Profile of reiki massage: how the no-touch therapy has made its mark

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To learn more, I went to see reiki master Alexander Koops at his home beside London’s Regent’s Canal. This is a discreet place with an appointments-only clientele, where the whiff of perfumed oil floats over tasteful arrays of crystals and quartz pyramids. There’s only so much reiki, Alex diplomatically explained, that a spiritual delinquent like me can handle in a single session. To benefit properly I’d need a cleaned-up lifestyle with less booze and gross-out food, and, ideally, I’d learn to meditate and try to think of myself – as reiki devotees apparently do – spinning inside a shining bubble. Reiki, according to its revered founder, is “a process not an eventâ€.
“What reiki does,†said Alex, “is to replace bad energy, which we feel as things like anger and stress and frustration, with good energy, in the form of happiness and calm. Everything is energy of some sort. The whole universe is made up of it. You can’t destroy the bad energy, but you can change its nature from something that harms you to something that helps you.â€
Given the scale of the challenge, Alex suggested I had a spiritual-healing massage with some gentle reiki thrown in. Flat out on his table, slathered in warm oil, I felt his palms descend. Was that actual heat spilling out of them, or is part of the cleverness of Reiki that it fools you into thinking the healer has hands like waffle irons?
He worked his way around the chakras – head, middle, feet – flexing his fingers to blast them with bolts of invisible energy. Lying face down, it is hard to have a clear idea of what is going on, and despite the sense of being wired up to some cosmic power plant, there’s a near-irresistible yearning to nod off. Alex cautions that Mr Evans’s story of being accidentally clawed by a masseur shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. “It wouldn’t happen in real reiki,†he says, darkly, “but there are people who mix other stuff in.â€
Alex, 42, studied regular medicine in his native Germany, but tells me his plans to become a conventional doctor were overtaken by an interest in self-discovery and alternative therapies. Finding his fellow Germans to be sniffy about such things, he moved to London 12 years ago, trained as a reiki master, and now runs his own clinic.
“There’s no particular type of client,†he says. “You get all kinds. It’s mostly people who feel that maybe there’s something beyond mainstream medicine that can improve their lives.â€
Reiki masters – at least the reputable ones – are careful not to make overambitious claims for the treatment. “We don’t diagnose, and we don’t offer specific cures,†says Alex. Yet the British Reiki Association’s website boasts: “Acute injuries can be helped to heal very quickly but more chronic illness takes longer. In some cases, such as terminal illness, there is not enough time for the progress of the disease to be reversed.â€
There are, inevitably, many who think the whole thing is bunkum. Edward Ernst, an Exeter University professor of medicine and author of a critical investigation into reiki, scoffs at the underlying theory: “Nobody has been able to define or quantify this 'energy’,†he writes. “It defies scientific measurement and is biologically implausible. These circumstances render reiki one of the least plausible therapies in the tool kit of alternative medicine.â€
You could feel a lot worse than I did when I left Alex’s premises. A little later, over a glass of Meursault and a seared-tuna slice, I was reminded that you could feel a lot better, too.
Mr Evans’s forehead appears to be healing nicely. But did reiki help? Or cause the problem in the first place?