Duke University expands its reiki pseudoscience program

Recently, Duke University expanded its reiki program. As of 2021, this pseudoscience has now infested almost a thousand American hospitals and who even knows how many universities like Duke. This infestation is a sign of the times, it seems. Pseudoscience in general has made serious inroads with what should be purely reality-based healthcare and science. But it’s clearly such a crowd-pleaser and money-maker that things won’t be changing any time soon.

Reiki (and its kissin’ cousin healing touch): A quick overview

Reiki is nonsense.

Stephen Barrett, M.D., of Quackwatch (archive)

Back in the mid-1990s, I dated a guy whose mother was a registered nurse (RN). She worked at a major urban hospital with a stellar reputation. I’ve no doubt she brightened the halls there. “Susan” was a lovely, generous, kind, optimistic, supportive, and open-hearted lady. I adored her.

Alas, she was also way, way into two forms of pseudoscience called reiki and healing touch. So were a bunch of her fellow RNs.

Reiki and healing touch are pretty similar. As one infested hospital tells us, both involve pretending to heal someone through the caressing of air—er, I mean, of nonexistent “biofield energy.” Through this air-caressing, a patient’s equally nonexistent “energy field” gains “support and balance.”

The main difference between reiki and healing touch is that in reiki, the person doing the air-caressing has to “attune” to their patient. This attunement is, likewise, completely imaginary. Reiki practitioners get certified in up to three levels, while healing touch has five.

No real evidence supports either form of woo. At best, a few very small (and generally flawed) studies indicate a possible positive effect on anxiety and pain. This possible benefit might be psychological—a natural and expected result from positive interaction with another person (particularly a sympathetic one). Other than that, no evidence supports practitioners’ claims that reiki or healing touch boosts healing in any objective way or results in any visible and measurable physical effect.

That said, the one thing a reiki practitioner should never do, cautions one reiki website, is “send reiki [do the air massage] while a person is in surgery.” Why, one might ask?

The Reiki energy can interfere with the anesthesia in the body and could cause the patient to wake up too soon. As soon as the surgery is complete you can begin sending Reiki.

Rise Above Your Story, “7 Situations where Reiki shouldn’t be used“

And wouldn’t we all just love to know what objective, real-world evidence supports that fantastical claim!

This quackery is already in urban hospitals across North America

Most trials suffered from methodological flaws such as small sample size, inadequate study design and poor reporting. [. . .] In conclusion, the evidence is insufficient to suggest that reiki is an effective treatment for any condition. Therefore the value of reiki remains unproven.

“Effects of reiki in clinical practice: a systematic review of randomised clinical trials,” 2008 (archive)

I didn’t know any of that back then. But I still knew woo when I saw it. When my then-boyfriend’s mom demonstrated one of these pseudoscience treatments on him, I could tell nothing at all was happening. (So could he, thankfully. He never allowed a second try.)

Even as freshly deconverted from Pentecostalism as I was, I knew that both practices were just pseudoscience. As earnest and well-meaning as “John’s” mother was, her ritualistic stroking of the air seemed—to me watching—as empty as prayer on that fateful day I realized I was just talking to the ceiling.

Susan and her fellow nurses were very into this stuff, though. They celebrated when their hospital opened an entire wing devoted to reiki and healing touch.

I, however, was horrified when I heard the news.

I wondered to myself how many sick and desperate people would waste precious time and money on this idiocy, especially once it gained the tacit approval of a big-city hospital.

But I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.

The woo takeover steadily progresses

Practicing Reiki does not appear to routinely produce high-intensity electromagnetic fields from the heart or hands of Reiki practitioners.

Paper title, 2013 (archive)

By now, reiki can be found in hospitals all over North America. Every so often, someone raises a fuss about it, as Edzard Ernst did in 2011 for the Guardian (archive). In 2017, PBS News Hour ran an article about pseudoscience in hospitals (archive).

But for the most part, the battle appears to be finished and over with. Universities that should be teaching real-world medicine offer courses, getaway wellness spas, and all kinds of resources for people who don’t understand or like real medicine or reality-based health practices. PBS quoted a neurology professor with the Yale School of Medicine as saying, “We’ve become witch doctors.”

I can certainly understand why that professor is upset, too. A quick search on Yale’s website reveals a “Reiki self-treatment” video from 2020. That same search returns 81 other pages on the university’s School of Medicine site. Yale New Haven Health, which collaborates with the Yale School of Medicine, gives a smattering of results as well for various affiliated offices and doctors that allow or practice reiki. Some of those results are for cancer specialists. They feature a testimony from a cancer survivor as well who name-checks reiki as part of her wellness system.

There is something particularly evil about a major university allowing pseudoscience anywhere near people with cancer.

But we needn’t attribute reiki’s takeover to evil. Not when money’s right there on the table to explain everything.

Someone’s making money from this reiki woo, at least

No effects of reiki were found on the FIM or CES-D, although typical effects as a result of age, gender, and time in rehabilitation were detected. Blinded practitioners (sham or reiki) were unable to determine which category they were in. [. . .] Reiki did not have any clinically useful effect on stroke recovery in subacute hospitalized patients receiving standard-of-care rehabilitation therapy.

“Effect of Reiki treatments on functional recovery in patients in poststroke rehabilitation: a pilot study,” 2002 (archive)

If you check out Duke University’s “Health and Well-Being” programs, you’ll notice that they now offer training in all three levels of reiki. And as you would expect when learning any legitimate medical process, Level Three training takes an entire FOURTEEN HOURS spread across TWO entire days.

Just to really drive home how completely valid this totally-real medical training is, it is done over Zoom.

Man, that’s just intense, isn’t it?

To qualify for Level Three, reiki students must first have paid for the first two levels of training from an accredited “lineage.” (That’s just woo-speak for a particular school or teacher.) Then, they can learn this completely valid and utterly reality-based and scientific healing skill for about USD$400.

Once our fledgling reiki Level Three masters have gotten their mitts on the D&D sorcery rune Usui Master symbol, they’re ready to fly.

(Related: A sorta-Buddhist cult that also likes itself some magical runes and chanting.)

Reiki is just the beginning of the woo brigade

They [various studies’ results] show no evidence that reiki is either beneficial or harmful in this population. The risk of bias for the included studies was generally rated as unclear or high for most domains, which reduces the certainty of the evidence. [. . .] There is insufficient evidence to say whether or not reiki is useful for people over 16 years of age with anxiety or depression or both.

“Reiki for depression and anxiety,” 2015 (archive)

In addition to their reiki training classes, Duke University runs a number of pseudoscience clinics, seminars, spas, and members-only wellness specialists. They also offer yoga clinics, a whole bunch of mindfulness seminars, and acupuncture-related sessions “for Self-Healing.” Each set of sessions costs over $200.

If someone wants to go on a three-day “Urban Retreat” to learn mindfulness through group therapy, that’ll set them back almost $500. Bonus, though: “No previous meditation experience is required!” So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

Strangely, Duke’s spokespeople didn’t want to talk to PBS in 2017 about their members-only Integrative Health Medicine department:

Duke Health declined repeated requests for interviews about its rapidly growing integrative medicine center, which charges patients $1,800 a year just for a basic membership, with acupuncture and other treatments billed separately.

“Top U.S. hospitals promote unproven medicine with a side of mysticism,” PBS (archive)

For all their shyness, they still run it, and it still costs the same.

By now, most insurance companies cover at least some pseudoscience. One reiki site gloats (archive) that if someone’s plan covers any kind of massage, then it almost assuredly covers reiki—which, remember, involves no or only whisper-light contact, which makes reiki the polar opposite of massage.

We apparently all now live in Clown World.

Come on, what’s it hurt for hospitals to offer reiki and other forms of total and complete woo to patients?

We noted the ASIRHC [a reiki provider’s business] did not provide robust scientific evidence that substantiated its claims that reiki was an effective therapy for cancer, ADHD, back pain, migraine, depression, anger, low energy, sleeplessness, ADD, sadness, bereavement, tinnitus and sciatica. Because we had not seen any such evidence, and we were not aware of any such evidence that would allow reiki practitioners to make claims that went beyond referring to spiritual or emotional healing, we concluded that the [advertising] claims were misleading.

“British Advertising Authority Upholds Complaint against Allan Sweeney,” 2011, hosted on Quackwatch.org (archive)

One number I’ve seen repeated frequently by woo providers is the “800” American hospitals offering reiki to patients as of about 2021. (You can see one such provider discussing it here; archive) I’m sure that number has only climbed higher in the ensuing two years.

Unfortunately for almost everybody, we’re bound by two constraints that are not easily renewed, if at all: Time and money.

Every penny wasted in one place is one that cannot be spent where it matters. Every hour spent being chanted at and pretend-massaged under the watchful eye of D&D magic runes reiki power symbols is one not being spent on legitimate wellness practices that actually will help someone feel better.

(I don’t really need to invoke Steve Jobs here, do I? I mean, I’m going to anyway. But do I really need to? For all his money and fame, he learned the truth about pseudoscience the hard way.)

Also unfortunately for almost everybody, we’re not medical experts. If an actual hospital run by some big-name place like Yale or Duke University tells us that “dozens” of trials support this or that pseudoscience, most of us will just accept that assessment. And that’s if we even get as far as wondering about it. For most people, just seeing the presence of pseudoscience offerings on the leaderboard will equate to the experts’ complete assurance that it’s legit.

The modern American healthcare system is FUBAR these days. But opening the door to pseudoscience hucksters won’t help anything get better. Not patients, not our shockingly awful health insurance system, and not the healthcare system as a whole. It’ll just make everything worse by prolonging patients’ illnesses and draining wallets that are already far too thin and light.

The only people who win here are the pseudoscience hucksters themselves and the various hospitals, insurance companies, and administrators enabling them for cold hard cash.