Energy healing in hospitals: Why Reiki works with Dr Ann Baldwin

Okay, so Anne, uh, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Uh, there is a lot to get into with you today in terms of what we know about Reiki can do for people, theories of how it might work.

But I wanted to start by just getting you to talk a bit about your background before getting into the world of Reiki and how this practice sort of crossed your path.

Okay, so, um, it all began with the rats.

I was working on a project with, um, blood substitutes to use instead of whole blood for transfusions, and I was injecting them into the rat's circulation and testing to see what they did to the, uh, blood vessels in the gut and the gut itself.

And what I found was it caused inflammation in the gut and leakiness in the blood vessels, and when I used a control substance, saline, I got no damage.

Well, then I moved labs.

I moved from the VA Hospital to the University of Arizona, and my experiments didn't work anymore.

So all of the groups of rats, it didn't matter whether they were getting the blood substitute or the saline, they all showed leaky blood vessels and an inflammation, and the only thing that had changed was where I was keeping the rats.

And I realized that the animal facility at the university was much more noisy and lots more going on than, um, at the VA.

And I did get a grant to study the effects of noise on, um, on the blood vessels of the rats, and I found, yes, it was the noise that was causing the damage.

The noise was stressing out the rats and causing inflammation in the intestine and in the blood vessels.

So I needed to hire a technician to help me analyze all the data, and the person that I hired turned out to be a Reiki master, and I'd never heard of Reiki before.And, um, she said, "Well, if the rats are stressed, why don't we try Reiki on the rats?" So we got a grant from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, two-year grant, to look at the effects of Reiki on the rats that are stressed by noise.

And, um, we did find that if they had 15 minutes of Reiki treatment every day for three weeks, that the problems with the noise, that the inflammation was, w- just disappeared.

And, um, we also had a group that had sham Reiki, where someone was not trained in Reiki, but they were just sitting there pretending to give Reiki, and there was a slight improvement in those animals, but not significant.

And then we had one group that had nothing, and, uh, they showed the normal damage.

So that's what really got me interested into Reiki.

And, uh, when I realized what it was doing to the rats, after a while I decided that maybe I'd learn how to do it too.

I guess it's worth pointing out at this point that, you know, you had had a career in sort of mainstream s- sort of clinical research, in physiology.

What was your sort of, I guess, worldview of, you know, how the body operates, how things work on a scientific basis, and then, like, what was your sort of reaction when y- you came across this new colleague, Reiki? Like, how, how did it sort of meet you?

Well, I was, um, a kind of traditional physiologist.

I was, apart from the blood substitutes project, I was working more generally on the mechanisms of transport of materials between blood and tissue, and I'd never heard of Reiki.

I had little interest in, um, complementary and alternative medicine.

And I can tell you that when I first learnt about Reiki, before we tried it on the rats, I was a skeptic.