The following appeared in the September 2002 issue of the BCA (British Community Association) Cairo Magazine.

Reiki - The Proof of the Pudding!

The day after I'd given an interview on BBC local radio about my work as a Reiki Therapist, I had a phone call in response to the show from a lady in her 50's. Mary wanted treatment for rheumatoid and osteo-arthritis that she had been suffering, in various stages of severity for 30 years. When I saw her in 1998 she could barely walk. She had seen doctors, several specialists and tried just about every complementary therapy you can think of. Nothing had worked. She was at her wits end as her husband was that week going to fetch her a wheelchair. She just wanted to give Reiki a go, so impressed was she with the claims that she'd heard me make for it!

She attended 6 or 7 treatment sessions, each time reporting some slight improvement in her condition - being able to sit in the car without pain for longer, or being able to climb the stairs on her own. Just little things, but to her, major achievements. Reiki was changing her life, and her husband told me that he hadn't seen her so happy, in spite of the excruciating arthritis, in years. However, with a condition as deep seated as this, which had been around for so long, it was going to take a LOT of treatments.

I suggested to Mary that perhaps she should consider learning Reiki for herself so that she could carry on her own treatments whenever they were needed. Two weeks later Mary and her husband attended the weekend class. By its end, both were amazed at the incredible heat that was Reiki that they could feel in their hands, and Mary went away to continue with her own treatment regime.

Three months later Mary contacted me to say that not only was she now able to wear high-heeled shoes and walk to the shops on her own again, but that her last blood test had revealed not a trace of her crippling arthritis. Her doctors were stunned with disbelief.

Earlier this year, Jim was rushed to hospital with a perforated colon that was allowing bile to leak through his whole system. He was in a coma with a temperature of 109 degrees and a prognosis of imminent death when he received Reiki.

After 2-3 hours of constant Reiki, his temperature had dropped to 101, and he came out of the coma. The bile purged itself from his system and he had a normal restful nights sleep. The following morning he was back to his normal self.

Since my article on Reiki appeared in the May BCA magazine, a number of people have asked about the evidence for its efficacy. These stories are two of the many accounts of people the world over in a state of suffering that have been helped by Reiki. Not all of them are as dramatic as these, but each time Reiki hands are applied, the suffering in the world is diminished a little.

Apart from anecdotal evidence, there is also hard scientific evidence to support the claims made by Reiki practitioners and teachers. At the University of Colorado during the 1980's, using a Super-conducting Quantum Interference Device (or SQUID), Dr. John Zimmerman discovered that during a healing session, magnetic fields a thousand times stronger than normal and several hundred times stronger than background noise are created around the practitioners hands. They also found that the frequencies of the magnetic fields were of the alpha and theta wave range, characteristic of deep relaxation and meditation, and that their pulse synchronised with the earth's magnetic field, known as the Schuman Resonance. Scientist Toni Bunnell (1997) has suggested that it is this harmonic resonance between the earth's magnetic field and that of the practitioner that allows the practitioner to draw on 'the universal energy field'.

Medical research has shown that the range of frequencies that will promote healing in the body are precisely those that are found in the bio-magnetic fields around the hands of those using healing therapies. Specific frequencies being beneficial to different tissues - placing an electrical coil around a fracture is a well known method of stimulating bone growth and repair. Ultra sound is used to break up kidney stones and to clear blocked arteries, whilst soft tissue is encouraged to re-generate with the aid of physiotherapy equipment that utilises the healing effects of specific frequencies.

At around the same time that Dr. Zimmerman was conducting his research Dr. Barnard Grad of McGill University in Montreal was using barley seeds to conduct experiments on the effects that healing energies have on plants. With elaborate double blind procedures in place one set of seeds were fed with healer treated water, which had been held by the healer for 15 minutes in a sealed container. The other set of seeds were fed untreated water. The seeds fed with healer treated water grew faster, were healthier and produced 25% more weight and had a higher chlorophyll content.

This may seem miraculous and beyond the realms of credulity to some, but the important thing to remember about therapies such as Reiki, is that regardless of other people's experiences, and also what the scientific community may have to say on the matter, the only real proof worth giving credence too is one's own direct experience. Reiki can manifest results in many seemingly mysterious ways. Some of these can be scientifically validated, whilst others cannot. Ultimately, if Reiki improves the quality of your life, as it has done for so many thousands of others, does it really matter what science has to say on the subject?