Mom of 3:

There seems to be some confusion about my identity and I wanted to clear it up.

I really don’t care, except you ignored my question. How does your happy thoughts and magical hand waving deal with the extra inch of heart muscle that grew during during my oldest child’s puberty? Come on, be specific how Reiki works with real non-self limiting medical issues.

And back to the anesthesiologist: the shivering that happens as a person recovers from anesthesia is very freaky if you have ever seen your child having full blown seizures.

JGC,

gotta get Krebiozen’s preview

You can download my slightly improved version here. It includes a ‘clear text’ button and a warning not try anything fancy with super or subscript, or ampersand HTML codes.

To all the Reiki practitioners and advocates who agree that the subject of this post is unethical and out of line:

Do you have a regulatory board to whom she (pronoun based on the other posts with the link above) can be reported? What disciplinary action can you, as fellow practitioners of your art, enforce against this type of practice?

Sorry, cause the symptoms of diseases you want to treat.

The funny thing about homeopathy and the accusation of allopathy is that both concepts are based on treating someone entirely according to symptoms. It seems to me that Hannemann trapped his thinking in that frame, filtering everything he saw in those limited black-and-white terms.

Real medicine uses symptoms as just one means to diagnose a cause and then treat the cause when possible. Sometimes people who get a disease don’t get the full suite of symptoms or sometimes they get unusual symptoms because of their unique quirks or circumstances. If the oddity doesn’t introduce new risks, the treatment is likely going to remain the same since the cause is the same.

In some cases, the treatment is counter-intuitive. Treatments for ADHD are stimulants that boost executive function in the brain, allowing the patient to control their attention and hold back their impulses, calming down their behavior. Alcohol is a depressant but can cause reckless or violent behavior because it suppresses brain function involved in inhibition. Science-based medicine is why we know these things.

That’s why allopathy is a ridiculous accusation, completely detached from how real medicine operates. It’s an accusation born from homeopathy’s oversimplification and misunderstanding of disease and thus it reflects badly on the accuser.

Reiki has the capacity to activate the relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system

I am not certain that the PNAS has a “relaxation response”. But before getting hung up on technicalities and pedantry, are we talking about the real human-physiology parasympathetic system? Or some kind of symbolic, metaphorical version, a Western equivalent of chakras and Kundalini Serpent?

@Krebiozen

No, no there’s no pleasing some people… *looks around*

Oh you mean me? 😉

A little late to this thread so my comment is probably very out of place now but I simply MUST comment on the ‘Stargate’ reference.

At the link posted by S, when I saw the word ‘ascension’ I immediately thought of the ‘Stargate’ series on the scify channel.

When I came to the ‘ascension code transmission’ part, I joked to myself, “transmission to where? The Pegasus galaxy?” (in reference to ‘Stargate: Atlantis’)

Sure enough, on scrolling down to the list of last couple of names, right there you have, “Crisostomo Jacinto
with his stargate chamber”.
Really, “with his Stargate Chamber”?? Don’t these people feel the slightest bit silly coming up with all this nonsense?

And then you have the reference to “zero point energy” by Jake.
@Jake: Zero point modules as a source of energy have only been documented in Science fiction (no, “Stargate” is NOT a documentary) and even in that fictional universe it is not an unlimited source of energy.

These people really can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, can they?

You have such fear of the unknown, the lot of you.

How’s that projection working Marg? Been there. Done that.

@Bronze Dog,
“It seems to me that Hannemann trapped his thinking in that frame, filtering everything he saw in those limited black-and-white terms.”
Well, the obvious issue with Hahneman is that he was responding to the state of science 200 YEARS AGO. At that time, the options for identifying germs, toxins and medicinal substances were presumably limited, and recording the symptoms they produced may well have been one of the better (less bad) options.

Something that just crossed my mind as an analogy of Hahneman is Cosmas and Lactantius, the church fathers who tried to revive the flat Earth. I have read bits of their writing, and what I found especially striking is that a good deal of what they wrote on cosmology was specifically criticism of geocentric astronomy. Hence, what one gets in the same text is ideas that seem like silliness even for their time side by side with ideas that seem a millennium ahead of their time.

David N. Brown
Mesa, Arizona

Can a blind person describe the trees?

@Jake

Citation needed. For everything you just posted. And the stuff you posted previously.

I do not have the patience to cite anything for your. especialy given your obtuse reactions to the field entirely which has been my lifes work

AKA I don’t have anything so I’ll scream “close minded”. Maybe if you posted some evidence we’d change our minds… oh hey, we asked for it already! Got anything other than logical fallacies there?

Go do the Randi Challenge. Then you can prove yourself without having to spend any money at all – with a bonus million in return if you succeed.

reference to dna in the holy bible.

Uhuh, sure…

Can a blind person describe the trees?

Is that relevant?

@Marg: Exploring the unknown has given us many terrific things, in both senses of the word (did you know you can set asbestos on fire?). A certain respectful caution towards the unknown is well-justified; I hear looking around a convention hall full of fluorine chemists is a good way to gain an understanding of why.

@Jake: If remote viewing worked, why did the CIA give up on it?

Was there anything in Jake’s comment that was true?

@jake,

Precognition. Proven True. Though knowing the future changes it.

So you can know the future but it does no good because once you know it it won’t happen? How is this different from not knowing the future? Is this like the man who can turn invisible, but only if nobody is watching?

Re: ” we are somehow able to transmit electromagnetic waves from our body onto another via our nervous system”

Citation needed.

“Tesla claimed that he could engineer frequencies to reproduce chemical effects in the body.”

Please provide evidence he was correct.

“I know for a fact at a repeatable rate that I can cause a reaction in someone without them even being present.”

How exactly have you established this claim as factual? Details please.

“Which recent studies show our brain itself is capable of entanglement between hemispheres.”
I give up–which recent studies show this? Citations needed.

“I do not have the patience to cite anything for your. especialy given your obtuse reactions to the field entirely which has been my lifes work.”
Why are you wasting our time, then, making claims you won’t even attempt to support?

“Any pioneer in any new field of discovery is ridiculed at first them praised later.”
Only some will be praised later, after they’ve gathered a sufficient body of evidence that they were right. The fact one’s ridiculed isn’t evidence they’re lkely right.

Reiki is not nearly as good as knitting. Knitting actually produces something.

Knitting actually produces something.

Lots of potential for entanglement there, in my experience.

Denice,

Secondly, does that mean that the hemispheres might actually NOT be totally INcommunicado all of the time?

Someone should design something that allows the hemispheres to communicate all the time, then we wouldn’t need all those gadgets, tapes, supplements etc. that claim to improve communication between them. Maybe they could call it the corpus callosum, that has a nice ring to it.

I found your entangled hemispheres right here!

I once had the nightmarish task of having to remember all the cognitive symtoms of a guy who had an operation to control epilepsy (IIRC) which severed the corpus callosum. When you know the symptoms then you can imagine how awful it must be ( although I don’t know if a person with that condition would realise just HOW awful). Now I’m thinking about it.
-btw- I like the knitted brain ( good name for a pub ?). Doesn’t Orac’s infamous grey bunny have a knitted brain that is also removable?

I hesitate to reveal this, but I actually have a 30-year-old BBC-spec Tom Baker scarf. I made it through about six rows myself before a friend’s grandmother took pity on me and cranked it out in the space of a weekend.

Krebiozen

Just to confuse matters, we ought to toss in corpus callosal agenesis.

Why didn’t Marge and Judith come with that link?

If energy medicine and wishful thinking works, then,

I will receive $2 million dollars in cash in the mail today. I will receive $2 million dollars in cash in the mail today. I will receive $2 million dollars in cash in the mail today… I will meet …

Most importantly, no WooSeller will have have an “M.D”. bestowed upon their name.

@Renate
I saw that one too, but didn’t post it because I didn’t want this rabidly anti-reiki bunch to start hounding the doctor.

do a few stretches, clap your hands a few times and rub them together – feel the energy ball?

Now I’m an energy healer, reiki style or maybe New Russian, no Quantum Touch that’s the ticket

@Beamup
Oh gee, now this doctor is a quack too?

But these guys are pure as the driven snow:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14944098/ns/nbcnightlynews/t/cancer-docs-profit-chemotherapy-drugs/#.UKui3WeVHiQ

Oh gee, now this doctor is a quack too?

Most certainly.

But these guys are pure as the driven snow:

Nope, profoundly unethical and should not be allowed. Completely unrelated to reiki anyway. Ever hear the term “tu quoque?”

@Judith – and that proves your point how, exactly? I see a short news story with exactly two sources – one ethicist pointing out the potential for conflict of interest and an oncologist agreeing with him. I don’t see anyone defending the system or name-calling critics or trying to change the subject, like you and Marg keeping doing.

And even if every oncologist in the US is as corrupt as you are very clumsily implying, that still doesn’t make “energy medicine” real.

Judith, it’s funny that now that the other thread automatically closed, you instantly forget that we don’t consider pharmaceutical companies “pure.” Heck, I described my relationship with them as keeping my friends close and my enemies closer. You’re trying to flush the truth down the memory hole while erecting a transparent straw man.

The pharmaceutical companies only have partial trust because their products only live up to our standards most of the time, but not all the time. Our trust is conditional and typically dependent on international consensus between multiple independent parties, not solely on the pharmaceutical company’s say so, like you’ve been lying about. Your real problem is that you’re not willing to go through the same hoops to earn even conditional trust.

Your jealousy and Ayn Randian business sense has also trapped you into seeing this as a competition, not as a test of your character or your accuracy. You’re not trying to prove your trustworthiness or the reliability of your conclusions, you’re trying to evade the issue by whining about someone else. If you want us to trust you, stop resorting to the tactics of a textbook scoundrel.

Judith,
As Beamup mentioned, you really do need to learn what the tu quoque logical fallacy is. You make a fool of yourself every time you attempt it here, especially when it is a straw man you are tu quoqueing about.

But these guys are pure as the driven snow:

That article is about a problem with the US healthcare system that no one here would defend, not with cancer treatment itself. In Canada where I believe you are, and the UK where I am, that situation does not exist, yet chemotherapy is still a mainstay of cancer treatment.

@Bronze Dog
That was not about the pharmaceutical companies, but about the doctors who earn most of their income from prescribing chemotherapy drugs.

@S
WHEE sounds a lot like EFT. In EFT one taps acupuncture points. I am acquainted with EFT, but not sufficiently to attempt an explanation.

@Krebiozen
I would say there is a huge problem with the healthcare system if doctors have to push drugs to make a living. I don’t know what your excuse in the UK is. By the way I thought surgery was the mainstay of cancer treatment. And although everybody jumps on the study that showed that adjuvant chemotherapy has an overall 2.3 per cent effectiveness, taking the criticisms into account only lifts it up to 8 per cent, which in my opinion makes it next to useless, for most cancers.

I would say there is a huge problem with the healthcare system if doctors have to push drugs to make a living.

@Judith, At least there are studies which evidence that prescription medications work for some patients. Do you consider it acceptable for a doctor to push herbs, supplements and energy treatments?

I’ve noticed that you have dismissed every single suggestion for a possible study to test the effectiveness of Reiki. It seems there is always an excuse as to why a study can not be done. I thought the waiting room treatment study would have been a good opportunity for you. If you want people to believe you, you need to come up with a means to conduct a proper study so as to demonstrate whether Reiki works.

I have to tell you, patients get a fast and hard education here on RI, and the more I read, the more Reiki sounds like total bull. No wonder so many people are complaining. It seems the real problem is that there just isn’t enough enforcement to stop all the shameless quacks from practicing.

“Hodgkin’s” – gremlin stole my apostrophe.

@ S:

About EFT( see also skeptical Inquirer):
Mercola recommends this for psychological issues- if you don’t believe in meds, I suppose you need something. EFT consists of tapping on accupuncture points while repeating affirmations or verbalising your problems. OK, as a psychologist, I can’t imagine how this would do anything other than perhaps distracting a person from problematic thoughts for a short while. It seems unrealted to the crux of the dilemma being considered.

What would the mechanism of action be? First of all, accupuncture points are not real, so how would stimulating them do anything? Even if ( in some other universe) accupuncture poits were an actuality, how would that translate into fixing problems that exist in the psycho-social sphere. People learn to behave maladaptively which leads to interpersonal and emotional issues.

So it’s at least doubly wrong: real psychotherapy involves learning more effective patterns of interaction and self- assessment, using language to change thought.

I notice that EFT can include NLP- a whole other species of inefficacy.

@Denice

I notice that EFT can include NLP- a whole other species of inefficacy.

From what I have seen EFT can include any woo you can imagine and some you would rather not imagine. In several of the training videos I have seen there is a guy on the stage furiously rifling through a tray of little vials as Gary Craig does his tapping routine on some mark. Gary Craig’s credulity knew no bounds. He was so open minded that his brain fell out and hopped a freight train.

@Krebiozen
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was one of the few cancers that was shown to respond well.

Also, how do you know the people you know who survived their cancers survived due to chemotherapy? You are making an assumption there. They could have survived due to surgery. Or radiation. Or luck. Or attitude. I am sure there is a name you all have for making such an assumption and you would use it if I made the same sort of comment for someone allegedly surviving due to energy treatments.

Speaking of the waiting room treatment, why does Bengston need pictures and names? He didn’t have the names or pictures of the mice he healed, did he?

And as others have asked, how recent does the picture have to be? Is a baby picture good enough?

How precise a name? Would LW be enough? Those really are my initials. How about Orac? Lots of people know the person by that name. Would the name on his birth certificate be required even if he is better known by another name?

I would think it would work better to show him the MRI or whatever and give him the name of the cancer.

@Judith, In your opinion, who is the best Reiki or Reiki-like Healer in the world? Would that be the Dalai Lama?

@S
The Dalai Lama is a great follower of science.

@LW
According to Bengston, chemo and radiation kill something in the person so treating them is akin to trying to charge a dead battery. He also says, quite responsibly, that if you use his method to treat someone who is currently receiving chemo, you might in fact cancel the chemo out, with the effect that the patient benefits from neither treatment.

He says he prefers to work with a recent photo. He didn’t discuss working with an MRI.

It’s not magic. I forget who it was that said that any sufficiently advanced science that is not understood appears to be like magic.

Judith, I didn’t get my 2 million dollars of cash in the mail today. What went wrong? I’m not on chemo. 🙁

@S
Patients who are “riddled with chemo” can be treated with Reiki palliatively. I am sorry you didn’t get your 2 million dollars. Neither did I.

@LW

I think the real reason is that the people who had radiation and/or chemotherapy certainly had a serious cancer. Excluding them greatly increases the fraction of patients who never actually had cancer – the ones who who were diagnosed by naturopaths, bio-energetic field machines, iridology etc. Hover, these people can still “wave their medical records” in youtube videos.

Interestingly, my Firefox spell checker doesn’t recognize naturopaths or iridology and suggests a hyphen in bioenergetic. Is there some secret bull$hit filter in it?

According to Bengston, chemo and radiation kill something in the person so treating them is akin to trying to charge a dead battery.

Ah, we’re getting somewhere. Now, chemo is a poison, we all agree on that. Does *every* poisoning kill something in a person? If little Johnny ate a few too many aspirin and had to have his stomach pumped, or little Suzy got stung by numerous wasps and was in the hospital for a while, are their somethings dead?

And radiation … how much radiation does it take to kill that something? Do we conclude that people who were exposed to the radiation releases after the tsunami have dead somethings? (At least homeopathy works even if you have a dead something.)

Oh dear — what about people who have to fly a lot and get exposed to poorly maintained X-ray machines? Do they have dead somethings? Or people who’ve had diagnostic — not therapeutic — X-rays?

I hope Bergston– or Judith — can clarify this. I mean, I’d hate to waste time and money on their magic if I had a dead something. Maybe I should just stick to homeopathy. At least magic water cures thirst.

@LW
Have you heard the story told by Bernie Siegel about the oncologist who was doing radiation for months with a dead machine and whose patients were still getting both the effects and the side effects normal to radiation?

To be fair, I don’t know that any of the people I’ve known who survived cancer did so because of the therapy they had. The statement, “My friend G. had lymphoma; he was treated with radiation and chemotherapy; and he’s all right now – therefore the radiation and chemo cured him” would be an anecdote.

I have a high degree of confidence that the treatment did, in all likelihood, cure G. because there have been a lot of studies that show the most likely outcome of leaving the cancer untreated and show that patients who have radiation and chemotherapy are much more likely to survive and even, dare I say it, be cured than people who are not so treated.

But spontaneous remissions do happen, so it’s possible G. would have been OK regardless. It’s just not the way to bet.

@Judith,

Have you heard the story told by Bernie Siegel about the oncologist who was doing radiation for months with a dead machine and whose patients were still getting both the effects and the side effects normal to radiation?

No, but I’ve heard the story of when the highway patrol pulled Werner Heisenberg over. The policeman asked, “Do you know how fast you were going?” and Heisenberg replied, “No, but I know exactly where I was!”

@Judith

Have you heard the story told by Bernie Siegel

Anybody can make up a story. Do you think Barack Obama was born in Kenya? Do you think aliens are flying halfway across the galaxy to abduct people and probe their anuses?. Do you think Pierre Trudeau had concentration camps constructed to imprison western separatists in the 1980s? I have heard stories about all these things.

Siegel’s theories concerning the purported benefits of psychosocial support therapy remain unproven. He has stated: “a vigorous immune system can overcome cancer if it is not interfered with, and emotional growth toward greater self-acceptance and fulfillment helps keep the immune system strong”, however he has published no scientific study supporting these claims.

In other words, he is another new age bull$hit artist who makes unsubstantiated claims, never collects any evidence to support them and has a convenient out to blame the patient when they don’t get better. What a repugnant money grubbing a$$hole.

EFT consists of tapping on accupuncture points while repeating affirmations or verbalising your problems. OK, as a psychologist, I can’t imagine how this would do anything other than perhaps distracting a person from problematic thoughts for a short while. It seems unrealted to the crux of the dilemma being considered.

So it’s at least doubly wrong: real psychotherapy involves learning more effective patterns of interaction and self- assessment, using language to change thought.

@Denice, I asked about EFT because I often find that the same practitioners who practice it also recommend or practice Reiki. I spoke with an LCSW some time ago about EFT, TFT, and similar treatments. She is not what one would consider as being an alternative medicine provider. Yet, she is attending meetings and events with other providers, and is being gradually introduced to these treatments. She is accepting that the treatments work with some patients because her peers state that the treatments work with their clients. When I questioned her as to specifically why she thinks that EFT works and how tapping on one’s forehead could “re-program” the way a patient’s brain functions and how they process thoughts, she dismissively stated that she didn’t know and it didn’t matter. She asked what’s the harm in trying it. She said that she just wants to help her patients, and EFT and similar techniques are easy enough to try. She said she doesn’t want to argue with people over treatments, but if they want to get better, then they can put the effort forth and try the techniques. It was quite a frustrating conversation.

There are a lot of mental health providers who assert that tapping can literally re-wire how one’s brain processes thought and emotion. No one can provide me with a specific response as to how this is happening. Frankly, I certainly believe it to be a load of cr-p, but I’m not the one with the psych degree and business license hanging on my wall. It is difficult to dispute her “what’s the harm” response.

A statement like “chemo and radiation kill something in a person” ( OTHER than cancer cells – which is what they’re supposed to kill) leads me to imagine that whosever made it believes in vital energy ( Qi, Prana, Mana, *elan vital* et al) that allows a person to live, heal and thrive. Unnatural interventions like chemicals and radiation from machines ( not the sun) interfere with Nature’s own healing powers..

Thus- how I understand it- healers and Reiki artists encourage natural energy patterns whilst SBM intervention works against it- stopping the natural healing from happening. One of the idiots I survey “adjusts” energy in people who have “imbalances” getting them to come into sych with his own pristinely perfect energy. SB meds and therapies- not being natural- can only harm according to this philosophy; non-organic foods, additives, GMOs and high heat can also destroy the natural life force inherent in foods- which would of course, assist the natural, self-healing. Pure foods and water, prayer , meditation and pure thoughts are healing- and probably non-acidic, if I follow their drift.

@ S:

Unfortunately your acquantance isn’t the only person who believes in whimsy-based psychology: Orac writes about Quackademia- it isn’t only doctors and nurses, you know.

Awfully enough, some of the anti-vaxxers we’re familiar with through AoA, TMR and the Canary Party include a social worker, school psychologist, counsellors…then there’s Carol Stott.. I can’t imagine how anyone who has ever studied the issues formally can buy AJW’s ideas and the various biomedical treatment scams.

@Denice Walter
Have you heard of EMDR? If you have, what do think of it?

BTW there is now something called Energy Psychology and they have yearly conferences for it. Many psychotherapists I know attend.

@Judith

BTW there is now something called Energy Psychology and they have yearly conferences for it.

There is also something called Holocaust Denial and they also have conferences for it. The fact that there are yearly conferences for something doesn’t make it legitimate. There was even a conference for geocentrism a couple of years ago.

@Narad
Here you go:

https://m360.energypsych.org/event.aspx?eventID=33234

Like it or not, the woo-meisters are taking over.

Interesting book:

http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Do-Harm-America/dp/1250015766

“How We Do Harm exposes the underbelly of healthcare today—the over treatment of the rich, the under treatment of the poor, the financial conflicts of interest that determine the care that physicians’ provide, insurance companies that don’t demand the best (or even the least expensive) care, and pharmaceutical companies concerned with selling drugs, regardless of whether they improve health or do harm.

Dr. Otis Brawley is the chief medical and scientific officer of The American Cancer Society, an oncologist with a dazzling clinical, research, and policy career. How We Do Harm pulls back the curtain on how medicine is really practiced in America. Brawley tells of doctors who select treatment based on payment they will receive, rather than on demonstrated scientific results; hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that seek out patients to treat even if they are not actually ill (but as long as their insurance will pay); a public primed to swallow the latest pill, no matter the cost; and rising healthcare costs for unnecessary—and often unproven—treatments that we all pay for. Brawley calls for rational healthcare, healthcare drawn from results-based, scientifically justifiable treatments, and not just the peddling of hot new drugs.

Brawley’s personal history – from a childhood in the gang-ridden streets of black Detroit, to the green hallways of Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest public hospital in the U.S., to the boardrooms of The American Cancer Society—results in a passionate view of medicine and the politics of illness in America – and a deep understanding of healthcare today. How We Do Harm is his well-reasoned manifesto for change.”

Interesting book

Posting three paragraphs of marketing copy, however, is not interesting.

Judith, what do you think about Bengston’s claims that he can cause cumulus clouds to dissipate by pointing at them. This is a claim that happens to fall into my domain of expertise since in happier times I spent a lot of time close to the bottoms of cumulus clouds in a glider and I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. This means that I know that cumulus clouds are huge*, and the thermals that create them contain a lot of energy. I also have a good although somewhat rusty understanding of thermodynamics. I find these claims of cloud busting risible and I am prepared to show my work as I did on the previous thread.

This time I will assume a more conservative dew point of only 2 C (275.15 K). Again starting with the volume of a 800 m cube of air rising from a quarter section of summer fallow field we have an air volume 512 million cubic meters. The vapor pressure of water at 2 C is 0.706 kPa (from Wikipedia**). Using the ideal gas law this gives us 0.706*512000/275.15/8.314 = 158000 kg mol of water vapor condensing into 2846 tonnes of liquid water to form the cloud. In order to make the cloud disappear Bengston must re-vaporize this water. The latent heat of vaporization of water at 2 C is 45.0 MegaJoules / kg/mol. This means vaporizing the cloud will require 158000*45.0 = 7110 GigaJoules. If Bengston busts 4 clouds an hour this will require an average power output of 7.9 Gigawatts. To put 7110 GJ in perspective this is equivalent to burning 263 tonnes of anthracite coal (27 GJ/tonne). Never mind healing Bengston has the answer to AGW (please don’t tell Stephen Harper or he will use it as excuse to nothing about Canada’s appalling CO2 emissions).

Now, what is more likely, everything we know about thermodynamics is spectacularly wrong, or someone is telling porkies?

*One thing you learn early is that cumulus clouds are much bigger and much farther away than they look.

**For all its’ faults, Wikipedia is a reliable source for constants like these.

@Marc Stephens is Insane re: Bernie Siegel …. GAAAAHHHH!!!! A good friend gave me Siegel’s stupid miracle book when I was diagnosed. It was my first introduction to breast cancer quackery, and I was horrified that a so-called medical doctor could be so ignorant and disrespectful. Talk about blame-the-patient mentality!

I went to the breastcancerwarrior site you linked to, and I’m disgusted. Ignorant and disrespectful don’t even begin to describe Siegel, who deserves to have his license revoked and be sued for malpractice. Here’s his advice to a breast cancer patient with recurrent disease asking how to choose a treatment:

“Dear TK — You get out of your head and into your heart. You need to do what feels right and stop thinking. You are not a… statistic. There is self-induced healing and people who don’t die when they’re supposed to. Doctors call them spontaneous remissions, which doesn’t teach them anything. Start living the life you love so your body knows you want to live. Your body doesn’t see death as the worst outcome so let it know you love it and your life and it will do all it can for you. ”

ACK!!!!

Militant,

It’s not quite the same feat as cloudbusting, but have you seen the story about the “miracle healer”/psychic in Israel who says he deflected Hamas missiles away from Gaza using his energy? He’s complaining that he’s not getting any of the credit:

“I see all these politicians thanking this and thanking that, but giving no credit to Oren Zarif,” said the controversial figure, as his interviewer chuckled quietly next to him. “You need to understand, when you see missiles falling harmlessly into open area, this is happening because Oren Zarif is operating in unconventional ways.”

Yeah, he refers to himself in the third person.

Kookoo for Cocoa Puffs…

http://www.thetwentyfirstfloor.com/?p=6810

Oh, MSII, I *totally* agree. No apologies needed! I wasn’t frustrated by your mention of this particular woo. In fact, it actually helps me by reminding me once again why I bother to even address crap like this. So many people tell me to not waste my time, but I’m inevitably drawn in.

I used to post a lot more on the breast cancer forum in response to quackery, but unfortunately the powers that be there prefer to give equal weight to all treatment options. It’s maddening, as you can imagine, to see woo allowed and encouraged there on a site specifically for breast cancer patient support (and owned by a breast cancer physician, for gosh sake! )

I wish I knew better what I could *DO* to make a difference in the real lives of real breast cancer patients who are directly targeted via quack-magnet forums like BCO. It’s so very frustrating, and I admit I let it get to me more than I should.

I really appreciate your posts here, by the way, and appreciate you thinking of me with regard to (anti-) breast cancer woo. I hate feeling so powerless, but it’s good to know I’m not alone. Thanks!

@MOB

Judith – you are thinking of science fiction grand master Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke’s law is generally stated as, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Let’s not forget this is also the same man who fell for a fairy hoax by a couple of pre-teen girls.

@S

It is difficult to dispute her “what’s the harm” response.

Have you seen the What’s The Harm website? It might have something useful there… but otherwise I’d make a point that encouraging avoidance of seeking properly trained medical assistance and medicines *is* the harm.

I know from experience that seeking alternative methods to meds/professional help is one way of both trying to avoid stigma and putting in some tough decisions about what to do. (Not aiming for victim blaming so much as suggesting apathy can do a lot to keep you away from SBM)

@Thenewme

I wish I knew better what I could *DO* to make a difference in the real lives of real breast cancer patients who are directly targeted via quack-magnet forums like BCO. It’s so very frustrating, and I admit I let it get to me more than I should.

I think the ‘difference’ is intangible for the most part. For me, my natural curiousity sent me reading different things and that sent me down a rabbit-hole of info. The more I read, and the more discussions like this I get myself involved in – even as a lurker – the more I learn about good from bad arguments. You may never hear from people whose lives change, or who think twice about something, or decide to go a different way: but trust me, it does happen.

The more people who speak up about this stuff, the better. The more people who say “this is my experience, this is the research, this is what really happened” the more you can counteract the silly testimonials and attempts to speak for the ones who *have* received chemo.

That’s my opinion on it, anyway.

@flip, the idea that they don’t really know if a treatment works – during a study even – is common and somewhat infuriating given the scars I have on my arm from all the blood they took outta me to track what was going on.

@LW

Thanks – my mistake, and serves me right for not proofreading before submitting. … Sigh… I’ll just waddle over here to remove my foot from my mouth…

@Al Kimeea

the idea that they don’t really know if a treatment works – during a study even – is common and somewhat infuriating given the scars I have on my arm from all the blood they took outta me to track what was going on.

Yes, during the study it’s hard to tell. After the study and with numerous repeats… not so much. (Also: ouch!)

Bengston’s treatment is not meant to kill the tumour but to strengthen the body.

Now The Mouse Whisperer needs a photo? No mention of that in The Star, just gushing paragraphs of him healing many things both mind and body – like a gangrenous leg.

Wait — so The Mouse Whisperer can strengthen the body and heal a gangrenous leg, but can’t strengthen the body enough to recover from the ravages of chemo? Which the body can generally recover from naturally, given time?

Oh wait, chemo is unnatural. Magic doesn’t work to repair damage done by unnatural things. Like taxol.

Marg, do you really not see how silly this special pleading is?

Oh, and Marg and Judith, how can Bengston heal cancer anyway, given that we’ve been assured that cancer is caused by unnatural toxins in the environment and did not exist prior to modern industry? It’s the result of poisoning by toxins produced by industry, hence it causes dead somethings, hence Bengston cannot heal it.

Judith,

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was one of the few cancers that was shown to respond well.

So you admit that chemotherapy isn’t completely useless? Yet you condemn those who prescribe it at all. Perhaps you should be a bit more precise in your language – not all chemotherapy is cytotoxic, and as you have noted some is adjuvant to surgery, some is the main treatment. Some types of chemotherapy are very effective, some are less so, some have serious side effects some have practically none.

Making sweeping generalizations isn’t very helpful, and as we have already discussed, even in situations where it is least effective such as unresectable pancreatic cancer or lung cancer it is not “next to useless”. A few months of extra life can be precious, as I’m sure you know from all your experience with terminal cancer patients. Those evil oncologists you condemn, who only prescribe chemotherapy for money, are probably saving people’s lives as they do so, unlike Reiki masters and energy healers.

Also, how do you know the people you know who survived their cancers survived due to chemotherapy? You are making an assumption there. They could have survived due to surgery. Or radiation.

I am making assumptions, but based on good evidence.

My friend with lymphoma didn’t have surgery or radiation; she had an aggressive form of lymphoma that kills within months without treatment.

My sister-in-law’s multiple myeloma which typically kills within a year was treated several years ago with chemotherapy alone and she is successfully maintained on drugs (thalidomide IIRC, I’ll check next time I talk to her).

My brother’s kidney cancer was treated with surgery, but the metastasis in his lung was treated successfully with chemotherapy, with no radiation. Maybe the lung tumor would have shrunk on its own, but I doubt it. It was growing before chemotherapy and shrank during it.

My friend with kidney cancer was also treated with surgery, losing both his kidneys, but the cancer had metastasized to his stomach, liver and pancreas so it is very probably chemotherapy that has kept him alive the past three years – I don’t think he has had any radiotherapy in that time. He is hoping to live until March when his first grandchild is due, so the few months chemotherapy may buy him are very precious indeed.

There is some doubt in there of course, but so little I feel confident enough to credit the chemotherapy in most cases.

Or luck.

By “luck” I assume you mean the natural variation in survival when untreated, but all of them have survived much longer than you would expect if they hadn’t had chemotherapy.

Or attitude.

There is little evidence that people’s attitudes have any effect on their survival and a lot of evidence that it does not. It’s another one of those things that everyone knows but isn’t true. IIRC some years ago there was a clinical trial of breast cancer patients that suggested an effect of a positive attitude, but several studies since have failed to replicate it. It seems that milder symptoms lead to a more positive attitude and a better outcome, not vice versa.

I am sure there is a name you all have for making such an assumption and you would use it if I made the same sort of comment for someone allegedly surviving due to energy treatments.

I was basing my statement on clinical trials that prove that chemotherapy greatly increases people’s chances of survival in the cancers my friends and relatives have or had. Where is the evidence that proves the same about energy treatments? Where is the aggressive lymphoma patient who only had energy treatment and is still alive 30 years later? The outcomes in the energy healing anecdotes you have related fall within the expected range of outcomes for untreated cancers, the outcomes in my chemotherapy anecdotes do not.

@MA, I don’t think so. I’ll check when I get home. I kept it to write something but never got around to it and now I might since he’s squeaked into my universe again.

@LW despite the word itself being used since ancient times to describe the disease. Must of been something else the egyptians were burning off.

@flip it was difficult for my minder and myself to know for sure during the study, but there are other bloody indicators that show a positive progression for us to follow/discuss. Those behind the curtain were following the progress of the treatment no problemo, having access to all the data.

I was able to figure out which arm of five I was in after it ended of course. One lab rat broke open his pills, found they were sweet and concluded he was on placebo. The real good news for me didn’t come until much later but I could feel I was healthier. Having said that, I felt that way during the first failed study. Placebo strikes again!

Ouchie, from the bloodletting? Not really, the lady was very good, 98% painless and the rest I felt a little prick. By the end she said she could feel the scar tissue.

@LW

Wait — so The Mouse Whisperer can strengthen the body and heal a gangrenous leg, but can’t strengthen the body enough to recover from the ravages of chemo? Which the body can generally recover from naturally, given time?

Oh wait, chemo is unnatural. Magic doesn’t work to repair damage done by unnatural things. Like taxol.

This kind of thinking shows just how much they’re applying themselves not to the real world, but to the supernatural instead…

@LW despite the word itself being used since ancient times to describe the disease. Must of been something else the egyptians were burning off.

I do hope it was apparent that I was being facetious. But “cancer is caused by unnatural toxins created by modern industry” is a trope beloved of many newagers. If only we lived in a pure state of nature we wouldn’t have all these problems…

“here is a website”

it would be really useful to have a preview button

@ Judith:

I was being facetious: how would moving your eyes from side to side or in ANY particular pattern have any sort of effect on complex patterns of social interaction and internal self-regard guided by language.

People’s problems with being-in-the-world are a complex of physiological and social as well as linguistic: what have eye movements to do with that?

I’m on my way out the door…

@Flip
Read his book.

Marc Stephens Is Insane:

Is anyone here familiar with radiology equipment? Would it even be possible for it to operate without the radioactive media without anyone knowing for over a month? This story smacks of urban legend to moi.

I’m a software engineer, and one popular cautionary tale in my field is the THERAC-25. It was a radiotherapy machine with a software defect that turned out to be fatal — specifically, a class of software bug called a race condition, which occurs only when events happen in a specific order and a specific timing. There were severe radiation injuries and a number of deaths as well. Given how long it took to figure out that this machine was killing people (two years), I could believe a machine could function for a month without anyone realizing it was silently failing to do anything.

I’m a tad more skeptical of the part of the story that claims patients were still getting all the effects and side effects of radiation, though….

Krebiozen:

I had heard that one before, it’s repeated in this article by Siegel. I’m not an expert on radiotherapy by any means, but don’t radiotherapy machines generally use x-rays? I don’t think I have heard of machines which contain a radioisotope that someone could forget to replace without anyone noticing.

Yes, they use x-rays. X-rays can be produced lots of ways. Your typical x-ray machine uses an x-ray tube that works in principle very much like a TV tube or a flourescent light, except that it emits x-rays instead of visible light. Many radiotherapy machines do the same thing; I believe the THERAC-25 did, for instance. But this takes a lot of power; portable machines, machines in developing countries, and some very old machines do still use radioisotopes. You’d *think* nobody could forget to replace it without anyone noticing, but stranger things have happened. One famous incident was basically the reverse of that — a radiotherapy machine was abandoned in a defunct hospital, and nobody had removed the cesium-137 source. A couple of scavengers broke into the abandoned hospital, found the device, and took it as scrap. They found an interesting glowing blue powder inside. The story gets pretty awful from there on out, especially once people started playing with the interesting powder. Five people died, but over a hundred thousand were exposed. (Still, I don’t think removal of a source would be at all normal. You need shielding and stuff like that; removing it would be a very obvious event. But maybe if the paperwork wasn’t filed, and someone was on vacation and several others involved got laid off or retired or were hit by busses — well, stranger things have happened, and one lesson I’ve learned in my job is that you can never assume everybody before you has done their job properly; you probably shouldn’t even assume that you yourself have done your job properly.)

tl;dr — I also find the story suspicious. But not because it’s inconceivable that someone would screw up the radiotherapy machine that badly. 😉

You’d *think* nobody could forget to replace it without anyone noticing, but stranger things have happened.

Isn’t it necessary to take films to verify the patient setup in the first place? This story also strikes me as fishy.

I should be really doing something else, but instead I’ve been looking at the International Energy Psychology Conference that Judith kindly posted a link to – it’s what Orac might describe as a target-rich environment.

There’s Gary Craig the developer of EFT (utterly implausible and unsurprisingly doesn’t work), who offers an entire day on “The Power of Ethical Marketing – Believability Builds Your Business and Your Reputation” which is presumably all about making your bulll$hit believable. He also offers a session entitled ‘A New Psychology – The Ultimate Healing Tool’, the modest and understated blurb for which I cannot resist quoting in full:

Walk with me through this new doorway and learn why all the standard books on psychology need to be rewritten. In this engaging 90 minute presentation, I will be introducing a New Psychology that is much more promising than EFT, medicine or anything else this world has to offer. Join with me in this pioneering new concept that blends spirituality with Quantum Physics into a compelling direction that is destined to take the healing field in a new direction. Discover that the Ultimate Healing Tool isn’t a method or a protocol or something you buy at the pharmacy. It is you.

More promising than medicine my a$$.

Marilyn Mandala Schlitz “helps Deepak Chopra explore the idea of nonlocality” (which sounds like a euphemism to me) and is President and CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a notorious center of pseudoscience. She is one of the authors of a recent study ‘Distant healing of surgical wounds: an exploratory study’ PMID 22742672. It looked at breast surgery patients, who were either blinded and received distant healing or no distant healing, or were unblinded and knew they were receiving distant healing.

The study found “No differences in the main measures were observed across the three groups”, which seems pretty unambiguous to me, but after some goal-post shifting sorry, I mean “post-hoc observations”, the study concludes, “some of the ambiguity observed in earlier DHI studies may be attributable to interactions among participants’ and healers’ beliefs, their expectations, and their motivations”.

Gary Schwartz was there, he is responsible for some of the most embarrassingly credulous “research” on mediums I have ever come across, and he apparently believes that ‘Medium’ is a documentary (check out his work with Allison Dubois).

Amit Goswami appears in ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?’ a movie so indescribably awful that I still haven’t managed to sit through it, despite several courageous attempts. I just couldn’t get past the bit where they claimed that native Americans literally couldn’t see the invading Europeans ships, apart from the enlightened shaman with his elevated state of consciousness. Dr. Goswami says in the movie, “The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.” That sounds like someone in the throes of a 1960s acid trip to me; no further comment on Dr. Goswami required I think.

Daniel Siegel seems to me to be the only one of these people who is at all able to distinguish things that go on inside people’s heads from those that go on outside them. Even he has a tendency to lapse into claims like:

I think an outcome of our brain development is that we think we’re all separate, when in fact we’re all interconnected like cells in the body. And so with mindfulness practice, we can actually use science to dissolve this optical delusion or separateness so we come to feel the truth, which is that we’re all deeply interconnected and interdependent.

That’s not an existential truth we need to wake up to, it’s an ideal we should be striving towards.

Just to add to the wooish flavor there were also sessions on ‘Healing Past Life Trauma’, ‘Integral Qi Energetics’ and, not to be missed, ‘Quantum Healing in Mind-Body Medicine’ from the aforementioned Dr. Goswami, who is allegedly a theoretical nuclear physicist who should know better.

I can’t say I’m sorry I missed it.

@Denice, If I have your permission, I’d like to compile some of your comments into a single document, and send them to that LCSW. I am sure she will see that as being argumentative and confrontational, but in any case, I’m interested in her response.

Along this line, there are other mental health providers who believe that having their patients view a series of colored lights is an effective treatment for depression, and perhaps other illnesses.

@al kimeea, no problems here either.

I was just afraid someone else might read my comment and think I actually believed that “[Cancer is] the result of poisoning by toxins produced by industry, hence it causes dead somethings, hence Bengston cannot heal it.” Which I don’t. Except for the statement that Bengston cannot heal it. I do believe that.

These are the two most egregious examples from the website: from a list of the conditions the recordings can “treat” and anonymous testimonials of their success. I guess he doesn’t mention cancer because it’s a British company and the Cancer Act applies.

AIDS

In AIDS, an AIDS healing download was listened to three times a day by a 36 year old woman and full recovery was clear 17 days later, she was better in all ways, could walk long distances (for example 5km instead of 100 meters), could work, could eat well, and all the symptoms had disappeared.

Malaria
(where there is fever, severe pain, weakness, etc)
The man (see photo) was better from malaria symptoms, after listening non-stop for 20 minutes in an hour, with no other treatment. Normal treatment takes 3 to 4 days, often only half works and has complications/weakness that remains for a week. In this case, the man (on the right) the morning after the night of malaria is standing with his kiln of 4000 bricks he is firing for building his house; this was such a rapid recovery that it is almost unheard of. This was also possibly the fastest cure ever seen.

Wouldn’t you like to be back at work or up and about tomorrow?

I can imagine a radio station that plays nothing but these resonance recordings. “Coming up at 2, the Herpes Hour…right now the sound of healing continues as we cure your chlamydia…Don’t forgot this weekend we go all malaria so you can be back at work Monday morning…”

If they’re homeopathic recordings, are they less effective the louder you play them?

Marc Stevens Is Insanely Funny

If they’re homeopathic recordings, are they less effective the louder you play them?

These guys don’t seem to think so.

Marc Stephens Is Insanely Funny, I agree. I’m starting to think there should be a page added to RI for the most quotable quotes.

Hum, the word practice in my last comment should have had a line marked through it, crossing it out.

S Krebiozen

isn’t it “”phrase”” without the “

open with a shift+comma and close with a shift+period with a key to the right of the right shift key before the closing strike

Thanks, Krebiozen and Al.

Al, I’m not sure I understand your comment. I call them tags, instead of phrases, but code works for me. Hopefully, this will not work. I use the greater-than and lesser-than characters, not the brackets.

S,
I should have specified to use the greater than and less than characters instead of the square brackets in my example, but you appear to have divined my meaning anyway.

@S
If it were “energy” by the definition we now give to the word distance would dissipate it. The phone is also an unnecessary accoutrement to the process. According to Bengston (and any number of others) distance is immaterial. Since you don’t think energy healing in person is possible, I doubt that you will have any greater regard for distance healing.

@Krebiozen
Thank you for your stories of cancer survival. In truth my experience with chemotherapy has been limited to what I have seen and heard and most of it has not been positive. It was good to read something positive.

I’ve heard of EMDR and don’t think very much of it: again, what would the mechanism of action be?

What we call mental illness and emotional problems can be both biochemical and psych-social- how in the world can blinking your eyes affect how you think and behave amongst people in the real world?

KIds take a long time to develop realistic ideas about the world and their fellows- including self-evaluation and self-regulation through language- what we call executive functioning: how can that be changed and all tidied up when amiss- by BLINKING! The idea is actually blinking mad.

I’m sorry, Denice, but this that you’ve presented here is a massive straw man, not in any way a realistic reflection of EMDR. It would be like me mocking the possibility that “talking therapy” could be of any use by asking rhetorically “how could merely uttering syllables at another person, who utters syllables back at you, possibly do anything to solve people’s real problems??”

I’ve had EMDR twice, and the effects of those sessions were pretty impressive, if somewhat unpredictable. In both cases, the therapist and I worked together to identify a statement that I accepted intellectually but was unable to come to terms with emotionally. I then followed the pencil he held as he moved it back and forth within my field of vision; it produced a rather unpleasant fatigue in the eyeball muscles, and we continued to talk about the statement I’d identified.

The two sessions had rather different results. In the first session, it led to a moment where I simply suddenly saw the truth of the identified statement. Remember, this was a statement I already accepted to be true intellectually, but emotionally could not accept. Suddenly it was like … the best comparison I can give is the difference between following all the steps of a mathematical proof, and on the other hand seeing a really well-constructed illustration of the proof. One convinces you, the other CONVINCES you.

The second session … went a bit differently. Even though we had worked on a statement beforehand, my mind actually went to a very different incident, one I hadn’t thought of in years, one I had always carried guilt and pain from. That incident suddenly came back to me, and I saw for the first time that – even though I would have entirely denied that I blamed myself for it – I did, in fact. I knew the accusations against me were false but blamed myself for being, somehow, the sort of person who gets suspected of such things. Recalling it in the session, for the first time I saw that I couldn’t take responsibility for others’ mistaken judgments of me, and again, it wasn’t merely accepting it on an intellectual level, but seeing the truth of it. … I suspect that the unpredicted results from that session, as positive as they were, were a major reason we didn’t go farther with the EMDR.

Now, do the results from those sessions prove that EMDR works? No; that’s the fallacy of affirming the consequent. However, I can say very confidently that something sure happened in those sessions that had never happened before or since. Whether it was EMDR, hypnosis, or some other effect, I can’t claim to know from just my own personal experience with it.

However, I do think it deserves better than dismissal with the straw man “‘all your problems can be solved by BLINKING!!’ Hogwash!”

The phone is also an unnecessary accoutrement to the process. According to Bengston (and any number of others) distance is immaterial.

You might as well get it over with and throw in time. In essence, all you’re asserting is that you don’t really mean ‘energy’ when you say “energy,” you mean energy.

@Judith – count me in as someone who had a positive chemo experience. Not bad at all and I’m NED (no evidence if disease). Be careful when you talk about something of which you know nothing about….and I hope you never do.

I for some reason cannot find the reference to Oren Zarif from earlier in the day to properly credit it, but this fellow really seems to be a winner in this category of competition.

Narad,

Here was my original link about Oren Zarif. Thanks for posting your links: they provided some laughs at poor Oren’s expense.

http://www.thetwentyfirstfloor.com/?p=6810

Judith and/or Marg – could you point out the flaw in my thermodynamic calculations that show that the claims of Begston’s “cloud busting” are risible? Even dissolving a small cloud would require an enormous energy expenditure equivalent to burning a dump-truck load of high grade coal.

Which is more likely, every thing we know about physics and thermodynamics is not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong or someone is telling porkies*?

I got this delightful Cockneyism from Ben Goldacre (pork pies = lies)

I felt a little prick
I feel the same way after being rude to idiots on the internet, but I get over it.

Continuing along:
I think that the reason that some might resort to techniques like EMDR or hypnosis is to shorten the amount of time spent discussing issues with the therapist; in the early days, pioneers of psychotherapy used hypnosis, free-association and the predecessor to the lie detector.

Similarly, utilising evocative therapies and imagination – perhaps discussing dreams and fantasies- are another avenue. I feel that the reason some far-fetched activities like past-life regression and energy work might have useful effects is because the client becomes aware of emotions not usually present and has someone there who is sympatheteic to listen and encourage further exploration.

I have personally used a form of mild self-hypnosis on myself- it’s not too far removed from self-regulation of your activities and emotions through inner speech.
(-btw- I don’t do any of those type of therapy on people- just straight forward counselling about specific issues and problems usually related to educational and vocational actviities)

And I can think of may other more effacacious ways of getting closer to deeply seated emotional issues.

@ Antaeus:

I’m sorry if you think that you’re wasting your time: forgive the hyperbole, I could probably have been more precise in saying that I don’t think it’s the EYE MOVEMENTS that do it: it is what ELSE is going on- analysing dreams was called the “royal road to the unconscious”, hypnosis was used to start exploration, similarly any of the other modes of evoking underlying feelings and thoughts. It’s not the hypnosis ( or the other actions) that change things but what occcurs later
when a person discusses what comes out and integrates it into his or her life. By executive functioning, I mean the complex evaluations of self and other,ways of managing emotions we use and several other abilities we use in day-to-day life.

I believe that EFT and EMDR may be presented as
something beyond what they actually are: ways to address underlying emotional issues prior to talk therapy/ CBT. It’s not magic, it’s not a secret pathway. If it works it’s because OTHER things happened- i.e the conversation with the therapist and the realisations you made.

I won’t waste your time any further.

@Antaeus
You are in a similar position with EMDR as I am with energy healing. I have experienced energy healing and seen it work, yet because other people have not, and because there are no studies that unequivocally demonstrate a sufficiently significant effect, they dismiss it, in somewhat contemptuous terms, as DW did with EMDR.

An article in Scientific American on EMDR (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=emdr-taking-a-closer-look) says that it works better than nothing, probably better than supportive listening alone, but not better than standard behavior and cognitive-behavior therapies. The article concludes that “not a shred of good evidence exists that EMDR is superior to exposure-based treatments that behavior and cognitive-behavior therapists have been administering routinely for decades”.

And yet you felt it do something.

The same way it is said about Reiki, for instance, that the calming effect or pain reduction it shows (with measured physiological correlates) is due to the other person’s presence or to the placebo effect.

Oh, and to be in possession of The Documents The Man Wouldn’t Let See The Light of Day Anyway. Can’t forget that.

@Denice Walter
That was not Antaeus’ experience. You are restructuring his experience to fit your model.

That was not Antaeus’ experience. You are restructuring his experience to fit your model.

What, pray tell, does this have to do with ray-qi, Marg? Oh, wait, I have an idea.

Comparing scepticism about EMDR to scepticism about Reiki is disingenuous. The implausibility of EMDR is dwarfed by the implausibility of Reiki.

@Marg

You really have given up haven’t you? It’s nice that you have nothing left you’re now reliant on Judith to do the heavy lifting for you…

Oh yes: Yet another tour of distractions away from the fact that MARG, the contemptible purse-snatcher of science, HAS NO EVIDENCE THAT ENERGY HEALING WORKS

Marg to Flip:

I’m going to have to start calling you a “one-trick pony”.

BAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh, that is rich! Marg, maybe you can do some hand-waving to repair the irony meter you just blew up.

@Chemomomo –

Charlatans have no code of ethics. That’s why they’ve chosen to become charlatans.

WOULDN’T be so special.

@Marg

I’m going to have to start calling you a “one-trick pony”.

And maybe I’m going to have to start calling you Gish gallop pony.

Yet again, I have to remind you that I wouldn’t be so repetitive if you’d do us all a favour and stop running around in circles. Put up some evidence or shut up with the logical fallacies.

By the way: that’s yet another comment in the column of not actually proving that energy healing works. See – if you had responded with some evidence, or a study, or something, maybe I’d change my comments by discussing said evidence…

Once again, Marg proves herself incapable of rising above playground retorts.

But that is essentially just your opinion.You are assigning degrees of implausibility.

EMDR claims that moving around the eyes, which are connected to the brain, might have a specific effect on the brain. Reiki masters claim they can beam an unknown healing energy out of their hands, curing cancer and other illnesses even at a distance. Equally plausible? Just my opinion? I don’t think so.

@Flip
And in fact, you are misleading them.

*sigh*  I should have known the purse-snatchers of science would descend to fit anything unguarded into their narrative.  All right, then.

First of all, let’s agree to put aside any claims of “but there’s easier/cheaper/more reliable ways of achieving the same effect” because even if COMPLETELY TRUE, those claims are irrelevant to the question under discussion, which is “does EMDR have this effect?”

Second, the idea behind EMDR as a useful component of a therapeutic approach (which is all it was ever claimed to be, which is why mocking the idea that it could function as a therapy in isolation is a straw man) is that “lessons” learned under traumatic circumstances can be maladaptive to later life (being very, very prone to overgeneralization) but very, very strongly embedded due to the trauma.  For instance, a case of illness that follows ingestion of a particular food may cause the mind to “learn” that the food is dangerous, and this can result in violent dislike of the food afterwards, even if it’s proved that the food was not the source of the illness after all:  the brain “knows” that the food was responsible and won’t abandon that “knowledge.”  A modality that allows the brain to be less rigid with what it “knows” might allow new, more adaptive lessons to fairly compete with the lessons laid down by traumatic events.

When is the brain less rigid with what it “knows”?  When it is dreaming; in dreams we accept as given facts things our conscious mind would rightly reject as utterly false in a waking state.  If we could find some way to bring a little of that flexibility of the dream state into a waking state, it might allow someone struggling to not allow trauma-lessons to dominate their thinking to bring about needed changes in their thinking.

What is the prior plausibility that there might be a “bug” in the regulation of dreaming that allows us to induce some of its effects in the midst of a waking state?  I’d say, pretty good, actually.  Evolution tends to produce systems that, while functional in the main, have weird quirks and bugs.  Why should seeing others yawn make us sleepy ourselves?  It makes little sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it’s still a well-known quirk of the system.  It’s not implausible that there might be other, less documented bugs, some of which might have uses.

It even avoids an otherwise potent objection, that of “if this was really part of the human system, wouldn’t we have evolved to take advantage of it?”  That objection is strong against, say, the claim that humans leave 90% of their brains fallow when they could be using them just as well as the 10%, or the claim that blinking by itself would have therapeutic effects.  However, if useful exploitation of such a hypothesized “bug” would require not just inducing the mental state but second-guessing one’s own thinking in order to devise a new set of thoughts to get oneself to think while in such a state – well, that’s a pretty tall order to expect from evolution.

Now, how does that compare to the prior plausibility of energy healing, as described by the purse-snatchers of science and other adherents?  Even if we bend over backwards to give energy healing the benefit of the doubt – for instance, answering “how does it always know what to do to have a healing effect rather than hurting?” with “maybe it just supplies the body with energy that can be employed in the body’s own healing” (ignore for the moment the fact that this would make auto-immune diseases worse) – we’re still left with utter implausibilities such as “this energy can be directed accurately over hundreds and thousands of miles by an originator who doesn’t even know where in the world the recipient is, as long as the originator has seen a photo of the recipient” and “this energy might be diverted to recipients the originator is actively trying not to affect, because the universe recognizes such macro-level human descriptors as ‘part of the same experiment’ and ‘quantum entangles’ together their health with those the originator is trying to direct energy to”?  If you tell me that seems plausible considering all you know of science, that tells me what you know of science is very little.

@Chemmomo
The woman is certainly flaky and I don’t hold truck with the idea of her not asking people’s permission. There was a discussion about her on a reiki site and people generally disapproved of the way she carried on. Does that answer your question?

And, from Judith’s Toronto Bioenergy Associates directly, this gem:

Dr. Larry Dossey divides medicine into three “Eras”. “Era I” medicine, which is medical practice as we know it, looks at the body as a machine. “Era II” medicine recognizes the power of the mind and introduces such concepts as meditation and biofeedback into treatment. “Era III” medicine brings the discoveries of quantum physics and a recognition of the body as a matrix of energy and information into the picture. The energy healing we do at Toronto Bioenergy Associates works with the body in this field of energy and information, creating possibilities for healing that can seem miraculous from the point of view of the “Era I” paradigm.

The trick with invoking Larry Dorsey is the question why the more accurate name Toronto Intercessory Prayer and Psychokinesis Associates wasn’t used instead.

Anyone who goes on about “Gish gallop” and writes in CAPITAL LETTERS should not go on about playground retorts. People and stones and glass houses and all that.

You seem not to understand this element of rhetoric, Marg.

Reiki pretty much involves making up an entire new branch of physics all at once and applying it right away instead of, say, proving this mystical stuff actually exists at all, and building one step at a time.

One might also note that the well-known ability to send ray-qi back in time would seem to imply experimental constraints by way of the CPT theorem, which, you know, has to do with what “quantum physicists” “call” “the Field.”

@Marg

And in fact, you are misleading them.

Please point me to the evidence you have posted – that *isn’t* Bengston, since that stuff has already been thoroughly refuted. Even if his work wasn’t, that’s one person; consensus is usually required in science because it means the studies have been reproduced. So, either show me a bunch of excellent studies I can read on Pubmed, or show me one large excellent meta-analysis I can read. I do not recall you doing this in the 1900+ posts so far. Indeed the people who have been posting studies and not anecdotes, newspaper articles, or blogs, have been… hmmm, the regulars here.

Am I *really* misleading anyone by pointing out those facts? Especially when the majority of it happened at a several-months-old thread that lurkers might not see?

Anyone who goes on about “Gish gallop” and writes in CAPITAL LETTERS should not go on about playground retorts. People and stones and glass houses and all that.

My use of caps etc has been a gradual thing due to the fact that no matter how many times I or others ask you questions, we receive very little other than … yep, you guessed it, Gish gallop and logical fallacies. You don’t even bother rebutting them, you just continue on like a runaway train.

For clarity: if you hadn’t noticed, I started off giving you the benefit of both politeness and doubt. After many many comments and questions and rebuttals, your lack of proper response got on my nerves. You are obtuse, inconsistent, ignorant of high school science, and willing to gloss over anything that doesn’t fit your POV. Instead of supporting your assertions, you simply dismiss everything that is said to you without consideration. You ignore replies that explain things; and then ignore them fifty times over as we re-explain.

You refuse, 100%, every time, to accept that many of us would happily change our minds if something was provided to us of a certain standard; and continue to build strawmen of extreme stature no matter how many times it’s explained to you that it’s false.

It’s not up to us to provide evidence, and it’s not reasonable to expect us to simply take your word for it.

Now if you stopped posting crap and started discussing things like an adult, I’d be more inclined to engage in a polite manner. You want to troll, that’s fine. I’ll play along and troll you back. For every inane retort you will come up with, I will ensure that no one forgets that you have not posted a single shred of evidence in your favour.

By the way, I note that once again you do not post evidence, but instead rely on tone trolling. Gee, wow – and you wonder *why* I repeat myself? In fact, you’re so dull at this point that I seem to be the only one willing to respond to you regularly, the others have evidently put you on a ‘do not bother’ list and are expending more energy on fresher targets.

Speaking of which:

@Judith

Are you ignoring my questions?

A long time ago, I worked for a non-profit; my work included counselling people who had been diagnosed with a serious condition- obviously their lives were fraught with anxiety and fear. A few were interested in
eastern forms of meditation and physical activities, so I took it upon myself and studied t’ai chi and yoga -on my own, over time**- to discover what might be of use to these clients. I found- admixed with woo and religion- exercise, relaxation techniques, quietude and cameraderie amongst the students and instructors. I think that these activities might appeal to some of the clients and benefit them. I informed them about what I liked: it should be noted that the providers of these activities often advocated spiritual activities and assumed vital energy as a force for healing. Thus, what they promote/ describe as benefits of their instruction and what I discovered ( and what SB research has found) are quite different.

I think it’s important if you are an advocate of SBM to stick to what can be illustrated by data.

There’s a possibility that what Marg and Judith advocate has merit and does really help people BUT not in the way that they think. The people who taught these eastern exercise systems believed in something beyond what yours truly- materialist, through and through- saw demonstrated. It’s possible that some people are actually searching for a spiritual connection or sublime experience beyond the work-a-day world we all inhabit BUT that has nothing to do with me. If some of my clients found spiritual promise and healing that also had nothing to do with me- and I probably
would call it something else-more psychological than spiritual

** and yes, I was actually rather good at these activities.

There’s a possibility that what Marg and Judith advocate has merit and does really help people BUT not in the way that they think. The people who taught these eastern exercise systems believed in something beyond what yours truly- materialist, through and through- saw demonstrated.

What Marg and Judith advocate is fraudulent by philosophical as well as physical standards, so I am inclined to disagree. I realize that my repeated invocation of Theosophy is getting… well, repetitive, but I think it’s accurate. What’s on offer is the worst of both worlds.

@MI Dawn

Is anyone else bored with Marg and Judith?

*Raises hand* “Aye”

It may be worth noting that the inventor of Reiki died of a stroke at the age of 60. He was using real super-secret Reiki, not the fake Reiki that was introduced to the west. Maybe he was doing it wrong.

In this study Reiki appeared to make chemotherapy patients feel better when compared to chemotherapy alone, but sham Reiki worked just as well, which suggests that real Reiki is no different to sham Reiki. This article by Edzard Ernst discussing the same study covers much of the ground we have been discussing here.

(Put another way, I consider “energy healing” not just to be an invitation to psychologically stay right where you are, but an offer to be billed for the digging of a post with tether to help keep you there, if one is to consider it in such terms.)

I’m in partial agreement, but this would vary with the type of energy treatment involved. If they are healing you for karma, as in something you did wrong in a past life, then this would be much more than an “invitation to stay right where you are”, it could very likely set a patient further back by a somewhat complicated scenario of self-blame. In this situation, the healer would be blaming the patient for their own illness, with the “cure” of healing/fixing their karma as unreachable. As the patient’s medical condition worsens, it supports the healer’s contention as to the presence of bad karma, and may make the patient feel as if they have done too much wrong (too much bad karma) to overcome. This may have the effect of making the patient feel they are inherently evil and spreading that evil to others around them, as a very ill, and therefore needy patient would certainly effect others around them in one way or another.

God forbid that people should be bored here. I am just listening to this:

http://www.cbc.ca/whitecoat/blog/2012/11/23/sully-sullenberger-lessons-from-my-hero/

Sully Sullenberger, the Hudson river landing hero, has become a consultant to bring the lessons from aviation emergencies to the operating room.

Don’t jump on me for it being irrelevant to this thread; I am bringing you something worthwhile to listen to.

Mr O’Brien:

And here I thought that ‘kitting’ was the preparation, creation and/ or stocking, of KITS.
Good to know.

I only find you and Marg boring. I am not bored in general.

For my entertainment, I have for the first time, been reading Mark Twain. I’m not for reading something just because it’s well known, but after coming across more and more of his work through skeptic sites, I decided it was likely I would enjoy his work and took it upon myself to start educating myself on it. (And I’m loving his work so far.)

I’m also reading several comment threads on several sites, enjoying my favourite TV show, working on a project of my own and several for other people, and am about 1500 posts behind reading blogs I’m subscribed to – and falling further behind now that ‘Bad Astronomy’ has moved to Slate. Not to mention the podcasts I’ve been neglecting.

Bored? Only of your lack of evidence… Which I see you’re now following in Marg’s footsteps by posting non sequiturs.

No wonder people start talking about food recipes here after a while…

flip,

I have for the first time, been reading Mark Twain

Don’t miss Twain on Christian Science. The parallels with contemporary nonsense are striking.

Sully Sullenberger, the Hudson river landing hero, has become a consultant to bring the lessons from aviation emergencies to the operating room.

This does sound interesting, and I will listen in when I have a chance. I expect that Reiki will play as much of a role in Sully’s recommendations for surgery as it does in aviation.

Is anyone else bored with Marg and Judith?

Count me in.

Alain

Here is another link

Judith, when you’re down to just hacking up arbitary links to radio programs and YouTube like so much flak, it’s time to reconsider whether you actually have anything left to say.

And Judith, even if mister Sullenberger would have something positive to say about reiki, it just proves he should stick to flying airplanes.

@Judith

I did not say “God forbid anyone should be bored”; I wrote “God forbid anyone should be bored here.

Yes and I replied by noting that if I am bored here, I can merely go away and do other things. Besides, you’re quibbling over semantics now. This proves energy healing works how?

Here is another link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUbfRzxNy20.

Do you agree with Dr. Goldman?

I do not respond to requests to view youtube videos. If you have a link to peer-reviewed literature on energy healing I can read – on Pubmed or via a journal’s website – I will read it.

I quote from what I said on another thread, which applies to youtube as much as it does to books:

Books are not papers, and depending on how bad the author/editor is, may not reference papers on the subject; or may misquote, cherry pick or otherwise bias the impression of the reader as to the true nature of the topic at hand.

This is why we like Pubmed, it allows us to find and read the actual papers referenced, and see for ourselves the actual data behind the subject. That’s what scepticism is: finding and reading the data and not taking someone’s word for it.

Even if I were to find a book well-written and the person’s opinion I agreed with, it does not mean that the same book or author has been entirely correct. Furthmore, books and experiments take many years to write, and even more to research. In the time it takes to get the book/paper through editorial oversight and printing, new experiments have taken place which give new information that can greatly change the nature of the understanding of that subject. This means that books can be extremely out of date very quickly: and why Pubmed is preferred because one can find the latest info as it is published and get a better and more up-to-date perspective of the whole.

Reliance on one book or paper is not a good idea, because it doesn’t fully encompass the data on the subject. Reliance on one book or paper suggests an unwillingness to read the whole, and an even greater unwillingness to consider that a subject must be judged not just on the ‘proofs’ but also on the ‘disproofs’ as well. If one outweighs the other, then we can lean towards agreeing with proven or unproven. When new evidence for either side is given, we adjust our position accordingly. That is what science does, and that is totally NOT what you seem to be doing.

@Judith, I too am curious as to how an energy healer can recognize when they have made a mistake. How would they know if the patient’s continued illness is due to their own negative energy or due to the healer using the wrong type of energy?

Could a healer’s bad energy seep through and damage the patient? Surely energy healers are not immune to iatrogenic errors.

Marg and Judith, I found Reiki Master Laura Bruno’s blog, which addresses some of my questions. This Master healer states that when the patient’s condition continues to decline despite their Reiki treatments, they are experiencing a Herxheimer reaction. In the case of their Lyme disease patient, discussed below, their infectious disease can not fully heal despite their Reiki and other medical treatments until “all lessons have been learned”. According to this Reiki Master, the patient may be so highly advanced from being a healer in their own past life, that they have become adept at sidestepping their healing treatments. http://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/healing-lyme-disease/

Most of those affected are, in this lifetime or certainly in previous ones, highly advanced healers. This awareness (whether conscious or completely subconscious) makes them adept at sidestepping treatments that would bring about healing before the lessons take root.

Yes, the healing comes when all lessons have been learned. It can come gradually, though. 🙂 You don’t need to learn every single lesson at once in order to start feeling much better. The Reiki attunement symptoms sound like a Herx reaction to the powerfully cleansing and vibration raising experience. All the things you’re doing are good things. Remember, Lyme is a vibrational disease. Everything is, but Lyme in particular, seems to respond well to raising your vibration completely out of the frequency of Lyme…

If you are wanting a more personalized reading you would need to schedule a private session, but the general information covers a lot of the areas affected. I see a fair amount of B12 deficiency and have written on that before, as well as given talks about it.

Laura Bruno writes that she is happy to spread what she calls hope and offers Medical Intuition sessions for $175 per hour. She seems to think she can diagnose a B12 deficiency from a distance, and for a patient client she has never even met – sight unseen, no tests, just her special energy powers. One testimonial even thanks her for curing their infectious disease. She offers a 3-pack for $333, and a Quickie for $75. This could be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that she is toying with people’s lives and health. http://laurabruno.wordpress.com/testimonials/

”Laura Bruno did what half a dozen doctors did not: She cured me of an infection that had persisted for two months, through harsh medication after harsh medication. With no advance warning of what my call would be about, Laura was able to pinpoint the problem on the spot and suggest effective treatments. Instead of looking at a chart and sending me to the drugstore for the chemicals that ‘work for everyone else,’ Laura looked at the source of the problem, and her solutions took into account my whole body, including my diet – something the Western doctors never stopped to consider but that turned out to be a major cause. Thanks to Laura, I’m cured!”
Amy B.– Ann Arbor, Michigan

@Marg and Judith, What are your opinions of her patient’s client’s Herxheimer reactions from their Reiki attunement? Do you share the opinion that a Reiki treatment can cause a Herxheimer reaction? How would you distinguish this reaction from her patient’s client’s symptoms from their seemingly acute medical condition? Do you think it is appropriate for Laura to be promoting Reiki in this manner? What about her energetically diagnosing vitamin deficiencies? Are these assertions typical or accepted behavior for Reiki Masters?

So no, I wouldn’t rely upon someone who deliberately divided attention between two tasks- one of utmost importance and another spurious.

Two days after Orac posted this blog about ReikiDoc, she did a blog post on “What Is An Anesthesiologist To Do?”

http://reikidoc.blogspot.com/2012/11/what-is-anesthesiologist-to-do.html

Everyone knows that the work of an anesthesiologist consists of ‘long stretches of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror’.

She provides a sample listing of things anesthesiologists do during their “long stretches of boredom” in the Operating Room. Watch YouTube, do crossword puzzles, talk on the phone, check email…” I wonder if she writes her blog posts during her patient’s surgeries. I’m almost afraid to ask if physicians really shop on Ebay while they have a patient on the OR table. Anyone?

I’m almost afraid to ask if physicians really shop on Ebay while they have a patient on the OR table.

Aviation, anesthesia, and wanking around on the ‘net came together here a few months ago.

MESSAGE BEGINS———————

Mining Gold? If I had the equipment necessary, I would make that “laugh” sound you all seem to enjoy so much. How charming that someone thought that shapeshifting was accomplished through the use of cosmetics. Believe me, I wish it were that simple, and didn’t itch so much. Dr. Minion Bimler, I think you know what to do about this.

I feel a molt coming on . . .

Lord Draconis Zeneca, VH7ihL
Foreward Mavoon of the Great Fleet, Pharmaca Magna of Terra, EZ-Molt™ Gold Level Sales Associate

Glaxxon PharmaCOM Orbital
00101101101

——————–MESSAGE ENDS

The Reiki Master S quoted wrote:

Lyme is a vibrational disease. Everything is

If by “vibrational” she means “psychosomatic”, that is probably true of the great majority of mostly self-diagnosed cases of “chronic Lyme” you read about. I fear she doesn’t though, I suspect she is referring to the idea of the body, and matter in general, as nothing but vibrating energy, “the body as a matrix of energy and information” as Judith’s Toronto Bioenergy Associates refer to it. It says so in quantum physics, so it must be true (it really doesn’t).

The idea seems to be that the higher the frequency a person vibrates at the healthier they are, until you get to those who can live on nothing but sunlight and air, and the advanced masters who have developed a body of light. There really are those who believe we are all evolving into light beings (one of my close relatives does, bless her). As Narad has pointed out, Theosophy lives.

It is true that matter and energy are interconvertible, but that doesn’t mean that human bodies behave like energy and not matter. The electromagnetic radiation and kinetic energy released by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was the result of converting one single gram of mass into energy; the energy a human being would release if converted into energy would be tens of thousands of times greater. Luckily that doesn’t happen, human bodies remain obstinately solid* and converting energy to mass takes a particle accelerator. Quantum weirdness really only happens at a sub-atomic level, by definition. That doesn’t stop this idea of matter as vibrating energy, and non-locality and quantum entanglement occurring at a macro level from being remarkably popular.

*I did once meet a man who claimed to have teleported from one room to another while meditating, in front of witnesses, but even ignoring prior plausibility, neither he nor the witnesses seemed very reliable.

I did once meet a man who claimed to have teleported from one room to another while meditating, in front of witnesses, but even ignoring prior plausibility, neither he nor the witnesses seemed very reliable.

“Steve Newell was an entirely different kind of guy. He liked it in the dark and spooky woodlands of Weir, and his ‘magic’ was unusual and, in a way, admirable because his attitude towards it was completely lacking in the pseudo-scientific double-talk and fantastic ontological categorical speculations which pass for philosophy among most occultists. Steve arrived, naturally, on a pitch-dark, windy, rainy night. After he had settled in he let us all know his idea of a good time was to walk through walls and talk to the dead, or at least to beings that did not conform to the usual restrictions of time and space. Could we buy that? Did we think it was crazy?

“I responded with my standard ‘life is a dream’ pitch. ‘You can go on any kind of trip you like. I don’t think you will learn much by doing that kind of stuff, but maybe that’s what you have to learn,’ I concluded.”

(Speaking of Twain, the chapters of this work are appropriately the same as in Connecticut Yankee.)

Re “raising vibrations”-
Perhaps that’s why I’m relatively healthy-
I once experienced high levels of vibration while flying AND I was using the uh… facilities. The stewards- from outside- requested that I did not exit the little room until the increased turbulence ceased- thus I was enclosed in a small space for quite a long while, vibrating at a high rate. I’m sure that this experience has had far-ranging consequences, although I’m not quite sure what they are.

@S
Can’t say that I’ve heard of Herxheimer reactions, but thanks to you and Wikipedia, I now know what they are and we can both confidently conclude that Laura’s correspondent (not her client) is not having one.

Everything is a vibrational disease?
Sounds like Rife.
Uh-oh.

You know, sometimes I think that we look at all of these separate little fumaroles of woo and lose sight of the fact that they all emanate from a vast, bubbling subterranean caldera… the caldera of wishful thinking and self-aggrandisement.

“if they feel they are helped”

@ judith:

Subjective experience isn’t the be-all and end-all of existence.
AND none of the regulars set themselves above and beyond what scientific consensus across diverse fields worldwide assert.

I love the way people jump on words like they are shiny baubles

Why, yes, yes it is. “Quantum,” “energy,” “geomagnetic,” “resonance,” “micropulsations,” and “matrix” spring to mind in this context.

Can’t say that I’ve heard of Herxheimer reactions, but thanks to you and Wikipedia, I now know what they are and we can both confidently conclude that Laura’s correspondent (not her client) is not having one.

@Judith, Laura is publishing the statments on her own blog and under the section about how to heal Lyme disease. It seems irrelevant for you to distinguish the other person as a correspondent versus a client. Laura communicated with the person over the same medium as she communicates with her clients, regardless if they are recieving a Reiki or an Intuitive treatment. It was Laura who informed the correspondent that she (based on her energy) was likely suffering a Herx. This seems like a diagnosis to me, done online, based on an energy, without a physical exam, and of a life-threatening condition.

Any Reiki practitioner who does not call an ambulance in response to an acute reaction {Herx} that seems to be life threatening is an idiot.

I’d suggest a correction to your statement, as follows: “Any Reiki practitioner who does not call an ambulance in response to an acute reaction {Herx} that seems to be life threatening is an idiot.”

Laura Bruno: Most of those affected are, in this lifetime or certainly in previous ones, highly advanced healers. This awareness (whether conscious or completely subconscious) makes them adept at sidestepping treatments that would bring about healing before the lessons take root.

Judith: There seems to be a school of thought that attributes physical suffering to life lessons, and guess what, it makes some people feel better to know that their suffering has some kind of purpose.

@Judith, Which life’s lessons? Do you believe in past lives? Laura is not saying that there is a purpose for the suffering. Laura attributes the client’s suffering to their actions (role as an advanced healer) from either this lifetime or a previous lifetime. She states that since the client was likely an advanced healer, they are unconsciously adept at sidestepping their treatments for the infectious disease. In other words, past actions from one or more lifetimes are the reason they remain ill, and not until their “lessons take root”, will they stop unconsciously sidestepping their treatments, and be able to successfully ameliorate their infection. In fewer words, she seems to be blaming the client’s unconscious ‘awareness’ for their infection not healing. Reiki aside, do you subscribe to this school of thought?

Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t see Laura as a client.

Oh, please go into detail.

holistic, natural… something, something clathrates

I like how there seems to be a hierarchy amongst the energy healers with reiki in the upper echelon of course. Emily Rosa wouldn’t go anywhere near a reiki master. The truth being it is the other way around.

And apparently Emily doesn’t have to be near them at all.

It seems, people in general want to believe in this stuff even if they aren’t hawking it – these are the self aggrandizing ones, selling a puffed up version of healthcare supported by nothing more than narcissism and word salad.

And these snakeoil salesladies make it sound like they are 100 percent effective. So, not only have they learned the secrets of manipulating matter and energy, they are god-like in action.

Puny humans indeed.

emily rosa

@S

This Master healer states that when the patient’s condition continues to decline despite their Reiki treatments, they are experiencing a Herxheimer reaction. In the case of their Lyme disease patient, discussed below, their infectious disease can not fully heal despite their Reiki and other medical treatments until “all lessons have been learned”.

In other words, they blame the victim.

According to this Reiki Master, the patient may be so highly advanced from being a healer in their own past life, that they have become adept at sidestepping their healing treatments.

And have special snowflake-ness about themselves.

Remember, Lyme is a vibrational disease. Everything is, but Lyme in particular, seems to respond well to raising your vibration completely out of the frequency of Lyme…

and

She provides a sample listing of things anesthesiologists do during their “long stretches of boredom” in the Operating Room. Watch YouTube, do crossword puzzles, talk on the phone, check email…”

Oy…

She seems to think she can diagnose a B12 deficiency from a distance, and for a patient client she has never even met – sight unseen, no tests, just her special energy powers.

So I guess my question – amongst others – to Judith and Marg is… what’s the difference between energy healing and being psychic?

@Edith

After months of observation, I have concluded that chronic insomniacs stand the best chance of benefiting from their “treatment.”

As a chronic insomniac: no, not really.