I once went and saw this very expensive ‘specialist’ on recommendation from some friends as a last ditch effort to fix my shoulder pain. He was… A chiropractor and acupuncturist and… some sort of voodoo man.

I mean I’m already sceptical of chiropractors – I have been warned of them by physios before that they’re not properly medically trained and can be really dangerous. But no matter, I didn’t let him crack anything. He touched parts of me – my legs, my arms, my neck, my shoulders, and pushed on my arm and told me my pain is in my shoulders. Thanks, I did just tell you that when I walked in.

Then he said ‘think of a negative experience you’ve had lately and how did it make you feel?’
Well I was in a job at the time that I was soon leaving to move overseas, and we had a horrible, abusive boss. So I thought of that and said ‘angry’. But that wasn’t good enough and he prompted me to say ‘frustrated’. I said it was more anger than frustration but he wasn’t a fan of that so we went with frustrated.

He then went back to pushing on my hand and saying numbers counting up from 1. He stopped at 18 and pushed my arm down harder and told me to think of what happened to make me frustrated when I was 18 as my body was telling him that was the root of my pain.

I told him that was probably the least frustrated I have ever been – first year of university, having the best time and everything was super fun. I had no cares.
He then told me that until I confronted what caused my immense frustration at age 18, I would never stop having shoulder problems.

And that was it. He insisted on a slight massage which was painful and horrible and tapped this weird thing on my neck to realign it which hurt and I left. So I walked out of there confused, poorer, and in more pain than when I went in which lasted days.

I don’t know if 18 is a standard age that people felt frustrated so he thought it was an obvious one to try but it couldn’t have been further from the truth for me. Just like when horoscopes are so off your life and you wonder how people ever buy into them but they go general enough to try and catch as many people as possible. Most people will have a memory that they can pull up that’ll fit in to a mould so it’s pretty safe I guess. But not this time. No confirmation bias at play here.

Anyway I went in with an open mind. I did, I swear. The people who recommended it weren’t stupid and I was pretty desperate and willing to try anything. But it pretty quickly turned out to be ridiculous, unfortunately.

I’ve always been rational, practical, I’m not one to buy into something that you have to ‘believe in’ to make it work, or anything that isn’t backed up by science or at least good old common sense.

Buuuuuuut I have somehow ended up getting myself booked in for a Reiki session next week. We get 4 free ‘complementary therapy’ sessions, so I am taking this opportunity to road test this next ridiculous sounding thing. Reiki involves someone holding their hands above your body to relax and heal you. Are you as unconvinced as me? Well I’m going to give it a go, why not. I’ll report back!