“We Need Scientific Proof!”

This is what a young resident told me the other day after I finished frying the synapses of my ER bud, Mark. Mark has been a happier camper since I started giving him a weekly Reiki treatment, and the resident was puzzled as to why. He simply couldn’t wrap his brain around the idea of energy treatments via my hands would send his formerly high octane boss into Nirvana.

He fell into the same trap that all good scientists do; he wanted to disseminate Reiki in order to understand its scientific properties, like one would do with a medicine. Problem is, there is little about Reiki that will satisfy our current definition of science. I tried equating Reiki to love – you can’t disseminate love either and, while there are some who question its existence, most of us accept it as part of our DNA. The resident was having none of it.

We were at a standstill until it hit me; he knows zip about the foundations of complementary alternative medicine principals, so it’s impossible for him to process the viability of Reiki. It’s like love. Until you’ve flipped both sides of the coin and have been in love, it’s impossible to make any judgments about it one way or another. Hampered by the lack of fundamental understanding, this resident is listening to a foreign language.

The way I see it, this resident is representative of the dichotomy currently taking place in medicine. Because many scientists don’t understand CAM principals, they want the ability to reduce holistic systems down to their most basic physical mechanisms like they do with medicine. Thing is, CAM can’t be measured following the traditional scientific rules, so the data becomes minimized, obscured, or distorted. I’m no longer puzzled over responses such as this young resident because I have friends like Mark who offer little in the way of scientific verification other than he “feels reeeal good.”