Device Investigation · Frequency generators
Rife Machines: Fifteen Dollars of Parts and a Book
A box with flashing lights, two electrodes and a paperback about a suppressed cure. It is sold to people with cancer on the claim that every disease organism has a frequency that will shatter it. Taken apart, one had about $15 worth of components inside. In Australia and New Zealand, people who used one instead of treatment died — one of them five years old.
- What it is
- A signal generator — typically a timer chip, a battery or mains supply and handheld or pad electrodes — set to “frequencies” said to kill specific microbes or cancer.
- The claim
- Every pathogen has a “mortal oscillatory rate”; tune to it and the organism dies. Cancer is said to be caused by a microbe.
- The evidence
- No controlled trial has ever shown a Rife device treats any disease. Cancer is not caused by a single microbe.
- Enforcement
- Criminal convictions in the United States; consumer-fraud judgments in U.S. states. In Canada, one 2008 Health Canada recall of a frequency generator has been located, and nothing else.
Where the idea comes from
Royal Raymond Rife (1888–1971) was a San Diego inventor who built high-powered optical microscopes in the 1920s and 1930s and made time-lapse films of microbes. He claimed magnifications that ordinary light microscopes cannot physically reach, claimed he could see a cancer microbe that took several forms, and claimed a radio-frequency “beam ray” could kill organisms by vibrating them at their own deadly frequency. None of it was replicated. By a 1938 newspaper account, he stopped short of saying he could cure cancer.
Rife was largely forgotten until 1987, when Barry Lynes published The Cancer Cure That Worked, which told the story as a cure buried by the American Medical Association. The book is often shipped in the box with the machine. From the 1990s, devices bearing Rife's name were sold for cancer, AIDS and almost everything else, frequently through multilevel marketing. In 1994 the American Cancer Society's journal described the trade as a pyramid-like scheme.
The idea that a disease has a frequency is older than Rife. It runs back to Albert Abrams's radionics boxes in the 1910s — the same lineage as the Clark zapper and the radionics device in Nicholas Gonzalez's practice.
What is inside
In January 1998 the magazine Electronics Australia opened a typical Rife device being sold to the public. It contained a 9-volt battery, a 555 timer chip — one of the commonest components in electronics — a switch, some wiring and two pieces of copper tube for the hands. It put out a tiny pulsed current at about 40 kHz. The parts were worth about $15. Devices of this kind were selling in Australia for anywhere from $105 to $34,000, and clinics charged up to $80 an hour to sit with the electrodes.
The people
David Carpenter
A 69-year-old retired railway worker with inoperable prostate cancer. His wife and son borrowed against their pensions to pay $1,425 for a machine from Electromed (Australia) Pty Ltd, which arrived with Lynes's book. His cancer seemed to retreat for a while, then returned and spread. His son had written the company a testimonial praising the cure. He died in 1997.
Liam Williams-Holloway
Liam had a neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer, affecting his jaw. His oncologists put his chance of cure with chemotherapy at between a half and two-thirds. His parents stopped treatment and took him to a Rotorua clinic where Gerard Uys used an electronic device he called a “Quantum Booster”, said to boost the immune system and kill cancer. Uys told an interviewer in 1999 that leukaemia was really just a mineral deficiency.
The state made Liam a ward of the court so chemotherapy could continue; his parents took him into hiding instead, and much of the New Zealand press presented them as a family hounded by doctors. They later sold their house and took him to Tijuana, where he died at a clinic in October 2000. When his oncologists complained afterwards, the Health and Disability Commissioner declined to investigate because the parents did not want an investigation.
Shelvie Rettmann's customers
A Prior Lake, Minnesota woman told cancer patients she could cure them with a “Rife generator”, a radionics machine, “foot zoning” and supplements. Wisconsin's attorney general sued in 1997, describing it as health quackery at its worst. One cancer patient had died after buying about $1,700 of treatment instead of chemotherapy. In February 1999 a Wisconsin judge fined her $50,000, ordered refunds and barred her from providing health services in the state.
Who has actually acted
| Where | Who | What happened | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Courts (reported by the FDA) | 1996: marketers of a Rife device sold for cancer and AIDS convicted of felony health fraud. | Conviction |
| Wisconsin | State attorney general | 1999: Rettmann fined $50,000, refunds ordered, barred from health services in the state. | Judgment |
| Washington State | Courts | Donald and Sharon Brandt of Mount Vernon convicted over a clandestine Rife clinic; short prison terms. | Conviction |
| United States | Courts | 2002: John Bryon Krueger of the Royal Rife Research Society sentenced to 30 months, concurrently with a murder sentence, for illegally selling Rife devices. | Conviction |
| United States | Courts | 2009: James Folsom convicted on 26 felony counts for selling devices under names including NatureTronics and AstroPulse. | Conviction |
| United States | FDA, Homeland Security Investigations | 2015: David Arthur of Huntington Beach, warned by the FDA in 2010, kept making a micro-current “Energy Wave” device sold for AIDS, diabetes and stroke; 18 months in prison and $30,000 forfeited. | Conviction |
| Australia | Therapeutic Goods Administration | Electromed's “PET” machine was listed in 1996 without any test of effectiveness; the listing was later cancelled, and electronic health devices were then taken out of the TGA's control. | Partial |
| New South Wales | Health complaints, medical board, ACCC, Fair Trading | In 2000 each told the Herald the problem belonged to someone else. Fair Trading promised an investigator after the paper called. | None |
| New Zealand | Health and Disability Commissioner | 2001: declined to investigate Liam's case because his parents objected. | None |
| Canada | Health Canada | 2008: recall (Class III) of the “Vibe Machine Multi-Frequency Field Generator” from Vibe Technologies of Greeley, Colorado, for sale without a licence. No action naming a Rife device has been located. | One recall |
The pattern is the one that runs through this whole section. Where anyone has been convicted, it was in the United States, and usually for selling an unapproved device or for fraud — not for a finding that the machine harmed a particular patient. In Canada the record located so far is a single licensing recall, for a related frequency generator, on the ground that no one had applied for approval.
Still for sale
Rife-style frequency generators are still widely advertised online, including to Canadian buyers, usually with careful wording about “wellness” and “frequencies” rather than cancer, and with the cancer claims left to the testimonials, the forums and the book. Hobbyist sites publish plans to build one. A survey of who sells them in Canada today has not yet been done for this page.
- Pending: a check of Health Canada's Medical Devices Active Licence Listing for any licensed frequency generator marketed with Rife claims.
- Pending: Canadian retailers and practitioners currently advertising Rife therapy.
Related
Sources
- Ben Hills. “Cheating death.” Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 2000 (archived copy).
- Jim Rowe. Analysis of a Rife device. Electronics Australia, January 1998.
- Barry Lynes. The Cancer Cure That Worked: Fifty Years of Suppression. 1987.
- American Cancer Society. Review of Rife devices. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 1994.
- FDA Consumer, September 1996 (1996 felony conviction).
- Wisconsin Department of Justice / KCCO-TV report, 16 February 1999 (Rettmann judgment).
- “When children are the victims of quackery.” NZ Skeptic, November 2001; “Parental rights,” NZ Skeptic, February 2000.
- New Zealand Herald, 28 October 2000 (Liam's death).
- “O.C. man sentenced to 18 months for selling fake cures.” Times of San Diego, 5 October 2015.
- Health Canada recall record, Vibe Machine Multi-Frequency Field Generator, 5 November 2008, via the ICIJ Medical Devices database.
- Royal Rife biography and prosecution record (Brandt, Krueger, Folsom), as summarized from contemporary reports in the Wikipedia article on Royal Rife.
People are named on this page only where a court or regulator acted, or where a death was publicly reported by the family or the press. “Rife machine” here means any device sold on Rife's frequency claim; no individual product's design is assessed beyond the 1998 teardown. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the page.