Monadith Bioresonance Smoking “Cure”
March 6th, 2007
As a lowly data monkey who spends a third of his life in the offices of a large multinational, I’m not subjected to half as much email spam and unfunny forwards as I deserve. Which made it all the more surprising when I received an offer to QUIT SMOKING in a mass email from the office manager. The text was straight to the point:
The attached leaflet is from a company who can help people to give up smoking, clear allergies and ease pain suffering. They are coming to give a presentation about their methods on Thursday at 12 o’clock – the presentation will take 20-30 minutes.
Please let me know if you would like to attend this presentation?
Thank you.
Well, obviously I was instantly interested. Give up smoking, clear allergies and ease pain suffering? Sounds too good to be true (haha - that’s just a little bad science humour there). Let’s have a look at the attached leaflet. You can see it firsthand here.
It’s an absolute goldmine of quackery! Right from the onset, the company, “Monadith”, whip out that old “chemical-free” chestnut. And they’ve misspelled “appointment” on the front cover. So far, so predictable. The address of the “QUIT SMOKING Allergy and Pain Centre” is a private residence - a dockside apartment not far from my workplace. Naturally, there is an excess of exclamation marks and capitalisation. Down to the nitty gritty, well, er… Actually the leaflet tells us almost nothing about the actual process, other than it was devised by “a Polish doctor” and lots of people swear by it. Oh, and it uses bioresonance. That would be the quack remedy where electrical waves are sent through your body to cancel out the negative vibes of the toxins. They even have a celebrity endorsement from Alistair Philips of PowerWatch - he would be the guy who sells tin foil hats to prevent electrosmog devouring your mind. Talk about birds of a feather.
So, here is my reply to the office manager, much more restrained than usual as science, though fun, doesn’t put food on my plate like a steady job does.
XXXX,
I appreciate that you are very busy and you may not have had time to digest this leaflet properly. However, after scanning over it for thirty seconds it’s clear that this company is a fraud, and these people are quacks, charlatans and fakes. There is no such thing as bioresonance therapy. It is made-up medical nonsense to extract money from the gullible and the desperate.
Some clues that I picked up on whilst reading the leaflet:
1) The NHS has billions of pounds worth of anti-smoking help available FREE to every citizen in the country. It is not necessary for a smoker to spend any amount of money on anti-smoking “cures”.
2) The only evidence given is in testimonials. This is a clear sign of quackery.
3) The 90% success rate boasted is patently ridiculous.
4) The only reference given is that this cure was discovered by “a Polish doctor”. We don’t even get his name.
4) The use of exclamations marks (five in row) is another hallmark of sensationalism and quackery.
5) Nina Goswami’s testimonial describes the well-debunked “detox footpads” which are known to contain nothing more than powdered wood vinegar which browns as it absorbs moisture.
6) Alistair Philips of Powerwatch is a crank who believes in “electrosmog” and sells hats to protect against EMF pollution.
7) Bioresonance is utter nonsense.
Please, please do not endorse this any longer, even with the best intentions, as distributing this is tantamount to spam, and spam from the worst of people.
With regards,
Frank
But then I realised, wouldn’t it be much more fun to turn up to this presentation, with a group of skeptic friends, and wipe the floor with these Monadith fraudsters? Yes! I have two and a half days to prepare my litany of confounding, revealing questions, with which I must undermine and expose these quacks. The clock is ticking! Quickly I hammered this follow up off to the office manager.
Hi XXXX,
BTW - I’ll definitely be turning up to the presentation on Thursday.
Best,
Frank
So the trap is set. I’d like anyone with even a passing knowledge of physics and electronics to give me some good debunking questions to ask. I’m going to try and record the whole thing on the sly, and post the mp3 for everyone to hear. It’s going to be great!
* update *
I received this email from the office manager today, CC’d to everyone who’d expressed an interest in being bioresonated.
All
Please see Frank’s e-mail below. As you have expressed an interest in attending the presentation I would like to know what your opinion is? Should we go ahead and let these people give their presentation or should be decline their offer?
Please let me know (sensible answers only) so that I can cancel the booking.
Thank you.
Disaster! Time for some furious backpedalling. We can’t let this little fishy get away.
Hi XXXX,
Don’t cancel it on my account. I’ll attend the presentation and pose my questions directly to the Monadith staff. It’s only fair they’re given a chance to respond to any doubts I have. Everyone else will be free to make up their own mind.
Best,
Frank
This was CC’d to everyone else as well, to keep them on board. Let’s hope the manager is swayed.
Continue the story here!
Entry Filed under: General, The Letters
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11 Comments
1. Ithika | March 6th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Sounds awesome! Alas my new workplace seems to be full of eminently sensible people who read badscience.net and could be heard crowing with delight when “Dr” McKeith got her comeuppance.
Good luck with the public shaming ceremony! ;-)
2. richard saul | March 8th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
actualy i had this bioresonance treatment six months ago but not with the same company, basically for the same reasons as you state; i didn’t want to go to some flat with a mobile number as a contact. I went down to london, sceptical but desperate to give up. i switched myself off to the explanations because none seemed plausible. But when i spoke to the guy treating me; he explained how reliance on a substance is a biochemical reaction. to change the biochemical reaction my body had to detox from that substance. still not the full picture. could have been the placebo effect, i cant be sure. but i do know that i just havent needed to smoke since. to be honest i’va also sent a couple of freinds down to them.
3. Frank the SciencePunk | March 9th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Unfortunately the plural of anecdote isn’t data.
Aside from not having any plausible method of action, if a machine like this really worked it should be able to perform in a double blind clinical trial. To date, none has.
4. warren | June 28th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
I think people should definatly try this treatment it worked for me and also 6 of my mates.
Even though 2 of us had to go back for the free 2nd treatment.We had all tried all the patches & gum and that did’nt work, but for whatever wacky reason Bioresonance is GREAT.
I would suggest the NHS take note of this.
5. kelly | October 30th, 2007 at 12:18 am
i also had this treatment after seeing it on richard and judy in 2005….had it done July 2005, have not picked up a fag since!
6. Ducado | February 9th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
It appears that it actually works and what is infuriating the skeptics is they just don’t understand why!
7. Frank the SciencePunk | February 10th, 2008 at 2:43 am
@ Ducado
If no-one understands how the Bicom works, how they build them?
8. Jiohn | April 26th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Bicom understand how it works, hence why they are able to build them, sceptics like you don’t and are too stuck in their ways to accept this treatment works, however been going 3 years now in the UK so looks like those early doubters have been proven wrong.
Too quick to form an opinion, looks like you are the ones with egg on your faces, think your clever, think again.
9. Patrick | April 27th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Jiohn, you apparently have not read through the entirety of this story, please read the follow-up.
http://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/2007/03/team-sciencepunk-pwns-monadith/
To restate the main point, it is not up to other people to disprove a science, it is up to the originator to prove that it will work. If you are so adamant about the capability of this working, please feel free to supply written documentation as opposed to just making claims with no data to back it up.
10. John | May 7th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I have had the treatment myself and it works, maybe they cannot afford to have expensive trials and simply rely on client feedback to ‘prove’ their treatment, nor do they say its been scientifically ‘proven’.
If there have been no scientific trials hence why there is no data on the subject, however this does not mean it doesn’t or cant work.
Nicotine patches were trialed and have a success rate of just 6%, so what the big deal with clinical trials, in most cases they are meaningless anyway, clinical trials have no credibility, are engineered for success, manipulated, stopped early and failed drugs are re-branded to new markets, so they are not without their serious flaws as well.
The simple fact remains this treatment has been in the UK for over 3 years now without any scientific data to support it but people as using it because it works, not because some boffin in a lab coat says it can’t work.
I find it amazing that instead of taking a treatment on its merits and being open to the possibility it just may work, you attack it form the beginning and seek to undermine it, maybe you work for a drug company and have a vested interest in undermining any alternatives that work, who knows?
Many people on this forum have had the treatment and it worked for them, plus there are thousands of others as well, so despite the fact you don’t understand how it works and spout the usual fluff about ‘scientific data’ as though it is beyond reproach to support your argument, guess what, clinical data is meaningless, as it all depends on who’s doing the counting, what they are counting and measuring and who’s paying their wages to do it.
It is not well known by the general public but it is widely acknowledge and established through a House of Commons Health Committee Report, that clinical trials a fraught with problems and suffer server credibility issues, “Today the industry has got a very bad name. That is very unfortunate for an industry that we should look up to and believe in, and that we should be supporting. I think there have to be some big changes.” Sir Richard Sykes. ‘House of Commons Health Committee -The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry Fourth Report of Session 2004–05′.
Your lack of objectivity, suggest you are bias and hence not credible.
11. Quit Smoking | October 8th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
This is an excellent post! As a female I know that smoking is more of a risk for me than a male.
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