A medical doctor in San Diego was so impressed by Reiki that she decided to learn it herself. Dr. Maria Danilychev, MD, now practices both medicine and Reiki, and she also teaches it as a Jikiden Reiki Shihan.
Only ten years ago, pairing Reiki with medicine would have seemed unlikely. That is changing, however, thanks to pioneers like Dr. Danilychev, a board-certified physician who is also a Reiki practitioner and teacher.
Reiki is a holistic healing art from Japan. The practitioner uses a light touch over different parts of the body. The method is gentle, but it can be very effective on many levels. It is often described as boosting the body’s own ability to heal by restoring the flow of Ki, or life force energy. While some find the idea strange, many people already know it well.
A doctor who stands apart
San Diego has many Reiki practitioners. Even so, Dr. Danilychev stands out, because she is the only medical doctor in the county who practices both medicine and Reiki. Since she understands both medical science and Reiki, she can bridge Western medicine and holistic healing. She can address a patient’s medical needs while also helping on the level of mind, body and spirit. That mix has made her known well beyond San Diego, and people travel from other states and even other countries for her sessions and training.
Her medical background is extensive. She earned her medical degree at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and then completed an Internal Medicine residency at NYU Downtown Hospital in New York City. After that, she studied Geriatric Medicine at UCLA. Later she spent several years in clinical and research fellowships in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine.
She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Geriatrics, and Hospice and Palliative Medicine, and also as a Hospice Medical Director. It was through hospice work that she first came across Reiki.
From skeptic to practitioner
Like most Western doctors, Dr. Danilychev says she was skeptical at first about the complementary therapies often used for patients near the end of life. Some research supports acupuncture, she notes, but studies on Reiki, Healing Touch and similar methods are simply inadequate. Doctors are trained to decide based on evidence. So when the data called Reiki neither helpful nor harmful, physicians could let patients enjoy it but expected nothing beyond a placebo effect.
Only after years of watching these methods did she begin to wonder whether there was something to them. After about a decade, she grew curious enough to learn one. That is how, in 2013, she decided to study Reiki.
She researched many styles before choosing Jikiden Reiki, which she considers the most authentic form because it was preserved in its original tradition in Japan. Over time, Reiki became diluted and mixed with other ideas. Today few practitioners know the original techniques, which the Jikiden Reiki Institute in Kyoto, Japan, carefully maintains.
Learning it was not easy for her at first. Reiki is simple and takes only a few days to learn, she says, yet she kept fighting her own doubts. It was unlike anything she had studied, and medically it seemed impossible that laying hands on the body could heal. Experience proved her wrong, though. After several years of practice, she still has no medical explanation for how it works. Yet she often sees clear improvement in many symptoms, beyond what a placebo would explain.
Despite her passion for Reiki, Dr. Danilychev stresses that patients should not give up Western medicine. It rests on what has been proven to work and keeps evolving with new science. She believes the two approaches can easily be combined, so doctors can use whatever helps patients feel and get better.
She also sees a middle ground between two camps. Some people think doctors only want money or are too rushed to offer natural remedies. Others see holistic healers as quacks and will not give them a chance. In her view, most doctors chose medicine to help people, and many healers have a real gift and want to help too. There may be a few bad apples on both sides, she says, but that is no reason to reject either one.
