Respectful Insolence has a truly wonderful, witty article about Reiki woomasters plying their nonsense on helpless, trusting pets. You will enjoy it.
I’m going to surprise you by saying that “distance healing” would be at least as effective as doing standard reiki. Well, maybe it’s not such a surprise. The reason that both are equally effective is that neither are effective.
It is, however, rather amusing, this reiki woo-meister’s dilemma. In a way, dogs are smarter than humans in that they don’t fool themselves into believing that hand motions are anything more than hand motions. They’d much prefer to be petted than to have some silly human making pointless hand symbols over them. I know what my dog would probably do if I were to try to make these hand symbols over him in order to “heal” him. He’d probably think I was playing with him and get very excited.
No doubt the dog would.
Here’s some ancient, bloggy, history for you my skeptical friends. A few years ago PZ was trying to talk some sense into a commenter at a big site, this particular commenter had zeroed in on me weeks earlier and had chased me around a bit claiming I hated women or something to that effect, over a post I had done on cervical cancer and the HPP vaccine. The topic in that subsequent thread was Plan B contraception, but the other poster was still flogging the idea that I was a misogynist creep, but masking it as a holier-than-thou pseudoscientific tirade — against a developmental biologist mind you — the gist of which was demanding empirical evidence for the point we had brought up and dismissively mocking whatever PZ and I sourced or said in response.
Which is when PZ happened to look up the person’s public profile. He found, you guessed it, they were so proud of being a certified Reiki master they had listed it there for all the world to see. It was quite entertaining to watch that poster get clocked in a full blown pile-on after that.
As a vet tech, this sort of shit infuriates me. We had, not that long ago, a family come in who decided to treat their dog’s cancer not with pain meds or steroids, but by coating the fur with tumeric. Sadly, I’m waiting for the day that someone claims that vaccines cause autism in animals as well and that’s why so many dogs of all sizes can sometimes be aggressive.
Remember the story of Navarre, the wolf that was found in a creek in the mountains in Italy? That generated a facepaw moment for me.
An animal rescue organization rescued him, treated him for gunshot wounds, mange, dehydration, hypothermia, malnutrition, and so forth … and then stuck him with needles all over the place. I was not aware that anyone had mapped the acupuncture meridians for wolves—let alone that they existed. The only references in Google I could find for wolf acupuncture meridians were for acupuncturists named Wolf.