Instead of the usual rant, this week I want to make an appeal. It’s an appeal for reason, for true science without commercial restraints, and for funding to carry out a simple, and inexpensive, experiment that may have enormous positive implications for all of us.
This line of thinking has been inspired by two pieces of paper that have landed on my desk this week. The first is from the Society of Occupational Medicine, which has just completed some expensive research that reached the astonishing conclusion that people who go to work are less depressed than people who are unemployed. The second is a letter from a gentleman who has seemingly successfully treated his prostate cancer by using a machine that was developed in the 1920s and 30s by an American called Royal Raymond Rife.
Rife, who died in 1970, has marginalised opinion between those who are convinced he was a genius who had discovered a cure for cancer and a range of other systemic conditions, and those who believe he was one of the biggest frauds of the last century.
For his part, Rife claimed to have discovered how to destroy cancer cells by ‘tuning’ into their frequency, just as an opera singer can shatter a glass. In 1934, he demonstrated his frequency machine on 16 terminal cancer patients chosen by the University of Southern California; within three months, they had all been cured, or so his advocates say.
On the eve of a press conference to announce the study’s impressive results, Dr Milbank Johnson, former president of the Southern California AMA, was fatally poisoned and all his papers were destroyed. Within five years, Rife had been vilified, his machines were destroyed, his research papers were burned, and doctors who continued to use the machines were struck off by the American Medical Association.
Critics argue that his theories are based on nothing more than pseudo-science, that people have died because they have preferred the Rife machine over conventional treatment, and they point out that Rife ‘practitioners’ are being rightfully jailed for giving false hope to terminally-ill patients.
But on what do they base their opinions? When I did a trawl through Pub-Med, the depository of every medical study carried out over the past 70 years or so, I couldn’t find one single study into the Rife technology. This seems astonishing for a therapy that offered so much early promise.
So – this is my appeal. Is there a way for us to conduct the very first medical study into the Rife technology? If money can be found for studies that tell us that unemployed people get depressed, surely we can find out a way to finally prove – or disprove – the Rife technology.
Why, when cancer has become the greatest epidemic of our times, should this be so hard for us to do?