What's the frequency, Mr Butts?

[khaosworks]

Who's holding a smoking gun to bioresonance?
Ben Goldacre
Saturday November 12, 2005
The Guardian

I know you're all looking forward to my fifth consecutive week writing about the tabloid's favourite MRSA "laboratory", but my Deep Throat keeps teasing me, so the latest explosion will have to wait. Now. It is a well-recognised phenomenon that swearing is only really funny when very old or very posh people do it: and likewise, bad science is only truly funny when it appears in the context of someone being jolly serious.

I give you BBC News. In fact, since it has unwisely put its TV news archive online, I can actually give you the video of the story at www.tinyurl.com/bfoeu, but for those who are nowhere near a computer, I'll transcribe. This is a story, in all the authoritative regalia of television news, about the excellently bonkers "bioresonance" treatment to help smokers kick the habit. "The bioresonance treatment is analysing the energy wave patterns in Jean's body," they begin. "It finds the frequency pattern of the nicotine and reverses it. That in theory neutralises the nicotine's energy pattern, so her body won't crave what's been wiped out." Now, apart from the observation that you can find Star Trek fans in every walk of life, notice there what is presented as fact, and what is caveat.

So what would it mean, if what the BBC said was true? Reader John Agapiou, who sent this in, sums up the flaws so well it's quite wrong that I should get paid for stealing his jokes: "You'd really need to extract the nicotine signal very carefully," he points out. "You wouldn't want to have any traces of 'dopamine' or 'haemoglobin' in the recording, and nullify those molecules, or you'd be in real trouble."

I'm not sure that anyone has ever calculated how many different kinds of molecules there are in the human body, but I'd have to guess that there are at least a million. So this machine, which looks just like a piece of modern hospital equipment, records something through funny little pads attached to the skin, and it can filter out precisely the molecule it's looking for? "Why they aren't making a huge amount of money from this amazing signal processing equipment is beyond me."

More...

You know this reminds me of? Dr. Drown's Homo-Vibra Ray (no, it's not what you think) mixed with some vague appreciation of Rupert Sheldrake's theories of morphic resonance.

This, and reports of "Celestial Drops" and "nano water" simply prove to me that Old quackeries never die — they just get better technobabble.