They are doing said study. From the second sentence:
> The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half the participants are receiving fake treatment.
> The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half the participants are receiving fake treatment.
I'd think I'd either figure out that the person giving me therapy was talking nonsense pretty quickly, or their 'placebo' therapy is indistinguishable from actual therapy, in which case am I still a control?
IMO the only way to blind this is to put people in an automated machine that either turns the magnet on or it doesn't (and it makes some noises either way). You can't have highly trained professionals in the loop making people feel valuable by giving them all this attention, as that could be a confounding effect in both the alleged-treatment and the alleged-placebo.
Note that with Reiki, it's a little more complicated to properly blind (this is an issue for pretty much every physical therapy, and surgery).
It's fine as long as both the experimental group and the control group get the same amount of attention, right? If both groups show the same amount of improvement, that means it was caused entirely by the attention, not by the magnetic treatment.
(I agree that this is what the "double" in "double blind" means, but that's not what we were talking about.)