While taking the Rolfing training in Germany, I heard the word Reiki often. It was born in Japan in the Meiji era and was once widely practiced there, then effectively disappeared after the Second World War. Meanwhile, by way of Hawaii, it spread as Reiki through the West, reaching Germany and the rest of Europe. In the end it came back to Japan as a reimport, and interest in the original Japanese practice revived there.
What surprised me is that nearly everyone in Germany knows about Reiki. German physicians, too, will sometimes bring it into treatment depending on the case.
The National Institutes of Health in the United States has twenty-seven institutes and centers, one of which — the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, or NCCIH — specializes in complementary medicine. Reiki appears on its list alongside yoga, meditation, tai chi, and homeopathy.
The allocation of funding is interesting. In 2011, NIH as a whole spent $441.82 million on research into complementary medicine, of which NCCIH accounted for $107.71 million. That is comparable to the $108.23 million the National Cancer Institute spent on complementary medicine research in the same year.
So Reiki does draw attention in the West.
Clinical research, however, is limited. There are studies using Reiki for fibromyalgia, pain, cancer, and depression, as well as for general health, but no randomized trials — the highest level of evidence — have been carried out.
Perhaps for that reason, the American Cancer Society, Cancer Research UK, and NCCIH all advise that Reiki should not be used in place of conventional medical treatment, only as a complement to it.
That said, part of why I set out to travel around the world was to experience complementary medicine for myself and find out what it actually is. I had tried Ayurveda before. And something else interested me: while traveling, I had the chance to receive Reiki at a distance, and a cough that had gone on for more than a month stopped abruptly.
Given all this, I wanted to know what Reiki is, whether it might serve the Rolfing I was now doing, and to study it if the opportunity came.
I was fortunate. In 2015, Takami Kamata, who lives in Frankfurt, held a Jikiden Reiki seminar in Tokyo as a certified teacher of the method. She is also a Rolfer. So from July 18 to 20, 2015, I took part in that seminar.
Next time I will write about the seminar itself.
Note, August 2026
What stands out on rereading is what I looked into before studying.
The allocation of NIH funding. That there is a center devoted to complementary medicine, and that Reiki appears on its list. The number of clinical studies and the level of evidence behind them. And that the American Cancer Society, Cancer Research UK, and NCCIH all advise against using it in place of conventional treatment.
I had already signed up for the seminar. All of this was looked up before the first day.
A habit from my earlier profession
I spent twenty years in medical research and the pharmaceutical industry. Whether something works, and at what level of evidence you can say so. Whether there are randomized trials, or only case reports. That way of looking at things stayed with me.
It has stayed since, too. I have written a piece taking up directly the question of whether Rolfing is pseudoscience (see “Is Rolfing Pseudoscience? — Understanding Rolfing Through the Science of the Body: The Latest Fascia Research and a PhD’s Perspective on the Evidence“) — the same exercise of surveying the evidence and sorting out what can and cannot be claimed.
I apply the same measure to the work I offer myself. That has not changed since this piece.
Having looked it up, I put my own experience beside it
What makes this piece interesting, though, is that it does not stop there.
In the same piece where I wrote that no randomized trials have been carried out, I also wrote that while traveling around the world I received Reiki at a distance and a cough of more than a month stopped abruptly. I did not say from whom, or where. One line.
What the evidence will not support, and what happened to me. I did not pick one and discard the other.
Ten years later, in the Advanced Training, energy work was taken up directly. What I received there was a framework for reconsidering the field as an exchange of information — not energy in the sense physics gives it, the capacity to do work, but something that includes nonlinear and nonlocal phenomena. A way of handling what existing scientific frameworks cannot fully account for, while leaving it unaccounted for.
There was another road available: if it cannot be explained, do not touch it. At the time of this piece, I did not take that road. Nor did I stop looking things up.
If the same question came now
What can be said about Reiki may well have changed. The figures here are from 2011, and so are the advisories. NCCIH itself has changed as well — Helene Langevin, a connective tissue researcher, served as its director from 2018 to 2025.
The overall shape, though, is probably the same. A national research body allocates funding to it as a category. The level of evidence remains low. And the experiences of the people who receive it remain.
This field sits where those three hold at once.