The Cleveland Clinic is widely regarded as one of the best hospitals in the world, but like many hospitals these days it is more than happy to push fraudulent “medicine” for fun and profit on its more ignorant and credulous patients. It has started a Center for Integrative Medicine that pushes all sorts of quackery like reiki, which it defines as:

a form of hands-on, natural healing that uses universal life force energy … [a] vital life force energy that flows through all living things. This gentle energy is limitless in abundance and is believed to be a spiritual form of energy. The Reiki practitioner is the conduit between you and the source of the universal life force energy… You may experience the energy as sensations such as heat, tingling, or pulsing where the practitioner places her hands on your body, or you may feel these sensations move through your body to other locations. This is the energy flowing into you.

What you should be feeling at this point is not “energy flowing into you” but your lunch flowing out of you. I have no idea how any hospital, especially a world class one like the Cleveland Clinic, can use a phrase like “universal life force energy” without feeling so much shame that they want to throw themselves off a bridge.

More: Medical Fraud at the Cleveland Clinic » Dispatches from the Culture Wars