The only acceptable evidence would be to measure the blood for organisms before the rife treatments, do the treatments measure the blood again. In the case of cancer, it would be to measure a tumour, apply the rife, and measure the tumour. Repeat and validate with a large subject group.
Here are the first three sentences from the introduction to Dr. Jay Goldstein's well-known book, Betrayal by the Brain:
Most patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, as well as other disorders of central information processing, which I term "neurosomatic," are not difficult to treat applying the neurosomatic paradigm. About 50 percent of my new patients feel dramatically improved after the first office visit; 25 percent more are better after the second. Twenty percent more eventually respond to treatment, leaving about 5 percent that I cannot help very much.
From what I have seen, these numbers appear to be correct. He is generally regarded as being in the top tier of ME researchers and clinicians, having treated over 20,000 patients in his career. Yet he does not pass your test for evidence. He was decades ahead of his time, and as a result, few people in the medical profession could understand his work. At a certain point, his papers no longer got published, because people couldn't understand them. He wanted to do double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, but all his grant requests were turned down, again, because people couldn't understand his work. Yet he was able to get major or complete long-term remissions in 95% of his patients, a success rate that I haven't seen matched anywhere.
But according to your quote, and others that I've seen in this thread, he had no scientific evidence for what he was doing. He had a theory, which was unproven, and he treated patients in accordance with his theory. He simply observed the reactions of his patients in order to decide what to do next. Different patients were treated differently. This in no way sounds like what you would call scientific proof; he simply had a theory and empirical evidence. Nevertheless, he was able to help 20,000 people put most or all of this disease into remission.
Killing microbes in a lab in a petrie dish is not any kind of proof that the same thing will work in the human body.
Of course not - I never said it was.
You can dump many every day products in a petri dish and it will kill microbes, drinking the same products won't do the same thing. So applying radio waves to organisms in a petri dish is not proof of anything except you can kill microbes in a petrie dish with radio waves.
This is true. Such experiments are quite useful, however, which is why they're done all the time. In this case, if the radio waves didn't do anything
in vitro, there would have been no need to continue the experiment; the uselessness of the technique would be immediately known. That's why
in vitro tests, where it's easier to control variables, are typically done before
in vivo tests whenever possible.
Rife and associated forms have been around for decades -- you would think by now there would have been many many many double-blinded studies.
Not if you knew the history and current status of Rife machines. It is
illegal to use them to treat people, and has been for many decades. Therefore, no studies involving people can be done.
The reason that these machines are illegal is solely political, and if you read up on their history you can verify this. I don't think that anyone in this group should be surprised that political considerations (including the influence of affected industries) can play a large part in medicine. And then there are people in the medical profession who will just say, "That's impossible!" without even looking at the evidence. I think we've all run into our share of such people. Such an attitude is not scientific, as it refuses to examine evidence. Nevertheless, it is widely held.
Making bold statements about cancer cures requires clinical proof. Chemotherapy and radiation have tons of research behind it, why not rife?
For the two reasons I stated above: It is illegal to use the machines for treatment (even in research), and there are various vested interests that want to keep it that way. For example, what would happen to the drug companies if Rife machines were proven to work?
In an earlier post, I said I didn't know whether Rife machines could be used to cure cancer or not. I still don't. But I've seen enough evidence of various types to suggest that further research into the use of Rife machines is warranted. Double-blind, placebo-controlled studies have their limitations, but yes, they are the best method we have for testing medical treatments, at least when done properly. I would love to see such studies done for Rife machines; I agree that that's the only way to definitively prove their usefulness. But right now, such studies are impossible for the reasons I outlined.
In the mean time, all we have is anecdotal evidence, but we have it from thousands of people who've been helped by Rife machines for various conditions. Now some people might get the impression from reading this thread that "anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron. However, a search of PubMed shows that this phrase is used in the title or abstract of over 1500 papers, which seems to show it's a well accepted term in the medical community. And in many of these papers, there is far less anecdotal evidence than there is for Rife machines. Anecdotal evidence is certainly one of the least reliable forms of evidence, but it's still evidence.
I think you missed the point of my posting my story about ganciclovir. At the time I signed up for treatment, the only evidence that ganciclovir was effective in the treatment of ME was in the form of fewer than two dozen anecdotal stories I found on the Internet. Not a lot to go on! But I was desperate, and my success added to the anecdotal evidence for what became Valcyte.
Now it's well known that research funds are scarce in our community. So when Dr. Jose Montoya wanted to find a drug that might be helpful in treating ME, he didn't just pick a drug at random. By that time the anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of Valcyte had grown quite a bit, with more people trying the drug as the evidence for its efficacy grew. I remember that people were begging the major ME researchers to do clinical trials on Valcyte so that they could have much stronger evidence of its safety and efficacy. And I think that there's no doubt that all of this played a large role in Dr. Montoya's decision to do research on Valcyte. If most or all the anecdotal evidence on Valcyte had been null or negative, do you think he would have used his scarce funds (and time) to test it?
So that's the value of anecdotal evidence. It's on the other end of the spectrum from proof, but it can be a valuable first step in that direction.
The "Letter from Doug MacLean, Coil Machine Inventor" offers no evidence of a microbicidal effect from oscillating magnetic fields produced by a solenoid (ie a Rife machine) because for one thing, there are no controls — microbes might die anyway when placed under a strong light shone on a microscope slide, and might die by osmotic shock if transferred from one solution to another, etc. You need to have an identically prepered control microscope slide which was not subjected to the oscillating magnetic fields, and compare the two.
If you read what I posted, it mentions doing multiple tests with multiple frequencies. There was a response at some frequencies and not at others. These tests were run multiple times. This rules out casual errors of the type you mentioned.
What I posted was obviously just a brief summary of his efforts. But the fact that he cured himself of long-term Lyme disease completely, and that this started happening directly after he started his treatments based on his
in vitro experiments, should tell you something. Unlike cases of spontaneous ME remission, I've heard of no cases of long-term Lyme disease just disappearing on its own.
Regarding your link "
The effect of Plasma Waves on Select Microorganisms". Just by that title alone, it's obvious that this is pure pseudoscience.
Really? Are you sure you understood the title correctly? And did you watch the video, where any ambiguity is removed?
But apart from the imaginative appeal, it is scientifically vacuous. It's bunk. When you generate plasma, it can generally only exist inside sealed containers (or in electric arcs like lightning), and any plasma waves cannot escape the container. Therefore plasma waves will not reach the microorganisms. How is it that the writer of that article, Anthony G. Holland, is not aware of this? Answer: it's because this musician is pretending to be a scientist, but clearly knows nothing about science.
Wrong answer. What you say about plasma is correct, and is known by anyone who knows anything about plasma. So when I saw the title, I assumed by "plasma waves", he meant electromagnetic waves generated by the plasma, which is clear in the video. Your interpretation didn't even occur to me.
As for the fact that Anthony Holland's primary career is as a musician, remember that Albert Einstein's primary career was that of a patent clerk at the time he developed the Special Theory of Relativity. Does that disqualify him? Should we throw out relativity? After all, that stuff is pretty weird, and some of it has never been verified. Compared to relativity, Rife machines are quite blasé. Sorry, Albert.
If there are any microbicidal effects from those tubes, this might conceivably arise from the ultraviolet light that plasma can emit. UV light is an extremely potent microbe killer. Just by seeing the white-blue color glow in that tube pictured in the above link, I would expect lots of ultraviolet light to be emitted.
At first glance, this would seem to be a reasonable alternate explanation. But remember that different modulating frequencies are being used for different organisms - only certain frequencies cause the organisms to die. Any UV radiation is at a constant frequency, so if it were causing the organism deaths, you would expect it to kill organisms at all modulating frequencies.
So why are those organisms dying only at certain frequencies?
I was shocked to see that the
last video you posted above on Anthony G. Holland's Rife machine pseudoscience originated from the
TED website, a website which has a very good intellectual reputation.
You're not paying attention, @
Hip. As I said in my post, "the presentation was given at a TEDx talk." TEDx is not TED. And if you had watched the video, you would have seen a big "TEDx" logo through much of it.
However, when I tried to find this video on the TED website, it was no longer available there...
"No longer available there" implies that it was once available there. Since this was a TEDx talk, and not a TED talk, it was never on the TED Web site. Another assumption not based on fact.
...so someone must have alerted TED to fact that Anthony G. Holland's talk is brim-filled with pseudoscience.
Although Holland's talk was never on the TED Web site, it is still listed on the
TEDx page for that conference. Apparently the conference organizers missed the whole pseudo-science thing.
On the pseudoscience scale of one to ten, this plasma wave nonsense definitely gets full points: a 10 out of 10 pseudoscience award. This is pseudoscience of the highest order.
So let's see how you arrived at this conclusion. You misinterpreted the title of the video, and on the basis of this misinterpretation, you built a whole wacky theory that nobody would buy, and then you proceeded to point out how wacky your theory was. But instead of taking responsibility for your wacky theory, you attributed it to Mr. Holland, who had nothing to do with it. You then offered an alternate theory as to how the tubes might work, but this theory has an obvious flaw. Then by misreading "TEDx" as "TED", you came up with a whole bogus theory about how TED had discovered that this was pseudo-science and removed the video from its site.
Note the singular lack of factual basis for any of this. So on a "sticking to the facts" scale of 0 to 10... well, I'll let you figure it out.
For the record, I do not enjoy pseudo-science any more than you do. However, your strong opinions have apparently blinded you to certain facts.
[P]lease - stick to the facts. They make arguments so much more convincing.
Because even an 18 year old physics student would be able to discern that this is bunk.
Really! When I was 18, I was a third-year physics major at MIT. And as I mentioned, the man who built my Rife machine (and also cured himself of Lyme disease using one of these machines) was a former NASA engineer. I'm pretty sure you need to know some physics to be a NASA engineer. You know, rocket science and all that.
It reminds me of this person who answered me on a support phone line, said she got all better from an alternative practitioner who 'aligned her elecrons'. (roll eyes)
Really? I'm curious - which part reminds you of that? There are many things that people say that are obvious nonsense - I've heard someone say that they won't use microwave ovens because they change the molecular structure of water. This is simply total ignorance of science. I've never been accused of total ignorance of science before - this is a first!
There are always people saying that something is impossible - there's never any shortage of those. I'll leave you with a few quotes that will hopefully illustrate the dangers of close-minded science.
Pierre Pochet:
Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction. How do you think that these germs in the air can be numerous enough to develop into all these organic infusions? If that were true, they would be numerous enough to form a thick fog, as dense as iron.
The New York Times, January 13, 1920:
A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere.
(The Times offered a retraction on July 17, 1969, as Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon.)
Scientific American, January 2, 1909:
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
Surgeon General of the United States William H. Stewart, 1969:
We can close the books on infectious diseases.
Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner:
No "scientific bad boy" ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.
Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer of radio, 1912:
The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.
Margaret Thatcher, 1974:
It will be years -- not in my time -- before a woman will become Prime Minister
Albert Einstein, 1932.
There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project
The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.
Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873:
The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.
Molière, from his satirical work "L'Amour Médicin" (quoted by Dr. Jay Goldstein)
It is better to die according to the rules than to recover in contravention of them.
I hope that at least some people will be a little more circumspect about what is possible and what is not, and what is science and what is pseudo-science.
