4 ms·

It can possibly work, if you open your mind to more then what's possible in the materialist scientific viewpoint.

• Tepix 7y ago
  Why would you do that?
  • bencollier49 7y ago
    Well, if we take the original comment at face-value, in order to make it work.
• tempestn 7y ago
  I don't know what a "materialist scientific viewpoint" is, but I'm not sure how one would seek to understand the world from other than a scientific viewpoint. You'd just be guessing based on intuition. If there's something that's real, it should be possible to investigate it in a scientific manner. For example, you could imagine a study comparing the effects of a real Reiki session to a fake one performed by an actor with no Reiki training. Depending on the results, that might give scientific evidence (not definitive proof, of course) suggesting either that there is a not-yet-understood element to the Reiki practice that does have a real effect, or that the effects are tangential, perhaps due to relaxation, placebo effect, or endorphins. Either way, further studies could be designed to delve further into understanding. That's science.
  • jlokier 7y ago
    I agree with you (and upvoted). However wish to point out that, if the study gave a clear result, great you have something to work with, but if it gave a negative result, that wouldn't prove Reiki per se doesn't work. Instead it would prove that Reiki training is not necessary to obtain the same outcome in this setting. Which would also be great as something to work with. But because of logical possibilities like "actors perfoming the actions they are told to do automatically draw on natural Reiki ability that we all have" (among others), it would be incorrect to rule out Reiki itself from a result like that without a much tighter definition of what is being ruled out. (And people would likely argue over such definitions and talk past one another while doing so.) Generally: Proving negatives is hard, and requires us to describe carefully what we're really proving, which is invariably narrower than we would like (non-generalisability of negatives). That's one of the difficulties with studying this sort of thing in a genuinely scientific way.
    • tempestn 7y ago
      Yes, I totally agree with the challenges you describe. And certainly, there are always going to be further avenues of study, whatever the result. For instance, I'm certainly not a Reiki expert, but my understanding is that chakras play a role. One could perhaps narrow the study I described above by having one practitioner intentionally misplace the chakras, while keeping everything else constant, to study specifically whether those locations are indeed meaningful. If you wanted, you could also approach studying it from another direction, and try to measure the transfer of energy that supposedly occurs. There would be various ways to go about that. Obviously I seriously doubt that a rigorous experiment would actually show an energy transfer from the practitioner, but if it did, and no flaws could be found in the measurement techniques, that would be pretty interesting!
• evgen 7y ago
  Please stop opening your mind so much that your brain falls out, it tends to lead people to waste time and resources on unproductive and often harmful responses to illness and injury.