War crimes fugitive Karadzic disguised himself as a Reiki practitioner

Dr. Karadzic, using the alias Dr. Dragan David Dabic, at an alternative medicine conference in January 2008.

Radovan Karadzic, the man accused of ordering the siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica massacre, and other war crimes as the former Yugoslavia crumbled into separate countries in the early 1990s, was arrested this week after authorities discovered he was living in plain sight (and under an assumed name) as an alternative healer whose modalities included Reiki, or as it's spelled in Serbian: Rheiki. The BBC has a photo of his business card, which mentions Reiki, as does Karadzic's web site, Psy Help Energy, which is still online. The site does not mention any Reiki lineage, however. Karadzic had been a fugitive since 1995.

Unfortunately, that breaking news story makes Karadzic a Celeb-Reiki, whether or not he was an authentic Reiki practitioner. In any case, long before going into politics and war, Karadzic was an actual psychiatrist, his studies including a year at Columbia University in New York. We hope his claiming to be a Reiki practitioner will cast no aspersions on the practice of Reiki in general, no more than the fact that he's a medical doctor should cast a cloud over medicine in general.