>Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...

If you asked me at any time to list off what I'm feeling now, I'd probably list a bunch of things like those that I wouldn't have noticed before being asked to consider what I'm feeling. If you told me you had done something right before that could plausibly affect me, I'd be suspicious you had something to do with it, even though it's most likely coincidental.

The fact that you weren't told the full explanation doesn't mean it couldn't be psychosomatic. People respond to visible attention, especially if it's done in a unique way. A proper test would either have to show that the person still gets the effect without them noticing any attention on them, or show that the person doesn't get an effect when there is the same kind of visible attention on them but the practicer is secretly not beaming Reiki to them. The practicer might act or interpret the subject's responses differently when not actually beaming Reiki, so a double blind study would be necessary. You could have an interviewer explain to a subject that you (in another room where the subject and the interviewer can't see or hear you in any way) will beam Reiki into the subject, and the interviewer records how the subject says they feel. During the experiment, you flip a coin and only beam Reiki if it lands on heads. (It's important that the placebo sequence is random and not known to the interviewer. The easiest way to avoid accidentally communicating the sequence ahead of time to the interviewer is to only decide whether it's a placebo run or not during the individual experiment after you're split up from the subject and interviewer.)

Another kind of experiment that can be done is to see if Reiki can be used to communicate information through timing. Put the subject in one room and you in another where the subject can't see or otherwise perceive you at all. The subject is told that you will beam Reiki to them at some point, and they need to write down the time as soon as they sense it. In the other room, you write down the time and set a fifteen minute timer. You roll a d10 and then wait that many minutes before beaming Reiki to the subject and writing down the time of that. You wait until the timer goes off before exiting the room and telling the subject that the experiment is over. (Subjects might be likely to think they feel Reiki when they hear you coming over to them to end the experiment, or they might think they feel Reiki randomly after a longer wait, so you wouldn't want the time you end the experiment to be linked at all to the random time you beamed it to them.) Then you collect all the written times and see if the times you beamed Reiki line up to when people received it. (I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary, but you could also add a control group by making it so after you leave the subject to your own room, before you roll the d10, you flip a coin to decide whether or not you'll actually beam Reiki to them. Imagine you ran the main experiment without controls, and the analysis on whether the individual times lined up was inconclusive and you didn't know what to make of it, but on average they said they felt Reiki after five minutes, and you knew you beamed it on average after five minutes, so you thought it was a success. But if had a control group and knew they also said it happened after five minutes on average, that would tell you that the main group's results had nothing to do with Reiki.)

If the social interaction between the Reiki beamer and the subject is important -- well, that would be a hint it's a psychosomatic effect -- there's still a further double-blind test that could be done. You could train a group of people to be Reiki practitioners, and then you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work, and then set both groups loose on some subjects and compare the results of both. It's not perfect because you might teach the two groups differently, you might accidentally teach the control group a different version of Reiki that still works, the control group might work out the missing detail, or the control group might notice the lack of results and act differently, but it's still something.