It's not so strange that Reiki works; it's a form of placebo effect. Placebos work, despite there provably being no active ingredient at work, and there being no reason at all for them to work except for the belief of the recipient. There's a good reason why new medicine needs to be proven to be better than a placebo in a double-blind study, and not merely better than no treatment at all with patients who know what they're getting. It is because a placebo does have effect.

Of course this belief is not going to cure cancer or broken bones, but it can reduce pain, nausea or affect other feelings. And feelings do matter. Our mind is not detached from our body, it is part of it. What we believe influences what we do, how our bodies react. How our bodies heal.

As a parent, I cure a lot of my kid's injuries with a kiss. It's surprisingly effective. No idea why. It's pure placebo, but it helps.

Placebos are still a poorly understood field. I've read that the placebo effect has been getting measurably stronger of the past few decades. How is that possible? And the size and colour of placebo pills matters. Believing that the placebo is the real thing rather than a placebo also helps, but even if you do know it's just a placebo, it can still have some effect.

The human mind is weird and still poorly understood. I don't want to get mystical about it; the mumbo jumbo behind reiki with its ki energy and all is most likely total nonsense. But our mind is part of our body, and what we think and believe influences what we do and how our body behaves. So believing in it may still help, which creates an ethical conundrum: is it okay to lie to someone when that lie has been proven to be good for their health? I honestly don't know. I often think I'm too skeptical to receive much benefit from these 'alternative treatments', just like a kiss is unlikely to make an adult's pain go away. I like believing the truth. But in this case believing the lie might be better for you. I'm still not sure how I feel about that.