Team SciencePunk pwns Monadith
Backstory: a company called Monadith, who claim to be able to cure smoking with bioresonance therapy, came to my office to present their nonsense. Anticipating their arrival, I organised a hit group of skeptics to attend, armed with revealing questions.
I think it went rather well.
Around noon, two Monadith reps set up in a tiny room in my office. Both Polish, both female, both young and pretty. Ripping into the reps was clearly going to be harder than I thought. Crowded into the room were ten of us - of which a full SEVEN were on my science hit squad!
The reps (we never did get their names) played two videos - a woefully uncritical BBC report on bioresonance, and a clip from science experts Richard and Judy espousing bioresonance (both of which Ben Goldacre has blogged about in the past). Then… well, actually, that was it. After the two videos, it was question time.
I have to say it made my heart swell with pride as my science hit squad launched into the women. I could barely get a word in edgeways. The poor duo were grilled for 40 minutes, the most brief of summaries I shall outline here:
“You said this treatment gets rid of the nicotine in your body, but nicotine leaves the body in 24 hours anyway. So how does this treatment have a continued effect”
“After 24 hours it is up to you to make the decision not to smoke.”
“How did you calculate the 90% success rate?”
“With statistics!”
“Er, yes, but after how long did you contact the smokers?”
“After one week we rang them to see if they still wanted to smoke”
“So the treatment is only successful for a week?”
“After that, if you decide to smoke it is your choice”
“Why don’t the NHS use this?”
“They don’t seem to want to, they say it doesn’t work but won’t research it”
“It’s not up to them to disprove your claim, it’s up to you to prove it”
“err….”
“When you take a ‘diseased’ reading pattern, how do you know what my healthy pattern is in order to cancel only the diseased part of the vibration?”
“I don’t understand…”
“Is there any clinical proof that this works?”
“No.”
“Who is this Polish doctor?”
“er… I don’t know. I’ve worked here for four years and I don’t know”
“If it is used to cancel pain, why doesn’t the pain come back as soon as the machine is turned off?”
“err….”
“Does the practitioner have a medical licence?”
“He has diplomas, yes”
“Ha, yes, but is he licensed to practise medicine?”
“In Poland, yes”
“Is he licensed to practise medicine in the UK?”
“No…”
All in all, we gave the ladies a rough time, and often they needed to converse in Polish (the one with more technological knowledge spoke less English). They sweated it out like troopers, and at the end asked if anyone would sign up with no real confidence in their voice. Seeing that these two were just the hand of the fraudster, and knew nothing more than what was on the leaflets, we lightened up. We explained that we wanted scientific evidence, and they brightened somewhat and promised to send us clinical proof. I am very much looking forward to that. On the way out, my friend asked one of the three potential customers what she thought. “Bloody ‘ell!”, she breathed “I’m going out for a ciggy!”
As we left for lunch, the concierge of the building had a stack of Monadith flyers on his reception. “You won’t need those”, my friend said, “it’s a fraud.”
“No”, he said adamantly, “it works. My friend hasn’t smoked since. You can’t tell me it doesn’t work”. Any feelings of success were, unfortunately, fleeting.
As I walked to the grocer stand for some lunch, I was handed a flyer. QUIT SMOKING it said. RENEWU! AS SEEN ON RICHARD & JUDY!
1 comment March 9th, 2007