Reiki Roundup

Flintshire, Wales, United Kingdom: Connah Broome's parents turned to alternative healing methods, including Reiki, for their five-year-old son after doctors told them there was nothing more they could do to treat the 11 neuroblastoma tumors attacking his body. Now all but one of those tumors are shrinking.

His family physician, Dr. Eamon Jessop, told a Western Mail reporter, “There are still many things in medicine we don’t yet know or understand. Looking at Connah and seeing the healthy, lively boy he is now, is something we can’t explain. With the extent of tumours he has, we would not expect him to be doing this well.

“When it was decided two years ago that his tumours were inoperable, we would have expected just a short time before he became very ill. But sometimes unexplainable things can happen that we have to call a miracle.”

Salt Lake City, Utah: The word "Reiki," but not the practice, makes the police beat again -- the owner of a massage parlor called "The Reiki Specialist" has been arrested and charged with running a prostitution ring, only four months after the manager of the business was charged with rape. For the record, neither sex nor violence has anything to do with the practice of Reiki.

Lynchburg, Virginia: The good news is that the Lynchburg News Advance has published an article about Reiki, complete with a photo of a Reiki share. The bad news is that the article not only repeats the too-often-repeated untruths that Reiki founder Mikao Usui was a doctor (he wasn't) and that he "rediscovered" the practice -- the reporter attributes those untruths to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The worse news is that for some reason the reporter was surprised that the Reiki master she interviewed was not "the long-bearded, tattered-clothes-wearing man one might envision a reiki master to be." 

Watertown, New York: Under the headline "Reiki is 'very comforting,' " the local Daily Times interviews a Reiki master who works with animals as well as people.