Reiki regulation - protecting the public?

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In anticipation of there being some sort of voluntary self-regulation (VSR) of Reiki in the UK in the next few years, in July 2006 the Reiki Regulatory Working Group (RRWG) published draft discussion documents on the subject of accreditation and education, continuing professional development, and code of ethics and practice. The RRWG is a body that has been set up to oversee the process of setting up a system of VSR for Reiki. All UK Reiki people have until the end of December 2006 to give their feedback to the RRWG on the consultation papers, and there are a number of road shows being organised, to present the proposals to however many people decide to attend.

Below you can read my summary of the proposals. You will see that I am not too impressed, really. There are some interesting points to be raised about them, and it is just as interesting to note what has not been said, what has not yet been worked out.

To read the documents for yourself, you can find them here:

http://www.reikiregulation.org.uk/

Protecting the public?

Now, we are being told, repeatedly, that these proposals are all about ‘protecting the public’. In fact this phrase is being repeated almost like a mantra, perhaps in the hope that we will all go along with the proposals to make sure that the public aren’t being endangered by Reiki practitioners in the future.

But the authors of the draft documents have failed to do two very important things, two fundamental things: they have failed to demonstrate how the public is being endangered by Reiki practitioners at the moment, and they have failed to demonstrate how their proposals will have the effect of protecting the public from this spectral danger.

Where is the danger, and how do the proposals eliminate this danger?

What we have before us is a collection of requirements, some of them fairly arbitrary or ‘over the top’, and having the appearance of having been plucked out of thin air. Some of the requirements might ‘look quite good’ to an uninformed onlooker, but are in reality an exercise in fairly mindless and inflexible bureaucratic box-ticking, ‘going through the motions’ to try and look thorough or rigorous.

An outline of the proposals

It is suggested that all Reiki people hoping to apply for registration with the Reiki governing body, so that they can use the title “UK Registered Reiki Practitioner”, will have to meet these requirements:

They will need to sign the code of ethics and practice and commit themselves to following it
They will need to affirm that they have read the Reiki National Occupational Standards (NOS), that they understand the NOS, that they will work in accordance with the Reiki NOS, and that they have met the requirements of the NOS in terms of knowledge and understanding
They will need to commit themselves to Continuing Professional Development, probably involving carrying out a certain of number of hours of CPD each year (perhaps 30), keep written records of their CPD activities and be prepared to be have these records ‘audited’ and be assessed at their workplace
Six months will have to have elapsed since they were first attuned
They will have to have actively learned about Reiki for a period of 50 hours in total, in a variety of ways, and at least 15 of these hours of learning/training will have to have been carried out in the presence of a Reiki teacher
They will have to have carried out 100 Reiki treatments, 20 of which will have to have been paid for

Interestingly, you will not need to be at Second Degree in order to treat the public: the RRWG are happy for you to treat the public at First Degree, so long as you have met the above requirements.

Treating 100 people?

I would hazard a guess that none of the Reiki people responsible for putting forward these proposals had carried out 100 Reiki treatments before starting to work on the public, and it is thus fairly unfair of them to be requiring the new generation of practitioners to meet this target, unless of course they believe that they were a danger to the public when they first started practising. Were they a danger to the public when they had only carried out 20 or 30 Reiki treatments? And if so, why?

On what has the figure of 100 treatments been based? What evidence do the RRWG have to demonstrate that a practitioner who has carried out 100 treatments is safe and effective, while if that person had only carried out 80 treatments, or 50 treatments, or 20 treatments, they would be a danger to the public? Remember, this is all about ‘protecting the public’ and ‘providing healthcare safely’. How is it that a Reiki person who has only carried out 60 treatments is unable to ‘provide healthcare safely’?

This is a figure that has been plucked out of thin air and has no basis.

Maybe this is a joke: maybe the RRWG is really thinking that 20 treatments is the number it wants to go for, and has set the figure ridiculously high so that after the consultation period is over, and after they decide for us what hoops we will need to jump through, their reduction of the figure can be given as an example of how they have ‘listened to their public’. Who knows?

50 hours of training, 15 hours of which must be carried out on a live course

The requirement is that the applicant for registration will have spent 50 hours actively training in Reiki in some way. 15 hours will have been carried out on a ‘live’ course and the remainder of the hours will be taken up by doing such things as reading Reiki books, writing a reflective journal, attending a Reiki share, going to a workshop, contributing to a teacher-hosted Internet discussion group, making a phone call, reading or writing an e-mail, or preparing and reflecting on a case history.

Where is the evidence that a Reiki practitioner who has not been in a room with a Reiki teacher for 15 hours is a danger to the public? Where is the evidence that a practitioner who has been in a room with a Reiki teacher for 14 hours, or 13, or 12 hours, say, is not safe and effective?

If the response is that there is no evidence to back-up these suggested training hours, other than a whimsical “sounds like a good number”, then should we agree to tie ourselves down to a requirement that has been plucked out of the air, has no basis, and is meaningless? Where is the evidence that underlies this requirement?

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

The RRWG insist on referring to Reiki people as ‘healthcare providers’, which I think is rather silly. While the RRWG may like to daydream about Reiki people in white coats, respected members of the multidisciplinary healthcare team, able to converse with Doctors and nurses and midwives, sharing responsibility for patient care, the reality is that Reiki people plonk their hands on someone, close their eyes and drift into a meditative state. Reiki has no contraindications, when you treat someone you don’t really do anything as far as most of the medical profession are concerned, and, rather like the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” entry for planet Earth, we are seen as “mostly harmless”, but deluding ourselves.

Along with this daydream of being a Reiki healthcare professional comes the idea of CPD, and the RRWG say that Reiki practitioners should carry out CPD “to keep up with changes in their field of practice”. But Reiki is not a system that benefits from the practitioner learning lots of new stuff: Reiki is not a system that benefits from the acquisition of academic knowledge. Reiki works best when you stop thinking, stop doing, stop trying, get your head out of the way and let it happen! What are Reiki practitioners going to learn? Detailed anatomy and physiology?: irrelevant. Chakras?: interesting but unnecessary. TCM and the meridian system?: interesting but unnecessary.

Fortunately some common sense has seeped into the proposed system, so that a variety of non-academic activities will count as CPD.

One thing that practitioners will need to commit themselves to is to self-treat, which is reasonable of course, and they will also have to commit themselves to receiving Reiki from another person, which I do not think is necessary or reasonable. Not every Reiki practitioner has access to other amenable practitioners, or is geographically well placed to receive Reiki from another person without great expense or travel difficulties. The whole point about Reiki is that it is a self-healing and self-development system, so why are practitioners being forced into receiving treatments from another person? Reiki is self-contained; Reiki is self-help, so why do we need to rely on someone else?

The insurance conundrum

It has been suggested that, once the voluntary self-regulation of Reiki has been set into motion, insurance companies will no longer insure practitioners who are not registered.

Herein lies a problem, because in order to become registered the unregistered practitioner will have to carry out 100 Reiki treatments, at least 20 of which will have to have been paid for. And if no insurance cover will be provided to unregistered practitioners then all new Reiki practitioners will have to treat 100 people without insurance cover, because they are not yet registered; not a welcoming prospect.

An amusing aside

We keep hearing about ‘notifiable diseases’ and all Reiki practitioners must commit themselves to notify the authorities should they end up treating someone with Anthrax or Plague or Yellow Fever or Leprosy or Paratyphoid Cough. Now, the amusing thing is this: it is made clear in the RRWG documentation that Reiki practitioners are not allowed to diagnose things (they are not Doctors, after all) while at the same time the practitioner is expected to notify the authorities if they end up treating someone with Paratyphoid Cough. How would they know someone had that? And if the answer is that the person they were treating told them that they had leprosy, or whatever, then the only way that the client would know what disease they had is by it having been diagnosed by a Doctor, who would have notified the authorities anyway! Very strange.

What is being left unsaid

Almost as interesting as what is being said by the RRWG is what they are not pronouncing upon. In the documents that have been published so far there is no description, for example, of what sort of bureaucratic hoops will need to be jumped through by thousands of existing Reiki practitioners, in order to achieve registration. The proposals currently on the table deal with new practitioners only, not existing ones.

This area is at least as important as the requirements to be applied to new practitioners, and yet nothing is being said about it. Why?

And while the published aim of the RRWG is to set up a national register of Reiki teachers, not a single word seems to have been published by the RRWG about what requirements will need to be met before a Reiki teacher qualifies in their eyes. In fact the proposals that have been published only deal with Reiki practitioners. What have they planned for Masters, are we going to get to see their plans, and if so, when?

Achieving a consensus?

The RRWG tells us that what will go forward in terms of rules and regulations will be decided upon through consensus, but I think they are misunderstanding the phrase. Consensus is all about accommodating differing points of views, going back and forth, conceding points and compromising in order to achieve a result that all parties are happy with. But this is not what is happening with the RRWG proposals. What is happening is that Reiki people have a one-time only opportunity to comment on the proposals, and the RRWG say that they are then going to have the feedback “independently analysed” and the proposals amended in light of what respondents have said. Significantly, they do not explain further about this “independent analysis” – who will it be carried out by, when, over what period, how will the analysis be carried out and how will the results of this analysis lead to amendments or changes to the proposals? In effect, we send our comments, which disappear into a ‘black hole’, and the RRWG expect us to trust that they will fairly represent our views and change their proposals to reflect all our views, even if the views of respondents differs greatly from their own.

The proposed road shows are a good idea in principle, to give Reiki people the chance to put their concerns to a RRWG representative, but if attendance is similar to the attendance at the NOS road shows (almost no-one turned up) then an opportunity is lost. And a cynical person might see these road shows as a way of giving the impression that practitioners’ views will be listened to. Is there a mechanism by which the views of Road show attendees will be fed into the “independent analysis”?

In reality I believe that what will happen is that the RRWG will take notice of feedback that largely supports their proposals, ignore opposing viewpoints, and push on regardless. And since many Reiki people do not like the idea of being seen to disagree, because it’s not nice, then the proposals will be steamrollered through.