Scenar Bioresonance

[BPSDB] The Alt.Med crowd love their electronic “bioresonance” devices. Here is one which claims to cure all kinds of ills with electrical impulses “tailored to mimic the electrical discharges of the nervous system.”

From their website:

“The basic signal component is a bipolar pulse, consisting of a negative square-wave followed by a positive saw-tooth, starting and finishing at zero and lasting for a few microseconds. A number of these pulses may be packaged into a discrete burst (intensity) which itself may be repeated at a fixed default frequency. The individual pulses in these bursts (intensity more than 1) can themselves be spaced out (Z=10/close together, to 80/wide apart) to give a concentrated (deep) or diffuse (shallow) penetration, depending on local body density or depth of pain location.”

How is this mimicking “the electrical discharges of the nervous system”? The nervous system produces neither saw-tooth nor square waves. Furthermore, changing only the spacing of the pulses will not affect their penentration of the patient’s body.

“Scenar devices adhere to the concept that the maximum dosage required to effect change is the most appropriate. This is furthered by emphasis on increase of information rather than energy content, thus minimising the triggering of body
retaliation and adaptation mechanisms.”

This is just a load of jargon strung together and does not mean anything. Saw-tooth and square waves do not contain much in the way of information.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so critical. It was developed by “Soviet top scientists” (although we are not told their names or any research they might have published. Making checking the claims a tad difficult):

“About Scenar
Almost twenty five years ago Soviet top scientists were tasked to look for a way of maintaining the good health of their cosmonauts without the use of pharmaceutical drugs, which are not appropriate in an environment where recycling of waste and water is essential.”

This sounds plausible – for about two seconds – until you realise that the recycling process that removes the body’s natural wastes from urine will also remove drug break-down products.

“Biofeedback dynamics can induce remarkably rapid healing, as function by unblocking ‘stuck’ energy resonances and repetitive central nervous system patterns, allowing the body to heal itself.”

What sort of energy are we talking about here? How does it resonate? How do these resonances become ‘stuck’? What does ‘stuck’ mean in this context. None of this is explained – probably because it is another collection of cobbled-together jargon. I doubt even the writer knows what s/he means.

To show how wonderful these devices are, a “summary of positive results is given” wherein two thirds of patients got completely better and one third showed some improvement. We are not told what their precise ailments were nor the actual numbers. In otherwords, cherry-picked results are given.

It gets better:

“A side effect of scenar treatment has been that by addressing and treating one illness with the device automatically led to improvements of other symptoms.”

Like a nineteenth century quack’s tonic, this thing cures everything at once.

and

“…after many years the Russians claim a complete absence of complications or negative side effects”

The classic woo claim. Sorry, anything that effects the body’s highly complex metabolic pathways to ring about a cure is inevitably going to have side effects. If it truly has no side effects then it has no effect at all.

Finally – there are four training courses, taking you from Level I to Level IV (sounds a bit like Dungeons and Dragons!) Each lasts two days and costs three hundred euros. All the medics who have spent six years of their lives and tens of thousands of euros learning their job must be fuming.

Tags: bioresonance, Quackery, scenar