By Catherine Guthrie

Last fall, Mary Scott Blake went to the doctor for a routine mammogram and soon got the news every woman dreads: Light blotches on the film proved to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. Blake did all the things one might expect. She arranged for surgery, cleared her calendar, and braced for a long, painful year of chemotherapy, radiation, and recovery. Then the 52-year-old homemaker in Louisville, Kentucky deviated from the norm. She picked up the phone and called an energy healer.

A close friend urged Blake to consider reiki, a type of gentle bodywork that aims to rebalance the body’s flow of qi, or vital energy. Proponents say reiki eases stress and anxiety—and even spurs the body to withstand pain and heal faster.

Blake was familiar with reiki; in fact, she’d already tried it in a class she had taken on spirituality and thought the idea sounded good. So on the day of her mastectomy, both Blake and her husband received 30-minute reiki treatments. “Afterward, I felt good about the surgery,” she says. “And I think reiki had a lot to do with it.”

Blake saw her reiki therapist regularly over the following months. On days when chemotherapy made her fingers so numb she couldn’t unwrap a stick of gum, she asked the practitioner to focus the healing touch on her hands. Other times she simply begged for relief from the overwhelming fatigue. “Some days I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other,” Blake says. “But I always left my reiki sessions feeling better than I had when I’d arrived.”

For many Westerners, the idea of energy healing, in which energy is said to be exchanged between practitioner and patient to expedite healing, is the stuff of Hollywood, not hospitals. (Who can forget the image of Mr. Miyagi rubbing his hands together to heal the injured Karate Kid?) “The idea is hard for people to swallow,” says Gala True, a reiki researcher at the Albert Einstein Center for Urban Health, Policy, and Research, in New York City. “If they can’t see it or measure it, there’s a strong disbelief factor.”

Yet in the past decade, a shift has taken place. For one reason or another—perhaps because of the technique’s noninvasive nature or its underlying spiritual aspects—practitioners and laypeople alike are signing on in record numbers. Dozens of hospitals, from New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering to Honolulu’s Wilcox Memorial, have set up energy healing programs for patients and staff. Spokespeople for organizations that train energy healers brag about tens of thousands of graduates. And last fall, the University of Minnesota became the first big-ten medical school to add Introduction to Energy Healing to its list of class offerings.

People who seem to benefit most from this soothing therapy are those with debilitating ills, such as cancer, chronic pain, and HIV/AIDS. For starters, energy healing won’t interfere with surgery, chemotherapy, or drugs. It’s also great for people who can’t tolerate a lot of pressure on their bodies, like burn victims or fibromyalgia sufferers. And patients can learn to use energy healing on themselves, which creates a narrow ledge of personal power during a free fall of illness.

“When you tell someone they have cancer or a terminal disease, they feel like everything is taken away,” says