Reiki Regulatory system is in a shambles!
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The subject of the Voluntary Self-Regulation (VSR) of Reiki never really goes away, much as many of us would like it to, and it is difficult to find out what our betters on the UK “Reiki Council” have planned for us in terms of meaningless hoops to jump through since all since the whole process is veiled in secrecy. But it seems at the moment that the whole process is in a shambles.
Here is a little bit of history:
In recent years there have been moves to introduce some sort of ‘voluntary self-regulation’ (VSR) for Reiki and other complementary therapies. The way it worked was for the various associations and societies for each therapy to get together to form an ‘umbrella organisation’ which was then responsible for deciding how each therapy was going to be regulated. Various documents would be produced dealing with such things as a code of ethics, training standards, registration requirements, continuing professional development (CPD), a draft disciplinary procedure etc. The Reiki umbrella body was called the Reiki Regulatory Working Group (RRWG). The idea was that the umbrella organisation would at some stage then ‘go live’ and become a ‘proper’ Reiki Regulatory body, and in the case of Reiki the body would be called the ‘UK Reiki Council’.
Representatives from Reiki associations and societies, and those from other therapies like Aromatherapy, Massage, Reflexology etc have all been working along these lines, forming umbrella organisations, developing codes of practice etc, with the idea that there would eventually be a Reiki governing body, a Reflexology governing body and an Aromatherapy governing body etc. We should remember that this is *voluntary* self-regulation, though, so there would be no compulsion for practitioners to join in with these voluntary regulatory schemes.
But a new idea came into being, which was that there would be some sort of a ‘federal’ system. This means that there would be an overarching complementary therapy governing body responsible for the licensing of all complementary therapists of whatever denomination, with common basic standards and registration requirements for all therapists. A Federal Working Group (FWG) was set up by the Prince’s Trust for Integrated Health with a view to achieving this goal.
But there was a problem, a big problem. The complementary therapy organisations were being presented with a huge multi-layered bureaucracy, with the representative organisations for the various therapies having very little input into or control over the system. In late 2007 there was a mass walk-out from the Federal Working Group (which then became the Natural Healthcare Council) and two competing registers were set up, leaving the Federal body with very few people to regulate.
So the Natural Healthcare Council went back to the drawing board and changed its name – again. It is now called the “Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council” and would *appear* to be taking a less bureaucratic approach. They have already accepted Massage and Nutritional therapists onto their books, Aromatherapists will be accepted shortly, and it seems that they plan to open their doors to other therapies, including Reiki, later in the year.
The formation and activity of the CNHC has not been greeted with universal enthusiasm. Here are a selection of criticisms of the CNHC, taken from Wikipedia:
"How does a regulator decide what is good practice and what is charlatanry when none of it has peer-reviewed, scientific evidence that it works?... Professor Michael Baum protested that 'this is like licensing a witches' brew as a medicine so long as the batwings are sterile'... It matters that Newsnight found homeopaths advising patients visiting malaria areas not to take anti-malarial drugs. And that patients are told not to give their children the MMR jab." Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
Private Eye magazine argued that the council had a conflict of interests between promoting and regulating alternative medicine: "Everyone would say that propagandists cannot be regulators because they cannot be trusted to act in the public interest." It quoted Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, as saying: "This is ridiculous. It really is a farce. All they will need to prove is that [practitioners] are following an established technique they believe to be appropriate. It's a ludicrous system."
Private Eye and The Economist reported that critics have nicknamed the council 'OfQuack'. Private Eye quoted a joke slogan, 'OfQuack - making quacks look professional since 2008'.
In January 2009, an online petition was started at the UK Government Petition website, asking for stricter requirements on efficacy and safety as a condition of certification.
In addition to the medical criticism, CNHC have also been censured by the British Standards Institute for use of their trademarked term "kitemark", and have also been criticised for poor openness and an inconsistent approach to data protection.
But in any case, back to our story: people can apply to join the CNHC direct, without having to go through the Reiki Council. I was talking to a Co Chair of the CNHC recently and they confirmed that this will always be an option available to people to follow, with the CNHC assessing individual applicants directly to make sure that they have met the Reiki NOS, for example. So it’s not clear at the moment where that leaves the Reiki Council in all this, other than it being an overbearing organisation where a small number of people are trying to impose their will on the people they purport to represent. The Reiki Council (when it was in its former existence as the RRWG – Reiki Regulatory Working Group) tried to consult with the Reiki community about curriculum requirements, but was spectacularly unsuccessful: out of a potential audience of an estimated 20,000 practitioners they succeeded in eliciting a response from 81 people, which perhaps shows how enthusiastic the average Reiki person is about the whole process, and then they ignored what these respondents said in any case!
Ever since this whole process of voluntary self-regulation started, many Reiki people have been very, very unhappy with this endeavour, for a lot of reasons. Many question the need for the regulation of Reiki in the first place, and while the RRWG (Reiki umbrella body which is now called the “Reiki Council”) continually emphasised the need to ‘safeguard the public’, not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to demonstrate that the public are currently being damaged and endangered through the practise of Reiki in the UK.
So, at the moment, the Reiki NOS (National Occupational Standards) are in place and have been recently revised, and the Reiki Council does have its Core Curriculum but doesn’t seem to want to publish it, which is not very helpful, really (maybe it thinks it can sell the document to people). But I have seen the Core Curriculum, and what the Reiki Council will expect of people before they can put “UK Registered Reiki Practitioner” after their name – for this is what the whole thing is about – is as follows:
(1) At least nine months will have elapsed since you took your Reiki First Degree course.
(2) You will have to have carried out 75 full treatments on people, including five which will have been supervised by someone who is “occupationally competent” in Reiki.
I wonder what evidence the Reiki Council has to demonstrate that someone who has carried out only 60 full treatments, or 50, or 40, is not qualified to practise (although they will have been treating people in order to obtain the required numbers in any case!).
The number has been plucked out of the air, has no basis, and is a big number because that “looks good”.
And of course there may be problems with the ‘supervision’ since a supervisor who practises one style of Reiki may not be happy with the way that you are practising your style of Reiki. Safeguards would definitely have to be put into place to make sure that such supervision was fair and style-neutral. It is not clear that this has been considered and plans put into place.
(3) You will have spent 50 hours training in Reiki, with 15 hours having been spent in the presence of a Reiki teacher. The 35 hours remaining will involve you in reading Reiki books, looking things up online, writing a reflective journal etc.
(4) You will have spent 100 hours training in practice management and practitioner skills, with 35 of those hours of training having been spent in a room with someone who is teaching you these things (so that means at least five full days of live training in practitioner skills and practice management, which is over twice the amount of time that you are expected to have spent being trained in Reiki!)
(5) The training course that you attend will only ‘qualify’ as a proper course if your teacher has been a Reiki Master for two years. So if you are a Reiki Master who is teaching, but 2 years have not elapsed since you took your RMT course, your students won’t be able to use your course to meet the requirements of the Reiki Council.
Let’s think about two examples. In the first case a teacher has been very motivated and has promoted their courses well, developed a good reputation, and is teaching groups of people every few weeks. After 18 months perhaps they have taught 100 people. According to the criterion above, their courses will not qualify.
In the second case we have a Reiki teacher who has done very little with their teaching. They taught a couple of family members and a couple of friends over a two-year period. This teacher’s courses now qualify and, although they have only taught 4 people, their students will be able to count their training time towards their necessary total of 15 hours.
The experienced teacher who has taught 25 times the number of people will have to explain to their students that their courses do not qualify according to the Reiki Council, and the students will have to take additional training elsewhere to make up their hours.
The effect of this proviso could be, of course, that Reiki teachers will be able to find very few people to teach in their first two years after qualifying, ensuring that all teachers who have just passed their “2 year” period will have less experience. So the Reiki Council have, in effect, introduced a proviso that means all new Reiki teachers, even two years after being attuned, are relatively inexperienced!
(6) Students will have to be assessed by the teacher, in a variety of ways, to make sure that they have met the competencies listed in the Reiki NOS.
(7) If I understand things correctly, the assessments that will have been carried out by a Reiki teacher, to ensure that the student has met the requirements of the Reiki NOS, together with records kept by the student, form a body of evidence that will then have to be verified by a NOS assessor; the cost of such an assessment is not known.
Unfortunately there are no Reiki NOS assessors in existence and there would appear to be no route available to people who want to train to be a Reiki NOS assessor, which is a slight problem!
What we have here is a group of people with too much time on their hands, getting a taste of power and trying to impose an arbitrary and illogical set of requirements on practitioners of a simple folk art that does not harm and does not require regulation, voluntary or otherwise.
Fortunately the whole process would appear to be going nowhere fast, and may yet die a death, which would be the best thing I believe.
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