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Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

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Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#81

Post by _y5hn »

connectsnk wrote: post #58
lilSebastian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely interested, how did you get started with meditation?

I did an Art of living course back in 2009. It was a 5 day session held in evenings with an Art of living teacher. I have been very infrequent in my practice and I might have become an absolutely fantastic human being if I was more regular in my practice. But I am easily satisfied and I am happy with where I am. There might be other avenues better than Art of living courses but I have not tried them.

I can vouch for Art of Living as well. There are many groups in most countries and is both rooted in tradition and seek scientific research/validation. It's about betterment of self and stress release.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#82

Post by riffraff »

nindalf wrote: post #42
lilSebastian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely interested, how did you get started with meditation?

Don’t know about that guy but I did it with Headspace. It’s guided meditation - he coaches you through it. I found it pretty helpful. Nowadays I do guided yoga with YouTube videos but I try to keep the lessons from Headspace in mind while doing them - clear my mind, focus on my breathing, if my mind wanders gently bring it back, think about how my body feels etc.

another vote for headspace for a simple reason: it has very little (none?) metaphysical/new age/faux-buddhist BS.

Things "feel the energy of the earth getting in through your soles" kind of things, which I find deeply annoying and distracting.

I am sure such things _are_ useful for some people though, so YMMV.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#83

Post by kd5bjo »

ALittleLight wrote: post #45

"Over the past two decades, a number of studies have shown that Reiki treatments help diminish the negative side effects of chemotherapy, improve surgical outcomes, regulate the autonomic nervous system, and dramatically alter people’s experience of physical and emotional pain associated with illness." The article links, with the phrase "a number of studies" to what seems to be one study [1]. In this study it looks l…

As far as I know, pain is fundamentally a mental phenomenon: the only way to know if someone is in pain is to ask them or observe a voluntary change in their behavior. Until this changes, the only evidence we can have that a proposed treatment reduces pain is via self-report.

As far as we can tell, though, pain is a real problem that affects many people. We need to find effective treatments for it, and as much as I’d like to see more objective evidence of efficacy, I can’t think of what that evidence would actually be.

Maybe we’ll eventually understand what’s going on well enough for a more objective test, but that’s not the case today. We need to make the best judgements we can on poor information as we also try to increase the quality of information we have to work with.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#84

Post by waterhouse »

ilaksh wrote: post #17

Maybe there is a way to use this concept of reducing stress with a gesture without invoking supernatural gibberish. I mean to me it seems totally plausible that having a person there that is trying to help you in and of itself can reduce stress. Also if they touch you, that seems like it could definitely reduce stress also. Or just the psychological effect of knowing that there are people who care, that seems like it…

> just the psychological effect of knowing that there are people who care

“You don’t have to be thinking anything,” one master said. “You are just there to love them.”

Wow, no kidding. If the practitioners, through practice (and perhaps self-selection), manage to produce that feeling at will, and if the patient picks up on this... Imagine that a competent, trusted person loves you and is laying hands on you in a kindly way to heal you. That has to speak deeply to evolved instinct; if there are ways that the patient's emotion produces hormones or whatever to affect the body, this seems like a powerful way to affect the emotions.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#85

Post by _y5hn »

sumofi wrote: post #73

Garbage :-( Believe in Placebo believe in Nocebo as well. Where do you draw the line? I draw it at unscientific. What do you think has all this shit done for our society? Reike, antivax, flat Earth, akkupunkture, traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, fake news. It's all bullshit. If you as a human just believe in stuff without effidence you are dangerous. Climate change? Oh no someone told me it's a hoax to get u…

Some people have a psychological condition they get sick from things they think makes them sick, like wireless and 5G. I don't judge the merits, but it can be anything and sometimes rooted in the psychological makeup.

Your failure to argument is just a failure to listen.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#87

Post by baddox »

travisjungroth wrote: post #51
seer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment and I apologize in advance for going off topic. We all have our mental models and it takes effort to re-evaluate and change them. And as the saying goes - there are no right models, only useful ones in some situations. Some are useful in more situations than others. Take “flat earth” model of the world. It’s not right, but it’s precise enough for the purposes of living in a village. Nothing wrong with t…

> Take “flat earth” model of the world. It’s not right, but it’s precise enough for the purposes of living in a village. Nothing wrong with that, its when you want to venture out, then you have to find a more precise one. I don’t think you have to have a more precise model. The modern world is incredibly tolerant of bad models. Last year, I visited four continents. I don’t think a single thing would have been differe…

You just weren’t doing anything that depended on your model of cosmology. I don’t think that says much about how tolerant of bad models the modern world is. The engineers making GPS required good models of physics, but their efforts probably would not have been thwarted by even the most inaccurate models of human medicine. And likewise it’s probably fine if your doctor doesn’t know about relativity.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#88

Post by tsimionescu »

hyko wrote: post #56
crispinb wrote: post #22

Almost more interesting than Reiki itself is the reflexive responses, bifurcating essentially into: 1. it's all mumbo jumbo 2. there's more in heaven and earth, my son Note that neither group is particularly interested in the empirical evidence, though group 1 will tend to take a louder cherry-picking feint at it. An empiricist mindset is really hard for humans to inhabit. We (scientistic hard-heads included) judge p…

These two responses are not equal, as every claim made by anyone should fall into category 1 until proven otherwise. Response 2 admits the possibility of better theories about the world being possible, while refusing to do the actual science that would prove their existence. Claims about alternative medicine don't even get to start from this generous position because the field has produced reams upon reams of utter-a…

It's all mumbo jumbo is equivalent to 'it has been proven not to work'. That is a strong position to take, not a default one. The second is too hand-wavy to even really call a position.

Note that it's generally important to separate the possible effectiveness of a technique from the beliefs about why it may be effective that practitioners hold. Willowbark is an effective remedy for some ailments, not because of some tree spirit or some alchemical mumbo-jumbo that many may have once believed in,but for different reasons they had no way of knowing.

If it turns out under serious study that Reiki has positive effects, we will need further study to understand why, and perhaps distill that into an even more effective treatment. It won't be magical energy, but perhaps there is something to it that can be identified and taught.

Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?

#90

Post by danielbarla »

logicchains wrote: post #53
connectsnk wrote: post #31

Many people are commenting that Reiki is like Meditation i.e. all mumbo jumbo placebo effect. This might persuade a lot of people to reject both without going through the experience. I have been a very infrequent practitioner of meditation since 2009. I am now a very different person and there is no way for me to measure how or what has changed in me. I am way more focused, happier and might I conservatively add the…

There's a simple logical explanation why meditation works. A huge amount of suffering comes from people making value judgements about things they're thinking about: "X happened/is happening/will happen, X is bad, now I feel bad". Meditation has two effects on this: firstly, it encourages non-thinking (or focusing on some specific thing like breathing), which means less time for random thoughts, which means less time…

I agree with most of what you said, except I think you miss a core mechanism. Specifically, it doesn't just encourage non-thinking (though this is certainly an aspect), but it also encourages you to take a step back, and explore around what you are feeling. This is profound, because it very quickly leads to you figuring out chains of causality in yourself. You gain a much deeper understanding of why you do things, what you are like as a person, and what you could change in order to stop these cause and effect relationships. So, in essence, you get a root cause analysis for free, which gets built in to your muscle memory.
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