Most people meet this practice name and guess wrong. "Men Chho" looks like English, and the obvious reading is a Reiki variant for men. It is not. The words are Tibetan, and they have nothing to do with gender.
What the Name Actually Means
"Men Chho" transliterates the Tibetan sMan mChod, which means "medicine offering." The same sMan appears in Sangye Menla, the Tibetan name for the Medicine Buddha, and that is the figure the practice is built around. Men Chho Reiki is practiced by and for people of any gender, and always has been. If you arrived expecting a men's health modality, the rest of this page is about something else entirely.
What It Involves
From the outside, a Men Chho Reiki session looks much like any Reiki session. You lie fully clothed on a treatment table. The practitioner rests their hands lightly on or just above your body, moving through a sequence of positions, and most of the hour passes in silence.
What differs is the frame around it. Before the hands-on work begins, the practitioner establishes a connection to Bhaisajyaguru, the Medicine Buddha, a figure of healing in Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism associated with relieving physical and mental suffering. That connection is made through mantra and visualization. The mantras and symbols taught in this lineage are presented as specific frequencies, each doing a particular job, rather than as general-purpose tools. The session sits inside a religious practice rather than beside one.
Where It Comes From
Men Chho Reiki took shape in the late twentieth century. Within the tradition it is attributed to Lama Yeshe Drugpa Thrinley Odzer, also known as Richard Blackwell, who organized a body of Vajrayana Buddhist teaching into a form that energy practitioners could train in.
Its teachers describe the lineage as restoring something rather than inventing it. The argument runs that an esoteric Buddhist dimension sits behind Mikao Usui's system, and points to accounts that Usui studied Sanskrit and Tibetan texts before his 1922 retreat on Mount Kurama. Those accounts come from Reiki's own oral tradition rather than documented history, and Reiki historians dispute them. It is more accurate to call Men Chho Reiki a modern synthesis, one that is openly Buddhist in a way the Reiki that reached the West is not.
The Three Levels
Training follows the Usui naming convention in three stages. If you are booking a session rather than training yourself, it is reasonable to ask which level your practitioner holds and who attuned them.
- •Level 1, Awakening or Shoden. Opens the practitioner's channel, establishes the Medicine Buddha connection, and introduces mindfulness practice and work with what the tradition calls karmic blocks.
- •Level 2, Inner Teachings or Okuden. Adds the mantras and symbols, work with ancestral and inherited patterns, and distance healing.
- •Level 3, Master or Shinpiden. Concerns what the tradition describes as illumination of mind, and carries the authority to attune others.
How It Differs from Other Reiki Lineages
Usui Reiki as taught in the West typically works with four symbols and a deliberately non-religious framing, so a student can learn it without engaging any belief system. Karuna Reiki adds a larger set of roughly eight to twelve symbols drawn from a blend of Christian and Buddhist influences, and often brings in toning or chanting. Men Chho Reiki stays inside one religious tradition and asks the practitioner to train in it.
These are differences in method and framing. None has been shown to produce a different clinical result, because no study has compared them.
What the Evidence Says
There is no research on Men Chho Reiki as a distinct lineage. Not one trial has tested it.
The available evidence is the general Reiki literature, and it does not transfer cleanly. A practice with different symbols, a different frame and a devotional structure has not been studied, so findings about Reiki in general describe something adjacent rather than this. That literature points toward modest benefits for relaxation and self-reported anxiety, with small samples, weak blinding and few active comparators throughout. Where trials have compared Reiki against sham treatment delivered with equal attention, the difference tends to narrow or disappear, which suggests that rest, expectation and a practitioner's sustained attention account for much of what people report.
That is still worth something. An hour of stillness with someone paying close attention to you has real value, and the biofield research synthesis published by Shamini Jain and Paul Mills in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine in 2010 found its clearest signal for exactly that kind of outcome rather than for disease-specific effects. It is a different claim from energy transfer, and a very different claim from treatment.
Safety, and When to Seek Other Care
Reiki involves no substance, no manipulation and no equipment, so the direct risks are minimal. It does not interact with medications, and you should continue anything you have been prescribed exactly as prescribed.
The real risk with any low-risk practice is substitution, using it in place of care that would help. If you have an undiagnosed physical symptom, get it looked at. If you are managing a diagnosed mental health condition, keep your clinician informed, because emotional release during a session is common and worth having support around. If you are in acute crisis, this is not the right first step.
One thing worth saying plainly: the Buddhist content is the practice, not decoration on it. You do not need to be Buddhist to receive a session, and practitioners generally make that clear. But if mantra, visualization and reference to the Medicine Buddha would be unwelcome, a secular lineage such as Usui or Jikiden Reiki is the better fit, and saying so at the outset is the easiest way to find out what you are walking into.
