Reiki versus dogs just being dogs

My cat was dying of renal failure. Science-based veterinary medicine saved her (although the vet always claims “it’s a miracle”, whenever she sees our kitty). Of course, it was rather more painful than reiki or homeopathy (all those big pills, drips and blood tests) but it worked and after 1,5 year my cat is very much alive and in good condition.

Well, the vets say that dying from renal failure is virtually painless, so if we chose reiki, our cat wouldn’t suffer that much – but I very much prefer to have her around, even if she wakes me up at 5.30 because she wants to be fed.

I can’t figure out if I prefer the Reiki response or the Christian faith healing response when you aren’t healed. I would be confused to be told I obviously don’t want to be healed and end up quiet and analyzing my personal motives for days (gee, thanks mom), but it’s better than the Christian faith healer who kept insisting they were called to heal me, failed, and proclaimed me possessed. 😐

Poor dogs! If they’re sick, take them to the vet. If it’s a skin thing and it is all over their body, analyze recent changes, consider changing pet foods (my dog started losing clumps of hair when I got Science Diet on sale and assumed it would be much better for her and tried the switch – she was allergic to it; back to Beneful and she’s great) first if you don’t want to go to the vet and have them suggest it. However, skin irritation is miserable…

~shakes head~

I suspect Reiki practitioners and the like enjoy the “I have a mystical skill” idea. The self-delusion of their increased awareness and importance just sucks them further and further from rational thought.

Hell, this wouldn’t even work on my fish. As soon as my hand goes in the tank (typically for cleaning or to replant the plants those bastards keep uprooting) they immediately start trying to eat it.

I wonder if reiki works through glass?

Eric Lund,

There have been a number of animal studies done for acupuncture and homeopathy which are held up by the CAM community as evidence they work because, after all, an animal wouldn’t have a placebo effect. Presumably Reiki would follow the same pattern. I see no reason animals would not be subject to placebo effects, and certainly the observer would. If you act like your pet is feeling better, sometimes it acts like it’s feeling better, which makes you think it’s working.

Approach the session by stating (to yourself),

Yes, don’t speak out loud. You wouldn’t want people seeing you talking to your dog and thinking you are crazy.

(full disclosure: I talk to my cats and dog whenever I have the occasion. On the other hand, I don’t pretend to heal them with the Palpatine touch)

What if My Dog Prefers Petting Over Reiki?

I agree with you Orac: dogs can be smarter than humans.

Science of Intuition

That’s quite the oxymoron, isn’t it?

Meh, is there a review button somewhere on this site? My links seem broken.
First was “is there placebo in animals” on Science-based medicine.
Second was the Wikipedia article on Clever Hans.

It’s even more hilarious if you picture the reiki process in your mind’s eye.

I have thought up an adaption for cats- who may not be as obliging as dogs with the hand jive. I have a large ,athletic cat who-like most cats- really likes to sit in boxes. Yesterday someone brought me a long cardboard box expressly for this purpose which he sits in- happy as a clam- looking for all the world like cat MRI**.

The reiki master would gesticulate over the box which would now be called the reiki healing chambre and probably should be painted silver.

OT- but is ironic nonsense from MIke Adams *ever* really OT @ RI, I ask you?

MIkey- for reasons immaterial to my point- investigates the PhD of some fellow with a Dutch name- seems it is a phoney! from a degree mill! and purchased! The horror!

Now Mike has never revealed his own degrees or anything at all about his own education and he has called himself a nutritionist. Nor has he rankled about Gary Null’s ersatz degree ( quackwatch, wikipedia, lee-phillips.org) or any of the other woo-meisters whose idiocy he broadcasts from his platform.I guess he doens’t have an axe to grind against them as he has against the guy in question.

** cat scan

What if My Dog Prefers Petting Over Reiki?

Then you have a very sensible dog and it deserves a run in the dog park.

I think someone mentioned in the comments to Orac’s older post on this subject that Caesar Milan’s training techniques, aside from the acupuncture, aren’t necessarily a good idea for dogs, either. Does anyone have a link to a decent S-B discussion of this? I know a fair number of dog owners who dig his advice, and I’d certainly spread around any rational critique.

@Denice Walter

probably should be painted silver

No, no, no. Wrapped in tinfoil. High end ones would, of course, be copper-plated.

All of this reminds me of the The British Veterinary Voodoo Society.

*sigh*

There was once a fellow who occasionally drank in my local who claimed to be a ‘Reiki Master’ (in my limited experience everyone who has a reiki session goes on to become a ‘master’).

He made the mistake of trying it on me. He told me I had chronic neck problems, I told him I don’t (I have a small surgical scar at the top of my neck from a lipoma removal).

He waved his hands in my general direction and asked if I felt an improvement and I of course, said no.

“You will”, he replied.

At that point I asked if he was a practising ‘psychic’ and he looked amazed and asked how I knew that.

I then explained to everyone at our table how he’d just turned a complete miss into a hit and said it’s a classic talking to the dead trick.

I then asked him how his ‘healing gift’ works and he trotted out the usual energy channelling crap.

To my shame I ripped his reasoning apart rather publicly (though i wouldn’t have if he hadn’t given a public demonstration).

The reason i mention this is that the reiki ‘healers’ I’ve met (admittedly not many) all claim to have psychic abilities and invariably use the same techniques of cold calling.

Only rather than I’m getting an ‘M’ they ask the ‘patient’ if they’re feeling anything. If the ‘patient’ says yes the ‘healer’ has a rough idea of the location because he’s waving his hands over the area.

The chap left the pub and never returned so apologies to the landlord. It was me who lost you a regular customer.

Richard Smith: Some people these days are using something like a Dremel tool (you can use a Dremel tool, too, if you have a fine-grind head for it and it goes down to low enough RPMs) to grind down cats’ claws, which is apparently less traumatising than clipping, since a lot of cats don’t like the pinching sensation. Something to think about, perhaps?

@Narad – the vet actually said that renal failure is virtually painless compared to renal cancer, so we should try to treat our cat, even if she’s almost dying because that wouldn’t cause additional suffering to her.
Anyway, I’ve been giving my cat subQ fluids for the last year and a half and while she does not really like it, she stopped trying to run away and that’s a huge improvement.
I don’t go to the vet very often, we do all the drips on our own, at home. The problem is, my cat is very aggressive towards everyone except me and my husband and she has to be sedated for all blood tests and such. When she was dying, our vet tried to do a renal USG without sedation – and this poor, dying kitty, lying like a rag on the table, bit the vet in the finger, straight into the joint. The vet bandaged the wound, said “I see a very strong will to live, we will try to treat her”, taught us how to do the drips… and that’s how we’ve been for the last year and a half. The cat is on a special diet, she gets her pills every morning and fluids every 5 days.

Belay part of my last!

Rather than Cold calling it should of course, read Cold Reading.

But you all knew that.

Atomic dog, anyone?

Eric Lund and Heliantus,
I see the Placebo by Proxy effect on animal owners every day. It has become standard of care to call the chiropractor instead of the veterinarian, and no one wants to dismiss “alternative” stuff. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to behavioral matters, indeed the “alternative” was far superior (and much closer to science) than some of the traditional stuff, tradition mired in very old attitudes towards the “dumber than us” animals. So just because in the recent past and even today, myself and others found practical and factual info in “alternative” training systems means that many extrapolate from that to embracing the woo.

I don’t see the tide turning anytime soon. Woo is going to grow and grow and people are going to spend more money on it.

The reiki master would gesticulate over the box which would now be called the reiki healing chambre and probably should be painted silver.

In MY DAY we called them “Orgone Accumulators”. Kids today…

@ herr doktor bimler ( and -btw- Todd W.)

Oh no, no, no! I’m over 50 and know perfectly well about Reich ( altho’ lord almighty, I wish I didn’t) but…
I think that a cardboard box painted shiny silver with someone waving their hands over it EXACTLY characterises what woo really is.

I think that a cardboard box painted shiny silver with someone waving their hands over it EXACTLY characterises what woo really is.

And the cat inside is simultaneously healed AND not healed until you open the box and collapse the wave-function.

@Heliantus: Point taken about wanting scientific proof. If my PT did a double-blind study, however, it might only show that HE can get results using this method, not necessarily that any random, “trained” person can. He seems to have a gift for it. Although he has a thriving regular “people” practice he has an affinity for animals and started out doing it for some friends’ pets. Even he was a bit skeptical at first, but people kept telling him it was making a difference in their pets, so he now has one treatment area for people, and a seperate room just for animals. Plus, he travels out to treat horses. Because the demand is growing (based on referrals) and he’s the only one around who can do what he does, he’s shifting his practice more and more to working this way with animals. It’s clearly not about the money for him, because his PT rates on people are double that of animals.
I’m definitely on the skeptical side, but when my friend told me he was convinced this guy added two years to the life of his dog, and when the vets don’t have anything to offer, then it was a no-brainer for me to give it a shot. Maybe that makes me a sucker, but I say it’s the best $180 I ever spent.

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

You can search for Brennen McKenzie’s articles over at SBM.

Rebecca: I realize that you lose money if your victims start asking awkward questions, like “Is there any evidence that you’re not a crook?” but that’s no reason for you to whine here.

@Narad: Many thanks for pointing out that SkeptVet is Brennen McKenzie. So much for my Google skills.

@Rebecca Petrovic – the fundamental flaw in your argument is that it’s based on faith. Faith is emotional, and emotions are notoriously individual and difficult to quantify. You can’t demand that I have faith in Reiki any more than you can demand that I fall madly in love with some random guy in a parking lot.

With apologies to the memory of Winston Churchill: Science is the worst way of knowing the truth, except for all the other ones. 🙂

@Rebecca – perhaps you misunderstand. He mocks pseudo-science and mystical/magical thinking because often people avoid science-based, proven treatments for magical thinking, which can sometimes allow diseases to progress and make people sicker.

He also does have a “real life” which includes cancer treatment and research. I think attempting to improve treatment outcomes and save lives is incredibly productive.

What science-based treatment modality do YOU recommend for people?

Orac:

Dogs love to be petted. Sure, the dog would probably prefer to be petted with both hands, but dogs are adaptable.

Then there is the cat that used to be in our house, but has fortunately moved to son’s apartment, who would go after you with full claws and teeth when she reached a petting limit. Okay, I can understand a cat getting annoyed at too much touching, but sometimes she would do this after tricking you into petting her. She had a habit of rolling on her back and looking up with an expression that said “rub my belly!”, only to use that as an opportunity to attack the compliant hand.

I love the lack of specifics in Ms. Petrovic comment. What exactly is she complaining about?

Ah, the “cat trap.” We also learned to recognize it, and would only respond with a foot encased in a shoe. She has very sharp claws and teeth.

She is now a bit older (about eight year old) and has calmed down. Since my son’s apartment is the gaming meeting place for his college friends on the nights he does not work, she has become accustomed to young male visitors. But she now distrusts anyone outside that demographic. When son had to de-flea the apartment I took her to our house. After he called to say we could bring her back, she hissed and clawed at me when I tried to pick her up.

Cats must be forgetful, because I used to be her favorite person in the world. But that was when she lived at our house and I was the one who fed her.

She had a habit of rolling on her back and looking up with an expression that said “rub my belly!”, only to use that as an opportunity to attack the compliant hand.

That behavior is not generally an invitation. The gesture is the showing, and that alone.

She had a habit of rolling on her back and looking up with an expression that said “rub my belly!”, only to use that as an opportunity to attack the compliant hand.

I saw on a documentary a she-lion using the same tactic to trick her prey (a gnu, if I remember correctly) into reach of her claws and teeth. Rolling on her belly in front of it and daring it to try to gore her. And catching and raking it as soon as if complied
The poor gnu was game in more than one sense…

No gnus is good gnus.

Nooooooo, Reiki is also very fashionable.

All the cool kids are doin it!

@Rebecca Petrovic: (and all the Storms of the world)

It must be a pretty sad life when you have NO WONDERMENT for anything!!
Tim MInchin says it so well:

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?

All right, if things like reiki haven’t been shown to actually heal anything, what do you make of this?

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf

Did you read it?

Again, not a real journal, so no reason to believe it is a real paper or that they actually did the science. And no evidence that in the last twelve years it has been replicated.

(Except for the mice, of course.)

In one of their ‘experiments,’ 10/11 ‘treated’ mice experienced remission while 7/8 ‘control’ mice experienced remission.

The proposition, advanced with a straight face, appears to be that the controls were quanto-spiritually entangled with the experimental group.

RE the reiki mouse study. I did read it. As only a lowly BS in ChemE who made microchips for a living even I can spot so much fail in there that it just isn’t funny. Person running the experiment becomes the “healer”? FAIL. Breaking protocol and “visiting the control group?” FAIL. Assuming that because the results between the experimental and control group were almost the same that it must have been magical resonance healing?? FAIL!

All experiments require assumptions – e.g., in this case that the mice should have all died from their induced cancers. So what does the mystery “disinterested professor of biology” who injected the mice with cancer have to say about it? Why wasn’t this professor cited in the paper?

This quote from Narad’s link is quite informative:

“It is not the difference between the experimental and control groups that is the important question, it is the difference between what happened and what ought to have happened”.

When your experiment doesn’t come out “right”, you don’t automatically assume it was “magic”. You go back and check your assumptions FIRST.

In any case, if Dr. Bengston (PhD, Sociology) is so sure of the innate energy healing ability that can “resonate” through walls, I’m sure cancer patients everywhere would chip in and pay a few bucks each for him to walk through the halls of any major hospital and cure everyone.

I’m still not sure who David Krinsley really is – I keep getting hits for a professor of geology.

“It is not the difference between the experimental and control groups that is the important question, it is the difference between what happened and what ought to have happened”.

Now if Bengston really believed that, why bother with a control group in the first place?

All of the “replications” appear to involve Dr Bengston. How can they be considered independent?

But it’s been done in five different places, all with the same results

Wrong. It’s been done in different places with different results, which is the basis for the unfathomably boneheaded “resonance” explanation. The basic idea is that you repeatedly screw something up in one lab in two groups and have another lab not screw things up, ergo, the explanation must be a mystical phenomenon.

I repeat: the mice survived in EVERY lab. Your explanation posits that in labs where things were done right the mice should have died. If the result was due to lab errors, in the lab where things were done right EVERY SINGLE MOUSE should have died. They didn’t. How do you explain that?

I think the point is that the true controls are all the mice injected with the same cancer in previous experiments, none of which survived beyond 27 days.

If “previous experiments” (by other researchers) are the “true control group”, then why did Bengston feel compelled to use a “false control group” in these experiments? Why is he trying to kill an untreated group of mice? You’re saying that they’re not necessary.

None of these mice should have survived, period; not the experimental, nor the control mice

Exactly. That is why we have control groups — to check that we’re doing the experiment competently. If contrary to expectations, the control group all survive, then Bengston has blundered. It’s up to him to work out how.

Marg, experiments are like colanders: they don’t hold much water unless you’ve plugged up all the holes. You don’t get to pick your favored explanation for the results you get just because it’s a possible explanation, or just because it’s the hypothesis you structured the experiment in the hopes of proving.

You yourself say that if Bengston performed the experiment correctly, 100% of the control group mice should have died. Instead, only one did. The most reasonable explanation is that Bengston somehow screwed up the experiment so that neither the control group nor the experimental group were actually subjected to the 100%-fatal-if-not-treated injection that Bengston thought/claimed they were.

That’s a lot more reasonable of an explanation than Bengston’s own explanation of “there was some mysterious quantum-mystical effect that actually made my control group part of the experimental group, experiencing the benefits of hands-on healing even though the hands weren’t ever on them.” Seriously. Between “previously unknown quantum mechanical effects” and “oh, you mean that fatal breast cancer culture needed to be refrigerated?” the latter is far more plausible.

Bengston didn’t prepare the mice. Lab technicians did. Cue the headline “lab technicians across North America so inept that in ten experiments at five different universities they failed to inject mice with cancer, leading researcher to believe that his experiments worked”.

How do you explain the fact that the mice grew tumors in the first four experiments and that the tumors then healed? How do you explain that a professor at a medical school is the co-author of the second article?

You guys are wearing blinkers the size of dinner plates. I’m surprised you are able to cross the street without getting run over by a bus.

To medieval and renaissance folks computers and microwave ovens would appear as magic. Until you discover the science behind a phenomenon, it appears as magic. And it is arrogance of the highest order to believe that we already know everything there is to know — but every society does.

Marg,

Your comment re microwaves is well taken. So how do we figure this out? Scientists figure it out by having unrelated people replicate the experiment under controlled conditions. How do you propose to figure this out?

ROTFLOL. You clearly know not a whit about physics. And are also unaware that claims of an EM field associated with reiki have been tested six ways from Sunday and unequivocally proven false. You’re really just providing more evidence that Bengston is either lying or grossly incompetent.

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

No, as a matter of fact we know quite a bit about both dark matter and dark energy. Not everything certainly, but to say “the rest is mystery” just betrays you as ignorant of the subject.

Like Dr Bengston, the characters in “Mousehunt” kept trying to kill a mouse. Unlike Bengston, they did not ascribe their failure to a new principle of quantum reality.

why did Bengston feel compelled to use a “false control group” in these experiments?

I want to repeat this question. If the answer is “the control group is to ensure that you’re doing the experiment properly — for instance, that you’ve used the correct strain of immune-challenged mice” — then congratulations, you grasp a key concept of science.
If the answer is “In order to ignore their results, re-cast them as a second experimental group, and claim that the *expected* results are the true controls” — then you are a cargo cultist, going through magical rituals that you have seen real scientists use, like wearing a white lab coat.

@Beamup I am glad you are rolling on the floor laughing. Just don’t hit your head on some piece of furniture. I am not revealing my own ignorance but that of the NASA scientist from whom I gleaned this particular piece of information, who is infinitely less arrogant than you. Given the variety of theories in physics, from quantum physics to string theory to chaos theory, I doubt that energy is better understood than anything in biology. If it is, than we are quite ignorant of biology too.

Allow me to quote Aristotle at you, Narad. I know one more thing than you do, which is that I know I don’t know anything. There is the kind of energy that hammers in a nail and there is the kind of energy that creates the Big Bang. Are they the same?

Allow me to quote Aristotle at you, Narad. I know one more thing than you do, which is that I know I don’t know anything.

I am acutely aware of what I don’t know. If you had actually honed this form of self-examination, you wouldn’t be attributing the remark to Aristotle and grossly embellishing it in the process.

There is the kind of energy that hammers in a nail and there is the kind of energy that creates the Big Bang. Are they the same?

Sorry, no, this isn’t “dharma combat.” You seem to be under the impression that energy is some sort of “stuff,” akin to the premolecular notion of heat. If you do not understand the meanings of words, you generally ought not to be tossing them hither and yon.

And of course it is “dharma combat”. Everything is “dharma combat”. Is the energy that hammers in a nail the same energy that creates the Big Bang?

Suit yourself. What energy? Does it exist, or is it emptiness?

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

Marg, when scientists say “energy”, they are referring to a very specific concept. This concept plays a critical role in such things and creating power stations, building bridges, and designing jet planes. If you wish to disagree with that definition, please feel free to do so telepathically. Any attempt to communicate to us with electronic media suggests you have no faith in your own ideas.

What boggles my mind is that none of you so-called scientists have an iota of curiosity about this. I thought people who were scientists were innately curious. My bad. You are not really scientists, you know, you just call yourselves that. @Narad, I don’t know what you are 🙂

@Narad, I don’t know what you are

If you wish to pretend that “everything is ‘dharma combat,'” don’t-know isn’t going to cut it.

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

The phrase I used was “the control group is to ensure that you’re doing the experiment properly”. The idea is to recognise our own capacity for self-deception, then find our own mistakes. Convincing other people is secondary.

Gray Falcon:

Marg, when scientists say “energy”, they are referring to a very specific concept.

Kinetic Energy = half of the mass times velocity squared
… or … the momentum squared divided by 2 and by mass

Potential Energy = mass times the acceleration of gravity times the height

The units of energy are (mass)(length)(length) all divided by (time)(time) or md2 / t2 (hoping the html for superscript works, it would be nice to have preview)

So Marg should be able to tell us what is causing mass and momentum.

I’ll let someone else do the dimensional analysis for electrical and magnetic energy. There are some equivalent equations to mechanics for electrical circuits, which is why analog computers worked. Oh, and using the potential energy from water behind dams to create kinetic energy to spin magnets to create electrical energy to power a good portion of this part of the country.

Just keep remembering that we don’t know what makes up 96% of the universe. We keep calling it dark matter and dark energy, but we don’t know exactly what it is. So we may have nice scientific definitions for “energy” but we would be fools to think that it explains all that is out there.

Marg, yet we know much about things work on the surface of this planet. If those experiments were valid they would have been replicated multiple times all over this planet. But they have not.

Wow, that’s just sad.

Please excuse me while I attempt two more angles on the superscripts.

Decimal entity: ²

Cut and paste: ²

Marg, we might not know everything about the universe, but we know enough about reiki to know that it cannot do what is claimed for it.

The only mystery surrounding reiki is why people still try and claim it is efficacious. And even that is not much of a mystery.

Narad, could you repeat that in English?

I am really starting to hate you because I have never heard of “SGML” or “octothorpes.” The rest are words I know, but not exactly how they are arranged. Especially since I have no idea how baby seals help me use super and subscripts on this blog.

You are an evil person.

The words, they are a language I used to know. The arrangement is still not something that I can interpret. And I once actually edited a newsletter for engineers using LaTex (and some of that was supposed to be subscript, but I cannot be bothered after drinking wine).

I am really starting to hate you because I have never heard of “SGML” or “octothorpes.”

OK, I’m sorry, it has been a rough day, as I spent part of the previous one with my 82-year-old downstairs neighbor, who has had a long career in labor organizing and city politics and is full of stories and has given the current president the what-for on at least one occasion. She also pours a really stiff martini.

SGML is the root superset of HTML, which I assume you have heard of. “Octothorp” is a half-baked consensus name for the pound sign. (The added ‘e’ above was a misspelling on my part.)

Narad, now show us subscript!

I doubt this will work, but very well: ₀ ₁ … ₉ (just in case, hex: ₈ )

I am not revealing my own ignorance but that of the NASA scientist from whom I gleaned this particular piece of information, who is infinitely less arrogant than you.

And I’m sure would be greatly offended by your gross distortion and misunderstanding of what he actually said.

Given the variety of theories in physics, from quantum physics to string theory to chaos theory, I doubt that energy is better understood than anything in biology. If it is, than we are quite ignorant of biology too.

Then you are grossly ignorant of physics, and really should just stop talking before you humiliate yourself any further.

Yes, that’s how it seems to me as well. It just doesn’t work out when actual, you know, physicists are in the audience…

Beamup:

physicists are in the audience

I am not a physicist, I was engineer of mechanical type with applied math. But I understand enough to know that the electrical and magnetic fields from a waving hand cannot affect the chemical bonds and cell processes in a rodent.

Energy is simply present, and holds many forms and vibrations. Energy can beconcentrated, dispersed, mutated but is always present, do you not believe people can harness adaption of such energy? Faith is belief in something. Do you not believe we have the power to use our presence to aid people to heal theirs? It does not matter how? Different horses different course… but all wish the best results. x

Ugh *chose

I miss preview.

I guess not.

On topic: there is no good reason to expect handwaving to eliminate invading microorganisms from the body, to straighten out immune systems run amok, to eliminate uncontrollably-replicateing cells, mend bones, and so on. Even in pets.

With reference to Marg’s attempt to convince us otherwise, it’s not arrogant to point that out, either.

With further reference to Marg (and with apologies to anyone who has addressed these specific claims already) dark matter and dark energy are not blank slates upon which apologists for reiki can project their desires.

Dark matter has the property of not interacting in any meaningful fashion with normal matter, which has hampered efforts to understand it – but it follows from that that it is a poor candidate to “gap explain” reiki.

While dark energy is an important part of the large-scale structure of the universe, its extremely low density means it is extraordinarily unlikely to be directly detected in a lab – and from that it follows that it is even more extraordinarily unlikely to have any meaningful clinical effects.

Bottom line: trying to use dark matter & dark energy as supports for any kind of pseudomedicine is nonsense.

Energy is simply present, and holds many forms and vibrations.

No. Energy is a property of a system. It “holds” nothing, and it does not “vibrate.”

@Pondfairy: Most everyone (even skeptical meanie-heads) probably remembers feeling much better (and even feeling less pain) when a caring adult kissed their boo-boos.

The mechanism might still be a mystery, but the phenomenon certainly isn’t anything new. Altering our perception of reality is not the same thing as altering reality itself.

And for the record, I am curious what really happened to those poor mice. It’s just that the more I read about Bengston, the weirder it gets. There just isn’t enough on the web to know what really happened – and despite declaring repeatedly that he’s a “true skeptic” and “doesn’t know what happened” blah blah he’s not trying very hard to rule out what CAN be known. Cognitive bias bingo.

Hello all,

You are not ‘skeptical meanie heads’ you are naturally concerned about this as you either do not understand it or have not experienced it. I will speak to you later in more depth, but my thought is this conventional medicine has proved the placebo affects, to my knowledge, and Reiki should not in necessary circumstances discourage convential medicine,(and to my knowledge of it does not) but enhance the persons well being to be able to restore them to health. If this then in turn means the person no longer requires that surely that is a win win situation?

Composer99 –

To give Marg her tiny due, she wasn’t trying to argue that dark matter or dark energy are in any way involved in the operation of reiki (unless I misread her completely.)

She was simply trying to complete an atom bomb syllogism consistent with her “I only know that I know nothing” misquote:

1. A particular knowledge set EITHER knows everything in the world OR knows so little it cannot rule anything in the world out even for practical purposes.
2. The knowledge set of mainstream science does not know what makes up dark energy/dark matter, therefore it does not know everything in the world.
3. Ergo, the knowledge set of mainstream science cannot rule out the possibility that reiki works, no matter how overwhelmingly the evidence shows no good reason to rule it in.

Of course, the flaw in Marg’s syllogism is that 1) is fallacious, an example of the All-or-Nothing fallacy, and the problem with using the “Nobody knows anything” meme to try and win an argument is that inevitably it’s used to set up a double standard. If no one knows anything, Marg doesn’t know that Dr. Bengston’s experiments show exciting promise; she doesn’t even know if Dr. Bengston really exists. You can’t say “Neither you or I know anything” and then pick and choose exceptions of “I know that Dr. Bengston did these experiments and that all non-exciting explanations can be ruled out.”

@Antaeus Feldspar
You are absolutely right. I don’t know that Dr. Bengston really exists. He could be a figment of my, and his own, imagination 🙂 Ditto the mice.

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

Tough going against that energy gradient…

There’s a book/ video called “Life Energies: Who Are You REALLY?” that applies these ideas to the psychology of personality making the assumption that particular forms of energy patterns are *born* not made and affect human development and interaction. People need to discover who the REALLY are and ‘go with the flow” or suchlike.

Psychological realities are explained as being “energy exchanges” – romantic interests, parent-child relationships and learning experiences are all energy exchanges.

Funny, I was taught differently.

Each herb and supplement has its own energy that coaxes the wonky energy back toward health vibrations… I could go on.. probably for weeks. I won’t

News for you, Beamup, reiki hasn’t been repeatedly and emphatically demonstrated to be utterly false. It has been demonstrated to speed up wound healing, and to improve surgical outcomes and anxiety in hospitalized patients. Pranic healing, another form of energy healing, has been demonstrated to protect cell lines against gamma radiation.

But whatever words they use to describe what they do, the fact is that it can work.

If that were true, shouldn’t you be able to point to a robust body of credible and compelling evidence demonstrating that reiki can work and has worked in the past?

Consider ibuprofen for inflammation, statins for high cholesterol, antibiotics for bacterial infections, etc. Anyone arguing in support of their efficacy could provide rams of hard evidence in support of their claims. If reiki really did work–if it treated diseases like cancer as efficaciously as opthalmic antibiotics treat baterial conjunctivitis, the hard evidence would exist.

So where is it? Why is the best anyone seems to be able to offer takes the form of anecdotal accounts or studies (like Bengstrom’s) that are so methodologically flawed they’re meaningless?

RE: Bernard Grad, I must assume your referring to the studies he reported in “The Influence of an Unorthodox Method of Treatment on Wound Healing in Mice.”, in the International Journal of Parapsychology 3, no. 2 (1961)? Is anything more really neccessary to establish the degree of intrinsic confidence vested in healing mice by laying on of hands is equivalent to that possessed by ESP, astral projection, clairvoyance, spoon bending, etc.?

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/bernard-grad#ixzz1xsOWlGc2

Here are some:

Journal of Advanced Nursing 2001 Feb;33(4):439-45 Biological correlates of Reiki Touch(sm)
healing. Wardell DW, Engebretson J. PMID: 11251731 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

Aladydy, Patricia and Kristen Alandydy, 1999. ‘Using Reiki to Support Surgical Patients’. Journal
of Nursing Care Quality , 1999 Apr;13(4): pp. 89-91.
Cancer Prev Control 1997 Jun:1(2):108-13 ‘Using Reiki to manage pain: a preliminary report’.

Olson K, Hanson J. Cross Cancer Institute, Edmonton, Alta. PMID: 9765732 [PubMed – indexed
for MEDLINE]

Pilot crossover trial of Reiki versus rest for treating cancer-related fatigue.
Integr Cancer Ther. 2007 Mar;6(1):25-35
Tsang KL, Carlson LE, Olson K.
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Fatigue is an extremely common side effect experienced during cancer treatment and recovery. Limited research has investigated strategies stemming from complementary and alternative medicine to reduce cancer-related fatigue. This research examined the effects of Reiki, a type of energy touch therapy, on fatigue, pain, anxiety, and overall quality of life. This study was a counterbalanced crossover trial of 2 conditions: (1) in the Reiki condition, participants received Reiki for 5 consecutive daily sessions, followed by a 1-week washout monitoring period of no treatments, then 2 additional Reiki sessions, and finally 2 weeks of no treatments, and (2) in the rest condition, participants rested for approximately 1 hour each day for 5 consecutive days, followed by a 1-week washout monitoring period of no scheduled resting and an additional week of no treatments. In both conditions, participants completed questionnaires investigating cancer-related fatigue (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy Fatigue subscale [FACT-F]) and overall quality of life (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy, General Version [FACT-G]) before and after all Reiki or resting sessions. They also completed a visual analog scale (Edmonton Symptom Assessment System [ESAS]) assessing daily tiredness, pain, and anxiety before and after each session of Reiki or rest. Sixteen patients (13 women) participated in the trial: 8 were randomized to each order of conditions (Reiki then rest; rest then Reiki). They were screened for fatigue on the ESAS tiredness item, and those scoring greater than 3 on the 0 to 10 scale were eligible for the study. They were diagnosed with a variety of cancers, most commonly colorectal (62.5%) cancer, and had a median age of 59 years. Fatigue on the FACT-F decreased within the Reiki condition (P=.05) over the course of all 7 treatments. In addition, participants in the Reiki condition experienced significant improvements in quality of life (FACT-G) compared to those in the resting condition (P <.05). On daily assessments (ESAS) in the Reiki condition, presession 1 versus postsession 5 scores indicated significant decreases in tiredness (P <.001), pain (P <.005), and anxiety (P<.01), which were not seen in the resting condition. Future research should further investigate the impact of Reiki using more highly controlled designs that include a sham Reiki condition and larger sample sizes.

PMID: 17351024 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

Tiny, unblinded, and effectively uncontrolled… yeah, that’s REALLY impressive evidence for a difference from placebo.

Placebo is amazing. In recent a Harvard study it was shown to work even when people knew they were taking a placebo. Maybe we should be studying placebos rather than drugs 🙂 I would say they have fewer side-effects, but people can develop great side-effects even with placebos. I suppose they are a heck of a lot cheaper than some of the new designer drugs. Think how much money could be saved in healthcare if we learned how to harness the placebo effect! The mind can do incredible things.

I admit nothing of the sort, Beamup.

There is such a thing as Reiki and the handwaving does indeed do things.

It would be grossly unethical to lie to patients and take money from them if it did nothing, but it does in fact help. And consider this, even if what helps is the placebo, if the patient walks away better, the treatment worked. What the patient pays for is the practititioner’s time. BTW even a certain percentage of doctors admit to giving patients placebos without telling them; do you consider that unethical? Should those patients not be asked to pay?

There is such a thing as Reiki and the handwaving does indeed do things.

What exactly does it do then?

Let’s make this as simple as possible: what in your opinion is the single strongest, most compelling piece of evidence supporting the claim that Reiki can effectively treat disease, promotr wound healing, or cure cancer?

Yes, I do consider that unethical; doctors should not do it and patients should not be required to pay for it.

It’s also highly amusing to hear the argument going, “oh, it’s so much more than placebo, but, uh, it doesn’t really matter if it isn’t because it’s still great… yeah, that’s it!” The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.

And if one can’t find research to support Reiki, one defends it with . . . handwaving?

One who actually understands science, rationality, biology, and the myriad ways one can fool oneself into believing something that is not true, realizes that “in my empirical experience” means nothing. You haven’t actually got the faintest idea whether you’re doing anything at all. And in fact you aren’t.

Reiki is fraud. That’s all there is to it.

Facts are facts. This is not a subjective or uncertain question.

One occasionally wishes to educate the public.

Marg @3.00pm: Based on prior experiments every last one of those mice should have died.
Yet as JGC noted, some of those mice received no treatment & so should have died. You seem rather quiet on that point…

What I do not understand about all of this energy medicine is how claims of effectiveness are allowed to continue, and be sold and promoted by US-licensed medical doctors. Really, I have followed many of the stories rather closely and completely enjoy reading Orac’s extremely informative blog. However, I simply do not understand how such bogus treatments are tolerated by the state medical boards and why these types of practitioners are allowed to continue to hold medical licenses of any kind.

Are not enough patients filing complaints? Are there too many complaints to investigate? I hear the outrage here and find it very refreshing to hear physicians and others speaking out about patients that are being exploited and otherwise taken advantage of, but it is just too much for me to comprehend how such blatantly bogus practices continue.

Supposedly, a founder for ILADS has a Power Point presentation listing effective treatments for Lyme disease, a bacterial infection. Among the treatments he suggests is psychic surgery in Brazil. Energy work. The ultimate Reiki. John of God is to heal his patients’ bacterial infections, or so he says. He is a licensed medical doctor in the US supposedly telling patients that going to Brazil to get psychic surgery is an effective means of treating their bacterial infection. What gives? How do these people get away with this for so long?

I am not a doctor. Hopefully, I am not offending any of the doctors here, as that is not my intention. I just do not understand how the rest of the medical community or the legal system allows this to continue. If someone was selling cars with no engines, they would be run out of business in no time.

Then yesterday, I read a patient testimonial . They are holding a benefit to raise money for Turn the Corner Foundation’s new organization the Tick-borne Disease Alliance. The testimonial says that psychic surgery in Brazil is what they used to treat their Lyme infection. John of God rid their body of bacteria. Yeah, right.

Here’s the Point Point presentation, see the last two pages.

http://www.lymeinducedautism.com/images/Lymewhat_is_it_part_3,_LIA.pdf

You can Google the testimonial by the Norwalk, CT musician. I don’t want to post the link and give them any publicity.

Thanks for listening!

What we have been trying to convey is that merely not being able to rule something out is not sufficient reason to rule it in.

Actually, I’m perfectly willing to rubbish reiki on the basis of being incoherent gibberish. The “cho ku rei” symbol will significantly increase the “energy flow”? The “hon sha ze sho nen” symbol will transport “reiki energy” across time and space? Screw this. It is content-free. My cat put more thought into things.

Marg:
the fact remains that in ten experiments a bunch of mice injected with cancer were cured

This is simply not true. It is not a fact. All we know is that a bunch of mice exposed to Magical Healing did not die, for which Dr Bengston claims credit. But then the mice not exposed to the Magical Healing didn’t die either.

At this point there are two choices: (1) The supposedly lethal injections were not lethal. Try to work out what went wrong… OR (2) The purported ‘control group’ was in fact a DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION Treatment group all along. Claim credit for curing them as well — collateral benefit, as it were. Mention “quantum entanglement”, wave hands in mystifying gestures.

The invocation of quantum theory in this context — where there is no description of the superposed quantum states of the mice (or of the mechanisms of protracted entanglement) — is simply cargo cult mentality again. It speaks of a rejection of physics as a discipline, combined with a desire to appropriate the terms of physics and use them as tools of magic.

Tim Minchin’s “Storm” came up on the radio just now. Just a coincidence?! SPOOKY.

@Denice – It is Sialis of the feathered variety, not a play on ‘Cialis’ or Gaelic, but a bird..

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

I dunno, maybe people who see no reason why reiki apparently deserves any credit?

Marg,

You are missing the point. Do you know how we figured out that giving Thalidomide to pregnant women caused the problem? Do you know how we figured out that a subset of the population were at risk with Vioxx? It was studied by scientists who used a variety of techniques all of which help compensate for our natural, human tendency to fool ourselves, unlike both you and Dr. Bengston.

Lastly: Yes, Cancer does sometimes just go away. I’m not suggesting that this is the most likely scenario, but there is at least a precedent for it, unlike your hypothesis. So, how do we prove that this wasn’t just chance? How do we isolate the control mice from Dr. Bengston’s seemingly miraculous powers?

I suspect something was wrong in giving the mice cancer – that whomever created the protocol didn’t write up that part correctly and it was done incorrectly every time. If the control group did just as well as the studied group, that doesn’t say anything in favor of the treatment modality; it just suggests there was a flaw somewhere in the process (or that the treatment works just as well as whatever it was compared against).

So the mice had cancer and then didn’t have cancer. Where did the cancer go? Who the hell cares that the cancer also disappeared in the control group, given that cancer never just disappears?

Marg, it is vitally important to know what happened to the control mice, because if they exhibit exactly the same behaviour as the treated mice, then the treatment is ineffective.

Having looked at Bengston and Krinsley’s paper and had an enormous chuckle to myself, I have concluded it is complete bunk. It would be impossible for anyone to repeat the experiment given the information provided. If this paper had been presented to a serious journal, rather than this bottom feeder effort, I am sure it would be rejected. For goodness sake, I have a h index higher than the whole journal!

The research is a disaster, there are changes of protocol all the way through, the controls are responding the same as the treated animals and there is this lame excuse that in each experiment the control mice were observed and this caused them to recover. If observing the mice was going to cause problems with the interpretation of the results, why were those experiments kept in the paper?

Then all the other excuses we have learnt to expect from magical medicine, such as statistical techniques cannot be used to evaluate this type of research. It is just all bunk. You will have to come up with something better than this.

Mrs Woo, I suspect there was considerably more wrong with the research than the protocol for giving the mice cancer.

** sorry, is NOT BLACK AND WHITE…

@Chris – I didn’t even read the entire study. For one, I haven’t learned enough about studies to know exactly what I’m looking for (I do know now that small sample sizes are a bad thing, control groups must be blinded, etc.). For another, it seemed from the outset, for all of its “we’re skeptics doing this” that it was setting out from the beginning to prove its end point rather than actually just investigating it carefully to determine if it warranted further investigation. In the first few paragraphs it just read “wrong” to me, but I wasn’t sure of all the reasons why.

More beach umbrellas.

Perhaps you should try to find some more information to bolster your arguments rather than searching for metaphors that are stupid, to say the least.

What we have been trying to convey is that merely not being able to rule something out is not sufficient reason to rule it in.

Actually, I’m perfectly willing to rubbish reiki on the basis of being incoherent gibberish. The “cho ku rei” symbol will significantly increase the “energy flow”? The “hon sha ze sho nen” symbol will transport “reiki energy” across time and space? Screw this. It is content-free. My cat put more thought into things.

That’s true, but I’m trying to impart a more general point, one that’s applicable not just to reiki but to pranic healing, astrology, colored light therapy, or whatever other form of woo Marg may take up alongside reiki. Woo propositions frequently are ridiculous in their own right, but didn’t quantum mechanics (the real kind, not the fates-of-mice kind) seem pretty ridiculous before the evidence showed that it was nevertheless true?

The really important point that Marg needs to grasp is that the propositions “The premise has not been completely ruled in” and “The premise has not been completely ruled out” do not add up to the result “The premise is as likely to be true as not.” They do not even add up to the result “The weight of the evidence is so balanced that one set of experiments whose results are consistent with both existence and non-existence of the premise tips us over to ‘Yes, it exists!!'”

@Marg – I was sincere in my offer to let you distance heal me. My disease is incurable and Mr Woo (there is a reason I am Mrs Woo) has taken me to a few faith healings that have failed. The one who assured hubby that he could cure me in only a few minutes declared me possessed when there was no change after he did his whole dousing me with lots of blessed oil laying hands everywhere while his wife spoke in tongues thing. I’ve also been alkalinized, put on a nothing white diet, on a nothing but raw foods diet, a vegan diet, a paleo diet, fasted… etc. etc… and not really had much to show for it. Mr Woo, the first year of my diagnosis, spent more than $2000 on alternative treatments, many of which made my disease worse just because what is “good for you” can be bad for a sick body with open internal wounds. He has suggested, repeatedly, that we go to a naturopath about an hour and a half away that is French and sounds very wise on the radio program. Along with a “detox diet” and probably a prescribed fast, he recommends daily colonics for several weeks until all the toxins are out of your system so your body can truly heal. Have (so far) been able to reason what what little bit of medical knowledge still resides in Mr Woo’s brain that our body actually excretes toxins very readily on its own. However, if the current decline continues much more, we might find me subjected to all kinds of new horrors soon.

Distance reiki, where you do your special moves and send the energy to my direction, sounds much less painful, at least. Do you need to know a general direction (i.e., if I am north/south/west/east of you)? I am actually a very honest person. If suddenly the disease manifestations end and I feel like I haven’t felt in twenty years, I will share it on this blog even if they do mock me. I might say, “Hey guys, this could just be placebo effect (it can happen in over 30% of cases), but I’m feeling better today.” I’m sure that their rational scientific minds will say “Yes, it is placebo effect, but I’m so glad that you found something your brain can believe in enough to have a placebo effect!” They are not cruel people. If anything, people on this blog are very caring. The reason they come out so much against alternative therapies is there is no rational basis for them and often people are encouraged to pursue them instead of treatments which have been researched and demonstrated greater efficacy than placebo.

Further info on my illness – the best possible treatments for the disease caused severe headaches for me (so I switched to an alternative), allergic reaction including difficulty breathing (so I switched to a not quite as good but still useful alternative) and another allergic reaction, contact allergy, with welts and reddening of skin wherever it attacked. There was no oral alternative so I switched to a liquid topical-type treatment instead. My body gradually rejected that treatment, though, so I ended up having to discontinue it and now the disease is progressing again and reducing quite a bit of my quality of life at this point.

So the offer is not made in jest – I am not making fun of you. Of course, if you haven’t progressed to a point where you are that advanced and do not do distance healing, I can understand, and I’m okay with that.

We don’t “rule out” things. We WILL say that there is little in scientific understanding to make something like Reiki possible (and there is), and that a study has to be well designed to get rid of “confounders” (things that would make the study less than acceptable for rational review). There have been studies done with acupuncture where neither the provider nor the patient knew if they got “real” acupuncture or “sham” acupuncture. In those trials, there was not a significant difference in outcome between the two modalities. However, they did do better than the treatment group. Placebo effect often happens when people are given hope and/or attention. It doesn’t matter what the attention IS sometimes, just that they got something that was done to make them feel better (think of mom, booboo kisses and band-aids at this point).

Yes Sialis – I was kind of offended. I’m not a complete skeptic – I enjoy my Christian faith, though it’s not quite “mainstream” in how it is viewed and my dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist Baptist family might be a little worried/horrified to hear some of what I’ve chosen to believe to continue in that faith journey. I DO know that there cannot be “room” for possession in a heart that is filled with the Spirit/light. If I’m possessed then I must be terribly deluded, because I love my faith and the extemporal being I worship with all my heart and believe I am called to love my fellow creatures and do nothing but my best to treat all living around me (down to plant life) with love and respect and an acknowledgment of their unique and individual life. 🙂

I ponder that part of my life when I read atheist blogs – I went back to Christianity because I missed what it gave me so much. If that is my made up imaginary friend, then I guess I must just still be a child at heart? 🙂

Woo-providing doctors ( as well as those who enable real oo-meisters) have the faith of their advocates : you’ll notice that Drs Burzynski, Gonzalez, Geier and others have been out there for many years as was one AJW prior to his striking off. Lyme is an area tghat is rife with woo- especially the long-term anti-biotic treatments.

Mrs. Woo – No worries. If you would like, I can send Orac information about a ‘Biointrinsic energy healer’ in NC. The healer has regularly scheduled healing sessions and can send you his healing energy over your telephone. Yes!. All you need is a telephone, and from the comfort of your own home, you dial into his telephone healing sessions. I can even send you some testimonials to prove that his treatment works.

My concern is that due to the severity of your illness, you may experience the well-known and dreaded Herx reaction. Of course, this would further prove that your illness is responding to his intrinsic energy. /sarcasm off

Oh dear Sialis. The dreaded Herx! Hubby endured it for almost two weeks on MMS before deciding he needed a break… 😉

Denice, I find the Lyme thing kind of fascinating. Hubby developed Lyme, had antibiotics and was fine. Since he is so enamored with woo I was very surprised that the antibiotics fixed him up so quickly.

@Marg – it is too bad that I cannot upload pictures here. I’m a slightly overweight (I said I’m honest!), 5’8″ woman with hazel eyes that tend towards aquamarine and waist-length chestnut brown hair (no gray; never died or chemically treated). I am in my mid-40s and live in central Missouri, if that is helpful enough. Then again, without providing a picture there’s an ‘out’ for the Reiki to fail anyhow, isn’t there? That’s too bad. I was looking forward to the experiment. Right now I’m in the midst of a flare that should continue for somewhere between 48 and 60 more hours and Mr Woo wants me at a surprise birthday party at 5 p.m.!

I feel like Marg keeps trying to convince us that she’s rich, because look at all the thousand-dollar bills she has!! and we keep trying to point out that real thousand-dollar bills are green, not aqua blue, and she keeps getting mad and sneering “So all the absolutely perfect printing of the President on the face, and the ‘1000’ in the corner that looks just right, and the crisp E PLURIBUS UNUM, that means nothing to you blinkered people??” And she doesn’t seem to realize that we’re saying YES, it means nothing. Because if the bills are aqua blue, that means they aren’t real currency, and if they aren’t real currency, it doesn’t matter in how many ways they imitate real currency.

A real scientific experiment tests a falsifiable premise. If it does not test a falsifiable premise, it is not a real scientific experiment, no matter how well it counterfeits their form. Bengston thought he was being very scientific when he blamed the failure of the cancer to kill the control group on reiki being somehow able to affect even the very mice that he should have been taking every precaution to not let be affected, but instead he made the premise he was testing completely unfalsifiable and therefore something that no scientific experiment could give any support to.

If we give Bengston’s experiments the maximum possible benefit of the doubt – which, ironically, means discounting his quantum-woo defense, and asserting that the control group didn’t receive reiki – we still don’t wind up with any evidence pointing to the effectiveness of reiki. Reiki vs. no reiki made no difference, and trying to claim that this means some great evidence for reiki was made by the experiments is like trying to spend those aqua blue bills. Even if we made the unjustified assumption that the survival of the control mice must be the result of some miraculous new scientific breakthrough, it’s far more likely to be “a new strain of mice that can shrug off cancer” than “reiki which can induce incredible healing in mice which do not get treated with it.“

@ Mrs Woo:

I believe that there is a SB treatment for Lyme that involves short-term anti-biotics- I was referring to those who use massive doses over insane amounts of time. There’s one guy ( probably originally from Goa) an Indian national with an Anglo- Iberian style name ( which I won’t mention)

About us atheists: for myself, I come from a long-line of them it seems but I certainly am not one to discourage people’s beliefs if that assists them in living this difficult life we all have- that position was alright for Wm James.

I do raise a ruckus however when faith is part of what should be scientific claims made pristine of as much emotional and partisan biases as possible. You seem to be the very reverse of that, as many religious scientists are also. I don’t see those inclinations as necessarily mutually exclusive.

I hope your condition ( which I believe I’ve figured out) has been more manageable lately.

@pondfairy1 @marg @mrs woo
At the risk of being jumped on by everyone I will say that there is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there for energy healing working. There are also a lot of useless practitioners. It sets my teeth on edge when I hear a Reiki person say to someone who didn’t experience any change that they received a healing on the spiritual level.

So I will, again at the risk of being jumped on by everyone, relate a few of these anecdotal stories. I rely on Mrs. Woo’s assurance that the people here are good people and I express my agreement that patients do need to be protected from sham healers. But I will also say that just because you prove in a lab that Reiki or this or that form of energy healing works provides no such protection. It proves the principle, not the ability of the individual practitioner. It’s not like aspirin.

I studied & worked with Dr. Bengston for almost 2 years, from Feb. 2007 to Oct. 2008. I was very enthusiastic about his studies and was determined to show that what he did also worked for human cancers. A small group of us taught by him employed him method on a variety of cancers. He said the more aggressive the cancer the better, so we looked for people with really aggressive cancers.

One person we treated had stage-4 pancreatic cancer and was days away from dying. He was in hospital, skeletal, jaundiced, on a morphine pump for pain, drifting in and out of consciousness. His family were told his liver was shutting down and he would likely be gone within 48 hrs. Enter the energy healing team, all gung ho and full of enthusiasm. We told the family we were doing something experimental and obtained the patient’s permission to treat him. We then proceeded to treat him an hour and a half a day.

So we start treating the man, and already after the first treatment there is a difference. The swelling in his legs goes down. He seems a little less yellow and more coherent. Some blood values change from one day to the next for the better. Then, as the days pass, he cuts down on morphine. He is able to eat. The whites of his eyes become less and less yellow. He is able to sit. He is able to walk to the door and back. Day 5 he stops taking morphine. Day 6 he walks on the corridor. Day 8 he is released to go home.

He lives 10 more weeks. After he goes home he continues improving. He can go up an down the stairs. He can go to the park and back. He can go grocery shopping. He can eat regular meals. He begins to put on weight. He can spend weekends at the cottage and stand at the barbecue grilling steaks without feeling that there anything wrong with him.

6 weeks after the beginning of the treatment he has bloodtests and the bloodtests come back “normal or near normal”. I remember one number in particular: bilirubin went from almost 600 to the mid-30s. I think under 30 is normal.

His doctor says it’s a miracle. The oncology nurse says she has never seen anything like this in 25 years.

Then at 10 weeks he suddenly dies of septicemia.

Even so, his doctor was sufficiently impressed to invite me to speak to her colleagues. I did, but her colleagues were not particularly interested. They did generally acknowledge that “no harm was done” and that we gave the man 10 extra weeks of life that he wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Another man we treated also had pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed as stage 4 after they opened him up to do a Whipple procedure and found cancer on his liver. We treated him for a year. During that year he was able to take long walks with the dog, do renovation and clean-up jobs around the house, and at the end of the year he was able to go white-water rafting and salmon-fishing. His naturopath marvelled at his condition, saying that people with his kind of cancer usually came to see him with walkers, in wheelchairs, or not at all. After a year he terminated treatment and died 7 months later.

We have seen other cases where tumours shrank or became less aggressive and across the board we have seen pain reduction. We would ask the patient at the beginning of the treatment “from 0 to 10 how high would you rate your pain?” and they would say “10”, then at the end of the treatment they would say “2”. Generally pain relief could last a day to a day and a half. That’s not “massage” or somebody feeling better because you are paying attention to them. If it’s placebo, so be it, and hurray for the placebo effect.

A colleague of mine is treating a man with small-cell lung cancer who was diagnosed in Dec. 2008. He has done everything, including going to see John of God. Still alive, still able to do stuff. He was supposed to have died in the fall of 2009.

So far our general observation has been that while we haven’t been able to cure cancer, we were able to help people have a much better quality of life than they would have had otherwise. I think that has value.

I have the bloodtests and please note that no claims of a cure were made.

Judith,
And where is the data to show that the results you claim are achieved more often or more reliably in the presence of “energy healing” than in the absence of it?

@chris
We were looking for a cure. He died. We felt we failed. There was no point in writing up a failure.

@Denice
If anyone were interested in studying it …

We were looking for a cure. He died. We felt we failed. There was no point in writing up a failure.

Um, no. You claim to have effected a miraculous recovery, observed in a hospital setting, that was thwarted out of the blue 10 weeks later by septicemia. One publishes the case report unless one is making things up. You think a nearly cost-free method that could pull that trick off wouldn’t be of interest?

Jane,

How did you gain access to the patients and their records without an academic or doctor’s involvement?

One may publish a case report if one is a doctor or an academic. If one is Joe or Jane Nobody with no letters after his or her name, one doesn’t.

You yourself claimed the following: “His doctor says it’s a miracle. The oncology nurse says she has never seen anything like this in 25 years…. his doctor was sufficiently impressed to invite me to speak to her colleagues.” Meet your coauthor.

You are simply making excuses at this point, and they’re not convincing. Remember,

Mice are injected with cancer cultures known to grow single large tumor.

You keep saying that, Marg, and I keep saying, No that is not known. Bengston and Krinsley assure us that “Host survival in the conventional literature was 100% fatality between 14 and 27 days after injection”, but the trouble is, I cannot find that “conventional literature”.* The documentation from the Jackson company does not mention mortality statistics (nor indeed the life expectancy for this breed of mouse when not injected with anything); only that they are riddled with genetic defects from all the in-breeding, and are usually blind by weaning age and doomed to an early death from spontaneous hepatoma.
Bengston and Krinsley do not mention their mice going blind. Perhaps they were cured of that as well.

* The only paper I could find is from 1966, by Lerner &c, but the strain has undergone several mutations since then.

You know, one of the major complaints with scientific journals is that not enough negative results get published. Judith merely shows this is not confined to standard medicine.

Not to mention the entertainment value of the good Dr. attempting Reiki on the poor Devils. I predict an entire Youtube channel devoted to the “treatments”…

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

Judith, if this case study was published, I see no reason why with the help of the doctor and nurse you could not have written up that paper.

Oh, and remember that this paper was published even though the experimenter had not even graduated from high school. Actually she was still in elementary school!

Not to mention the entertainment value of the good Dr. attempting Reiki on the poor Devils

I can hardly wait.

“the fates of the experimental and control groups got quantum-entangled and so all received the benefit of free energy that came from nowhere”

One thing I’ve wondered when reading such “explanations” is, why do *these mice* get quantumly entangled with *those mice* and not with, say, their litter mates, the oak tree out back, or random clumps of dirt? Moreover, having become quantumly entangled, how do they become unentangled? Or do these mice, for the rest of their lives, mirror each other’s conditions? It seems like that would be demonstrable, if the magic really worked that way.

I was under the impression that in order to have two mice (or Tasmanian devils) quantum entangled they must start out close to each other and spinning in opposite directions.

Denice Walter – Yes, the mice being a protrusion into our dimension of hyper-intelligent pan-dimension beings performing performing incredibly elegant psychological experiments on people by, say, running down the maze the wrong way or suddenly not dying of cancer explains much in human history.

@ Mephistopheles:

I think you’ve got it!
To make matters even worse:
there is a very nice woman in Hobart who has the same name as yours truly which has led to very complicated misunderstandings in messaging sevices. And yes, Hobart is on the same seam as Cornwall.

-btw- my ex had a reserved table at the restaurant at the end of the universe- you’ve probably run into him- sad dark-haired fellow, speaks English and Gaelic rather well. Usually at the same time.

I’m still trying to figure out how the mice got quantumly tangled up*. Is there a special spell that you recite over them? Or is it possible that every mouse in the area got all quantumly tangled up just because the experimenter was waving his arms around? Wouldn’t that invalidate every experiment by everyone else? That ought to make reiki experimenters popular.

*Yes, I know it should be “quantum entangled”, but “quantumly” sounds so much more sciency.

@LW: The degree to which mice and men get quantumly entangled depends of the phase of the moon. All sources of energy work together, the mice simply get confused. This explains all inconsistencies in results.

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

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

Like other commenters, I encourage the idea of doing whatever needs to be done to publish a case study.
It would not be the first case study to report that “The operation was successful although the patient died”.

I have been wondering mice can be quantum-coupled since normally they are zero-spin entities (apart from these ones, bred for physics research).

Tasmanian Devils are spin-1/2.

Orbit-sharing fermion mice: “They also dance or spin in pairs”.

Herr Doctor – in high school the chemistry teacher would occasionally ask “why is a mouse when it spins?” Now I know.

@Marg – you’ve provided seconds of entertainment……

Really, marg? The single strongest piece of evidence you can offer in support of Reiki’s efficacy is a study which found Reiki performed no better than a complete lack of any treatment whatsoever, but we’re the ones with blnders on?

Perhaps, in the interest of science, we should compile a list of additional treatments which are just as effective as Reiki (i.e., which also perform as well as no treatment at all)? I’ll start: Wearing your underwear outside of your clothes.

@JGC – I thought that particular treatment made you a super hero!

No one said Reiki handwaving cured metastatic tumors. A) The Bengston study did not involve Reiki but another form of energy healing. B) They were not metastatic tumors but one single large tumor. I have not heard of Reiki curing metastatic tumors either. My so-called “faith in Reiki” does not extend to metastatic cancers and is not faith because it is based on empirical observation of change in conditions other than cancer. I am not prepared to enter into discussions about whether I can trust what I see with my own two eyes and hear with my own two ears, in terms of patient response and testimonials. Your ignorance about energy healing is just that, ignorance. Have fun with your paradigm.

@Beamup
I said I am not going to enter into a discussion about whether I can trust my eyes and ears and I repeat that your ignorance about energy healing is just that, ignorance. Have fun with your paradigm.

That would be an accurate description of what you guys are doing, AdamG.

Marg @2:35 19 Jun has just summed herself up for us (my emphasis):

I am not prepared to enter into discussionsabout whether I can trust what I see with my own two eyes and hear with my own two ears, in terms of patient response and testimonials.

Yes, Marg, if you can’t go beyond testimonials, you aren’t prepared to enter discussions about whether or not a treatment works.

Your ignorance about energy healing is just that, ignorance.

What about your ignorance about science and scientific method?

If you want to go beyond just having faith in empirical observations, your ignorance is going to a bigger problem for you than my inability to share your faith in energy healing.

Have fun with your paradigm.

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

Oh, but you’ll probably be back in a few days with a few more insightful one liners, like today’s @9:10 am, 10:16 am, 1:31 pm. And when you have no clue what we’re joking about, you’ll just mock us for making the jokes? (And since I already know you are humor impaired, I will clarify that if you disagree with the first part of the previous sentence: this is an invitation to prove otherwise with an explanation in your own words.)

Apparenty, I should have posted “you’ll be back in a few seconds.

The Bengston study did not involve Reiki but another form of energy healing.

Does this even mean anything within your own “paradigm”? It’s all the same “energy,” right? What’s the theoretical basis for differentiating the “forms”?

(Somehow, I have only now realized that intrepid researcher Bengston has trademarked “The Bengston Energy Healing Method.”)

Narad,

Not just trademarked, but also a nice little cottage industry for the socialist. He travels the world giving “seminars” at $300 per person and has a book and a series of six CDs where, for only $50, he’ll teach you the “Method”.

From the CD salespitch from his website:

Hands on Healing

A growing body of scientific evidence has validated the power of Bengston’s hands-on healing technique. So what makes this treatment so effective? Dr. Bengston theorizes that image cycling may be key to accessing healing potential so that the body can restore itself to its natural state of wholeness. This six-session course is based on Dr. Bengston’s workshops for learning this powerful method. Includes practical instruction on distance healing, instilling healing energy into objects, and more.

“Growing body of evidence”? “Image cycling”? “Instilling energy into objects”? My eyes burn from the stupid.

It can’t be a skill unique to Bengston if anyone can learn it for a mere $50. Why aren’t there hundreds, nay thousands of people running around the world curing cancer with this “Method”?

Check out this quackadoodle’s website, especially his hilarious quack Miranda disclaimer:

http://www.bengstonresearch.com/

That should have read “sociologist”, not “socialist”.

And, if Bengston really does have this dramatically life-saving ability, or gift, or whatever, he is keeping it to himself rather than actually saving lives. What a selfish thing to do. You think he could spend his time more productively and make much more money actually healing rather than giving workshops to others.

From his biography:

Dr. Bengston does not provide healing treatments, medical diagnosis, or any other personal consultations related to health, medical, or psychiatric issues. Rather, his time and attention is devoted to energy healing research and education.

Yes, I find the trademarking quite funny.

So do I, but probably not for the same reason.

Qigong can feel like millions of tiny magnetic ballbearings vibrating under your skin.

I think trying to drag qigong into this and furthermore suggesting that it produces effects something along the lines of the onset of delirium tremens is a bit much.

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

Marg, can you admit that it would be a complete waste of time to study it comprehensively if it isn’t something real? Back in the 1800s phrenologists studied VERY comprehensively the relationship between the shape of an individual’s head and that individual’s personality and intelligence. Problem is, that relationship wasn’t real and so all the time spent studying it comprehensively was wasted.

When the best evidence you can present for us that energy healing is real is Bengston’s experiments, where energy healing was supposed to account for whatever statistically significant difference was observed between the experimental and control groups and no such difference existed, it really doesn’t give us much reason at all to think it’s real.

“we have far more control over our subjective experience than we usually realize”

For pain ‘management’, this seems to be true. I watched a woman running a seminar (business not health) do this concentration/ relaxation/ visualisation stuff. Getting someone to visualise pain as a ‘thing’ – what colour is it? how much water can it hold? and then getting them to fade the colour and shrink the size seems like a good technique.

Many daily aches, pains and other niggles cause, or are caused by, muscle tensions. Being able to ‘see’ them vanish, or reduce substantially, by simple relaxation and visualisation is a good way to avoid too many trips to the medicine cabinet. And much less time-consuming than a cup of tea and a good lie-down.

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

Is it or is it not possible for “energy healing” to cause harm?

@Narad
Not to my knowledge. IMHO the mice that were fried in the Orgone machine were fried because they were in a machine. It’s like concentrating the rays of the sun with a magnifying glass to set things on fire. But you illustrate the fear that many people have of energy healing. You are simply afraid that if the mind is strong enough to generate healing it can also be used to generate harm.

@jgc
Many people use Reiki as a generic term for all forms of energy healing. Stop your sneering already, all of you. You won’t convince me, I won’t convince you; the whole discussion is pointless.

No response yet about how Marg would falsify energy healing of any type, because, I think, Marg knows just as well as we do that she has no answer to this question.

No amount of data, no study that could ever be performed would convince her… Dunning-Kruger to the core.

People who are truly interested in helping others listen and truly engage with all the ideas on the table in order to find the one that is most effective at helping people.
People who are truly interested in helping others are able to admit that they might be wrong about something if the well-being of others is at stake.

People who are only interested in themselves refuse to engage with and truly understand opposing arguments.
People who are only interested in themselves do not possess the strength to even consider the possibility they might be wrong.

On which side does Marg fall?

Marg,

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

Are you telling me my empirical anecdotal observations are inferior to yours?

I’d agree that until you can offer something credible in the way of evidence to support the position that Reiki in specific is effective (or more generally that energy healing in some or all of its various incarnations are effective) the dialogue cannot and will not advance.

As for the whole “Enjoy your paradigm” trope, we don’t have a paradigm. We have a method: one that’s proven to be singularly effective at deriving a meaningful and accurate understand of the natural universe and processes occurring within it. By what rational argument should we abandon it when addressing energy healing, to rely instead on personal testimony , blind faith and/or anecdote?

To illustrate my drift:

Scanning PRN’s archived Noontime Radio Woo-Fest:
yesterday’s edition has the host raging against Melinda Gates’ ( and her Foundation’s) efforts to train teachers-

(paraphrase) modern education is based on psychological principles established by Wundt ( mis-pronounced, -btw-) to reproduce information – it subtracts the “soul” and “will”- those are the only things WORTH studying in psychology. I had GREAT teachers not what they have now. ( end)

I hereby rest my case.

When did they fight Groucho Marx?

Also, what in tarnation is all this nonsense about “paradigms”?

I mean, really, if you think about it, the last paradigm shift in medicine was the shift from pre-modern medicine to modern (science-based) medicine – and that shift is actually still underway in some respects if this post is any indication.

Just this

Where do the likes of Marg get off thinking that the next great “paradigm shift” is set to get underway?

Or is it that Marg is throwing around the term, just like she threw around the Ghandi quote, as a ward (a magic spell, so to speak) against critical examination of her favoured flavour of quackery?

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

Leave Ghandi out of your scam, will you? But if you insist on witty quotes, I raise you Carl Sagan:

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown

@Marg – that open & your brain falls out…..as is obvious by your belief in “magic.”

http://reikiinmedicine.org/pdf/jacc.pdf

At least some MDs are beginning to look at Reiki as a viable alternative.

@Composer99

Some MDs are beginning to think it’s not ridiculous.

Are you an MD, AdamG?

Marg @11:52pm 21 Jun 12
I looked at your study. It uses the wrong control group – where are the patients who had a nurse nottrained and using Reiki in the room with the patients?

Oh, and the authors themselves admit the problem. From the study itself

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

Well, Marg, what do you think? And could you come up with a way to demonstrate that the effect is really coming from Reiki?

Actually, Marg, I’m a medical researcher with a PhD in Genome Sciences.

We don’t have to ask Marg that question…we all already know she’s just a sneering ignoramus.

It is selfish and amoral to charge people money for a ‘treatment’ that is solely based on the premise that your observations are infallible. Do agree or disagree with this statement?

Marg, I wouldn’t be using the word “ignoramus” to refer to anyone else if I were you. For an advocate of “Energy Healing™” to display such an invincible ignorance of the very meaning of the word “energy” leaves you open to some unkind rejoinders.

Also, you know those jokes that you didn’t get, riffing off the notion of “quantum entanglement” between the subject group and control group of mice? “Are you people having fun?” you said. Yeah, that’s the sound of people who know what quantum entanglement is. Your complete and utter puzzlement as to what they could possibly be talking about? That’s you, not knowing what quantum entanglement is. My advice to you is to quit while you’re behind.

The evidence is already in. There is, for all intents and purposes, a 0% chance that you are correct. No need to wait.

Marg,

I noticed that near the end of that letter to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology it was stated that “It is unknown whether the beneficial effects of Reiki treatment over music stem from the presence of another person, the
presence of a person with healing intention, the light touch
technique, or a combination of factors. 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.”

What they’ve managed to prove so far is that music may improve your mood but doesn’t reduce the variability of your heart rate. Further they showed that being touched by a nurse makes you feel better overall than left alone in a room with nothing to do.

Gotta love the arrogance. Everything is already known. There is no scientific principle out there in this enormous universe of ours that humanity in its greatness has not yet discovered. No new phenomena will arise from now until humankind ceases to exist. We live at the pinnacle of civilization and will never get any smarter or gain any more knowledge. I bow to your wisdom, oh great ones. May hubris never darken your door.

@marg

Yawn, try a little harder at your supposed insults next time.

LOL – got to love the stupidity.

@Marg

Gotta to love the arrogance etc.

Oh my…what a persuasive argument you present!
Personally, I’ll take informed arrogance over arrogant ignorance any time.

Marg,

I encourage you to really think about Chemmomo’s question. This isn’t taking the piss or trying to goad you. This is what scientists all over the world do every day for everything they study. We have a lot of evidence that human senses and, more importantly, human reasoning are deeply flawed. The techniques of science have been developed to compensate for the limitations inherent in the 1.3Kg of wet goo in our scull.

As much as I’ve enjoyed mocking you, Marg, there’s something you should know (unless you’ve finally stuck to the flounce):

I would love to be wrong about Reiki! – I mean, come on, wave away tumours or dangerous infections with a flourish of the hands? Who wouldn’t want to be able to do that?

But until such time as its advocates & apologists come up a rigorously-collected body of evidence showing its efficacy for, well, anything, reiki’s detractors are right on the money.

@chemmomo @niche geek
The healing intention would be hard to control for, but they could have a control group that received light massage and another control group that had someone simply sit with them and chat.

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

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

I beg to differ about ‘healing’ being a “new phase of our evolution” because people have been fooling themselves and others about arcane capacities for THOUSANDS of YEARS: if you read anthropology, the idea of a highly specialised individual with healing powers is not a new role in human culture; so far, there have not been any un-biased demonstrations of this profound capacity in well done RCTs. EVER.

Anyone can say that they can heal: and many espouse this esoteric malarkey because it brings social power and often monetary remuneration. Is it more likely that people are developing mysterious powers to heal cancer or that charlatans- AND the well-meaning but self-deluded- are demonstrating effects that are truly artefacts of shoddy research that JUST happens to have results that conform to a particular, desirable, unlikely event.

There is an aspect of evolution involved here: humans have -over their long period of development- become masters of abstract thought, including planning and foresight, manipulation of variables, SELF criticism, understanding others’ motivation, understanding of mathematical principles and CHANCE- what psychologists call “executive function”- which springs into being, like Athena herself, sometime during adolescence. The scientific method is based upon capacities like these, which Piaget called “formal operational thought”..

The same unique abilities that enable us to create intricate mythologies and fictional glimpses into other POSSIBLE worlds also allow us to understand our own abilities to fool ourselves and to dream up new ways to check our own foolishness and explore what might actually, probalistically be the unvarnished reality that exists outside of our biased selves.

Judith,

So the question remains open: as a believer can you offer some insight into what controls would be sufficient for an energy healing experiment? If we can’t falsify the hypothesis then it likely isn’t useful to us and certainly isn’t useful in medicine. Every doctor and nurse that treated my wife had the intent to heal so all of scientific medicine already uses this “energy”.

@Mrs Woo
I have a problem with those people too. I am of the group that says “let me put my hand over this painful spot etc.”

@Denice Walter
I stand by my assertion that these healers exist, are genuine, and represent the avant garde in a new phase of our evolution. Read chapter 5 of Leigh Fortson’s “Embrace, Release, Heal” for an account of a healing facilitated by one of them. Anecdotally I can tell you that there an explosion of interest in healing, with thousands of people attending workshops, and I’ve seen many of my colleagues achieve good results. I believe before this becomes “scientific” it will be a grassroots movement.

BTW I’ve seen interesting effects with animals — not mice. Two cats I treated that were very elderly and terminal both presented with the matted, grungy fur that very sick animals have that is attributed to an animal being too sick to groom itself. By the end of the treatment one cat’s fur went back to appearing normal, although I didn’t touch it, and it didn’t groom. The other cat’s fur started returning to normal during the treatment (the top half did; the bottom didn’t) and was normal by the next day. It stopped having blood in its urine and stopped hiding in the closet; it also started eating again and lying in its favorite spot in the sun. The fur effect is very strange. Another cat I treated had a brain tumor that invaded its nasal passages, causing the poor thing to sound like Darth Vader when it breathed. Every time I treated it, the breathing was normal for three days, as reported by the owners. Another cat had chronic hyperthyroidism and after treatment its thyroid values returned to normal. What happened there? Relaxation? Placebo effect? I am willing to give Dr. Bengston the benefit of the doubt on the subject of the mice because of the things I’ve experienced. Experiments are not the only way to know things. Doctors prescribed aspirin for generations before anyone knew how aspirin worked simply because of the observed effect that willow bark had on pain. It remains one of our most effective medications while others, arrived at through the much vaunted scientific method, have been withdrawn from circulation after multi-million dollar lawsuits because they harmed people.

Judith wrote

There are unique individuals who can genuinely heal; and strange effects can occur around them; most of them don’t really know how they do it although they might formulate a theory to try to explain what happens. I think Dr. Bengston is one of those individuals.

If Bengston doesn’t know how he “does it” how can he possibly trach his “method”? He sells expensive weekend workshops, books and a CD series intended to teach others how to heal, do distance healing, instill “energy into inanimate objects” and other crap.

Maybe it’s like a pyramid scheme or MLM…he makes more money selling the “secrets” than actually doing anything himself. What a crook.

By the end of the treatment one cat’s fur went back to appearing normal, although I didn’t touch it, and it didn’t groom…. The fur effect is very strange.

I would certainly volunteer to let mine get matted for a test of this unique power of energy hairdressing.

@ Narad:

Re “energy hairdressing”:
If you live in the US or the EU, you can purchase CHI in a plastic spray-container: it will enliven your tresses with ENERGY. Spray-on Chi, who would have thought.
-btw- it is especially effective if you have twisty or wavy hair like yours truly.

Experiments are not the only way to know things

Maybe; they’re the only way to prove things.

I’m still thinking about how to control for healing intent. Short of putting jerks in the room with the patients (and sadly I do have some in mind who might qualify), I’m not sure there’s any way to eliminate that while having another person in the room. By nature, nursing professionals and hospital volunteers have “healing intent.”

But that’s pretty much the out, isn’t it, Marg? You’d probably find some way to attribute “healing intent” to the jerks, too, and then declare victory.

@Chemmomo

I don’t pretend to have the answer as to how this should be done. I just offered suggestions.

Sorry, Narad, can’t do much about anal sacs

Why’s that?

Chemmommo,

I’m still thinking about how to control for healing intent.

As I understand it, you cannot do Reiki until you have been initiated or attuned by a Reiki master, a process you normally have to pay as much as $10,000 for. So according to the founders of Reiki you can have as much healing intent as you want, if you haven’t been attuned, you cannot access your healing abilities. That makes controlling a trial much easier, unless charging money for attunement is just a scam of course.

Judith,

Bengston is full of crap in that video clip, which by the way is nothing more a clip from a commercial for his “healing” CDs series (ANYONE can learn his patented “method” for $50–can’t be too special. But I digress…)

He claims us skeptics don’t want to see any “evidence” his method works. We’ve been BEGGING for some proof, some objective evidence, some real clinical trials,some papers published in credible scientific journals, anything. So far he hasn’t provided any real scientific evidence because he can’t. No touch healer or reiki master can provide any proof. I’d be the first to change my mind with some real scientific proof.

Sorry Judith, 22 seconds into your “bio energy healing” commercial a quack says he can psychically heal anyone with AIDS in three to four days. I stopped watching.

If I want to waste an hour watching fantasy I’ll put on the Sci Fi channel. That is how you’re trying to establish credibility for faith healing?!

That’ll be the day when some somnolent BS artist can tell me what skepticism is about. Sorry, Judith, you lose.

I think this discussion has come to an end. Your minds are as closed as a steel trap which not one iota of information can enter. You have no curiosity to speak of and no imagination. If this is what science has come to, we are in a sorry state.

Judith,

Just give us that one iota of information. we’re begging you. James Randi has a million dollars standing by if you can prove your faith healing works.

You know the rules, though: no anecdotes, no YouTube videos, just real scientific information.

The fact we spend some or our leisure time here shows we have no curiosity? That curiosity is what led me here in the first place!

And what does imagination have to do with science?

Judith,

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

How can you tell it isn’t a fake Reiki master pretending to attune you? Shouldn’t this be easy to demonstrate in a clinical trial? Why isn’t it?

“The problems of this world cannot be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities, but only by people of vision, confidence, hope and imagination.“

~George Bernard Shaw

Aphorisms? Platitudes? Quotable quotes? Still no proof. By the way, nice google skills 🙁

@MSII
I found the Einstein quote on imagination:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.”

http://einstein.biz/quotes

Like I care what an author says about science or medicine.

Notice how we skeptics address every point raised by Margit/Judith but they ignore our points and either change the subject or post meaningless quotes and YouTube quackamonials.

Judith, why are there no clinical trials supporting touch healing? If there is data, as Bengston says, but we don’t want to see, why can’t you provide it? Believe me, we do want to see it. James Randi will give you one million dollars for some proof–isn’t that more of an incentive that just changing some minds on Orac’s blog?