pmiles

I have been practicing Reiki professionally for 26 years and teaching for 22, and I encourage you to develop yourself as a Reiki practitioner by giving yourself a full hands-on Reiki self-treatment everyday without fail. Nurses understandably often approach Reiki as a health care intervention, but it is actually a spiritual healing practice, and the best way to develop a deep understanding of what is possible is by experiencing the benefits for yourself, especially if you are thinking of teaching some day. It is certainly possible to have a Reiki business, especially today, but it requires the development of three very different skill sets, those of a business person, a Reiki practitioner, and a teacher. You will find much overlap from your nursing experience, but not all of it will translate. For the past year, I have been training nurses in the peri-operative department of a hospital in NYC, and the focus is on self-care practice first. Nursing is a profession with a serious burnout problem -- I'm sure I don't have to tell you that! :-) From the foundation of self-care (which my students often describe as life-changing), nurses begin offering patients moments of Reiki touch, or a brief modified treatment, and quickly see the results. So if you continue your nursing job (which seems like a good idea for now), you might start by integrating Reiki moments into routine care, and let your experience deepen while your patients teach you. Here are some resources you might be interested in. You'll find a free recording of a Reiki presentation I gave at a medical conference at Reiki In Medicine.org, and Reiki research papers, including a study we did at Yale published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, at the Medical Papers page.

Why don't you look at the peer-reviewed papers that I've mentioned? There are a number of small studies that show significant improvement on a number of hard and soft measures after Reiki treatment. Perhaps you've only looked at Ernst's paper, in which the authors concluded there was not enough evidence to include Reiki in standard care for any condition. That is true, for a number of reasons, notably that Reiki treatment is not symptom or condition-specific, but rather balancing to the person overall, encouraging ANS down-regulation, thereby optimizing the body's own self-healing mechanisms. One problem with Ernst's conclusions is that you cannot reasonably study something that you don't understand. We can do respectable research into the impact of various CAMs on the human system, but it makes no sense to think that such meaningful research can be done in the same way as pharmaceuticals are studied. As we wait for the research (and who will fund it?), patients, families, and staff are suffering. A non-invasive, no-risk, low-cost healing practice can help. What is the ethical justification to denying this care to people in need who want it?

Reiki is a healing practice. There is no reason to study whether or not the practice exists, just as there is no need to do research to find out whether meditation or yoga exist. The point is to study the impact of the practice on the human system, and although research into the effects of Reiki is just beginning, there are many small studies in which there are significant improvements in both physiologic and self-report measures. A study I participated in at Yale was written up in the well respected conventional peer-reviewed Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Twenty-minute Reiki treatments given to patients within 72 hours after a heart attack improved heart rate variability as effectively as beta-blockers. You can read more here https://reikiinmedicine.org/clinical-practice/reiki-heart-attack-reik/ With all respect, you don't seem to be in touch with how complementary therapies are currently being used in hospitals to support patients, families, and staff. No one is suggesting that patients receive a Reiki treatment instead of conventional care.

How wonderful that you are looking at how Reiki can help patients in conventional medical settings. I have been pioneering the use of Reiki in health care for 20 years, and you'll find papers on my website published in peer-reviewed journals that will give you a good start, and save you from sorting through a lot of papers that are not solid research https://reikiinmedicine.org/medical-papers/ Although there is not yet much good research on how Reiki can help patients, a number of studies have shown it can help reduce pain. And there is much unpublished data. For example, in a program evaluation for a 3 year funded program I had at an out-patient cancer center in NYC, 97% of the people who reported pain and/or anxiety before their Reiki treatment, reported feeling relief after their treatment. Most of the participants were patients, but also some family and staff, and the treatments lasted between 10 and 50 minutes. We started very low key, but soon the nurses were referring patients for Reiki treatment, or asking that I send the practitioner into the chemo room, because they saw how much even a brief Reiki treatment did to make the patients more comfortable and the nurses' work easier. All the hospitals where I've set up Reiki programs have had similar experiences. Reiki treatment is increasingly offered to patients in hospital, including many prestigious hospitals such as Memorial Sloan Kettering, Yale-New Haven, Dana Farber/Harvard, M. D. Anderson, and California Pacific Medical Center, despite the lack of research because it is widely recognized that Reiki is low-risk (unlike morphine) and the anecdotal evidence is compelling, and growing.