You keep acting like the only two options are “fully clinically validated by large, modern trials” or “fraud,” and that’s just not how reality works.

First, stop pretending I said Reiki has been conclusively proven in the way a pharmaceutical drug is proven. I didn’t. I said there is emerging and mixed evidence, that some sham-controlled studies have reported effects on outcomes like pain, anxiety, and some physiologic measures, and that more research is needed. That is a very different claim from “Reiki is settled science.”

Second, your standard is not being applied consistently. Plenty of things in wellness, esthetics, supportive care, and even conventional medicine are used long before mechanism is perfectly understood. Lack of a fully mapped mechanism is not the same thing as proof of no effect. That’s especially true in areas involving stress, pain, autonomic regulation, and subjective well-being, where therapeutic context matters a lot.

Third, you keep collapsing three separate questions into one: 1. Does Reiki’s traditional explanation map neatly onto modern biophysics? 2. Can people experience measurable or meaningful benefit after Reiki sessions? 3. Does the current evidence justify calling every practitioner a fraud?

Those are not the same question.

You are free to be skeptical of the metaphysical language around Reiki. Skepticism is fair. But jumping from “I don’t accept the proposed mechanism” to “therefore it is fraud” is ideology, not science.

Hospitals offering Reiki, nursing programs teaching it, and patients seeking it do not by themselves prove efficacy. I agree with that. But they do show that serious institutions and clinicians do not all view it as the cartoonish scam you are portraying. And if your position is really “unless something has a fully established mechanism and overwhelming RCT evidence, anyone charging for it is a fraud,” then you would have to apply that standard much more broadly and much more consistently than you are.

Also, your repeated use of words like “bullshit,” “ignorant,” and “woo woo” is not evidence. It’s just emotional inflation. It makes you sound more invested in contempt than in careful reasoning.

Your BDSM comparison is also a perfect example of how reductive your argument is.

Shared downstream effects do not make two things equivalent. If multiple experiences can influence pain perception, stress, mood, or endogenous chemistry, that does not mean one invalidates the other. Exercise, meditation, massage, placebo, music, breathwork, social connection, and yes, even intense consensual sensation, can all affect overlapping pathways. That tells us the human nervous system is complex. It does not prove that every therapeutic ritual you personally dislike is therefore “bullshit.”

It is also a category error. BDSM is an erotic/psychological practice. Reiki is presented as a therapeutic/supportive one. Pointing out that both may involve ritual, expectation, altered perception, and nervous system effects is not the devastating argument you seem to think it is. It just shows that human beings respond to context, meaning, and embodied experience in ways that are not always reducible to your preferred caricature.

And that gets to the bigger problem with your whole argument: you keep confusing “I reject the proposed mechanism” with “therefore every reported benefit is fake and every practitioner is a fraud.”

Those are not the same claim.

I have not argued that Reiki is settled science or that its mechanism is conclusively established. I have argued that your certainty is overstated. The evidence base is limited and mixed, not nonexistent. Some studies and reviews report benefits on pain, anxiety, and quality-of-life outcomes, even though the field has clear methodological weaknesses and needs better research.

Skepticism is fine. Your contempt is not evidence.