I have only anecdotes.

I can hold my hand a centimeter away from another person's hand and "channel" Reiki to them and they can feel it clear up to their elbow. But I don't know how to make a scientific instrument to detect that.

(BTW, it is great! I was careless taking a pan out of the oven a few months ago and burned my thumb pretty good. I "beamed" it with Reiki and the pain went away and didn't come back. "So I got that going for me, which is nice."

Quoting myself from back then:

> I burned the tip of my thumb the other day taking a pan out of the oven, 450°F. I was careless and didn't quite hold the potholder correctly, burn reflex overridden so I wouldn't drop the pan, it melted the fingerprint whorls. After I finished hopping up and down, pissed off at my own carelessness, I took a few moments to "beam" Reiki to my thumb, while concentrating on communicating with my healing and immune responses telling them to "get in there and clean things up". The pain went away and didn't come back. A very modest blister formed under the melted skin. The spot was tender, and it stung a bit if I let hot water touch it the first day, but after that there was no tenderness. Two days later the blister was gone. The skin is slightly rough, but it's not peeling, nor is it a scab. Day three I woke up and forgot that I had burned myself. The flesh apparently reconstituted itself. I'm not sure it will even leave a scar. [It didn't.] The skin still hasn't peeled.

> In sum, a minor second-degree burn, apply ten seconds of Reiki, result: no pain and accelerated healing.)

My initial "initiation" (that's the jargon used) was unexpected. I was in Seattle, walking down the street, and I passed one of those shops that sells crystals, incense, and Tarot decks. On a whim I went in, and there was a sign about Reiki classes downstairs. I went downstairs and there was a kind of class going on, and the folks in the class were having some sort of exam or test. The teacher of the class looked like if Santa Claus ditched the red reindeer-hide coat and dressed as a pirate. He grabbed me and sat me down in a chair and some woman started waving her arm at me from about a meter away.

I feel a certain ineffable something "filling me up" with a kind of immaterial pressure or presence. I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. It's difficult to explain in words what it feels like, people describe both warmth and coolness, presence and emptiness, tingling and relaxation, sometimes in combinations. The best I can do is that it felt like a high-tension electric field if you could somehow feel the field directly. Anyway, she started at the base of my spine and went up the center line to the top of my head at which point I felt a flower- or fountain-shaped field extend out from the crown of my head into the space around my body. Simultaneous with this I experienced a deep psychological change, comparable in intensity to a modest dose of "magic mushrooms" or LSD, that was deeply pleasant and healing. At that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and now it lifted and I felt wonderful for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that.

So that was my first experience with this thing called Reiki. Nobody had told me anything. I had no beliefs about it going in. And it sure wasn't the "placebo effect" (whatever that is.) I had no idea what to expect, or even to expect anything at all.

After that I found a group that practiced and taught Reiki without charging the traditional fees and worked with them. I also, as I said, went looking for anyone who had "done science" to it, with the results I mentioned above.

There's a lot of variation (in my experience) between different Reiki sessions even with the same people. Most are pretty mellow, and other than a deep and abiding sense of peace and health there's not much you can point to and say, "there, that's the effect".