Sometimes we don't see the big picture. Having another caring human being giving you any kind of attention is healing. Having another human being touch you is more than healing. There's no woo-woo in the human touch. It's that we're social creatures who need to be loved, touched, paid attention too. Remember BFK Skinner's cold wire monkey mums and the effects they had on their wee ones?
My sister, two degrees, one in nursing, who had breast cancer had Reiki done through some outpatient cancer center in Canada. It soothed her mind and calmed her down while her life was in peril. We always need to look at the science and the details . . . and sometimes we need to step away and look at big pictures. She's 11 years in remission. Not because of the Reiki but because of so many other factors that came into play, including the Reiki.

Its a money making scam no one can do magic

As ineffective as accupuncture, but with fewer needles!

I'm a nurse. All throughout nursing school if there was one consistent, important theme, it was that you should have good reason backed up by solid evidence for everything you do to patients. Great advice not just for nurses and nursing, but all people for everything in my opinion. Furthermore, nurses have been trying to advance nursing as an esteemed discipline and practice for decades. What totally fuckin' kills me though is that every year during 'nurses week' they offer reiki, aromatherapy, polarity therapy, and the blessing of the hands for the staff nurses. Way to set us all back, guys.

Anyway, people would reply to me that the pre and post scores the 'therapists' got on their cards 'proved' it worked to which I said the following:
"Of course the scores improved. You are taking tired, hungry nurses off under-staffed floors that smell like piss where they have to clean up diarrhea, and you're laying them down on a comfortable table in a dark room with soft music and pleasant smells. That in NO WAY tests the efficacy of the 'treatment'. If you really believe it works and that your credentials are real, put your money where your mouth is with a real test that controls for variables. Put someone who has never learned any reiki techniques into one of the rooms with all the same amenities and see if my made-up version of energy manipulation garners similar differences in pre and post scores." Needless to say, no one ever wanted to test it.

Feels good

From the standpoint that at the atomic level, everything is energy and vibrates at various frequencies (talk to any quantum physicist), it's not too much of a stretch for me to think that living organisms have concentrations of this energy due to the fact that they are living.

So although it isn't yet scientifically discovered and observed, to me it's a matter of time that some of this woo stuff will be exonerated. My $0.02.

Edit: The fact that it has yet to be scientifically verified, it's just an opinion of mine; not something I'd ever try to debate or prove.

being shown how to relax. nothing wrong with that but you should only need it once or twice

It works very well on a flat earth, but you have to believe in peanut butter!

my jury is still out...

My (self-described shaman) cousin did some energy work on me once a long time ago. It involved crystals and visualization and I swear I felt some sort of something. It's hard to verbalize but there was definitely something.

Dartmouth Medical Center in Lebanon,NH is where I was treated on and off for three years with AML-acute myloid leukemia. They offer free reiki, massage, art therapy, writing group and knitting to cancer patients. I had reiki twice a week in-patient. It is relaxing-some is more touching and some is no touching at all. Massage was more satisfactory-needed hands on.

There is no scientific premise for it. At all. That sums it up for me.