Download Lectures on Biostatistics (1971). Corrected and searchable version of Google books edition
Download review of Lectures on Biostatistics (THES, 1973).
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.
16 Responses to Resonators and kindred frauds
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My connection with this is that I used to attend “business meetings” with one these “oscillator healers” until I realised who and what these people were. These devices are used by those who channel “spirits of demons, working miracles”. In that respect they really can cure anything, but at a terrible price.
This device clearly comes under the MHRA orbit. That they fended it off is unconscionable. They clearly are not serious about protecting the public.
This device bears an uncanny resemblance to a scientology e meter.
The Unanswered Question and the Challenge
Why hasn’t the Resonator been tested to see if it can eradicate viruses, bacteria, and parasites? They refuse to conduct such tests. I challenge them to do it, as they claim it is inexpensive, and then publish the results in plain English.
The Warranty and Return Policy
There is a statement on the Resonator’s website: “If you are not happy with your Resonator within the first year, return it to us undamaged, and we will replace it or refund your purchase price.” (This only applies to those over the age of 40.)
The Reality of Returns
Apart from an elderly lady who didn’t like the sensation and a young 30-year-old who said it did nothing for her (both were refunded, including their postage), none of the 200 or so units sold have been returned. As for making money, for every two units I sell, I give one away to those who can’t afford them.
Testimonials of Success
Tell the people whose Lyme disease has been cured (incurable after suffering for six weeks) and those with various infections, both internal and external, who have recovered at twice the speed, or the many who were cured of COVID, tell them that it does not work. Tell them you’ll buy it back—none will sell it to you.
A Lifetime of Helping
For the past 25 years, I have dedicated my life to helping those whom Western medicine cannot assist. With Rone Therapy, which I developed, we can eliminate every negative emotion a person has in one session, and go on to teach them how to remove any future negative emotions. Ask an AI if that is possible—no, and according to them, it won’t be for at least the next 25 years.
Anything that challenges the ancient Newtonian way of helping people to be healthy, is put down, or ignored.
I guess that it’s not surprising that you are less than enthusiastic about the results of our investigation. It’s a pity that just repeat the claims made on your website, but make no attempt to respond to our actual findings. Do you disagree that the device that you sell passes milliamps, rather than the microamps that you claim? Do you agree that the resonant frequency of a structure depends on its size and shape, so it’s impossible that viruses, bacteria and parasites are all sensitive to 30 kHz?
Thanks for telling us that you’ve sold 200 or so units. At £97 each, that’s an income of £19,700,for rather small outgoings. It’s true that you aren’t going to get wealthy on that, but the sad truth is that, by claiming that it can cure Covid, you might kill a few old people.
Thank you, the milliamps have been corrected. Yes, everything has its own resonant frequency, and in theory, the Resonator should not work in the way it does.
These devices are marketed under various names worldwide. So why would anyone invest in making, distributing, and selling them if they didn’t work? In the six years I’ve used the Resonator, I haven’t had a single chest infection—an issue I faced annually before. It restored my sense of smell, eased muscle spasms in my shoulder, and delivered many other benefits. Regardless of any scepticism, I, along with many others, know it works.”
In terms of finances, I have made for me 200 units. Half were sold at £90 plus £7 for postage and packaging, and the other half were sold at £60 at various fairs. Each unit cost me £40. For every two units sold, I gave one away. Over six years, the profit amounted to approximately £2,000, or about £335 per year. However, after deducting expenses for attending fairs, fuel, and stall fees, I end up with a negative balance. This is why large companies aren’t interested in making or selling these products—there’s no profit in it. But I don’t do this for the money. Thanks to its use, far more than 200 people are better off, and at 81, I consider myself the richest man alive. I have no aches or pains (considering I was always ill for the first 50 years of my life) and am content with life. My joy comes from helping others. With Rone Therapy and the Resonator, I have a full toolkit to make a difference even though the world might not see me right now.
As for curing COVID and being careful of killing elderly people, this was sent to me “Following our conversation yesterday and telling you that having contracted Covid 19 at the age of 72 I thought I was in for a rough ride. My daughter who is asthmatic also caught this horrible virus as did my husband who is 77, so as we sat in the living room, we passed the “Resonator” around throughout the day. After two days I had no symptoms, the same could be said of my husband whilst my daughter took two weeks to get rid of her cough. I could not believe how we all came through this virus so unscathed; I have to say I have had the flu which has been worst. I am so impressed that I have now ordered one for my brother, my son and neighbour have also purchased their own and I would encourage everyone to purchase one, for the little cost, it really is a ‘best buy’ Please do not come out with things you know very little about.
As I said in the blog, it’s evident that you really believe that it works, despite the fact that you can’t produce any real evidence. I’m quite happy to believe that you aren’t doing it for the money.
The claim that it can fix any infection is a sure sign that it can’t fix anything at all. It’s really stretching credulity to imagine that if your box cured everything, that nobody would but you would have noticed by now..
Thanks for your anecdote about Covid. Here’s mine. I am 88, and I got Covid in summer 2023, . It wasn’t pleasant but I survived it, probably because I had every dose of vaccine that I was offered. We know that vaccines work well because they’ve been tested properly. ‘Resonators’ haven’t.
You have proven, in theory, that the Device should not work. And yet—it does.
So here’s a challenge: take one of the microprocessor frequency generator chips and uncover the truth. Why does it function when everything you know says it shouldn’t?
Your blog reaches countless scientists. Surely, among them, there is one daring enough to step forward. But beware—this Device is something Big pharma has spent decades trying to silence. Most of you have built your careers on grants funded by that very entity, and they will go to great lengths to ensure you never unravel its secrets as they have done for the last 100 years.
Only those free from their grasp—those unafraid of being blacklisted—should attempt this.
But consider this: Einstein once predicted that the next medical revolution would be vibrational healing. Now is your chance and I shall help in any way I can.
Who will be the one to prove Einstein right?
You don’t seem to understand that if you make medical claims for a device that you sre selling, it’s your responsibility (legally as well as ethically) to produce evidence that it works and that it’s safe. It isn’t the responsibilty of anyone else to show that it doesn’t work.
You don’t seem to understand that if you make medical claims for a device that you are selling, it’s your responsibility (legally as well as ethically) to produce evidence that it works and that it’s safe. It isn’t the responsibilty of anyone else to show that it doesn’t work.
I don’t have the finances for a clinical trial and anecdotal evidence is not acceptable, the MHRA will never give it a CE mark, so what should I do now?
It works and as you have found it is safe.
Anthony, do you think Big Pharma should be allowed to make therapeutic claims on the basis of anecdotal evidence?
Yes, anecdotal evidence should be acceptable if it is akin to the Resonator’s circuitry, which has existed for over 40 years without any complaints of harm or ineffectiveness. In contrast, nearly every drug comes with a list of side effects, some of which can be fatal. Apart from antibiotics or antiviral medications, very few drugs actually cure anything. The Resonator has cured Lime ( I know it is the wrong spelling) disease and Endometriosis, both of which are deemed incurable. If you find someone with these diseases, I shall send them a Resonator as a gift.
Anthony:
“Yes, anecdotal evidence should be acceptable if it is akin to the Resonator’s circuitry”. I have no idea what that means. I was not asking about the Resonator, I was asking for your opinion on how drug R&D should work. I was not asking about drug safety testing either. Please answer the question.
You seem to think that you should be permitted to make whatever claims you like without having to provide evidence. You really need to understand how science works and what evidence is. Science is a way of minimising the risk of fooling yourself. This is important because, although your business is tiny and not even profitable, there are much bigger players who sell many kinds of unlicensed and ineffective medical devices, selling for £1000s per unit, with expensive training on top. Tolerating uncritical thinking encourages real harm to significant numbers of people.
You have challenged us to prove that the device doesn’t work. This shows how little you understand about science. Your idea of a test would start from the premise that it does work, but what you really should do is to assume that it doesn’t – this is called the null hypothesis – and then seek to disprove that.
You ask what can you do if you can’t afford to run clinical trials. Simple answer: stop making false claims. It really would be ridiculously cheap to run a simple trial of the resonator. I will happily write you a protocol for it, and guide you as to how to run the trial. What worries me though, is that when the trial shows that it doesn’t work, you will find a way of ignoring the results and returning to your anecdotes.
You claim that Big Pharma has sought to suppress and cover up your successful product. You really need to provide evidence for that. Please provide just one document from one pharmaceutical company showing that it has sought to act against your business.
I suggest that you don’t use terms like “quantum physics” in your advertising without understanding what they mean. You denigrate “the ancient Newtonian way”, without explaining what that means either. What is the reference for the Einstein quotation? I don’t think you really understand what vibration means in this context. As David has already explained, there is no particular reason why a frequency of 30 MHz would have wide ranging effects on microorganisms of widely differing sizes. How would an electromagnetic oscillation of that frequency “shake a pathogen to pieces”, which is what you claim? I would have thought that an audio frequency of some kind would be a more plausible mechanism of action. Please don’t revert to your “it works” mantra, you have made claims about mechanism of action and you need to explain them.
You probably think you are being bullied by some scientists who are ganging up against you. But if you embraced science, and tested your device properly and proved that it worked, not only would you sell a lot more Resonators, you’d be in line for a Nobel prize.