Our healthcare system is buckling under its own weight.
You know this. Waitlists in months. Staff leaving faster than we can replace them. Buildings that needed funding a decade ago. Million dollar machines doing brilliant, necessary work, while the person in the waiting room has been tired for two years and nobody has ten minutes to sit with them.
Let me be clear before I go further. I'm not against the pill or the scalpel. They work, and they work brilliantly, and they save people every single day. I'd take them myself, and I have.
But there's a kind of suffering they don't reach. And we have built almost nothing to meet it.
Take fatigue. Not tiredness. The kind that sleep doesn't fix. The kind that follows illness and treatment around for years.
The current advice for it is exercise. Tai chi. Meditation. Therapy.
All good things. Every one of them asks you to do something.
And here's the line that stopped me, buried in a study published last month. The researchers note, almost in passing, that people often can't keep up with any of it. They're too sick. Too sore. Too worn out.
Read that again. We are prescribing effort to people who have none left.
The study that changed the question
The study is worth knowing about, and not for the reason you'd think.
It's in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. That's not a wellness magazine. NCCN writes the rulebook. When your oncologist decides what to offer you, they're working from guidelines that come from people like this.
Reiki versus massage for cancer-related fatigue
A cancer centre in Rochester tested Reiki against massage in 87 people worn down by hormone therapy for breast and prostate cancer. Everyone improved. Enough to matter in their actual days, and they still felt better a month later.
Reiki kept pace with massage. It did not beat it, whatever anyone tells you, and I'd rather say that plainly myself than have someone say it for me.
No bad reactions in the whole trial. No needles. No scans. Nothing to swallow. Nothing to weigh against a side effect. No machine. No waitlist. People lay on a table with their clothes on, and someone put their hands on them.
Now look at what they compared it to.
Massage is already accepted. It's already in the guidelines. Doctors already offer it.
You don't spend four years testing a fringe thing against an accepted thing to find out whether the fringe thing is real. You do that when you've moved past that question. You do it to work out which one to give someone, and how many times. They even tried two sessions against four, to see if more was better.
Nobody runs that study to ask if Reiki works. They ran it to find out where it goes.
I wrote before about the research finally catching up. This is something else. This is the paperwork you file on the way in.
What actually changes anyone's mind
Not a paper. I know that, because I was a sceptic, and a good one. Someone else's belief in a thing I didn't understand was never going to move me.
Here's what moved me.
Years ago I was pregnant with my second, and the baby was the wrong way up. Weeks to go. The other option was turning her by hand from the outside, which is risky, and I'm told it hurts.
My midwife suggested acupuncture.
I didn't believe in acupuncture. Not for a second. But I trusted her. She was careful and she was smart and she didn't waste my time. So I went, and I lay there like a pin cushion feeling absolutely nothing, thinking this is very silly.
Three days later, the baby flipped.
Do I know it was the acupuncture? No. I don't, and I won't pretend I do. I'd have taken the manual turn if it had failed. I'd have gritted my teeth and done it.
But I didn't go because I was persuaded. I went because someone I trusted put it on the table as a real option.
That's what a study like this is for. Not for me, and not for you. It's for the midwife. The nurse. The doctor. The person in the room deciding whether saying "there's this, if you'd like to try it" would cost them their good name.
Right now, for Reiki, it might. So they say nothing. And their patient goes home tired.
A guideline isn't proof. It's permission.
What I claim, and what I don't
A word about my own field. Energy medicine is growing fast, and some people in it claim things they cannot back up. You'll hear that Reiki cures disease. They don't know that.
Here's my position, as plainly as I can put it.
I don't know where Reiki's limits are. Nobody does. Not yet.
I won't tell you it cures anything, because I have no evidence for that. And I won't tell you it can't, because I have no evidence for that either. Nobody has looked properly.
So I don't make promises. I do the work and let it speak for itself. And I wait for the studies.
I know how that sits next to a clinical trial. I hold it anyway, and I hold it carefully. Because we've been here before. Half of what's ordinary now was laughable forty years ago. We keep finding results in places we were certain we wouldn't. So I stay careful, and I stay hopeful, and I think some of what gets called woo today becomes science later, once we work out how to look at it.
Not because I need to be proven right. Because people need more options than they've got.
What I want
I'd like Reiki taught, not just sold.
Because here's what most people don't know about it. It isn't only a service. It's a capacity. It lives in you already. You can put your own hands on your own body, and something happens.
So I long for a day when patients are shown self-Reiki the way they're shown how to use crutches. When the woman too exhausted to get to an appointment can tend to herself at three in the morning, in her own bed, with nobody's permission and nobody's hourly rate.
That takes nothing from me.
Here's what a practitioner is actually for, plainly. Since I started this work, things have grown in me that I can't explain. I sense things during a session. Images arrive. I pick up on what's going on in someone's body, and in their life, before they've told me. I don't have a mechanism for that and I'm not going to invent one. But it's useful. People get off my table with something they didn't walk in with. Not just rest. An insight about their own life. Something named that they'd been carrying around for years without words for it.
That's the part your own hands can't give you at three in the morning.
Your hands are for the hard nights. Someone with years in theirs is for when you need more than that, or you're too unwell to do it alone, or you're unsure and need to feel it done well before you'd trust yourself. I've written more about where this work sits alongside modern healthcare, if you want the longer view.
Self-Reiki is the floor, not the ceiling. Knowing how to stretch never put a physiotherapist out of work.
I want you to have both.
A word for the people who hold the budget
I should tell you where I'm standing. Before this work, I spent seventeen years in evidence-based policy. I know how a claim gets weighed. I know what counts as proof in a room where money is moving, and what gets waved off. I know how slowly things change, and that it usually isn't malice. It's inertia. It's risk. It's nobody wanting to be the first name on the memo.
So I won't ask you to believe anything. I'll ask you to look at the arithmetic.
Start with the simplest version.
Your extended health plan almost certainly covers massage therapy. Nobody finds that strange.
This study put Reiki head to head with massage. Reiki kept pace with it.
So one of them is a benefit you can claim, and the other one isn't. Ask why. It isn't the evidence.
It's regulation, and I'll say that before someone says it at me. Massage therapy has a college, a licence, a scope of practice, somewhere to complain. Reiki doesn't. Insurers don't pay for evidence, they pay for accountability, and they're right to.
And before anyone tells me Reiki can't sit inside a medical setting, I'd point out that it already does.
It's in hospices across the UK, listed on their own websites next to massage and aromatherapy, as ordinary care for people at the end of their lives. St John's Hospice. Arthur Rank Hospice. Saint Francis Hospice. It's been in the palliative care literature for twenty years. This very study leans on a published evaluation of a hospital Reiki program for cancer patients. The researchers didn't have to imagine what that looks like. They cited it.
So the question isn't whether this can be done inside real medicine. It's being done. Just not here. Not at any scale. And not for anyone who can't pay out of pocket.
Now, would Reiki benefit from proper standards? Absolutely, and I'll be the first to say it. In a clinical setting especially, where the person on the table is frightened and unwell and in no position to vet anybody. I'd welcome that. I'd sign up for it tomorrow.
But that's a design problem, and we know how to solve design problems. It needs doing with care, so the red tape doesn't strangle the thing that makes this work in the first place, which is a skilled practitioner's presence and judgment. You can regulate a practice without regulating the life out of it. That's a conversation for another day.
The point is that we are not having the conversation at all.
So let's have it. Money talks, and I've watched it talk for seventeen years. So talk to me in your language.
What would eight Reiki sessions do to a body over a year? Not to a tumour. To a person. Their sleep. Their pain. Their stress. How many appointments they need. How many pills they end up on, and for how long. How long they stay standing before they arrive in your system as an emergency.
I don't know. That isn't modesty. Nobody knows, because nobody has run the numbers.
That's my ask. Not belief. Not faith. Fund the analysis.
Look at what you'd be pricing. An hour. A quiet room. A table. A pair of trained hands. No machine, no scan, no waitlist, nothing to weigh against a side effect. It can happen in a clinic, a long term care home, a hospice, or someone's living room. It's one of the few things in healthcare that gets cheaper as it scales, not more expensive, because the equipment is a person.
Then look at what we reach for instead. We reach for the prescription pad, because it's what we built, and because it's fast, and because there is nothing else on the shelf for the person who is simply worn out. Some of those prescriptions are keeping people alive and I'd never touch them. But some are there because we had nothing gentler to offer.
And fund the study nobody has run. Every trial so far tests a practitioner working on a patient. Not one has taught patients to do it themselves and followed them for a year. That's the only version that truly scales, because it costs a lesson and a pair of hands.
Show me the analysis. Run it properly, with people who know how, and let it say whatever it says. If it comes back and tells you this saves nothing, I'll read that too.
But I don't think it will. And I think when you go hunting for dollars, you'll find something else sitting right beside them.
Because it isn't only cheaper to keep a person comfortable. It's kinder. It's the difference between managing a body and tending to a person.
That's a rare thing to find in a budget line. I'd take a serious look at it.
It's already happening
There's one more thing you can do, and it costs nothing.
If Reiki, or acupuncture, or anything else has helped you, say so out loud. Tell your care team. Not to convert anyone. Just so it's on the record. Clinicians change what they offer when patients tell them what's working, and there are far more of you than there are of us. Some hospitals and hospices already run Reiki programs, quietly, because enough people asked.
That's how acupuncture did it. Decades. From ridiculous, to tolerated, to something a midwife could offer a frightened pregnant woman without risking her reputation. Nobody blinks now.
It didn't happen because sceptics were argued into submission. It happened slowly. One careful study. One honest practitioner. One patient saying that helped.
We're near the start of that arc. One study won't do it. But somebody at a serious cancer centre spent four years asking, not whether this is real, but how many sessions people should get.
That's a real question, asked in a real room, about a gentle thing.
The door isn't open yet. But somebody is measuring it for a frame.
Maria