The BBC reports that a third of cancer patients are using complementary and alternative medicines. They describe the practice of Reiki, whose practitioners claim to manipulate the supposed “ki” or “life force” (that no scientific instrument can even detect), by an unexplained magic process. Shame on the BBC for giving credence to this dross, but at least the article does end with the disclaimer:
Dr Terry Cullen, chairman of the British Complementary Medicine Association emphasised that complementary treatments were not a cure for cancer.
Agreed. But that begs the question, what is Reiki good for? And how do they know? Because the problem with Reiki is that it’s un-falsifiable – you can’t test it in such a way that, if it was false, it would fail the test. If you feel better then it’s the Reiki that did it. If you don’t feel better then you’re “resisting” the Reiki. It’s never that Reiki doesn’t work. So how do they know it does anything?
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