It doesn't work, no more than placebo or straightforwards meditation does.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work. Placebo and meditation do work. I suspect Reiki works in exactly the same way.
Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
231–240 of 315 posts
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can reliably distinguish whether the distant practitioner is doing anything to you or not, you should be able to get yourself a million dollars [0]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_...
It's entirely possible that he can still hear the distant practitioner, and that the practitioner's words are enough to trigger the effect. If it even works without hearing the distant practitioner, then yes, go win that million dollars.
True. By "distant" I got the impression that the practitioner is in another building or even another city, but that might not be the case.
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring? It's ok if you feel that what I said was irresponsible. I know that is the mainstream view of things, and I expected a lot of backlash for posting a comment on this. I usually hang out with the crowd where the experience and reality of subtle energy is not in doubt. Among them are the people fo…
>"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." - Nikola Tesla
Material reductionism has really done a number on Western civilization. The notion that existence is limited to what can be measured, and all claims to the contrary get painted with the brush of pseudoscience, to me, embodies the hubris that is holding science back. Not to diminish the achievements of science and academia – they just have one eye covered.
See the work of Dean Radin for a series of studies on nonmaterial phenomena, that I hope are the start of a wave of discovery.
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dream of a species which doesn't use tribal psychology to explain complex phenomena. Yes yes, "the rich and powerful" are "greedy and selfish". Yes yes, they brainwashed everyone. You look at limited resources and are disheartened by your conspiratorial fantasies explaining their limitation. I look at you and I'm disheartened that you mistake limitation for conspiracy, and sustainable distribution for greed. What a…
Disappointment is good. It keeps us (atleast some) looking for ways to change, upgrade those tools of thought, push against those limitations and breakthrough.
But it's not the only driver, so it's not necessary. Perhaps it's the strongest motivator, but I look for improvements in many things, often they're systems I don't use or products I'll never be able to afford. It's not disappointment that drives that (arguably it might be historic disappointment).
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#235Garbage :-( 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.
I've even heard of a study that showed that stress is only bad for you if you believe that stress is bad for you.
That's an interesting one to ponder, isn't it?
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#236It's not so strange that Reiki works; it's a form of placebo effect. Placebos work, despite there provably being no active ingredient at work, and there being no reason at all for them to work except for the belief of the recipient . There's a good reason why new medicine needs to be proven to be better than a placebo in a double-blind study, and not merely better than no treatment at all with patients who know what…
No, placebos don't work.
That is not what is meant by "the placebo effect" by doctors. There is no active ingredient in a placebo. That's why it has no effect on broken bones or cancer. A placebo doesn't have an effect on anything.
However, patients that receive treatment that include a placebo medication and/or procedure (instead of the active version) often report improvement in their perception of their condition. Including pain, nausea, depression, and anxiety. The patients report feeling better.
This "feeling better" after receiving a fake treatment is the placebo effect.
The reason a kiss and a hug works so well on kids (and adults) is that it is comforting and loving. It makes them feel safe and secure and cared for, lowering their anxiety and indeed pain.
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I dream of an economic system that serves human beings instead of the numerical abstractions behind which the rich and powerful hide their extreme selfishness. This is what capitalism is in its essence - a complex decentralised pricing mechanism where every human's choices is taken into account on the free market. The problem is that it has been corrupted by cronyism which has indirectly destroyed the human element…
> This is what capitalism is in its essence - a complex decentralised pricing mechanism where every human's choices is taken into account on the free market. That's what capitalism is in a world populated by Homo economicus . We have to deal with it in a world populated by Homo sapiens , who are notably clumsy at separating capital allocation concerns from social dominance concerns (when we even bother to try).
There's also the small matter of us valuing ourselves rather highly regardless of whether there's a million others like us that could equally create more wealth for which ever capitalist we'd have the misfortune of being owned by.
Some people may be content to consider themselves grist for the capitalist mill, but some very few I imagine.
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#238Western medicine is, IMHO, too averse to exploiting the very real, very powerful, placebo effect. To get a treatment approved you need to prove that it's not a placebo, which excludes, of course... effective placebos. In India, for example, a lot of family doctors don't see their job as curing the disease, but as giving the patient a feeling of agency and control over their lives. Letting them feel like they're doing…
No, clinical studies work by showing statistically significantly greater efficacy than the placebo (sham treatment) group. Placebo can be anything. Just as the treatment. But it turns out that placebo is basically the measure of how much the patient believes in the treatment. And that correlates with price, attention of staff, length of treatment, etc.
That's exactly the point: new medicines are tested against a placebo rather than against no treatment at all, because the placebo does have an effect: the placebo effect. It is an effect, and it can be leveraged to make people feel better. Is that quackery? Or is that making people feel better?
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... That sounds testable. Use 10 people who have chronic pain who report pain relief with hands-on reiki. As for the test: Hands-off reiki vs hands-off no reiki (person who isn't trained in reiki present) vs nothing We should see significant reporting of gains with the hands-off reiki, and should see no gains with #2 or #3... Just because we can't see this assumed energy doesn't mean we can't measure it somehow.
There’s the rub though: what you’re proposing isn’t measuring “subtle energy” at all. It’s measuring whether or not there’s some phenomenon (possibly psychological) that brings pain relief. Your proposed test is only measuring the effect (which is a valuable test!), but not providing any insight into the mechanism of action.
Technically, that is also true when studying energy in physics.
You can't ever measure it directly. Only indirect effects.
From that we build models.
And one of those models contains a quantity called "energy [physics/chemistry/etc]" which is in fact a highly abstract concept that doesn't correspond to any actual object in the world. Technically it doesn't even have a definite value in any real system.
But we take it seriously because there's a useful, strong conservation law based on strongly compelling underlying principles (e.g. Noether's theorem), and no known violation of said law, or at least, every time there is an apparent violation, it eventually leads us to an explanation. It's a very useful abstraction indeed, and we can build all sorts of useful things knowing it.
In fact, the conservation is key to making "energy [physics/chemistry/etc]" accurately measurable at all. And sometimes we even get that wrong.
The notion of "subtle energy" is another model, much less well developed and rarely if ever quantified. One can argue all day about whether it's a useful model and what it models, if anything. My view is I'd love to see serious attempts to work backwards from observed phenomena (such as mentioned in the GP), as well as other reports (people report tingling, heat, feelings like electrical currents etc - this is data even if it is subjective, and it has structure). And from that build a more coherent model than the "intuitive" explanations often produced.
But they are both describing abstract properties in models, and measurements are indirect not direct in both cases.
Re: Reiki can’t possibly work, so why does it?
#240> 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…
Reiki focuses specifically on this aspect in emphasizing the focus, intent and emotional commitment of the practitioner. Replace "energy" with "emotion" and it begins to look legitimate.
Which is interesting because emotion is directly proportional to level of energy in brain cells.