Googling ‘bioresonance therapy’ produces a large number of hits.  One of the first comes from the Oxford Chiropractic Clinic, which says

“Bioresonance is one of the most exciting innovative complementary health therapies of our time. It is a bespoke therapeutic approach that is noninvasive, painless and energetically supports the body by addressing potential causes of chronic and degenerative disease.”

“By enhancing the body’s cellular energy levels and ability to detoxify, almost any condition can benefit. It is a safe therapy to use alongside traditional and alternative medicine and is not used to diagnose or treat dis-ease.”

Almost needless to say, the claim that “almost any condition can benefit” is made-up nonsense.  As so often, sciencey-sounding language is used to sell the product.

“Bioresonance is a form of oscillation medicine, founded on the theory of Quantum Physics, that all matter is in motion, oscillating and vibrating.”

Once again, there is an allusion to quantum physics. It makes no sense at all. It’s just a pretentious bit of gobbledygook, written by someone who has no idea what quantum physics is.  The spiel continues:

“This motion is in the form of waves which can be measured and defined by their frequency. All parts of the human anatomy, cells, tissues, organs, systems etc. have a particular spectrum of frequencies relating to them. The same is true for pathophysiology (dis-ease processes), bacteria, viruses, parasites, mould, heavy metals, pesticides, environmental toxins, electromagnetic smog, geopathic stress, essential vitamins, minerals and probiotic bacteria.”

The implied claim to fix anything whatsoever is a sure sign of quackery.

In 2019,  Les Rose and Mandy Payne wrote, in the HealthSense newsletter, about one particular “bioresonance” device, the Resonator, which is sold by Anthony Grant via his website.  They were astonished to find that

“one of the complaints had been brought by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA). In fact, the MHRA is itself the statutory regulator for medical devices, so why was matter referred to the ASA [Advertising Standards Authority], an independent body whose code is voluntary, instead of using its own regulatory powers?”“one of the complaints had been brought by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA). In fact, the MHRA is itself the statutory regulator for medical devices, so why was matter referred to the ASA [Advertising Standards Authority], an independent body whose code is voluntary, instead of using its own regulatory powers?”

The fact is that neither the ASA nor the MHRA are effective regulators.  The ASA upheld all the complaints about the “Resonator”, but all it can do is to request that the advertisement must not appear again in the form complained of.  That was in June 2021.  The recommendation was simply ignored, and, in January 2025, resonator.uk continues to make the same grotesque claims that were condemned by the ASA.

Anthony Grant contacted HealthSense after seeing the article and offered to supply his product free of charge for us to examine and try. HealthSense accepted his offer and he duly supplied two Resonators.  Since I retired, I no longer have access to an oscilloscope.  But, luckily, a neighbour, John Nickalls, is a recently-retired electrical engineer. He kindly agreed to look at what’s inside the resonator.  His report can be downloaded here.

What’s in the box?

The box has an on/off switch and sockets for the two handgrips which appear to be made from sections of copper pipe.

Opening the box reveals that it contains a single semiconductor chip.  It is a simple square wave generator. A search with Google Lens shows that very similar devices are widely available on the web. They are cheap -prices for the chip are mostly between £0.74 and £5.00.  -for example from Ali Express Ali Express or from ebay

Grant sells the device for £97.00.  That sounds like a healthy profit margin.

Open circuit (no load attached), the device produces a 30 kHz square wave between 0 V and 9 V, with 50% duty cycle (as set on the device).

When a 1 kΩ resistor was connected across the tubes (crudely simulating a body load) the  voltage change was roughly halved (to about 4.3 V), which suggests that the source resistance of the semiconductor device in the ‘high’ output state (i.e. 9 V) is about 1 kΩ.

What matters for the response of the body is the current that flows, rather than the voltage that drives it. This was monitored by placing a small (100 Ω) resistor in series with the negative side of the resonator output.   During these measurements the copper pipes were held, one in each hand, as the instructions that come with it specify.

The upper trace (red) shows the voltage across the copper handgrips.  The fact that it doesn’t rise instantly shows that the body has capacitance as well as resistance.

The lower trace (blue) shows the voltage across the 100 Ω resistor, which is directly proportional the current flowing through the body of the person who is holding the copper hand grips.  Following the rise of the applied voltage, the current the flows peaks at 40 mA `and declines over a few microseconds to about 10 mA.  These values are inferred by applying Ohm’s law to the voltage across the 100 Ω resistor (blue trace).  For example, the peak voltage on the blue trace is about 4 V and this corresponds to a current of 4 V / 100 Ω = 0.04 A = 40 mA.   

These currents, of a few tens of milliamps, would be in the potentially dangerous range if they were direct currents, or varying slowly, like mains currents (50 Hz).  But oscillating currents, like that produced by the Resonator, are more complicated.  The concept of resistance has to be replaced by impedance, and understanding that needs an understanding of complex numbers (numbers that depend on the square root of minus one).

In this case, we can circumvent the theory by noting that the person holding the handles felt no sensation at all.  A current of this size would normally be expected to stimulate motor nerve fibres and cause muscle contractions or, potentially, bad effects on the normal rhythm of the heart.  The fact that there was no perceptible sensation felt by people holding the handles suggests that the high frequency of the pulses causes most current to flow through the superficial layers of skin, with relatively little flowing through underlying muscle.  That is just as well, because the currents would otherwise be dangerous.

The only comparable frequencies are used in bioimpedance measurements. This is a notoriously inaccurate method that attempts to estimate lean body mass by passing a high frequency current, often 50 kHz, through the body, but this uses currents in the microamp range, so at least it is safe.

So what is the effect of the Resonator?

According to its website

“The “Resonator “ is an electronic bio-resonance, non-invasive device. It is not a medical device. As with any electronic device, it works or it doesn’t. The Resonator works.

It does not come under the requirement of clinical trials etc. Clinical trials are conducted on new drugs to ensure they do no harm and that they work better than a placebo. It does not require a CE mark as it is not a medical device and causes no harm.”

“The Resonator produces a resonant frequency in microamps [not true] from a tiny 9-volt battery that kills your parasites, and bad bacteria and destroys viruses. The 30kHz frequency vibrates at 30,000 times a second, shaking the pathogens to pieces.”

It is obviously absurd to say that a device that’s claimed to kill “your parasites, and bad bacteria and destroys viruses” is “not a medical device”.  That’s said in a (futile) attempt to justify ignoring the ASA’s verdict.

Almost certainly the Resonator has no effects whatsoever.  The claim that “The Resonator works” is true only in the sense that it does indeed produce an oscillating 30 kHz voltage. But it does not work in the only sense that matters. The idea that a bacterium can be “shaken to pieces” by any electromagnetic field that could be tolerated by the human body is not established.  Even if it were possible, it’s very obvious that objects of such vastly different size and shape as parasites and viruses would all have very different resonant frequencies: they couldn’t possibly all resonate at 30 kHz.

The myth of bioresonance started in  the 1930s with an American, Royal Raimond Rife.  His work has never been reproduced and has sunk into obscurity. But even he didn’t pretend that all bacteria have the same resonant frequency. In 1936, he produced a table that claimed to show the resonant frequencies of various bacteria.  They varied from 139.2 kHz (for Anthrax) to 1.6 MHz.  None were as low as 30 kHz.  The idea that there was something magic about 30 kHz originated much later.

Rife’s work was dismissed until a naturopath, Hulda Clark, revived it in the 1980s. She wrote books with titles The Cure for All Cancers (1993), The Cure For HIV / AIDS (1993), The Cure for All Diseases (1995) and The Cure For All Advanced Cancers (1999).  Anyone who writes about the cure for all diseases is pretty obviously seriously deluded, or, perhaps, a charlatan. Her claims were too much, even for luminaries of the world of alternative medicine: for example, Andrew Weil described them as “bizarre”.  And the Swiss Study Group for Complementary and Alternative Methods in Cancer (SCAC) issued a strong warning to cancer patients considering Clark’s methods.  Even she didn’t claim that a single frequency would kill everything.  She sold a device called a Syncrometer which she claimed would detect relevant frequencies but this was clearly fraudulent. The FTC intervened and Clark moved her clinic from San Diego to Mexico, to avoid lawsuits.  Nonetheless, Grant recommends her work to readers of v.

Anthony Grant can be heard in an interview with Michael Marshall, of the Merseyside Skeptics group and the Good Thinking Society.  Grant, on his website, says that the resonator “runs at microamps, (1,000,000 of an amp)”, a claim repeated in the interview.    As shown above, this is not true – it is in the milliamp range. It’s clear that he has little understanding of either physiology or physics – e.g. the definition of Hertz on his website is totally garbled “Hz (hertz) is the cycle of an alternating frequency that travels in one second”. He admits that there is little evidence for the effectiveness of the device, and, as usual, he attributes this to the cost of doing clinical trials.  That’s true of huge phase 3 trial, but it would be cheap to do experiments with bacteria, but they haven’t been done.

Conclusion

Anthony Grant appears to believe genuinely in the device he’s selling. It is always hard to distinguish between delusion and fraud.  This dilemma was discussed perceptively by the US physicist Robert Park, in his book Voodoo Science: the road from foolishness to fraud (Oxford University Press).  In summary, his thesis is that those who propagate these ideas often start with a genuine belief that what they say is true. Rejection of the ideas by sensible people just makes them more determined. Eventually, though, it probably dawns on many of them that they have made a terrible mistake. At this point, some recant, but more often they have so much reputation to defend, and frequently too much income to protect, that they will continue to propagate their ideas even after they have realised that they are wrong.

Grant’s is a small scale operation, so the number of people who are likely to come to harm as a result of his activities is limited. From that point of view, I feel almost guilty for being hard on him.  Nevertheless, selling medical devices that clearly don’t work is not a good way to earn a living.

What should be done?  This story is really about the regulators who fail abysmally to do their job. In the USA, they are more effective, at least in the most egregious cases like that of Hulda Clark.  The MHRA failed to take action in this case and the ASA did what little it could, but its judgement was simply ignored.  This is not good enough.