Cheating death - What really happened
Cheating death - Debunked!
If you google for Rife technology or even look up Royal Rife on Wikipedia, it will not be long before you find a link to an article from the Sydney Morning Herald (Dec 30, 2000) with a negative report about Rife technology which is then associated with Electromed and Geoff Baker. As that report was written by skeptics in Australia and is full of inaccuracies and heavily biased, we have now decided to obtain the facts of the case and present them here. This report was put together using original documents supplied from the Electromed archives. In order to protect the privacy of Des Carpenter and his family, we will not be releasing their original letters unless the skeptics reaction to our debunking makes this necessary.
First of all, let us look at the article itself with our reactions added in [square brackets]:
Sydney Morning Herald - December 30, 2000
[We have added our debunking comments in square brackets]
Cancer sufferers have died after putting their faith in a device with electrical parts worth just $15. Ben Hills reports.
[Cancer sufferers have died in their millions after putting their faith in expensive orthodox therapy like chemotherapy and radiation therapy as well. The fact that some people die of cancer despite treatment is true of all therapies so this unreferenced comment of Ben Hill means nothing]
The doctor said he might not see Christmas. It was the winter of 1996 and David Carpenter, a 69-year-old retired railway worker, had
inoperable cancer of the prostate gland. He had been sent home to die in the village of Geurie, on the western plains of NSW, in the fibro cottage where he lived with his wife of nearly half a century, Madge, and his son, Des. As the disease inexorably advanced, he took to his bed.
[This paragraph establishes that David Carpenter had already been given up on by allopathic medicine. He had been treated the allopathic way and told he has no chance and might not even survive for Christmas. As it is claimed to be Winter, David cannot have been given more than about 6 months to live (In Australia, Winter is in the middle of the year)]
Flicking through Nexus, an alternative magazine published from Mapleton, Queensland, which features articles on UFOs, miracle cures
and conspiracy theories, Des saw an advertisement headlined "Rife Technology".
Underneath was this claim: "A brilliant new Walkman-style personal therapy system, offers a comprehensive range of frequencies from common colds and flu to the most serious debilitating and degenerative diseases, including arthritis and cancer."
[The advert in question was not placed by Electromed or Geoff Baker and they had no knowledge of it. The advert was in fact placed by "Electro Therapy Systems, Australia" (ETSA), an independant company that had applied for and been given permission to market the PET on the internet strictly for the treatment of Arthritis only. ETSA breached the signed agreement with Electromed by placing an unauthorised advert in Nexus and also by linking the product with cancer therapy. The advert itself can be seen in the video clip below.]
Des rang the 1800 number in the ad and was assured that not only would the device, called a Personal Electro Therapy or PET machine, treat his father's cancer, but it could be tuned to frequencies that would cure his own chronic fatigue syndrome and his mother's arthritis. "I wouldn't normally fall for something like this, but you have to understand we were desperate," says Des. He and his mother borrowed money against their invalid pensions and sent $1,425 to a company called Electromed (Australia) Pty Ltd, which sent them a small black box decorated with flashing lights, some wiring, two nylon pads and a copy of a book, The Cancer Cure that Worked - Fifty Years of Suppression, by an American "investigative journalist", Barry Lynes.
[Des actually bought the unit from "Electro Therapy Systems, Australia", NOT from Electromed who had no knowledge of this sale. Let me also point out that Geoff Baker was not even working for Electromed. After he had performed the arthritis study, Geoff Baker moved onto further research work unrelated with Electromed or the PET. Geoff had no involvement with sales and marketing at all.]
At first it did appear to work. With daily applications of the pads to his abdomen, David's cancer went into remission, he regained his
appetite, got up and threw away the pills his doctor had given him. Des even wrote Electromed a testimonial to the "miracle cure".
[Whereas allopathic medicine had already given up on David Carpenter, the PET did have a positive effect. Although the unit was programmed to treat arthritis, some of the frequencies used are known to have a beneficial effect on cancer, as now confirmed by various independant clinical studies and thousands of patient reports. The fact that David's cancer improved is not that surprising]
But then the cancer returned with a vengeance, spreading to other parts of David's body. By the following August, Madge and Des were burying him in the Dubbo cemetery. He had become another victim of a device that has been branded in America as "health fraud in its darkest form" - one of at least four people, including a child of five, who have died in Australia and New Zealand after giving up conventional therapy for treatment with Rife machines.
[Allopathic medicine had already given up on this prostate cancer patient which was "inexorably advanced" back in mid 1996 with a prognosis that he would be dead by Christmas 1996. It can hardly be claimed that David gave up conventional (allopathic) for the PET treatment as conventional medicine had already given up on David. In fact, the patient used the PET and survived until August 1997 which is about 8 months longer than his doctors thought possible. According to Electromed's investigations, David Carpenter felt so good that he considered himself recovered from his cancer and unfortunately stopped his medications and electrotherapy without consulting with his doctors, ETSA or Electromed. It was only after stopping the therapy that his health degenerated again and this time could not be stopped. These details were of course omitted from the Sydney Herald article. Electromed did receive some letters from the Carpenter family and it was not made clear that the patient was treating cancer. The staff assumed the patient was treating arthritis as this was the only disease the unit should have been sold for and responded accordingly. When Electromed realised the unit had in fact been sold for cancer, they immediately refunded the money in full and cancelled the contract with ETSA for breach of contract.]
A Herald investigation has uncovered a cottage industry in Australia promoting these devices for treating the most lethal illnesses,
including cancer, leukaemia and AIDS. Two companies are manufacturing and selling them, and at least a dozen clinics, some operated by qualified doctors, offer Rife therapy at up to $80 an hour to desperately ill patients. There are about 60 Internet sites devoted to the devices and innumerable books and magazine articles.
[Electromed's units were approved (see below) and being legally sold for the treatment of arthritis, based on the results of a double-blind clinical study. Electromed and Geoff Baker are not responsible for the actions of other companies.]
The most-publicised death to date was that of Liam Williams-Holloway, a child on New Zealand's South Island, who was being treated with radiotherapy at a hospital in Dunedin for cancer of the jaw. Last year, there was a public uproar when the boy was taken from the hospital by his parents and treated with a Rife machine at the Rainbow Health Clinic in Rotorua.
The boy died in a Rife clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, after his parents sold their house and embarked on a futile round-the-world search for
an "alternative" cure. Liam's former doctor, Michael Sullivan, a pediatric oncologist at the Dunedin hospital, said he would have had a
"60 to 70 per cent chance" of a cure with conventional therapy and said he had other patients who had been reduced to "a horrendous
condition" by the "therapy".
Although unanimously condemned as worthless by mainstream scientists and banned in at least two American States, the highly profitable Rife industry is flourishing in Australia because of a lack of effective regulation, says John Dwyer, the head of medicine at Prince Henry and Prince of Wales teaching hospitals in Sydney. He blames this on "buck-passing" among no fewer than five government agencies supposedly responsible for protecting health consumers (see "Nothing to do with us, say agencies") which have failed to act against promoters of Rife machines and other "cures" he regards as quackery.
[The scientific reports found on www.rife.de show that mainstream scientists are actually confirming the positive effects of electrotherapy which is even used in many mainstream European hospitals and clinics. The fact that Rife therapy is banned in some (not all) American states mean nothing as the US market is seen as one of the most restrictive markets in the world.]
The device was invented a century ago by Albert Abrams (1864-1924), an American physician who became a millionaire and was branded by the American Medical Association "the dean of gadget quacks". His theory was that every medical condition was caused by an organism that had a specific frequency - by building a machine to generate and beam that frequency back into the body it would be destroyed, much as an opera singer can shatter a glass.
[Albert Abrams developed Radionics which is a completely different technology to Rife resonance therapy. Skeptics often try to associate Radionics with Rife therapy as an attempt at diffamation by association]
His research was refined by a Californian pathologist, Raymond Royal Rife (1888-1971), and a New Mexico chiropractor, James Bare, who drew up tables giving the frequency of 30,000 organisms they said caused every condition from dandruff to leprosy, strokes and syphilis. AIDS, for instance, is said to be cured by a frequency of 2,489 kilohertz in as little as three three-minute sessions.
[As resonance therapy can by nature devitalize pathogens of almost any size (dependant on the frequency used), over the years frequencies for treating a wide range of conditions have been put together. As not all frequency lists have been fully tested, it is recommended to only use frequncies that have been confirmed scientifically. Such frequencies can be found in Nenah Sylver's Frequency Directory or from www.dnafrequencies.com. None of these lists claim to cure AIDS with just three three minute sessions.]
Electronics Australia magazine, which has been campaigning against the gadgets, analysed one and found that it consisted of a nine-volt battery, some wiring, a switch, a timer and two short lengths of copper tubing - components worth about $15. The electrical current delivered was "almost undetectable" and unlikely even to penetrate the skin, let alone kill any organism.
[This was discussed in the video clip (below) and none of the units shown were made or marketed by Electromed or Geoff Baker.]
After falling out of fashion, the devices have been revived in the United States over the past 20 years, promoted in conjunction with an
early edition of the Lynes book. Later editions contain an appendix entitled "The Exploiters" in which Lynes says: "Sadly, in most cases,
the cancer patients lost precious time - three or four months - before recognising that they had been swindled in a clever marketing scheme. People died because they had faithfully used the worthless black box instead of orthodox or alternative, non-conventional cancer therapies which actually worked."
In Australia, the first known Rife device was built about 1989 by Geoffrey Charles Baker, 47, of Terrigal, a former CSIRO researcher
with no medical qualifications who says he spent $3 million over seven years developing it. Baker told the Herald he built the device with the help of the executor of Rife's estate and it "saved my life" when he suffered a prolonged illness from mercury poisoning.
[Geoff Baker is a qualified and licensed naturapath and research scientist. Geoff did suffer from mercury poisoning and his Rife devices were the only thing which enabled him to recover after allopathic solutions had failed him.]
Baker has been selling the devices - he would not say how many - since the early 1990s. At first he was in partnership with a now-bankrupt "herbalist, numerologist and astrologer" named Eilleen Whittaker, who claims to have cured Kim Basinger's dog Bee-Bop of leukaemia. In more recent years Baker has been a principal of Electromed, the company that sold Des Carpenter his PET machine.
[Geoff Baker had no connections with Electromed at the time of the Des Carpenter case and only years later took over the company at the request of the owners - the Davids organization in Australia. The PET has not been sold for many years as Electromed has moved on to be a pure research organization. Again, Electromed was not involved with selling any devices to Des Carpenter.]
Baker admitted that, with no acceptable scientific evidence, he had been advertising that PET machines could treat arthritis and
"recurrent viral or bacterial infections". But he denied he ever claimed it could cure cancer.
[The devices were marketed for arthritis based on a scientific double-blind study which allowed the company to obtain official TGA listing. Geoff Baker has never claimed that his equipment can cure cancer - not even allopathic medicine can claim that.]
That is not how a number of people remember it. Carpenter says Baker provided him with a machine "specifically tuned" to treat his father's cancer. Greg Ray, chief-of-staff of the The Newcastle Herald, quoted Baker in 1993 as claiming his machine would "rid Australia of cancer" - an article Baker never challenged. In a tape-recorded speech Baker gave the same year to a patients' group on the Central Coast he makes clear and repeated references to curing cancer.
[Carpenter and Baker have never communicated with each other and Baker was not even working for Electromed (or ETSA for that matter) at the time. Baker has never made such claims of curing cancer. If such recordings exist, where are they?]
Baker also claims in his advertising material that his machine has been "tested" by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the Federal
agency in charge of medical devices. The TGA denies this. It says the PET machine had been "listed" - but never tested for effectiveness - in 1996, but that listing was cancelled last April.
[The certification is shown below. It is true that the listing expired for a short period as the renewal date was missed. That listing was however renewed.]
Herald: What would you say to people (like Carpenter) who would say that you are a quack who is encouraging people to give up legitimate therapy in exchange for expensive treatment by a bogus machine ?
Baker: I'm sorry, but they are entitled to their opinion and you are entitled to yours.
[At the time of the interview, Baker was not working for Electromed and had no knowledge of the Carpenter case (see video below). He could not comment on cases he had no knowledge of]
One of the clinics offering "Bare-Rife Therapy" is Complementary and Ecological Medicine, which operates from offices on the Pacific
Highway in St Leonards.
On its Web site it says: "While we offer no 'cure' for cancer, there are treatment options available today which can increase life
expectancy and life quality."
It then gives three case histories of cancer patients said to have been treated with the clinic's Rife machine: a woman of 53 suffering
from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, now pronounced "free of cancer"; a woman of 27 with a tumour of the neck and chest, who had been given only days to live but survived and returned to work; a man of 64 now apparently cured of prostate cancer.
The clinic's director, Pauline Rose, who has no medical degree, could cite no peer-reviewed, double-blind clinical trials to support these claims and said treatment with her New Zealand-manufactured Rife machine was "experimental". Her cancer patients had continued with conventional therapy, so she had no idea what caused the "cures" - "Did the power of prayer cure her? I don't know."
[Due to the highly prohibitive costs of clinical trials, only a few companies like Oncotherm have performed them.]
In the US, two States, Wisconsin and Minnesota, have taken tough action to put Rife machine operators out of business. In one case,
Shelvie Rettmann, of Prior Lake, Minnesota, was fined $US100,000 ($178,800), ordered to refund money to all her patients and banned from the health care industry after two people she was treating with a Rife machine died of cancer.
[This case will be discussed seperately. Suffice it to say that Shelvie Rettmann was using a radioonics machine, NOT a Rife machine]
Attorneys-general of the two States issued a public warning that the therapy amounted to "health quackery at its worst" and said: "The bottom line ... is that [Rife] devices have no value for diagnosing or treating anything."
[What science did they base those statements on? It is one thing to say a technology is unproven, but all that means is that it cannot be said if it works or not. It cannot be inferred from a lack of scientific studies that a technology has no value. In fact there are an ever increasing number of scientific studies that prove this technology has significant value in the devitalizing of pathogens]
In Australia, says Dwyer - who has examined one of the machines and found it medically worthless - nothing has been done to put Rife operators out of business, or to warn the public of the dangers.
"Regulatory authorities and politicians tend to put the problems associated with false advertising into the too-hard basket," he says.
"Medical boards, health complaints commissions, even the Therapeutic Goods Administration, all want to pass the buck to each other when it comes to investigating and prosecuting this dangerous anti-science."
[Dwyer has not examined the PET. As above, where is his scientific data backing up his negative claims? Science has shown the opposite is true].
Four months after he received an official complaint, the NSW Minister for Fair Trading, John Watkins, has promised to assign a senior
investigator to see whether promoters of the Rife machines should be challenged to justify the claims made for them.
But that, of course, is too late for the grieving family of David Carpenter.
Nothing to do with us, say agencies
[And nothing to do with Electromed either as Electromed has justified the sales of their PET for arthritis with their own double-blind study]
Cheryl Freeman, a nurse from Dudley, near Newcastle, has been campaigning against Rife machines - and other bogus medical devices - for several years. "I am just sick of the run-around I have been getting ... No-one seems to be interested in protecting sick and vulnerable people," she says.
She originally wrote to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission which is charged with protecting patients against medical malpractice.
The commission replied that it "only investigates those complaints it considers most significant in terms of the issues facing the overall
health system" such as "alleged sexual misconduct". It passed her complaints to the NSW Medical Board and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The medical board wrote to Freeman that because of recent changes to its legislation "the board no longer has the power to deal with
unregistered persons who advertise cures and offer cancer treatments".
So whom could she go to? "It is not yet clear who will be responsible for prosecuting these matters in future," the board said.
The ACCC said that it had recently taken action against bogus medical devices including Giraffe World's "negative ion mat", a laser
hair-removal clinic, and the Raylight "parasite zapper" that claimed to cure AIDS.
However, the commission said it would not act against Rife machine promoters and suggested Freeman contact her local consumer protection agency.
She wrote to the Department of Fair Trading in July but, four months after the complaint was referred to its "rapid response and
assessments branch", Freeman had heard nothing until the Herald took up the case.
Finally, she wrote to the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which is responsible for regulating all medical devices sold in Australia. Make that used to be. "Electronic health devices were excluded from the TGA's control" in 1998, wrote the agency. It suggested she contact the ACCC.
[Cheryl Freeman and Prof. Dwyer are known activists of the Australian Skeptics - an organization dedicated to ridiculing ANY non-mainstream therapies. As can be seen with this story, they have been seriously misleading the public even as far as knowingly (they have read the name of the company on the advert, yet accuse Electromed instead) putting the blame on someone not even involved with the case. Both Cheryl Freeman and Prof. Dwyer tried to interfere with the double-blind arthritis study as well. Here is a letter mentioning her (and Prof. Dwyer) by one of the study participants in answer to another article by Prof. Dwyer]
-- END OF REPORT --
Text of Advert found in Nexus by Des Carpenter.
RIFE TECHNOLOGY
Investigative Journalist Barry Lynes has now revealed the
brilliance of Rife to the World in his provocative book,
‘THE CANCER CURE
THAT WORKED’
50 YEARS OF SUPPRESSION!*
Genuine Rife Frequency Technology is now available in
Australia. A brilliant new ‘Walkman” style personal therapy
System, offers a comprehensive range of frequencies, from
common colds & flu, to the most serious debilitating and
degenerative diseases, including Arthritis & Cancer.
This Personal Therapy System is only AU$1425 inc.
Carry Case & Charger and free delivery in Australia.
* The book is free with each system or $20 plus P&H
For information & free article on Rife research
FREECALL 1800 620 866
Electro Therapy Systems Australia
“The Home of Rife Technology in Australia”.
Please note that "Electro Therapy Systems Australia" no longer exists and belonged to an independant agent and was not owned, managed or staffed by anyone working for "Electromed Australia, Pty" or Geoff Baker.
The PET unit is no longer being marketed.
If the skeptics cannot even get the name of the company right, that sold the unit to Des Carpenter, how accurate is the rest of their report likely to be?
Further Details on this Story
The skeptics have been making a lot of this story recently, as it features on an Australian skeptical website and has even found its way onto the "Royal Rife" page on Wikipedia. The story was not only released by the Sydney Morning Herald (Dec 30, 2000), but also featured on the Australian Channel 7 TV program, Today Tonight (Aug 10, 2001).
As the skeptics side of the story is being used to harm Rife therapy in general, it was decided that it is time the real story should be told. After our debunking report on the Sydney Morning Herald report, the following shows the highly biased and misleading report put out on the "Today Tonight" programme in Australia. Many thanks to Geoff Baker and Electromed for providing this clip, original documents and the responses to this report. It is a good example of how skeptics misreport the truth in order to discredit legitimate technology proved in scientific double-blind trials.
Electromed Australia PLT started marketing their PET frequency therapy unit specifically for the treatment of Arthritis and all units they sold were for this purpose only. Geoff Baker, the research scientist behind developing and testing the PET, left Electromed to work on completely different research projects. He was not involved in marketing of the PET at all. The staff at Electromed handled the actual marketing of the PET and granted permission to "Electro Therapy Systems, Australia" (ETSA), an independant company, to market the PET for arthritis over the Internet only.
The Cosolidated Annotated Frequency List defines the following frequencies for prostate cancer: 20, 60, 72, 95, 125, 666, 727, 787, 790, 766, 800, 920, 1998, 1875, 442, 2008, 2127, 2128, 2217, 2720, 2050, 2250, 5000, 2130, 2120, 690, 304 Hz.
Some of these frequencies are also useful against arthritis and the following frequencies were also part of the arthritis program used in the PET, amongst others: 20, 727, 787, 800, 2008, 2127, 5000 Hz.
Although the PET was not designed or programmed to treat cancer, the fact that some of the frequencies used to treat arthritis are also claimed to have a positive effect against cancer, a positive effect against cancer is possible. Mr. Carpenter did report his condition improved considerably after using this device.Unfortunately, without asking his doctor or anyone at Electromed, David Carpenter was so sure he had beaten his cancer that he stopped using his pills and the unit considering himself cured. As those involved in Rife research know, it is certainly not a good idea to stop any therapy without proper medical advice and the cancer quickly returned.As the PET manual listed Electromed at the manufacturer, David did exchange letters with them when he was asking for more information. Electromed assumed at first that the unit was being used to treat arthritis. When the staff at Electromed realised that the unit had been sold and was being used for treating cancer, despite strict instructions to only market for arthritis, the ETSA's contract was terminated and Electromed gave a full refund on the cost of the unit along with a full apology.
Now have a look how this was reported on an Australian TV station.