88 APRIL 2020ESSAY
Reiki Can’t
Possibly Work.
So Why Does It?The 20th-century
Japanese healing
therapy is now
available in manyhospitals. What its
ascendance saysabout shifts in how
American patientsand doctors think
about health care.By
Jordan Kisner“When I started it, they
all just called it that crap.
Like, ‘Oh, they’re over
there doing that crap.’ ”
This nurse, whom I’ll
call Jamie, was on the
line from a Veterans
Affairs medical center
in the Northeast. She’d
been struggling for a
few minutes between
the impulse to tout the
program she’d piloted,
which offers Reiki to vets
as part of their medical
care, and the impulse to
“tread lightly,” because