Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 315 posts

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

#171

Post by zipwitch »

dmos62 wrote: post #139
logicchains wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a problem with taking something as subtle as the internal workings of a human and saying "aha! I now understand what the effect of this is or why that is happening". We seek simplicity and conformance to our mental models, but nature doesn't have those constraints. It's naive to think "I've figured it out". And, that's a good thing. Many times desire for explanations is just to make oneself feel in control. J…

Sometimes it doesn't have to be "I figured it out". Just being able to say to yourself, "I feel X about Y, but maybe I don't want/need/choose/have to feel X about Y" can be very empowering. And I'm not talking abstract empowerment, I mean in a very practical "I have more control over my life, my self, and my choices" sense.

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

#172

Post by [deleted] »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #23

> The ailments that Reiki seems to treat most effectively are those that orthodox medicine struggles to manage: pain, anxiety, chronic disease, and the fear or discomfort of facing not only the suffering of illness but also the suffering of treatment. This is key. Modern medicine, with the way hospitals and health insurance are run, do not and cannot address, for economic reasons, a pretty important aspect, albeit su…

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by barry-cotter »

skissane wrote: post #142
barry-cotter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US spends more on healthcare per capita than any other country, which is hardly surprising given that it’s the richest country. Whatever criticisms one might make of the US healthcare system not enough money is far down the list.

> The US spends more on healthcare per capita than any other country, which is hardly surprising given that it’s the richest country. Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Brunei, Norway, UAE, Kuwait and Switzerland all have more GDP per capita (PPP) than the US yet spend less per capita on healthcare (PPP). So, the US coming first in health expenditure per capita is not simply due to coming first in wealth. (The US…

> Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Brunei, Norway, UAE, Kuwait and Switzerland all have more GDP per capita (PPP) than the US yet spend less per capita on healthcare (PPP).

GDP per capita understates how rich the US is. A better measure is average individual consumption. Unfortunately I can’t find great figures on that but the only country/region with higher household consumption than the US is Hong Kong, with far smaller households[1].

Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait and Norway are petrostates. Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland and Switzerland all have oversized financial sectors and as such Gross National Product gives a more realistic measure of how rich they really are. Singapore and Switzerland it doesn’t change much but Ireland’s GNP is ~80% of GDP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

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

#174

Post by wpietri »

dmos62 wrote: post #129
hosh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the attitude one holds is important. People can sense that at some level. Subtle energy is real though. Reiki is one of the modalities that does not require being in person. There’s a bunch of weirder, more obscure modalities that can work with chronic pain, trauma, and the like.

Addressing the quiet downvoters. It upsets me how dismissive our culture can be. What if there's something to it? There's a rich history of people thinking that there is. Do they really not deserve a second thought? I wish everyone were always a skeptic, but never off-hand dismissive. To those entrusting our mainstream with authority on what's bullshit and what's not, remember that psychedelics research is still ille…

I think there are two components here. One is people reporting their experience. We should definitely honor that.

But the other is people making claims of fact based on their experience. That's something people need to be responsible about, because it imposes a burden on the rest of us, and can be actively harmful.

So if somebody sees funny lights in the skies, great! I would like to hear about their experience. But suppose somebody uses that to claim that aliens are real and are coming to probe people's anuses and the government is covering that all up. That's not a neutral act! As we can see with the recent rise in conspiracism and a lot of specific wacko beliefs like Flat Earth theories, bad thinking is contagious. And when we look at antivax hysteria, it becomes obviously dangerous.

A comment like "subtle energy is real" is for me in the realm of irresponsible behavior. It's an unevidenced assertion of fact about the nature of the universe. And here, it's placed in contradiction to somebody being open-minded about the experience and trying to find a way to fit it into more useful frameworks of fact. So the "subtle energy is real" person is actually the one being dismissive here. I'd say the downvotes are reasonable.

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

#175

Post by wpietri »

stronglikedan wrote: post #160
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #23

> The ailments that Reiki seems to treat most effectively are those that orthodox medicine struggles to manage: pain, anxiety, chronic disease, and the fear or discomfort of facing not only the suffering of illness but also the suffering of treatment. This is key. Modern medicine, with the way hospitals and health insurance are run, do not and cannot address, for economic reasons, a pretty important aspect, albeit su…

> The figure of the family doctor that takes his time and actually shows you attention has vanished. They're still plentiful if you seek them out.

Where? I've been seeking for years. The best one I found didn't even take insurance, because that didn't pay enough to justify the time she spent with patients. She recently closed her practice, alas. And on my insurance, I'm now required to go through one of the approved primary care doctors.

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

#176

Post by andrepd »

barry-cotter wrote: post #133
andrepd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The figure of the family doctor that takes his time and actually shows you attention has vanished. The average experience of a hospital visit is that of being treated like a number. This doesn't have to be so (indeed in many places it isn't yet). This is a consequence of a strained public health system which is simply running over capacity. Maybe if we stopped pumping money into banks and wealthy people's pockets we…

The US spends more on healthcare per capita than any other country, which is hardly surprising given that it’s the richest country. Whatever criticisms one might make of the US healthcare system not enough money is far down the list.

I was talking about countries with a national public health system, in fact I specifically had my own country (and other European countries with similar models) in mind.

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

#177

Post by dmos62 »

logicchains wrote: post #164
dmos62 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a problem with taking something as subtle as the internal workings of a human and saying "aha! I now understand what the effect of this is or why that is happening". We seek simplicity and conformance to our mental models, but nature doesn't have those constraints. It's naive to think "I've figured it out". And, that's a good thing. Many times desire for explanations is just to make oneself feel in control. J…

It's not about describing the mind, it's about modelling the mind. E.g. if we have some reasonable axioms: thinking about things can cause suffering, how reaction to something depends on how we value it, and our values can be change, then from those axioms it follows that we can change how much we suffer from thinking about things by changing our values.

True enough. There's some balance to be struck between being observant and letting observations turn into blinding beliefs.

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

#178

Post by conjectures »

gerbilly wrote: post #168
411111111111111 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. None was provided, so we will have to dismiss it until some proof is provided. Nobody is dismissing proof here. They're only dismissive of the extraordinary claims that an immeasurable energy somehow inherent to some things has any effect beyond essentially the placebo effect. After all, there hasn't been any evidence which showed differently. If you have some stud…

And who's the authority on what's extraordinary then?

It's extraordinary in the sense that there is no known mechanism for it to work.

E.g. soap kills viruses by dissolving them, some painkillers work by blocking transmission of signals along nerves, radiotherapy kills cells in the blast zone.

Other than through establishing a psychological effect around 'someone cares', there's simply no known way of positive thoughts in one person's head being transmitted down through the hands and directly doing some work on an illness.

If there were, what is it:

What kind of 'energy' do hands emit? How does the difference between Reiki hands and non-Reiki hands manifest? How does that 'energy' selectively effect diseases? How does thought modulate the diseases the 'energy' effects. E.g. how is the Reiki hand energy signature a function of the targeted disease? What's the molecular pathway by which the 'energy' improves the target ailment? If it's just regular 'energy' why can't we copy it with a machine and play it back en masse?

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

#179

Post by infinity0 »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #23

> The ailments that Reiki seems to treat most effectively are those that orthodox medicine struggles to manage: pain, anxiety, chronic disease, and the fear or discomfort of facing not only the suffering of illness but also the suffering of treatment. This is key. Modern medicine, with the way hospitals and health insurance are run, do not and cannot address, for economic reasons, a pretty important aspect, albeit su…

A key foundational fallacy of modern "dogmatic scientism" (for lack of a better phrase) is the fallacy fallacy - just because something doesn't have a scientific or otherwise formally-theoretic explanation, doesn't mean it's false. This is why empiricism was and remains so key in pushing technological progress, contributing to the Enlightenment and the efficacy of the scientific method. As opposed to "dogmatic scientism" where scientifically-oriented religious zealots denounce techniques for merely the reason that we don't properly understand how they work, in the false belief that they are promoting science or being scientific.

(A variant of this is where they denounce something for merely the reason that it seems to contradict another scientific theory, but in fact that theory only applies in a different context with different assumptions, and there is no actual contradiction.)

"The Science Delusion" is a very good pro-scientific book that covers various other examples of these topics.

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

#180

Post by barry-cotter »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #151
barry-cotter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US spends more on healthcare per capita than any other country, which is hardly surprising given that it’s the richest country. Whatever criticisms one might make of the US healthcare system not enough money is far down the list.

> The US spends more on healthcare per capita than any other country ... ...because it's very inefficient

You have the causality reversed. The US spends money on marginal improvements in healthcare that other countries judge not worthwhile. The US is so rich that they focus on quality and convenience when other countries are trying to cut costs.

The US system really is very inefficient. All that excess capacity makes it relatively robust to surges in demand, like for ICU beds now due to COVID. IIRC the US has 70% average occupancy compared to the UK NHS’s 85%. Waiting times to see a doctor are also much shorter in the US than in Canada.

The US is richer so it can afford to value other things over efficiency.

Post reply on HN