If Reiki isn't a psychosomatic effect, then there must be some possible test to differentiate them. I don't mean this just in some abstract definitional way, but in a pragmatic way too: if there's no imaginable test that could distinguish them, then Reiki can't be any more capable than a psychosomatic effect. That doesn't make it nothing. It would be useful to study a psychosomatic effect that can reliably make people feel good or energized. There doesn't need to be a mystery behind it. Solving the mystery would mean that people would know to make use of Reiki better and know exactly what problems to turn to Reiki for and what not to.

If Reiki isn't a psychosomatic effect, then it should feel surprising that they can't be differentiated. If you immediately predict every possible test to differentiate them will fail, then I wonder if your brain is modeling them as equivalent concepts and only "believes that it believes" they're different. This post on the subject is excellent: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...

I guess it could be that Reiki is both a psychosomatic effect and a special "spiritual energy" working together: the psychosomatic effect causes the subject's mind to open up the body to be affected by the spiritual energy. You would rightly expect a negative result on all the experiments I proposed previously if this was the case because all of those experiments were based around eliminating the possibility of a psychosomatic effect being involved at all. Moving on from trying to rule out the psychosomatic component, there's still more possibilities for investigation:

* Is it possible to trigger the psychosomatic effect without the spiritual energy part, or vice versa, and get a result that's different from triggering both or neither?

* Does the spiritual energy cause the body to react in a way that wouldn't be possible for the psychosomatic effect to do alone? Say that the psychosomatic effect part is found to release a signalling chemical in the blood (a psychosomatic effect doesn't necessarily work like this, just as example), and we injected a person with the chemical continuously for a long period of time. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect, then we'd expect that the chemical is telling the body to use energy it already has stored quicker, and the person will eventually become very exhausted. If the chemical is allowing the body to take in an outside "energy", then the person should stay energized. There could be downsides to taking in so much continuously, but it would be suspicious if the downside of that looked exactly like the downside of a chemical that made the body use energy it already had.

* If the spiritual energy gives someone more energy, then it's imaginable that we should be able to to track that. Imagine that we can very carefully track a person's weight, measure their caloric intake, and measure their caloric outtake (the amount of physical exertion the person does including muscle use and body heat, and the chemical contents of their sweat, exhalation, urine, and feces) to an accuracy level where there's no discrepancy between a normal person's intake and outtake. Now imagine we do that with someone using Reiki. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect that causes the body to use the energy it has in a different way, then there should still be no discrepancy. If there is a spiritual energy component, then there should be a discrepancy, otherwise it's completely explainable by psychosomatic effect alone.

>Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.

Most of the experiments I mentioned could be changed so that the person administering the Reiki doesn't know that there's an experiment going on. In the experiment I described in the previous post where you go into another room and flip a coin to decide whether or not you should beam Reiki, you could use the coin to decide whether to call up a Reiki practitioner to come do the beaming who doesn't know an experiment is going on. Sure, in this plain setup, the intention still isn't to (directly) heal people, but it's easy enough to reframe the experiment so it's in a context mainly about healing people. Imagine that this is done as part of a hospital's procedures during treatment of certain conditions. When a patient comes in with a certain condition, they always see a doctor, but there's a certain percent chance that additionally, a Reiki practitioner will be invited into the hospital to try to help them, but isn't allowed to enter the room with them and can only do it on the other side of a one-way mirror that the patient may think a doctor is behind. The intention is to heal, but the hospital is also keeping records and doing its own tests on procedures as it does in all of its processes. The concept of hospitals randomizing experimental treatments isn't anything new.

For the experiment about mis-teaching Reiki to practitioners, you could instead teach the control group to practice an invented energy/enthusiasm-boosting psychosomatic effect without telling them it's just a psychosomatic effect. (A super basic example would be to teach them to do an arbitrary ritual that involves giving someone attention and telling them a non-explanation like "Science confirms that this ritual gives people energy and enthusiasm. It's called Foo and has a long history in _ culture.".) Do the groups get different results? What if you tell the control group the invented thing is called Reiki? (Assuming that both groups are selected to be people who weren't previously knowledgeable enough about Reiki to spot any of the lies that are told to the control group.) What if you include one specific true minor detail about Reiki and a bunch of fake ones? Where is the line that will cause the control group to get results indistinguishable from Reiki? (And are any of the results unexplainable by placebo effect?)

If it works differently based on whether someone is testing it, that just means there should be even more ways to test for it. If you secretly installed a lot of measurement devices at the location where someone practiced Reiki and took notes on the people that did it there, would they start complaining that Reiki was no longer working, and possibly go seek out other places that Reiki worked? If so, then anyone who really wanted to get a building they knew didn't have any surveillance devices could decide to only buy buildings that previously had successful Reiki practitioners. What if someone funded opening a Reiki temple -- but had no other interaction with it -- with the hope that if Reiki is truly a supernatural phenomenon, then getting it more exposure would eventually attract people who would directly study it there? Would that Reiki temple automatically be less successful because of the intent than a Reiki temple in the same area created with funding from a similar hands-off person who just loved Reiki? What if both of those people helped fund the same Reiki temple opening together 50-50? The idea of something reacting differently to the intention of testing at a distance seems even more untenable than the base claim.