Bioresonance is an alternative therapeutic and diagnostic method employing a device developed in Germany by the scientology member Franz Morell in 1977. The bioresonance machine was further developed and marketed by Morell’s son in law Erich Rasche and is also known as ‘MORA’ therapy (MOrell + RAsche). Bioresonance is based on the notion that one can diagnose and treat illness with electromagnetic waves and that, via resonance, such waves can influence disease on a cellular level. Bioresonance instruments are akin to the scientologists’ ‘E-meter’ which essentially consists of an electronic circuit measuring skin conductivity.
Until recently, just three studies of bioresonance had been published.
- The first was from Germany and suggested that it is effective for treating GI symptoms. This trial was, however, tiny and its findings are likely to be false-positive.
- The second study is from Turkey and suggested that it works for smoking cessation. It is a ‘pilot study’ that has never been followed by a definitive trial.
- The third trial was a double-blind, parallel group study in children with long-lasting atopic dermatitis. Over a period of 1.5 year, 32 children were randomised to receive conventional inpatient therapy and either a putatively active or a sham (placebo) bioresonance treatment. Short- and long-term outcome within 1 year were assessed by skin symptom scores, sleep and itch scores, blood cell activation markers of allergy, and a questionnaire. The results showed that bioresonance had no effect on the outcome.
Now a most ingenious study can be added to this list. Unfortunately, I was published in German, but bear with me, I will explain below. First the original abstract for those who can read German:
Hintergrund
Trotz aller Aufklärungsarbeit wird die Bioresonanz weiter benutzt. Seit einigen Jahren sind modifizierte Geräte auf dem Markt, die auch in Reformhäusern zum Einsatz kamen.
Methoden
Zwei moderne Bioresonanzgeräte, Bioscan-SWA und Vieva Vital-Analyser, wurden untersucht: Neun freiwillige Probanden (vier Frauen, fünf Männer), zwei männliche Patienten, eine Leiche, jeweils frischer Leberkäse (Fleischbrät) und ein feuchtes Tuch nahmen teil. Unter gleichen oder fingierten Angaben von Namen, Geburtsdatum, Geschlecht, Körpergröße und Gewicht der Probanden beziehungsweise Patienten wurden wiederholt Einzelmessungen und Vergleichsuntersuchungen von Proband/Patient, Leberkäse und feuchtem Tuch durchgeführt (nach den Angaben der Hersteller).
Ergebnisse
Bestehende Diagnosen schwer erkrankter Patienten wurden nicht erkannt, der Leiche beste Gesundheit neben einer Fülle potenzieller Gesundheitsrisiken attestiert, ebenso wie allen Probanden. Messungen an frischem Leberkäse sowie an einem feuchten Tuch unter verschiedenen Angaben zu Alter, Geschlecht, Körpergröße, Gewicht und Namen führten zu unterschiedlichsten Befunden mit relativen Standardabweichungen bis über 200 %. Andererseits waren Ergebnisse, die unter gleichen Probanden- beziehungsweise Patientendaten am feuchten Tuch und dem Fleischbrät gewonnen wurden, nahezu identisch mit denen, die von den Probanden beziehungsweise Patienten erzielt wurden.
Schlussfolgerung
Die Gerätschaften waren nicht imstande, die jeweiligen Testmaterialien zu unterscheiden. Es wird vermutet, dass die Überbrückung der beiden Pole der Untersuchungssonde durch schwach leitende Materialien eine Software aktiviert, die gesundheitsrelevante Befunde erzeugt. Wir empfehlen als einfache Tests für die Validität von Bioresonanzergebnissen den Leberkäse- oder verwandte Tests.
And here is my explanation.
The study tested the diagnostic validity of two different bioresonance machines commercially available in Germany. The tests were carried out on:
- 9 healthy volunteers
- 2 seriously ill patients
- 1 human corpse
- 1 liver pate
- 1 wet towel
The results show that the bioresonance method
- failed to diagnose serious diseases in the patients,
- produced a clean bill of health for the corpse,
- diagnosed a host of health risks in the volunteers,
- produced variable results for the liver pate and the wet towel with standard deviations for repeated tests exceeding 200%,
- generated no real differences between the wet towel and the healthy volunteers.
This study was published in 2019. It would be interesting to monitor whether the sales figures for bioresonance machines will now dwindle. Even though I am an incorrigible optimist, I shall not hold my breath.
37 Responses to Bioresonance: a new and hilariously ingenious study
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It reminds me of the famous “dead salmon” study of fMRI. As I’m sure you know, there is a huge range of `bioresonance’ machines, which the MHRA declines to regulate effectively. They don’t even maintain a list of licensed devices. They say that any unfounded marketing claims are a matter for the ASA.
IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study, Scientific American
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/
But was it pate foie gras? I don’t see how the study could make such conclusions without being specific about the subjects.
I love this! I always find it difficult to get any data on ‘non-sense’ remedies and machines, for obvious reasons the studies aren’t done or published.
This is what we need. And hilariously it’s very similar to a few articles on the daily mash about homeopathy.
I looked up the article and read that this research was filmed for a tv programme on German broadcaster BR Fernsehen. You can still watch it online: https://bit.ly/34oltJH it’s great!
thanks – I did not know!
For those techfreaks that can understand German: A certain Daniel Pugge tested some such devices for the data flow between sensor and PC. He found: None. All the results presented to the customer are created within the PC by the software without any data read from the probe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsIpFRJmPOM
This of course is why, when I ask these charlatans for evidence of reproducibility of signals, the conversation stops. Do you have a link for the Pugge study? I can struggle through the German (good practice!).
I don’t think he did a scientific study, he compared the data from several devices and got the same nonsense results, basically no information was collected, all results were just randomly collected from the same database
I had bioresonance and found it amazing. After seeing doctors for almost thirty years who couldn’t find the cause this equipment immediately picked up liver detox and mercury. A few months later this diagnosis was backed up by DNA testing. I have two double copies of poor liver detox genes and will always hold on to heavy metals particularly mercury. Diagnosis changed my life. I have an almost normal energy level these days but must take bentonite zeolite and liver tonics daily. I also have friends who have had wonderful experiences with bio resonance too.
” I have two double copies of poor liver detox genes ” … and a quadruple copy of a gullibility gene?
So what you’re saying is that a wrong answer delivered with absolute confidence is better than an honest answer of “I don’t know”?
“Bioresonance” is the thinnest of flim-flam (did you miss the liver pate?) invented by the same people that make a magical meter that measures your sweat. That you report subsequent improvement suggests a psychological mechanism: the comfort of embracing pat certainty and putting your neuroses to bed at last. (Dollars to donuts that a mild antidepressant and daily talk therapy would have worked too.) I know what it’s like to feel your life’s in a hole, not in your control, and the wave of relief when you climb back out; but why credit the dime-store scammers for what you finally did for yourself?
@Christine
I am sorry to tell you, but you have fallen for a fraud and a scam. ‘Bioresonance’ is nonsense, and its practitioners are usually medically incompetent laypersons who pretend to have healing skills.
As an expert in biomedical electronics I can tell you that it is absolutely impossible to assess the state of health of organs or persons via a couple of simple electrodes held in both hands(*). Best case, this equipment can tell if someone has sweaty hands or not – and many of these machines are complete scams, as they don’t measure anything, but just spit out more or less random ‘diagnoses’.
Bioresonance practitioners nearly always tell their customers that they suffer from ‘toxins’ – and then proceed to sell them completely useless ‘detox’ products(**).
I’m afraid that this actually may achieve the opposite of what you want: yes, bentonite and zeolite are capable of adsorbing heavy metals and other toxic substances. The problem is that these minerals, when mined, already have adsorbed lead, mercury and other naturally occurring but unhealthy substances. Stomach acid and enzymes can turn these heavy metals into salts and other compounds that are subsequently absorbed in the intestine. Which means that there is a certain chance that you are actually poisoning yourself instead of the opposite.
Furthermore, even if this bentonite would adsorb more toxins than it delivers into your body, it is still quite useless – because it can only remove any substances from the intestinal tract, but not from the rest of your body. The intestinal tract is, after all, designed to extract nutrients and water from whatever passes through, not the other way round. You can’t ‘draw’ toxins from your body this way – and it might even adsorb important nutrients from the food you eat, such as vitamins and minerals. Which of course is also undesirable.
Let me guess: you buy these daily ‘liver tonics’ from the bioresonance practitioner? Or one of his acquaintances? And I’d be most interested in learning what these ‘liver tonics’ actually are, because to my knowledge, there is no substance that can remove any toxic load from the liver when simply ingested (in cases of real systemic poisoning, antidotes and chelating agents are exclusively administered by IV, and need careful monitoring).
About you feeling better: there are several ways to explain this without pseudoscience and pseudomedicine. There is of course the placebo effect, and this is often amplified by adopting a more health-conscious lifestyle, together with the feeling that you are in control of the process, instead of just following ‘doctor’s orders’. In this regard, one might say that the bioresonance practitioner helped you in a way – but this help still involved deception and nonsense, so there must be a better way to achieve the same effect.
*: Please think about it: if any uneducated person could reliably assess the state of health of all your organs within a few seconds with a simple box containing perhaps 50 dollars worth of electronics, then why is real medicine still messing around with MRI machines, CT scanners and other radiological equipment costing millions of dollars, requiring highly trained (=expensive) personnel to operate, and even more expensive medical specialists to interpret the results – and still getting it wrong sometimes? Why does it take a professional lab several days to find what ‘toxins’ are really present in your body? One complete serum and urine tox panel already costs more than one such bioresonance device (not to mention the investment of setting up a lab, starting at a million dollars or more) – so why aren’t these machines used instead? The answer is simple: they don’t work.
**: Some 10 years ago, a couple of Dutch journalists did some research into alternative medicine, consulting several different practitioners with made-up vague complaints, after first having a very thorough medical and toxicological check-up by real doctors. The results were as expected: all quacks they consulted found things wrong, and told them they needed treatment. Quite telling was the fact that their diagnoses and proposed treatments differed wildly, with ‘toxins’ and ‘negative energy’ as most named ‘root causes’.
Christine, who did the DNA testing? Has it occurred to you that 30 years of not finding anything might indicate that there is nothing to find?
Do you have any comments to make about the amount of pharmaceuticals that have killed patients or maimed them, eg thalidomide, or the dreadful side effects caused my many traditional medications? Or the addictive treatments you can never come off? It’s strange that we never hear any comments from the medical profession about this. Or the misdiagnoses from doctors – during Covid I had two – one was my weight loss, diagnosed over the phone as cancer by a doctor I had never seen and without any tests. The weight loss was caused by stress and anxiety, persistent diahrrhoea and a switch to a low FODMAP diet, invented by an Australian university to help IBS sufferers, but is actually a weight loss diet. IBS itself is an umbrella term, given when doctors have tested for everything else with normal results and who have no idea how to treat IBS, which is horrendous. No cure for it? Is it any wonder that people are moving to holistic medicine, including quite a number of doctors who are retraining and seeing that as the future for medicine. My other misdiagnosis during Covid was heart failure. I was duly tested and all was normal – panic attacks, easily taken care of by a holistic practitioner and a great Chinese acupuncturist. These therapies do not have the enormous amounts of money spent by Big Pharma to do similar tests and rumour has it, that those tests are manipulated and not always accurate. It is at the end of the day a matter of opinion, the public are not stupid, if it works for them they will do it regardless of medical tests. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I hate the sneering manner in which you write these messages. It says more about you than it does about the subjects!
“It is at the end of the day a matter of opinion”
NO!
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
YOU MEAN LIKE BLOODLETTING THAT WAS USED FOR CENTURIES AND KILLED THOUSANDS?
What you say sounds similar to the experiences of people before mainstream medicine was able to do much to help people. Then, techniques like homeopathy actually were better for patients than many common treatments such as bloodletting that actually traumatized patients. Homeopathy is a placebo, but at least it’s (usually) a gentle placebo.
Apparently you didn’t have serious problems, just some stress and anxiety. And the interventions of the holistic practitioner and acupuncturist might have benefited you just from the placebo effect. A placebo might be very helpful with stress, anxiety and panic attacks.
So it doesn’t mean that now you know that whatever the holistic practitioner did, or acupuncture, are effective treatments. If something serious happens, you’ll likely need to go back to actual doctors to get help.
@Diane Paul
Do you have any comments to make about the amount of pharmaceuticals that have saved patients or at least improved their quality of life by taking away pain or relieving other symptoms? Have you spent any though on how a significant proportion of the frail and elderly can still enjoy life thanks to pharmaceuticals? Do you realize that those pharmaceuticals that you choose to demonize enable surgeons to do their work? Or, in case you need e.g. hip surgery, would you prefer that they cut you open with only a couple of swigs of brandy plus perhaps some willow bark extract in a futile attempt to take away the worst of the pain? And then, would you bet on your luck for the wound not to get infected – or, worse, have ‘holistic’ practitioners apply ayurveda-style cow manure poultices, simply because cows and their excrements are considered holy?
Yes, sometimes things go wrong with pharmaceuticals and their manufacturers. But that is not remedied by denouncing modern medicines altogether and returning to medieval treatments based on belief instead of science, as that would be throwing away the baby with the bath water. This thalidomide disaster is a point in case: this event started a huge effort to test medicines far more rigorously than ever before, in order to prevent similar things happening in the future. Yes, curbing the greed of pharmaceutical companies, making medicines safer and e.g. preventing unnecessary use of medicines is an ongoing effort, but we are making progress. Any way you look at it, pharmaceutical products do far more good than harm, and that is quite the opposite of your message.
And about misdiagnosing conditions: do you have any idea how incredibly difficult it can be to reach a correct diagnosis? Even after ten years of very hard study and countless hours of practice, doctors still get it wrong on a regular basis. This is not because they are stupid or malevolent, but because medicine is one of the most difficult things we humans do.
Oh, wait, I think I understand: those doctors spending huge amounts of effort on science-based medicine are of course doing it completely wrong. Now if only they’d all listen to their holistic brethren (‘the future of medicine’ as you claim), they would realize how face-slapping stupid they were – and how easy and simple diagnosing any condition is: “Blocked Flow of Chi”, or “Disturbed Balance of Energy”, or “Negative Aura”, or simply “The Wrong Diet”(*). There, THAT is how easy it can be! If only ALL doctors would diagnose patients this way!
If I may ask, what did your holistic practitioner diagnose in your case?
*: In fact, ‘wrong diet’ IS one of the most common diagnoses by real doctors, as many health problems are linked to eating too much of the wrong foodstuffs, causing obesity, declining physical condition, type 2 diabetes and a host of other problems, up to and including lots of mental issues. Unfortunately, patients generally find it very hard to follow the ‘natural’ treatment, i.e. eat less, eat healthier, and exercise more (and – importantly – keep this up for the rest of their life). So in may cases, they choose the rather less desirable but far easier way of just treating the symptoms, e.g. by taking statins for their high blood cholesterol, painkillers for their overloaded joints and stiff muscles, antidepressants to make them feel better … And even though doctors can (and do) discourage this course of action, they can’t force patients to adopt a healthier lifestyle when these patients ask for relief of their problems. If they see that their lifestyle advice is not heeded, should they then refuse to at least treat the symptoms? That would lead to more health problems and more deaths … So doctors do what they can, even if it is not the best solution. Because it is patients they deal with – patients with a mind and a will of their own, often stuck in bad habits.
… blood pressure medication, glucose-lowering medication, …
Yes, and those kinds of drugs that patients take for the rest of their lives are the big moneymakers for Big Pharma.
That sounds like it wasn’t a diagnosis, merely a possibility. Cancer is common, and weight loss is a common cancer symptom.
That also isn’t a diagnosis, just a possibility. Testing ruled it out.
Doctors do many tests for scary but common conditions. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are leading causes of death, and it makes sense to rule them out.
Going to doctors does involve health scares and sometimes expensive testing for dire possibilities that turns up negative. When a test comes out negative, that doesn’t mean it was unjustified. Doctors aren’t time-travellers, after all. A doctor can’t peek at what your file would be after the test before doing the test, and decide not to do it.
When a doctor does do excessive testing, it’s likely CYA behavior. A patient might sue a doctor who failed to diagnose heart disease or cancer, especially since an early diagnosis might have saved their life.
Also, there are functional medicine MDs who often do a lot of invalid testing. Just seeing an MD is no guarantee that one won’t be exposed to BS.
To Laura
“If something serious happens, you’ll likely need to go back to actual doctors to get help.”
So what happens when you just came from “actual doctors” .. and now the problem not only persists, but is worse ?
What then ?
Then one would need to either work with the current doctors to find the answer, or consult other doctors.
It’s important to be an effective partner with doctors, learn how to be an engaged patient, and ask them good questions about the choices available.
Also, self-investigation can help a lot to figure out what’s causing allergy symptoms, much more so than with most other medical problems.
By self-investigation, I mean investigation of one’s personal situation. Not, going online and looking at sources not authored by doctors that purport to have the answer.
Couldn’t somebody just retrieve the software from the machine and find out what it does with the input?
This is the relevant part. Whether or not the liver pate or the wet towel imitated a human being well enough so the machine couldn’t tell the difference isn’t relevant to its effectiveness.
The liver pate and wet towel were chosen to have an electrical conductivity similar to a human.
Similarly, a liver pate or wet towel could be heated to the temperature of a human fever, and a thermometer couldn’t tell the difference between them and a human being. But thermometers are still very useful for evaluating someone’s health.
This is usually quite difficult, for several reasons:
– These machines are hugely expensive (usually upwards of $4000), even though they often contain less than a hundred dollars worth of electronics. This exorbitant price tag serves to increase credibility and of course to make money – but also to discourage technicians such as yours truly from obtaining and analysing one of these machines.
– Software in these machines is usually read-protected, so you can’t get to the code even if you had access to such a machine.
But there is a far simpler reason why it is safe to assume that all of these machines are total frauds: there is no way in the world that a simple measurement with two hand-held electrodes can tell you anything more than whether the test subject has sweaty hands or not. Even a basic ECG requires several electrodes to be placed around the heart, plus a ground connection to another part of the body. And only muscles and nerves produce electric signals; other organs do NOT produce any ‘resonance’ or ‘frequencies’ or whatever.
Most of these machines only check if a small current flows between the electrodes or not; if so, the conclusion is that someone is holding the electrodes. This is the signal to start blinking some lights, show a wavy line on a display and perhaps do some sort of countdown. And after a minute, it spits out a completely arbitrary ‘diagnosis’, with the more sophisticated devices taking certain pre-entered characteristics into account, e.g. the test subject’s sex, age and weight, to lend more credibility to the procedure and prevent embarrassing errors such as diagnosing a woman with prostate issues.
But you can rest assured that nothing is ever actually ‘measured’ with regard to health. It is a complete scam, and the people building and selling these machines are fully aware of this.
And just think about it: if these machines would work as claimed, then why is the medical world still messing around with huge, multi-million-dollar MRI and CT scanners and big laboratories in order to diagnose their patients? Why isn’t one of these miraculous diagnostic devices sitting in every general practitioner’s office?
The police often get digital information that the owner thought they’d erased or wasn’t accessible, so this seems dubious.
There doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe these machines are other than a fraud, but your other arguments aren’t convincing that they must be a fraud. Hence this semi-humorous study.
@Laura
There are several ways to protect programming and data, and the most rigorous way is on the hardware level, i.e. setting a ‘code protection’ bit when programming the actual chip. This type of protection is almost impossible to break.
(FYI, I am a biomedical electronics engineer with 30+ years of experience – I could design and build a device like this in a couple of weeks.)
And of course some people have laid their hands on machines like this, and analysed the data streams passing between these devices and the connected laptop. In most cases, no measurement values were seen, such as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biD7uQ5X5QM (German)
This means that any ‘diagnoses’ and ‘measurements’ are fabricated by the laptop software.
According to the paper, some doctors do buy these machines as well as alternative practitioners, at least in Germany. They’re also in some health food stores there.
The output is a mixture of values like osteocalcin and dust allergy that are actually measured in lab tests, and things like “mental power”, cognitive performance and bizarrely, “cerebrovascular oxygen content in blood pressure (PaO2)” – yes, Pascals, the metric unit of pressure, combined with oxygen!
From looking at the paper, the software is something you download onto a computer, and it’s connected via USB or something to the “bioresonance machine”, which is connected to a handheld device with a couple electrodes.
I wonder what the bioresonance machine has inside it. It didn’t seem to say in the paper whether the authors bought these machines or just borrowed them. If they bought them, it would be interesting to open them up and investigate. It’s meant to look like a sophisticated medical device, anyway.
There is input besides from the electrodes: one gives the software the date, the person’s birthdate, sex, height and weight. And the software uses this info to make its results look more convincing: there were very different results when one of the authors entered his age of 68 correctly, and when the software was told he was just 12 yo. He had a lot more health problems as a 68-year old.
The author says he was personally somewhat mortified to find that the machine gave him a “memory index” of 0.152, which the software categorized as pathologically low. But when they tried the machine on a block of liver pate’ and described it as him, it got a “memory index” of 0.163 – also categorized as pathologically low – but it was better than he did!
Again, it seems the machine gave the liver pate’ a pathologically low value for memory because it was described as a 68-year old man.
This kind of diagnosis would be useful for the doctor or alt practitioner, because they can then sell the person supplements for memory or whatever. As in “you’re getting old, and this sophisticated machine thinks you have problems with memory / will be having them soon, so I recommend this (showing patient a bottle), it will help”.
One would think the people who use these machines in health food stores would similarly prank them, so some people would realize the results are invention. But then, wanting to use such a thing generally involves also wanting to believe it works. So they would be disinclined to inquire too closely.
That’s probably one reason for the popularity of alt-med practitioners in general. Both the provider and the patient want to believe it’s working, so they don’t inquire too closely.
Claims to personal expertise and ability abound, especially online. They’re also the bread & butter of alt-med.
There’s a video where someone dissects a bioresonance therapy device. It was broken, found in a dumpster, and auctioned off.
This is similar to the devices tested in the paper, but different in that it’s trying to do therapy, and the devices in the paper are only intended to diagnose.
It’s a bunch of electronic components inside, except for a little tube of chlorophyll in a water solution that’s surrounded by an electromagnetic coil : )
He comments that the device has no shielding so he thinks it would pick up electrical noise from the AC current in the walls, wifi and radio signals, all highly amplified.
Laura,
I think PaO2 was meant to be Arterial blood oxygen tension (normal):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_gas_tension#Oxygen_tension
Not that the device could measure it, of course.
Ah. In that case you seem to have picked up on something the authors of the paper didn’t.
In the output from the software, it’s described as cerebrovascular specifically, so it sounds like it’s the partial pressure of cerebrovascular blood oxygen.
It would really be interesting to see what’s in that software. It would show whether the maker is a conscious fraud, or some kind of Deepak Chopra-esque believer in quantum healing (there’s a lot of quantum talk associated with these machines) …
That might make a difference as to whether the people responsible can be prosecuted for fraud or not.
Laura wrote “It would really be interesting to see what’s in that software.” and
“It’s possible to decompile exe files, although you don’t get the original source code back.”
I think it would be very interesting, and doable, as you say:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler
QUOTE
A decompiler is a computer program that translates an executable file to a high-level source file which can be recompiled successfully. It is therefore the opposite of a compiler, which translates a source file in to an executable. Decompilers are usually unable to perfectly reconstruct the original source code, thus frequently will produce obfuscated code. Nonetheless, decompilers remain an important tool in the reverse engineering of computer software.
END of QUOTE
See also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disassembler
@Pete Attkins
https://sourceforge.net/projects/decompiler/, for example : )
Today I was in a chat session with Bicom UK – https://bioresonance.com/. Their website claims that the machine reduces toxin and stress load on the body. I asked what toxins are affected by the machine, and how they measured stress (eg cortisol level?). I was told there are lots of “peer reviewed studies”. I said “can’t you give me just one example of a toxin that is affected by the machine?”. The company representative ended the chat, without even saying goodbye. That’s all you need to know about how these things work.
It would really be interesting to see what’s in that software. It would show whether the maker is a conscious fraud, or some kind of Deepak Chopra-esque believer in quantum healing (there’s a lot of quantum talk associated with these machines) …
That might make a difference as to whether the people responsible can be prosecuted for fraud or not.
It’s possible to decompile exe files, although you don’t get the original source code back.