By Catherine Guthrie

Last fall, Mary Scott Blake went to the doctor for a routine mammogram and soon got the news every woman dreads: Light blotches on the film proved to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. Blake did all the things one might expect. She arranged for surgery, cleared her calendar, and braced for a long, painful year of chemotherapy, radiation, and recovery. Then the 52-year-old homemaker in Louisville, Kentucky deviated from the norm. She picked up the phone and called an energy healer.

A close friend urged Blake to consider Reiki, a type of gentle bodywork that aims to rebalance the body’s flow of qi, or vital energy. Proponents say Reiki eases stress and anxiety—and even spurs the body to withstand pain and heal faster.

Blake was familiar with Reiki; in fact, she’d already tried it in a class she had taken on spirituality and thought the idea sounded good. So on the day of her mastectomy, both Blake and her husband received 30-minute Reiki treatments. “Afterward, I felt good about the surgery,” she says. “And I think Reiki had a lot to do with it.”

Blake saw her Reiki therapist regularly over the following months. On days when chemotherapy made her fingers so numb she couldn’t unwrap a stick of gum, she asked the practitioner to focus the healing touch on her hands. Other times she simply begged for relief from the overwhelming fatigue. “Some days I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other,” Blake says. “But I always left my Reiki sessions feeling better than I had when I’d arrived.”

For many Westerners, the idea of energy healing, in which energy is said to be exchanged between practitioner and patient to expedite healing, is the stuff of Hollywood, not hospitals. (Who can forget the image of Mr. Miyagi rubbing his hands together to heal the injured Karate Kid?) “The idea is hard for people to swallow,” says Gala True, a Reiki researcher at the Albert Einstein Center for Urban Health, Policy, and Research, in New York City. “If they can’t see it or measure it, there’s a strong disbelief factor.”

Yet in the past decade, a shift has taken place. For one reason or another—perhaps because of the technique’s noninvasive nature or its underlying spiritual aspects—practitioners and laypeople alike are signing on in record numbers. Dozens of hospitals, from New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering to Honolulu’s Wilcox Memorial, have set up energy healing programs for patients and staff. Spokespeople for organizations that train energy healers brag about tens of thousands of graduates. And last fall, the University of Minnesota became the first big-ten medical school to add Introduction to Energy Healing to its list of class offerings.

People who seem to benefit most from this soothing therapy are those with debilitating ills, such as cancer, chronic pain, and HIV/AIDS. For starters, energy healing won’t interfere with surgery, chemotherapy, or drugs. It’s also great for people who can’t tolerate a lot of pressure on their bodies, like burn victims or fibromyalgia sufferers. And patients can learn to use energy healing on themselves, which creates a narrow ledge of personal power during a free fall of illness.

“When you tell someone they have cancer or a terminal disease, they feel like everything is taken away,” says Jeri Mills, an obstetrician and author of Tapestry of Healing: Where Reiki and Medicine Intertwine. “Suddenly they’re depending on outside sources, whether it’s drugs or people, for all their functions. When you give them Reiki, it gives them back their power. They have something in their own hands to take away their pain.”

No profession has embraced energy healing more wholeheartedly than nursing. The surge of interest has paralleled staffing shortages and the overall curtailing of care by profit-driven hospitals. Nurses welcome the idea of energy healing as a way to regain meaningful contact with their patients, says True.

For Pamela Potter, a Reiki practitioner at Yale’s School of Nursing in New Haven, Connecticut, energy work feels completely natural. “Nurses have always practiced hands-on healing,” she says. “We tend to be holistic. It just fits with the notion of putting the person in the best position for nature to act upon them.”

For her dissertation research, Potter is looking into whether Reiki can alleviate anxiety in women undergoing breast biopsies. In her work with cancer patients, Potter has seen Reiki lessen pain, relieve nausea, and enhance the effectiveness of medications. Other Reiki practitioners report similar results.

But you needn’t be facing a debilitating illness to try energy healing. Many proponents believe physical illness is the end result of years of pent-up stress or emotional upheaval. Therefore, they believe everyone could benefit from a brief energy healing session now and again to soothe and dissipate any stored tension.

“Clearly something powerful is going on,” says James Gordon, founder and president of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, in Washington, D.C. “How powerful, I don’t know. We’re at the very earliest stages of taking a hard look.” And that’s the crux of the issue. How does one measure, much less define, something as ephemeral as energy healing?

Some answers seem like no-brainers. Hold a lover’s hand, embrace an ailing friend, or walk into a room brimming with friends and family, and it’s tough to deny that some form of energy is being exchanged. Everyone uses energy healing, whether they know it or not, says Mills. “In ancient cultures they would have done it consciously, but we’re taught that it’s impossible, so most of us do it subconsciously.”

In fact, most ancient cultures believe in some form of life-giving energy that infuses all living beings. Consider prana in India, ki in Japan, and China’s qi (or chi). Eastern medicine views health as the harmonious flow of energy—and disease as a symptom of blocked energy. As a result, many Eastern medical practices, including acupuncture and reflexology, are based on techniques (needles and pressure, respectively) that are thought to influence energy’s continuous ebb and flow.

Energy healing is based on the same premise, but with a twist: Instead of physically manipulating the patient’s energy, the practitioner herself is considered a conduit for healing energy. For a typical 60-minute Reiki session, the client lies faceup and fully clothed on a padded table. The practitioner moves slowly from head to feet and back again. Along the way she places her hands side by side, palms down, in a series of places along the client’s body. Each stop corresponds with a particular energy center, or chakra, and the practitioner spends between three and five minutes at each position. The sensation of receiving Reiki energy varies from person to person and runs the gamut from deep relaxation to tingling to warmth.

Many Reiki practitioners also perform a similar style of energy healing called Therapeutic Touch (TT). TT is a more Westernized approach to energy healing created in 1972 by two Americans, a nurse and an energy healer. It differs from Reiki in that TT practitioners intentionally send energy where they intuit the client needs it. Reiki practitioners, in contrast, take a more passive approach, believing that the energy is self-directed, going only where it’s needed.

As one would expect, studying this elusive form of medicine is a mystifying proposition. Even so, 21st-century science is coming tantalizingly close to an explanation for how it might work. Here’s the gist of it:

Scientists have long known that the heart has a pulsating electromagnetic field that can be measured several feet from the body. This field creates a low-frequency electromagnetic signal that proponents believe can cause cellular changes that aid healing. Experts have yet to pinpoint exactly how the energy transfer might work, but some studies do suggest that the electromagnetic field gets stronger when a caregiver projects feelings of concern and compassion. Many healers also believe that with practice, people can generate their own healing energy and treat themselves. Once they become “attuned”—the term used to describe the process by which someone learns to channel energy—they can lay their hands on their own bodies and direct healing energy to places that need it.

Mills compares the heart’s electromagnetic field, which she calls the energy body, to a Russian nesting doll. Think of the physical body as the toy’s solid core and the outer layers as ever-larger shells of energy. “An imbalance in the mental, emotional, or spiritual level of the outer layers, if left unresolved, may manifest itself as physical disease,” she says. “Likewise, a physical injury will result in changes in corresponding areas of the energy body. The goal of energy healing is to rebalance the body, mind, and spirit by smoothing out the patient’s energy.”

As for scientific proof, well-designed studies are just beginning to emerge in this fledgling field. A recent review of TT studies in The Annals of Internal Medicine showed a positive effect in seven out of 11 randomized, controlled trials. Among other things, TT helped ameliorate tension headaches, osteoarthritis of the knee, and anxiety in burn patients.

And Pamela Miles, a Reiki researcher and practitioner in New York City, got great results from a small study last year among 30 HIV/AIDS clients in a hospital clinic. The results, published last spring in Alternative Therapies, found that 20-minute Reiki treatments significantly reduced participants’ pain and anxiety.

“This is big,” Miles says. “No matter what the disease or disorder, if you reduce a person’s pain and anxiety, you’ve succeeded in making their life more manageable.”

But for every study that propels energy healing forward, another sends it skittering back. The most famous example was the 1998 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which a grade-school student supposedly debunked Therapeutic Touch. Although heavily criticized afterward for its design flaws, the study left the field with a black eye.

And it still smarts. In a recent study of stroke victims, published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, the authors concluded that Reiki had no “clinically useful effect on stroke recovery.”

The study illustrates one of the most vexing challenges in researching energy healing: how to create a placebo so you can compare patients who receive the treatment to those who don’t. If you’re testing the effectiveness of a supplement, for instance, it’s easy enough to create a sugar pill for the purposes of the study. But with energy healing, you can’t know for sure that a person can turn off her energy field while treating a patient.

“Every time we conduct a study with a mock treatment, we can’t be sure the mock treatment doesn’t have some effect,” Potter says.

Such nuances leave plenty of room for skeptics. Some argue that patients who volunteer for energy healing studies are already open to the idea and, therefore, have a natural bias toward the therapy. Others question whether it’s the energy healing or the environment that promotes a surge of well-being and relaxation. Put the average stressed-out American on a comfy table, tuck a blanket around her shoulders, dim the lights and play a soothing CD, and is it any wonder that stress levels plummet and pain subsides?

Whatever the mechanism at work, energy healers are quick to point out the limitations of their therapy, knowing what it can and cannot promise. “If you get hit by a truck, see a surgeon,” says Mills. “But afterward, call a Reiki practitioner to help you heal faster.”

And many practitioners aren’t immune to the occasional moment of disbelief. “There are times when I’m doing Reiki that the doctor side of my brain says, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’” says Mills. “Then another part of my brain kicks in and says, ‘But it works.’ So I keep doing it. It’s the thing you dream of when you go into medicine, that you’re going to touch people and make them feel better.”

Stuart Walker, an AIDS patient in Louisville, Kentucky, can testify to Reiki’s subtle power. He first tried Reiki a few years after being diagnosed. Since then, the 49-year-old credits energy healing with helping him overcome his body’s resistance to drug therapy. Now, during his Reiki sessions, Walker works on visualizing the drugs doing their job throughout his body. “I believe if you open your mind, they’ll work better,” he says.

As a person who’s lived with AIDS for 14 years, Walker also recognizes the soothing balm of a light touch. “When you have AIDS, you don’t get a lot of physical contact. So just the fact that someone is willing to put their hands on you means a lot.”

Finding a Healer
Finding a qualified Reiki practitioner can be a bit tricky, since there’s no standardization or certification process to distinguish those who were trained in an hour-long workshop from those who’ve honed their skills for years. To a great extent you have to rely on intuition and word of mouth. At your first visit, gauge whether your personalities mesh. Find out what training the person has and how long she’s been practicing. Make sure she comes highly recommended.

And ask about the person’s expertise. The practice is handed down from teacher to student through a ritual called an attunement, and there are three levels of training: first degree, second degree, and Reiki master. Generally speaking, first-degree practitioners are told to practice only on themselves and their friends; you need to be at least second degree to work on a broader range of people. Ideally, you should find someone at this level or someone who’s a Reiki master, which means he or she has more training in the technique’s fine points and a greater depth of experience.

Also, don’t forget to inquire about the length and cost of a typical treatment; it should jibe with massage rates in your locale. To find a practitioner, call the Reiki Alliance at 208.783.3535 or visit www.Reikialliance.com.

Therapeutic Touch practitioners, on the other hand, complete a 12-hour basic workshop, then spend a year working under the supervision of a mentor. And would-be TT practitioners must undergo an additional 14-hour training before applying for a credential. Ongoing classes are needed to keep certification current. A typical TT session lasts between 15 and 30 minutes and costs from $25 to $75. To find a practitioner, call Nurse Healers-Professional Associates International at 801.273.3399 or visit www.therapeutic-touch.org.

This article is from www.alternativemedicine.com

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