Talk:Royal Rife/Archive 1

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Does the Smithsonian Institute actually possess a Universal Microscope?

An electron microscope requires the sample to be coated in a conducting solid (ex. gold), or frozen, or embedded in a plastic, so the electron beam itself would not kill the sample. Staining of samples is required since most things that have no colour cannot be seen, even if one looks at them very close up.

If Rife's work with the Beam Ray was so extensive and ground-breaking, at least some of his research would still exist today, if it was so popular at the time of experimentation.

Who is the "one" doctor who stood up for him? The entire paragraph about Fishbein's utter obliteration of Rife is POV.

The FDA articles describe food preservation.

The inner workings of the Universal Microscope need to be explained in a different article.

--CDN99 01:38, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Biased

The section under Beam Ray, where it says the patients were "cured" of their cancer, there is no evidence that I know of that supports such a concrete claim. Also, the tone of the article is biased toward Royal Rife.

Answer

Have you bothered looking in the Bibliography to "The Cancer Cure That Worked"? ALL THE SOURCES -- absolutely 100% of the sources listed by Barry Lynes are available on microfilm at major libraries. Among these sources, if you bothered LOOKING AT THE FACTS, you would find that numerous patients and MEDICAL DOCTORS submitted SWORN AFFIDAVITS attesting to their cures, during the legal proceedings brought against Royal Rife by Morris Fishbein's American Medical Association. Thus, you "know of no evidence" simply because you haven't done your homework.

Now, I suppose, you are going to remove this comment, too, like you have removed my previous comments. Be aware, however, that I am not going to go away. I am going to learn and study Wikepedia, until I absolutely master the means by which your biased writing can be overcome to provide a more Neutral-Point-of-View. I am not going to go away.

---A RESPONSE---- 'Evidence' in medicine consists of effects that are statistically likely to be due to an intervention as shown by large, multi-centre, randomised, controlled, prospective trials that have been subject to peer-review & subsequently published in a recognised medical journal with the data & statistical means by which the conclusion was reached made freely available. Sworn statements do not prove anything. As you are in the process of familiarising yourself with Wikipedia, perhaps you would like to read more about medical trials. Also, using capitals is rude - there's really no need to shout however angry you may be.

  • Hello. I'm an unregistered user, who, as a matter or personal preference, values logic and reason. I was recently diagnosed with cancer, and even more recently heard of Royal Rife. I see that there's quite a lot of dispute about his claims. My response, at least to the comments on this talk page, is that the use of UPPER CASE and phrases such as "sworn affidavits" reeks of conspiracy theory rhetoric and cult-like over-defensiveness. Of course, this is just my opinion, but as a cancer patient, I grow weary of people — who aren't actually suffering from cancer — offering unscientific cure-alls and then insulting me for not accepting them. It boggles my mind.

    If, as a follower of Royal Rife's work, you are ever diagnosed with cancer, I wish you good luck. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.239.133.107 (talk) 18:09, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Sources Requests

I am formally requesting a source for information on the raid and destruction of papers/equipment.
--Breakpoint 10 May 2005

Sources

--Unknown 20 Aug 2005

Here are some of your sources: This is not a complete list. The problem with Rife is that there was supression of his device. People hold his notebook entries and won't release it. However, rife.org has LOTS of letter and NOTEBOOK entries. I suggest you look there. I am going to help dispute this claim. http://www.rife.org/ http://www.rifeconference.com/

I'll get more later

Once, again, look at the Bibliography of "The Cancer Cure That Worked." Take the time to go to a large library and copy ALL THE SOURCES listed by Barry Lynes from the library's microfilm records.

You will find articles in The New York Times, SCIENCE magazine, etc., etc.

Do your research and you will find your answers. Here I am FORMALLY GIVING YOU A SOURCE FOR INFORMATION -- the Bibliography located at the end of "The Cancer Cure That Worked" by Barry Lynes. Now it is up to you to GO TO THE SOURCE and OBTAIN YOUR INFORMATION.

Seek and ye shall find. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.107.103.80 (talk • contribs) .

Answers to CDN99 questions...

Q: Does the Smithsonian Institute actually possess a Universal Microscope?

A: My understanding is that the Smithsonian Institute possesses an incomplete and/or broken version of one of the earlier Rife microscopes, which technically was a predecessor to the Universal Microscope, but is called "Universal Microscope" by the Smithsonian in all the documents on the web I've been able to find.

Q: An electron microscope requires the sample to be coated in a conducting solid (ex. gold), or frozen, or embedded in a plastic, so the electron beam itself would not kill the sample. Staining of samples is required since most things that have no colour cannot be seen, even if one looks at them very close up.

THat is not why the sample is coated, and the electron beam passes through the sample anyway so it is no explanation. No living object has been imaged with an electron microscope, not least because the interior of the instrument is evacuated to a very high vacuum. The Invisible Anon 14:05, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

A: Indeed. The Rife microscope used prisms to allow objects to be examined without stains. Several modern microscopes available today use the same technique. See Richardson Technologies' microscopes (http://www.richardson-tech.com/) for just one example. There are several others.

Q: If Rife's work with the Beam Ray was so extensive and ground-breaking, at least some of his research would still exist today, if it was so popular at the time of experimentation.

A: Rife's work has survived, but much of his notes and equipment were destroyed in the fire that burned down his laboratory. Crane was trained by Rife, and continued his work. His work is continued today, mostly in Europe and by Dr. James Bare in the USA.

Q: Who is the "one" doctor who stood up for him? The entire paragraph about Fishbein's utter obliteration of Rife is POV.

A: I'd have to look up the doctor who stood up for him. It is in the literature on the Rife sites already cited in this discussion. As for Fishbein, with a minimal amount of web research you will find numerous alternative therapy people of the time who had their careers and lives destroyed by the machinations of this man. Rife was just one of many. Fishbein is notorious in the alternative healing community.

Q: The FDA articles describe food preservation.

A: Yes. Food preservation by means of destruction of microbes using pulsed EM and pulsed RF fields. Rife also used pulsed EM and RF fields to destroy microbes. The FDA articles prove the basic underlying concept outlined by Rife as viable technology.

Q: The inner workings of the Universal Microscope need to be explained in a different article.

A: Agreed. I've never been able to find detailed info on this device. I'd love to find it....

Perhaps when a working copy is available, teh article on Rife could be re-written but until then he seems not to deserve symnpathetic treatment. The Invisible Anon 14:05, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

The "one" doctor

There were actually two doctors who stood up for him: Dr. Arthur Isaac Kendall at Northwestern University and Dr. Milbank Johnson.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20011215/timeline.asp http://www.dfe.net/Milbank_Johnson.html

Pseudoscience tag

Any reason why the article is tagged with the Pseudoscience tag category? I don't see any evidence to suggest that Rife was pulling a fast one, or not. For all we know, his cancer study was part of a scientific study; but to assume he was a fraud, without any evidence, is pseudoscience itself. It is unfortunately that his research was destroyed. --Iantresman 23:19, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

The size of object you can resolve depends on the wavelength of the radiation you use to resolve it with. Bats can resolve insects and threads using ultrasound, people can resolve things on the order of a light wavelength apart, with sufficient magnification, and to get 30 000 times magnification you need to use electrons, which have a much shorter wavelength than light. If you look at blurs you can convince yourself that you see many things, but this was a device which could not work as claimed. Pseudoscience. Midgley 03:56, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

It was already explained that the Universal Microscope operated outside the visible light spectrum, how many times was it said? ULTRA-VIOLET LIGHT is not hindered by the physics of white light (the simple fact that we CAN'T see it for one) but through heterodyning the two beams were crossed and the INTERFERENCE of the microbe illuminated it in the 3rd longer beam which was visbible. 66.203.231.75 04:39, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Split for ease of commenting. You have not a clue of what you are talking about. There are several useful articles on light and the electromagnetic spectrum in WP, why not read them instead of writing this rubbish. White light is a mixture of wavelengths, from red to violet. UV is as one would expect slightly shorter than violet, and as you say, invisible to humans. Bees however see it adequately well. The physics of UV are exactly those of violet and the resolving power is marginally better hence the use of UV microscopy in various situations. Midgley 11:14, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

This is why I would plead Aristotle's dictum...the benefit of the doubt goes to document, NOT the critic. The doctors and scientists of the 1930's were not morons, they knew what they were looking at, this was not the dark ages. Rife was very well published and the some of the links I added provided photocopies from newspapers of the time. This is supposed to be encyclopedic, right? The air is rife with an obvious heavy bias against Rife. Have you ever looked through a universal microscope?...no. Do you own one?...no. Are you in charge of leading a team of scientists to try to recreate one?...no. Were you on the research committee behind Rife at his clinic?...no. Then leave the facts well enough alone, or please PROVIDE SOME LINKS TO COUNTER HIS RESEARCH, I mean, seriously now, at least do that much and quit acting like little wiki-dictators or pseudo-experts....step up to the plate. 66.203.231.75 04:39, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Do you own one? Showing pictures would be helpful. Midgley 11:14, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
I have a pic of the scope, but being new here, haven't posted it yet for concerns about fair use. Thoughts? Fredsagirl 03:59, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Possible Rife Microscope (UV & Prisms) Operational Concepts

One of several key principles supposedly in use by the Rife Microscopes was that of heterodyning light. Heterodyning is accomplished by taking two signals x and y and multiplying them or adding them together.

To demonstrate the principle of heterodyning, there is a mathematical trigonometric identity that states that

2[sin(x)cos(y)] = sin(x+y) + sin(x-y)

Also a similar trigonometric identity that states that

sin(x)+sin(y) = 2[sin((x+y)/2)][cos((x-y)/2]

From these mathematical identities, we can see that if we can multiply two light wave sources together, we can shift the frequency x by +/- y, or if we sum the light wave sources, we can get a resulting light wave comprised of half frequency differences or half frequency sums "modulated" or multiplied with one another.

To further elaborate on how heterodyning can be used, further explanation is required...

In radio wave receivers so called Superheterodyne can be used. In such radio sets, only a small (one or none) number of expensive high frequency semiconductor circuit amplification stages are used to initially boost the incoming radio energy (automatic RF gain, etc), and then another one to multiply the incoming signal with a locally generated voltage controlled oscillator signal that is tuned to differ from the desired tuned radio station by the standard "intermediate frequency" (IF) of either 455 kHz or 10.7 MHz. AM receivers typically use 455 kHz, while FM receivers use 10.7 MHz. NTSC Standard Definition TV sets use another IF setting. High frequency circuit components typically have been much more expensive, and by minimizing these expensive parts, it makes the cost of radio and TV sets more reasonable.

Once the incoming signals are multiplied (mixed in the mixer circuit) to properly isolate the desired intermediate frequency signals (the down-frequency shifted version of the radio or TV station signal) the radio set will have frequency band-pass filtered IF amplifier stages. Once the tuned and filtered IF radio signal is sufficiently strong, it is finally demodulated via demodulation circuitry. By using lower gain in each IF amplifier stage (at the same time as using cheaper semiconductor components), less harmonic distortion is introduced, so a radio receiver manufacturer might have lots of cheap low gain stages, rather than a few low distortion (highly linearity), expensive, higher gain stages.

The Rife Universal Microscope had 4 Risley prisms with extremely fine angular adjustment. As the viewing angle of a prism is adjusted, the frequency spectrum selected changes (with white light, you'd be looking at a different color of the rainbow coming out of the prism per each angle change of the prism). If, on the other hand, you beam two different colors at appropriate offset angles into a prism, the prism will combine the various light beams into a single multi-spectrum (near whitening / fuller chromatic effect) beam of resultant light. Therefore the Rife Universal Microscope could supposedly / possibly select/filter or combine (add?) two or so sets of light.

One place that I read might have said that the quartz prisms were special in some way, having a polarizer or diffraction grating on one or both or just some parts?

If a diffraction grating is placed at an angle to the incident light ray, how would the angle affect the interference pattern of the light leaving the grating?

Could this cause an adjustable phase shift of the incident light with or without a prism to recombine the refracted light?

It is not known to me if Rife added or mixed (multiplied) the light source, or the subject sample's reflected light emissions or both somehow.

It must be that the UV light source at least in part was the one being filtered / prism'd and so on, since bright UV light could damage the live samples under observation.

Filtering the sample's emission / observational light may or may not be necessary simply because the human eye is only sensitive to the visible light spectrum, however, attached and focused photographic and movie cameras might require this so as to produce clearer pictures?

If the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation / light required to detect viruses is quite short, then it stands to reason that the heterodyning method used must have been the one that results in the necessary frequency shift or reduction to be able to bring even a sampling measurement of the tiny subject specimen(s) into the human visible range.

By adding together two sets of near-monochromatic ultraviolet light, it would be akin to adding two "low harmonically distorted" sine waves together rather than two waves rich in possibly unknown harmonics. Because of this, phase shifting, phase detection, and heterodyning the waveforms would be more predictable. Oldspammer 14:37, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Use of the UV requires that quartz lens be used in the optics just to let the light through since glass would block it.

There is a Rife Microscope book / PDF file 1998, 2001 by Tom E. Bearden that claims that Rife's Microscope operational secrets involve a concept that Bearden has coined "recursive virtual state magnification," "recursive coherent increase of the signal-to-noise ratio," and "recursive vacuum engine." Bearden attributes much of this to highly theoretical ideas from Stoney - Whittaker like phase conjugate waves / biwave pairs--E. T. Whittaker (mathematical physicist) 1903 and 1904. There are references to this Whittaker 1904 guy in other alternative / electrotherapeutic medicine web sites, thereby, in my eyes, discrediting it all somewhat. To me, Bearden's convoluted descriptions have too many illogical leaps of faith that I as a reader am not confident to follow.

When a person looks at a big enough picture of the Rife Universal Microscope, one can see what appears to be a large S-shape formed from short straight segments of rectangular channel tubing that has 45 degree bends to form the curves in the S-shape. Does anyone have an idea why Rife might have this structure?

To partially answer my own question, the S-shape on the body of the microscope houses an S-shape of blocks of quartz with each bend consisting of a quartz prism. The only reason that I can think of for this is to eliminate unwanted / divergent colors of light that entered the microscope. I don't know if each quartz block had any lenses within that would further boost the magnification? Oldspammer 02:38, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Can anyone confirm that Rife used a vacuum for stages of the microscope? Oldspammer 07:40, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Recent reversions

User:66.203.231.75, please discuss on the Talk page instead of repeatedly adding unsourced article content. And please (re)read WP:NOR, WP:CITE and WP:NPOV. AvB ÷ talk 12:25, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Arbitrary reverts

It's become increasingly apparent this subject is flooded with a bias against Rife, unfortunately insomuch that I've been told I have not a clue what I'm talking about. Did the scientists AND doctors of the 1930's not have a clue either praytell?
Aristotle's dictum states that the benefit of the doubt goes to the document, N-O-T the critic. I have graciously provided link after link WITH pictures, WITH official reports, WITH variable Rife machines, WITH recently funded research, WITH freakin' court documents if you bother to LOOK at them. If you're having trouble facing reality, seek help, don't burn books that have popped your party line bubbles. Even after another man elaborated even farther on quartz magnification and IBM's new re-discoveries of Rife's old work (albeit, he didn't provide any links), not even that survived the revert.
There were 3 kinds of people who had an interest in Galileo's telescope, 1) looked and believed 2) looked and still didn't believe. But by far the worst group was 3) didn't believe and WOULDN'T look.
When I provide verifiable links and photocopied newspaper clippings, and all you provide is....pffft....Quackwatch? "Dr" Barnett's personal propaganda page? And you believe you're good unbiased Wikipedians? What do you want me to do, read the pages to you? Mail you pictures? That's just lazy, or slanted journalism. Shall we now commence to burn the heretics? 66.203.231.75 01:08, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I applied Aristotle's dictum in reverting your edits. Current Wikipedia policies happen to be consistent with Aristotle's ideas in this regard; unfortunately for you they tend to protect the existing article text. Please also note that Wikipedia editors are required to report existing viewpoints, not to be journalists. FWIW, I am not particularly enamored with Quackwatch. That does not mean Barrett is always wrong. I am not particularly susceptible to guilt by association either. (Mentioning some personal opinions just in case you really believe they do matter.) Wikipedia is not about my or your opinion. It's about what's already out there (see WP:NPOV). AvB ÷ talk 01:25, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, Avb, I will admit the references regarding Moris Fishbein are unsubstantiated, I can easily say I have no empirical evidence for a conspiracy, it is only theory, that's why I never bothered that section. But when characters like Midgley or CDN erase entire paragraphs detailing what Rife did and how he did it, I'm sorry, this is an article about a MAN, not an article about medicine or cancer. I think we've gotten a little off track with forgetting that.
I think that the current viewpoint supports Rife, since all we can do is look at the evidence presented, a few of the links that have been provided are recent, updated on a regular basis, and backed by their respective organizations. Now if you want to go with the world's viewpoint on Roy Rife, 99.99% of the world has no idea who the man is, this includes doctors.
To my research prior to posting, the AMA has no comment on Rife either, or I would have included it.
So the conclusions seem to be, if you do a search for Rife on the internet, the top listed websites are all supportive of his research, this must be the popular viewpoint. What say ye? 66.203.231.75 03:24, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

You make some good points. It would be nice if we could get some constructive discussion going on this talk page. However, your recent edit lacks consensus so you shouldn't be surprised if it is reverted. If so, you may want to see it as your contribution towards clearing the air. I've slightly refactored your note above for the same reason. I'll post some general info on your talk page.
(Please note I won't be doing much on Wikipedia for the rest of the week.) AvB ÷ talk 11:38, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Aristotle would be a WP:AUTH? I would suggest that if the Google hits are in favour it is because they are selling something or trying to back up a general set of claims that current science is wrong - (Pasteur / Antoine Bechamp, Variolation / Homeopathy etc). I think it is more reasonable to regard the Google hits on light microscopy, resolving power and wavelength, the photo-micrographs of Smallpox and so on as the orthodox or contemporary response to Rife's claims than to demand that the busy world of science gives you a page of argument specifically why this specific gadget is not currently working. It isn't difficult to convince scientists of things, all you have to do is to build one and let them play with it - or for theoretical stuff just do the sums. For instance, what flux of UV light at what wavelengths do you need to put down on a bacterium to arrange that a detectable amount of it comes off as heterodyned gamma rays (short Xrays perhaps, but to get 40* the resolution of ordinary light you need to use 40* shorter rays, and 40* shorter than violet is pretty energetic. Heterodyne and superheterodyne were terms which came into public use around the period RIfe was hawking his gadgets I think (by all means look it up) in connection with radio sets. I suspect him of stringing together a set of buzz words, seeking investment, and making claims which were illegal even then. BTW, what is http://69.107.103.80/ ? Midgley 12:08, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Your points are accurate, as usual. FWIW, I researched the 30 nm claim and, as far as I can see, it is wanting as predicted using phase shift masks and /or fluid immersion, 193 nm deep UV was predicted to reach a resolution *for etching purposes* of some 70 nm but this has not been accomplished as yet, while but has experimentally reached 30 nm recently [1], possibly leading to postponement of the switch to higher frequencies for digital chip feature etching purposes being made even as we speak. However, I do not think you have addressed the main points raised by 66.203.231.75, such as relative instead of absolute notability; or the covering of viewpoints held on (perceived) scientific issues (including the worst of quackery) that are not based on articles in peer-reviewed journals. I would add that if Rife's work has never been published (or commented on) in peer-reviewed journals (a hallmark of pseudoscience by the way), the article cannot be built from reputable sources as per the (deprecated) WP:SPOV policy and therefore everything needs to come from other reputable sources as per WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:CITE. Comments on/criticism of Rife's work are not allowed if not out there in the context of Rife's work. Obviously the SPOV has a place in the article if underpinned by relevant quotes. The room allocated to viewpoints should be based on the proportion of people out there who e.g. have heard about Rife and *know* it's all nonsense; those who have heard about Rife and *know* it's all true; etc. I would say that people who are ill that can't be helped by mainstream medicine are another important group whose size can help gauge notability (and I'm sure it contains both Rife believers, Rife skeptics, etc.). A different issue is how to describe the contemporary situation re current Rife followers (good faith, criminals, whatever. They exist). Much more to say but must "run" now. AvB ÷ talk 12:59, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I think the medics on Wikipedia are using an outdated, deprecated and therefore increasingly inadequate tack in order to protect the public against quackery, fraud, you name it. The time has come to present the facts instead of deleting or ridiculing information about non-SPOV viewpoints. To paraphrase Jimbo, if it's important enough, you can find reputable sources reporting on it. If you can't find such sources, you can't say it in WP. Wikipedia is not the battle ground - it describes battles. From all sides. If you want to protect the public but the info is not out there, you can develop or join initiatives aiming to get it written and talked about in the media (this obviously includes, but is not limited to, peer-reviewed journals). Then you can quote. If you don't like this, don't blame me - blame Jimbo.
(Question to self: am I turning into a Wikiholic?) AvB ÷ talk 13:20, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
The facts however are that claims were made, and they do not come up to proof. So simply repeating the claims, particualrly without some reference to court records etc is by no means biogrpahical, nor does it make an encyclopaedic article about the gadgets. Midgley 18:37, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Midge, I don't know how closely you've been following my talk here on the discussion page, I said way up there, that there were "freakin' court documents if you bother to look at them..." It only takes a few clicks around the Rife.org site to find afformentioned documents. Rife.org has an enormous plethora of his material, the largest I have ever seen.

There's several hundred pictures and newspaper clippings on the site, up for everyone's scrutiny. I guess one could say there was no evidence if one wouldn't even turn around to look at it. 66.203.231.75 05:34, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Might it be reasonable to actually refer to them then, rather than saying "the truth is out there, go and repeat my search to find it?" There is a WP policy, I believe, that links to references should be to the document not to the site, and it is a convenience to users, who might be man in th emany years to come. Midgley 14:22, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Explicitly unverified

100% VERIFIED My father used the system and saved him not only from death, but from a very bad surgery that would have taken out 30% of his face and one eye. Hi used the Rife machines and they worked very well. You can find this information by emailing me. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 76.168.71.34 (talk) 06:53, August 20, 2007 (UTC)

Great. So we can e-mail a random person who didn't even leave an e-mail to get a testimonial that supposedly proves it. I'm sure that's completely compatible with WP:RS and Wikipedia:Verifiability. Adam Cuerden talk 09:57, 20 August 2007 (UTC)


If the science described existed it would be repeated. It hasn't, therefore it didn't. Midgley 11:07, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

This is a clever, but overused trick in debates, it's called "shifting the burden of proof". Let's say, your honor, I have photographic evidence of a flying green dinosaur that terrorized Chicago rooftops in 1999, and I also have 40 credible, sane witnesses who stood there and saw it too as I took the picture. Now my flying green dinosaur picture has also been printed in the newspaper, and I have the testimony of 2 FBI photography experts, who say that my picture is original and not tampered with. I also have cryptozoologists examining the droppings of this flying green dinosaur and they testify that it is reptilian in nature but not like any they've ever seen. To top it off I also have Lieutenant John Smith with the National Guard who confirms a large blip appeared on the radar near the Sears Tower that day.
My friend, my job is not to provide you with MORE evidence for Rife, YOUR job is to DISPROVE mine. Aristotle's Dictum.
This means finding an organization who has tried to reproduce Rife's work to no avail. It must be a group of professionals (not a bunch of teenagers doing a research paper). It must be scientifically demonstrated and concluded with real equipment and duplications of what Rife worked with (not some fat guy with an opinion). And they must test their hypothesis within the boundaries of Rife's theories in order to prove or disprove Rife, otherwise it's non sequitur and/or a rubber ruler (IE: "Rife's microscope cannot see a star, therefore it cannot see a microbe" or "In a 5 second test, the Rife machine provided no results, therefore it does not work"). The evidence of Rife's work is fact and the popular viewpoint to boot, now disprove his results. If you can't, then accept it, and move on. 66.203.231.75 05:53, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

That approaches WP:CIVILITY. Note that this is a relevant item as far as contemporary devices said to be beased on his work go. http://www.healthwatcher.net/Quackerywatch/Cancer/Cancer-news/smh001230rife-aus.html Also, do you in fact have "40 credible sane witnesses who saw viruses down a Rife microscope? Shall we try to be a little specific on the actual devices we are talking about, otherwise we might as well be talking about crytopoo?

Midgley 14:17, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

My allegory of the 40 sane, credible witnesses was hinting at the 40 or so doctors who supported Rife, many of them pictured in the 'Banquet' photo and names are given. The devices we are talking about are the two Rife was famous for of course. The Universal Microscope first, and secondly his Beam Ray. Both had witnesses, both were submitted for review, and both achieved national accolades. I read the article, it mentions that Barry Lynes's book does have a chapter titled "The Exploiters" who will throw together some wires and a black box and call it a Rife machine. If you notice the article also says there have been no double-blind peer-reviewed clinical trials done with re-creations, all we can do here is go with actual factual history. I don't come here to promote companies, I am more than aware of swindlers and quacks. 66.203.231.75 08:11, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
(please use colons to indent, it makes life easier and more logical. I'm a doctor. I've been taken out to dinner from time to time and been told things. It doesn't mean I support them and it emphatically does not mean they are true. However, some of the dinners have been excellent. I've also attended demos of things, and then seen that the report in a peer reviewed journal matches what I have been shown and what other researchers have been able to duplicated. That tends to indicate they are true, and that is not how machines using Rife as a touchstone are being marketed. Midgley 14:21, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
I expect Aristotle was taken out to dinner from time to time as well. Midgley 14:22, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Sources?

Funding: "Four insurance companies are interested in financing Rife proivided the International Cancer Foundation gave its approval. Dr. Mildred Schram, Secretary of the Foundation, after visiting Rife's lab, stipulates conditions for acceptance which have nothing to do with Rife's work. Rife doesn't have time to be sidetracked. Result: the Cancer Foundation never funds any of Rife's work."

Good grief, Midgley, "Another picture said to be of him..." You really do have a vendetta don't you? Even if it's completely unrelated to his work, such as the pyramid scheme. People today want to make money, so therefore Rife was a quack 70 years ago. Eh, er, run that one by me again? 66.203.231.75 06:12, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
It would work like this:- an unethical trader wishes to make money so they identify a source of plausible gobbledegook, hype it up, persuade many other people to likewise hype it up and set up a pyramid (I think the Americanism of "MLM" is something we don't bother with over here but possibly means the same thing.) Money flows and the originators get richer and happier. That isn't an obscure idea - did I really need to explain it or am I being trolled? Midgley 09:08, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
My point is, it has nothing to do with discrediting a man's published work 70 years ago. In America today, people like to make money--some will lie to do it. We have entire corporations over here setup on pyramid schemes aka MLM, companies like: Amway, Kirby, Avon, and Melaleuca just to cover a few of the more popular ones. 66.203.231.75 14:46, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
A pyramid scheme would account for the multiple mentions of him on the Web, and for the claims of unlikely effect. If anyone can demonstrate that picture to be of him, then it is a picture of him, until then it is a picture one person says is of him. Encyclopedias should be accurate. I don't have a vendetta against him, but I would be interested to know what is the source of interest of the main writer of this page? Midgley 14:12, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Another thing that would account for the multiple mentionings of him on the web would be "information" and "knowledge" and "search engines". On Yahoo right now I'm looking at 1-10 of 1,040,000 hits on the name "Midgley". 66.203.231.75 08:37, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

If any of them say I can cure cancer let me know. (I do actually, but only a few sorts and not using anything that isn't entirely clear.) Midgley 09:08, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Contemporary accounts of "Rife machines"

http://www.healthwatcher.net/Quackerywatch/Cancer/Cancer-news/smh001230rife-aus.html

Another "not a biography" page

If one reads a biogrpahy it tends to have things like

1888 Born in Elkhorn, Nebraska.

1913 Married. Moves to San Diego. A man of varied interests: ballistics, racing auto constructions, optics and microscopy.

in it, possibly even with a note of who the subject married[2](?), and the issue of their union.

This is actually an article about a device, or two devices - at present - which show things smaller than the wavelength of the light they use, and achieve a 100% cure rate in arbitrary forms of cancer. And are on sale, althought he design was destroyed by the FDA and AMA (gosh, I wish the BMA could mount an occasional commando raid, we just get to talk to people).

Which is it supposed to be, about the man, who by one report became alcoholic, was arrested, fled the country ... Midgley 17:47, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

It is about the man, and his notable achievements (hence the reason he is in Wikipedia). If you can find something else notable that he did, by all means add it to the article. To my knowledge he wasn't a classical composer, he wasn't an athlete, and he wasn't a singer or painter. His field of wide renown was not the automotive industry, or ballistics. If you would like to add to the article with a generous contribution of his work in other fields, by all means do so.
If you know more about where he was born and who he married, then go ahead and type your heart out, though none of the above is what he was even remotely famous for, you are right, it should be included. 66.203.231.75 06:28, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Development based on Rife's microscope

http://www.rifeconference.com/videos.html reports the Ergonom 500 microscope to be "based on Rife's work".

http://www.grayfieldoptical.com/microscience/e500/history.html gives the history of this device.

(It doesn't mention ultraviolet, heterodyning etc, but it does remark on difficulties in agreeing a deal for purchase of the technologies by existing large suppliers of microscopes).

Midgley 14:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC) Here is a Usenet conversation on the topic: http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.techniques.microscopy/2005-01/0003.html

Here are pictures of what probably is a microscope made by Rife, declared to be stored in the Science Museum London. http://www.rife.de/mscope/mscope4.htm - on a site by the chap referred to immediately above, Mr Walker.

"Rife was the first worker known to have isolated and photographed the tuberculosis virus," (regarded by orthodox medicine as a baterium then, and now. "a fairly large nonmotile rod-shaped bacterium ... The rods are 2-4 um in length and 0.2-0.5 um in width." http://textbookofbacteriology.net/tuberculosis.html (which includes a picture taken with a 100X objective lens.)

"In March, 1882 Robert Koch announced his sensational discovery of a staining technique which would reveal the bacterium causing tuberculosis, now known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis." http://www.uccs.edu/~cragmor/tuber.html Nobel Prize 1905 http://nobelprize.org/medicine/educational/tuberculosis/readmore.html Pictures incl microscope and micoscopy: Google image search results for "tuberculosis koch"


And here is a picture of what is listed as the universal microscope: http://www.rife.de/mscope/Images/univLarge.jpg Is that the device we are talking about? And might anyone provide a picture for the article?

Shall we do interests? I am a doctor, with an interest in the promoters and promotion of quack medical treatments on the Internet. THats mainly a hobby, but does connect to my work in that patients who lose money or time by falling for quackery may also lose health as a result. Anyone selling anything here? Midgley 14:43, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I am a "post Lyme" CFS patient with expert knowledge of Lyme Disease and CFS. I have an interest in the promoters and promotion of quack treatments for CFS and Lyme disease. In addition, many patients attempt to self-treat (diets, food supplements, OTC meds, self-imported antibiotics, etc). I believe that well-informed patients will not easily fall prey to deception. Information is the key. AvB ÷ talk 16:10, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

obscure meaning

What does this phrase mean? "Rife commissioned the invention of a device called the "Beam Ray". Midgley 15:38, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I know you said you're a doctor, which certainly takes years of training, and I can't help but wonder when you write "telescope" twice now instead of "microscope", and now you're saying that's an obscure sentence? 66.203.231.75 09:17, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
No need to make this personal, 66.203.231.75. I've changed these freudian slips to "microscope". All they tell us is that it could as well be called a telescope according to Midgley. Nihil novum. AvB ÷ talk 10:15, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I know that could be misconstrued as being a personal attack, but it's not. If I work with Fords I'm not going to call them Harleys. It seeemed like one heck of a freudian slip to me, but I didn't say anything about it until he said that sentence was obscure. The only other thing that crossed my mind was perhaps English wasn't his native language, but he types too well for that. 66.203.231.75 11:40, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I meant telescope. If someone has written "radio microscope" that is going to look very unusual. The resolving power depends on the wavelength, although in radio telescopes, and probably in optical ones, other factors put coarser limits on the resolution achieved in practice. If you work with Fords, you may well remark on the factors that govern cornering, where the adhesion of rubber to tarmac etc may be worked out on Maclarens. Optics is optics, light is light. What is 66.203.231.75, and what is that sentence to be taken to mean? Midgley 12:35, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
User:66.203.231.75 was referring to your mention of "microscope" here. AvB ÷ talk 14:57, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
Aah yes. Slip of the tongue. I'll try typing with my feet next. Meanwhile ... how would I for instance go about commissioning the invention of a device, whether called a beam ray or bandsaw? I suspect it of being a quote from somewhere, and doubt it made sense there either. Midgley 01:16, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
It still eludes me what is so obscure about that statement. You can commission all sorts of things under the sun, here in America there is even a local city office of the "Commissioner". Rife commissioned the invention of it, in the same sense you can go down to a metalshop and give specifications of equipment you need molded and cut, or go to an engineer and give blueprints of a structure that you need built. 66.203.231.75 18:50, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Interesting (I mean exactly that, interesting.). I'd say that invention isn't in the same sense that one can have something built by specifying it. It is something that requires a spark, an element of newness, some non-obviousness. So the guy who does the specifying for having it built has done the inventing, and the one to whom it is specified, and who then builds it, is the constructor, fabricator or whatever, carrying out as someone talking about patents and copyright here would call a mechanical process, although with some adaptability and ingenuity. To me the phrase or sentence seems ambiguous. "Rife invented the beam ray, and had the components machiend by a local 'shop." would do, although I suspect it would be better to lose the troublesome word "invent" altogether, and talk abut "Rife commisioned the production of his invention, the Beam Ray" which used a marine radio linear amplifier to produce radio frequency oscillations... what he did with that would be potentially (and potential is a carefully chosen word here) interesting. Midgley 19:59, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Well yeah, I figured for the sake of details that phrase was more appropriate than saying he invented it. Rife wasn't known to assemble machinery in the same sense as the Wright brothers, or Thomas Edison. Rather, he drew up the schematics and had someone else do it for him. 66.203.231.75 05:26, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

hocus pocus

"He illuminated the microbe with two different wavelengths of the same ultraviolet light frequency"

wavelength = Frequency /c

where c is the speed of light, in other words, the distance between crests of waves is set by the number of willges per second, and the number of metres per second the wave moves at.

Specifically, for a heterodyne system you require two frequencies, which differ by the amount of the frequency you want as a result - for radio, which is the only use I'm aware of except possibly some odd singing, you use a frequency which differs from the received radio frequency by the exact amount of the frequency of your intermediate stage - about 5 MHz IIRC.

Explanation or clarification? Midgley 15:07, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

This is a verbatim quote from the website of a manufacturer? of purportedly Rife-based machinery (though I'm sure whoever wrote it will not be crying "copyvio!"). I have no idea if it conveys Rife's ideas, but I'm sure removing it actually helped latter day Rifeans since it was bound to strike many readers as obvious nonsense. ~:-] AvB ÷ talk 11:10, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I believe you'll find your explanation here, I'm rather sure it's credible. So much for the "obvious nonsense". http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/wav/frequency.html "Waves of different wavelengths can have the same frequency." You can even see with your own eyes what Rife was doing with heterodyning, they have some interesting graphical 'toys'. 66.203.231.75 13:50, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
That isn't about light waves, which do not move through an aether, nor stand still, nor move at different speeds in the same medium. Midgley 13:59, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
It remains obvious nonsense to me. AvB ÷ talk 11:39, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Now it's time for the $64,000,000 question. "What is light?" Sometimes it acts like a particle and sometimes it acts like a wave. It's obvious the dual nature of light is not completely understood, it was one of Einstein's last unanswered questions. Electricity can produce light, fire also produces light, and light can be observed separately from heat. In a recent study (which I can provide) sound has been able to produce light in a liquid medium, such as water, but yet light is supposed to be a photon. Note, I am not referring to refracting light off of vibrating water, I mean illuminating the water itself, using sound. It's also been discovered in the last 6 years that the speed of light is no longer a constant.
You wouldn't think that electricity and magnetism had something in common until you saw an electromagnet lift an enormous car, something that ceramics or lodestones, even neodymium cannot compare to the power of. Perhaps Rife had something actually important among the nearly 6,000 parts. 66.203.231.75 15:22, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps he had. As to microscope resolution, constructing phase shift masks (and certainly immersion lenses) may have been technically possible at the time. I'd like to see something tangible here. Irradiation of living tissue with high energy RF waves was quite possible at the time. On the other hand, I have grave doubts about the use of any kind of "resonance" to seek, identify and destroy (if only because genetically identical bacteria come in different weights and sizes depending on reproduction cycle etc. - see also ajn below). Absolutely unbelievable are the "Rife-derived" devices that are claimed to cure by means of sound - sometimes even applied via a headphone.
I don't know whether or not Rife was a quack. However, I don't believe there are Rife machines around that can cure cancer, or Rife microscopes with x60,000 magnification. But I am quite ready to revise that belief when someone demonstrates such devices to me and allows me or others to research their principles and actual effects. One of my friends recently developed breast cancer for the second time, both times requiring radical surgery. The first time it didn't metastasize - this time it probably has done so, test results due in tomorrow. Now tell me she could have kept her breasts. Tell me where she can go to kill off any and all metastases right now without chemotherapy, X-rays and prayers. In the meantime I am only too glad she won't be boarding a plane to a "Rife" clinic. AvB ÷ talk 11:39, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Regarding sound, it was not merely soundwaves coming out of an amp. There is a particular type of wave called a "scalar" wave. Sound waves are curved, scalar waves are square, any Rife machine using some generic radio frequencies may be able to cause some funky sounds in your stereo equipment, but there's no guarantee of anything.
I can honestly tell you your lady friend could have kept her breasts if she had some of the things my wife had when she came down with cervical cancer 10 years ago (the kind that turned her abdomen into a lumpy rock) and sought no conventional medical treatment. That's how I was able to come here and graciously provide the information about LER and the REM SuperPro--we knew Pat Ballistrea, before and since prison. That's the only Rife device I would ever consider vouching for. The rest I would call suspicious myself.
Other than that, theres a few *other* things we've had access to over the years, and whadyaknow? Some of our friends and relatives just miraculously got better after being sent home to die.
As a sidenote, (though not completely unrelated) I can say Quackwatch is honestly full of c-r-a-p when it comes to 35% h2o2. I could summarize their articles on it in 3 words...."misleading scare tactics". I actually chuckled after reading one of the paragraphs because I know all the information Barrett left out. 66.203.231.75 13:59, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Up to Wikipedia standards?

Some editors do not always see the wisdom of WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:CITE. For example, Midgley's "hocus pocus" edit removed from other people's viewpoint something the editor knows is nonsense (after explaining on the talk page). However, that's not Wikipedia. If this is about a notable viewpoint, so be it. Describe it as well as possible. Little point in trying to convince other editors it's right or wrong. If mainstream science says something is not possible, do not remove it from an existing viewpoint. Simply add the scientific point of view by quoting external sources. In this case, comments on Rife's work and that of his (real or purported) followers. Inform and empower by describing what's out there. That's Wikipedia. AvB ÷ talk 11:01, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

The sentence Midgley removed wasn't POV, it was literally nonsense. You can't have two different frequencies of the same wavelength of light (because the speed is constant and the frequency is defined as the speed divided by the wavelength - Midgley's got the equation wrong but the right idea). NPOV doesn't mean including material which is just plain wrong on its own terms. The section from which it was removed was clearly POV, as it was presenting the claims of the microscope's method and results as if they were undisputed fact (the article's now a little better in that respect, but not much). Rife was also working from a now-discredited theory of microbiology (see Technology and Alternative Cancer Therapies: An Analysis of Heterodoxy and Constructivism, David J. Hess, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 4, Dec. 1996, pp. 657-674.), so at least some of the time he was claiming to see things which electron microscopy has subsequently shown not to exist. --ajn (talk) 11:23, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
You seem to be one of the people who do not fully understand WP:NPOV. Please reread what I wrote. FWIW, you are right in that the disputed sentence is nonsense. But that's not the point. AvB ÷ talk 11:39, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
PS We can hardly remove a structural part of a notable viewpoint simply because we can prove the part (and therefore the probably the entire viewpoint) is nonsense. A valid reason for removing nonsense would be when editors agree that it is e.g. not relevant to or illustrative of the viewpoint. I'm sure clicking on Random article will provide you with countless examples of articles that would suffer greatly from the removal of nonsense. AvB ÷ talk 11:54, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
It is not a notable viewpoint - it is nonsense. The problem here is that Rife's microscope was not claimed to herald the overthrow of conventional physics, it was claimed to work within the accepted scientific paradigm (where f = c / λ, and c is a constant). If someone, somewhere (no sources cited) is making the claim that for a given value of wavelength you can have two different frequencies, that's nonsense according to Rife's POV (as well as according to conventional scientific POV). If you can provide a reference for someone who believes that the microscope worked by means outside standard optical physics (and from what I've read of Rife that certainly wasn't his view), the sentence could go back in. I'm afraid this illustrates the problem with a lot of "followers of X" - Rife himself understood the basic theory behind what he claimed to be doing (regardless of whether he could actually do what he said he did), but whoever wrote that sentence had no idea. --ajn (talk) 12:10, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
Please read what I wrote. You are repeatedly arguing a point on which we do agree. We simply have a different opinion as to what to do with it according to Wikipedia policies. My point is that the nonsense is out there, it's notable because it's deceiving less educated folks, and removing it from Wikipedia does not serve any purpose. AvB ÷ talk 12:21, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
One of the purposes of an encyclopedia is to educate - IE that someone less educated comes to the article, they should become more educated. I suspect that the relevant WP: is not NPOV, but Patent Nonsense which is around somewhere. Midgley 12:30, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
You and I recognize the nonsense. Not everybody does. You could educate readers looking up information on Rife so much better by leaving in the nonsense (or even adding it yourself) and refuting it, rather than removing it. Especially when the nonsense is clearly used to deceive e.g. terminal cancer patients. AvB ÷ talk 13:22, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I have read what you wrote - what you're saying is that unsourced "information" which is contradictory on its own terms should be left in articles. I'm not saying that it needs to go because it's "nonsense" in the sense of being contrary to conventional science (which would be counter to NPOV), I'm saying it needs to go because it is literally nonsense - it doesn't make any sense at all. It's using the words "frequency" and "wavelength" in ways that are meaningless. If someone has claimed that that is how the microscope worked (and I'm sure Rife would not have been this confused about basic optics), NPOV might allow for it to be included in the article with attribution. Without attribution, it is, as Midgley says, patent nonsense, not a question of NPOV. --ajn (talk) 12:52, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
No, I do not want to keep nonsense that is NOT out there in Wikipedia. Once again, this came from a website selling purported "Rife" machines and is illustrative of how an entire "Rife" quackery industry is selling its stuff. Very notable. AvB ÷ talk 13:22, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
Nonsense is only acceptable if the source is cited, and it's made very clear that it's what the source believes, not something which is being stated as a fact. Neither applies to the sentence which was removed. --ajn (talk) 14:05, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
You seem to think I want to put these sentences back in. If so, I would have done so immediately. I simply used it as an example to explain my point, which is about editors removing "information" they oppose. If the reason for its removal had been that it was unsourced, I would not have used it as an example; I would have cited the source and reinserted it as a matter of principle. It was not removed because it stated the nonsense as a fact. If so, I would have re-inserted and NPOV'ed it (like I did before with other parts of this article). No, the reason given on the talk page was that it was nonsense (& fully documented). My point is that editors should distinguish between "stand-alone" nonsense (indeed, Patent nonsense) and nonsense used out there as part of something notable (good, bad or ugly). Like rubbing blue mud into your belly button to placate the gods. FWIW, the reference is [3] but I would not want to advertize such URLs in this article, especially not where it still fails to warn potential customers. Also, you seem to have joined a discussion without seeing its "prequel" - which is better understood as what may be becoming a bit of my mission here on WP, namely showing SPOV proponents how they can more effectively spread the word by refuting than removing. I'm not very good at it, but that's just a temporary drawback. (This example was not quite as useful as I thought it would be.) AvB ÷ talk 14:45, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Removing "incredible" with no indication of why it might be credited

A reason for not regarding a doctorate as incredible would be being able to point to the university (of Heidelberg) account of awarding it. No such pointer. Fraud. Quackwatch assuredly does remark on him. In detail. Midgley

Heidelberg. THis will be leakage into his legend of material from the senior scamster - Abrams - nearby. Midgley 20:20, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Quackwatch and quackery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tearlach#Job_Collins_document

This should probably be on a central page somewhare, perhaps as an RFC, but teh main material is WP:RS and WP --> external links. Midgley 17:30, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Article Cleanup

This is a very interesting debate. I have gone through the article in an attempt to fix many obvious spelling, grammatical, and stylistic errors, but am rather unsure in a few places; WP:NOR states that any specific claims in an article must be backed up by reputable sources. Much of the material which is disputed results from an author's new synthesis of potentially unreliable secondary sources, and therefore seems unfit for inclusion here.

AvB suggests that it is unproductive for those pursuing SPOV to delete material containing misleading scientific or medical claims. Any attempt at refuting these articles, however, could conceivably be hamstrung by the same WP:NOR considerations that should prevent our IP-addressed friend from making his preposterous claims. Anyone with a sufficiently advanced scientific background can see that the proposed mechanism of this microscope is a wash. The explanation given is not only confusing and lacking in rigor, but riddled with misconceptions in spectroscopy, optics, and electromagnetic theory. To contradict established theory is a wonderful thing, but there can be no doubt that the burden on proof rests firmly upon the claimant, not his critic. This is the only way the consistency of science can be preserved.

I am hesitant, however, to modify the article to reflect the unreliability of its sources, for fear that this debate might be seen as one between relatively equal points of view. It is not; one should not be tempted to grant those who make extraordinary claims the equality of consideration they demand, but instead regard their claims with withering skepticism. A valuable idea will withstand this treatment, while those misusing scientific vocabulary to achieve some other end will be appropriately disposed of without expending too much time and effort on the part of the editor.

I await comment on this issue.--Angio 20:38, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Hesitation becomes us, sometimes... Midgley 21:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
My point was directly taken from WP:NPOV. You would be right if this were e.g. a textbook you're preparing, but you can't use this line of reasoning as long as Wikipedia's policies are what they are. You may want to verify my point by rereading relevant policies (mainly WP:NPOV and WP:NOR). There is a conflict in the real world between contemporary mainstream science and Rife's claims. What we can do is describe the conflict. We cannot simply throw out what we "know" to be garbage. Our IP-based friend is not simply claiming things, s/he is describing other people's claims. The former can go out of the window straight away, the latter are a different matter. The only proof our friend is required to provide is that the info is out there and that a minority do not see Rife and his latter day followers as quacks but as saints and saviors. What you can do here is to contrast it with published critiques of Rife, his work and his current followers and imitators. And while you can't call him a quack yourself, you can quote notable sources that do so. AvB ÷ talk 23:26, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Sometimes, as in the humanities, it is appropriate to describe the conflict, or else when there is an argument to be made that draws either upon peer-reviewed research or the well-established principles of science. On other scientific matters, however, such as whether it is possible to use light to achieve a magnification of 60,000, there is no such legitimate conflict. In cases such as these, calls to "describe the conflict" ring hollow, and are reminiscent of Creationists' calls to "teach the conflict" over evolution, a basic theoretical proposition over which there is no scientific controversy. It is still appropriate to describe the claims made by Rife, but it is not appropriate to give more than a shadow of credence to them. Angio 19:00, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I do not agree that "describe the conflict" rings hollow in this case, or that giving or witholding credence is up to WP editors. It all depends on what's reported in the real world. We are not teaching the conflict, we are showing all important sides. And in an article on Rife, his "side" is important. We need to report what's doing the rounds out there in the real world.
Nevertheless, I think we're in agreement - if only because your recent edit does almost exactly what I meant. It probably boils down to the fact that mainstream science has sufficient evidence to leave very little doubt that Rife's theories, devices and cures were quackery based on pseudoscience. AvB ÷ talk 22:27, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Tone

Folks! I don't believe Rife cured cancer, but let's try to remember that articles here are supposed to be in the style of an encyclopedia. The opening salvo (there's no other word for it) calling Rife a "fraud and quack", claiming his microscope's resolution was "impossible", and all other manner of superlatives just doesn't cut it. Any science or protoscience (or pseudoscience) should be discussed in such a manner to provide the reader with information on the subject, the debate (if any) and current standing in mainstream acceptance, but what we have here is bloodsport. Take three deep breaths and count to 10! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Xenoncloud (talk • contribs) .

'Homework eaten by dog'

While an amusing metaphor, this section title strikes me as NPOV... -Toptomcat 14:45, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

That may be so, but a header with the title "Homework Eaten by Dog" is not something that should ever be seen in an encyclopedia. The article is just as firm in rejecting Rife's claims without using ad-hominem attacks and sarcasm.Angio 16:38, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't disagree that the amusing metaphor (understood by all) has had its day. I'm less certain that there were ad hominem or ad personem attacks in there though. Midgley 16:54, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

POV Edit

The preceding comments were indeed well-founded. I have edited this article for tone and clarity, removing most of the unprofessional vitriol. I also removed the two subheaders on microscopy, as they are inappropriate content under a biographical article, opting instead to link to our own substantial offerings on the subject. I feel the article now strikes a neutral tone, and have removed the controversial tag. Angio 18:51, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Good work, Angio. This article can now help inform readers who do not have a fixed position on "Rife" and come to Wikipedia for information, e.g. when they consider buying such a device or visiting a "Rife" clinic. Thanks. AvB ÷ talk 22:11, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
No no... now as then that vitriol was professional. Rife was a fraud and quack, and the devices using his name are pyramid sales efforts if not outright fraud, as well as quackery. The advice to anyone considering buying such a device - apart form the component value of it being on the order of £10 and an appropriate sale cost being around £20 therefore, should be clear on the basis and history of it. Attempts to make use of WP to provide apparent support for similar health frauds is noticeable and will increase. Midgley 13:00, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
If this entry is supposed to be in the style of an encyclopedia, then I suggest you remove the biased passages from it that have obviously been inserted by people who disbelieve the process. Because others have been unable to repeat an experiment does not necessarily invalidate the original findings.

NNDB

Anyone know if the NNDB can be considered a reliable source? It has some info on Rife not in the WP article. I think Midgley will like it. http://www.nndb.com/people/693/000098399/

uncited claims redacted.

I redacted this:-

[Current research has shown tiny precursors to stem cells in the blood, and it is possible that Rife's microscope may have been able to visualize these.]

If it had any sort of reference to it it might be possible to see why it was thoguht to be true. Midgley 12:29, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Agreed. Sneaky bastards! Angio 18:26, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Optical nanoscopes?

The reference to these interesting instruments was omitted by mistake perhaps?


I find it very intersting that so many people totally want to dismiss Rife off hand. During his time, he was considered a brilliant scientist and was wrote about at least twice on the front page of the san diego newspaper, and also appeared in the Smithsonian Institute's work, with a ten page writeup, not to mention numerous other articles.

The problem lies in the medical field adopting the wrong theory on diseases back in the late 1800's. What has now proven to be the correct theory(undisputably proven again, with a microscope(Ergonom 500) that is not even as powerful as rife's original microscope), was Antoine Bechamps "Pleomorphism" theory, and not Louis Pasteur's "Germ Theory". Until the medical profession is willing to admit it is wrong(and face it, they probably never will---imagine all the money they would lose between the Doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies---not to mention jobs...), and starts teaching the correct theory(those who claim its not true are either willingly ignoring undeniable proof, or intentionally remaining blissfully ignorant of reality), we will continue to persecute all those who claim the world is actually round, while flying in the face of modern day science which claims the world is flat. Sound familiar? Galileo so angered the world with his nonsensical drivel claiming the world was actually round, that he was nearly killed for making such a ridiculous claim. Well, what do you know...I hear recent photographs from outer space reveal that Galileo was right...oh I forgot--all that outerspace stuff is made up in a huge studio in Hollywood right? The same people who will try to make one believe that there have been no improvements made to the internal combustion engine that would allow a car to get more 20-25% efficiency are the same people who will tell you that Rife's research was nonsense. Oh yeah, btw, they just once again, invented an internal combustion engine that gets over 85% efficiency--this time it made the front page of yahoo news, but of course these people are just mistaken(kinda like the people back in the mid 1930's who origianlly developed a design almost identical to the oe they created). Of course, no automaker will ever put one of these in the car, even though they claim they want to increase fuel economy and hybrids, blah blah blah---if that were true, all the cars would use the diesel engine, which was originally developed to run on----no, not gas or oil----nope---not diesel fuel----peanut oil. Yes thats right. The diesel engine was made to work with peanut oil. Which might explain why anyone with a diesel engine these days can buy a retrofitting kit for about $400 and drive virtually for free by getting used oil from fast food restaurants. Oh, sorry---I am sure this must be a lie too---the big oil companies would never undermine the people trying to ruin their trillion dollar industry would they? Of course, they wouldnt give the politicians so much money that they turn a blind eye either would they? As gas continues to climb towards $4/gallon in the US, there have been engines that will get 100-150 miles a gallon around for 75 years that mysteriously have never made it into an automobile...wow how amazing---but i digress---back to the topic at hand.

I guess in the end no amount of factual evidence will ever get people to believe what they just dont want to believe. If you want to believe that medical science has the answers for everything, then go right ahead, but as we can see many times they just dont. Not because they dont want to, or even because they arent trying, but because they have been led down the wrong path their whole scientific life, starting from their first biology class all the way thru college and into their laboratories(I am well aware of the process---my mother has been in medical research for over 40 years). They often are very rigid and everything must fit into their view of the way things should be, which is based on the ideas they have been taught(the same ones that are wrong). As the next generation gets ready to go into the research field, they are inevitably taught by these same people, which explains why this perpetuates itself. It is funny how medical science claims that x-rays destroy cancer cells, while Rife's observations claim just the opposite---that x-rays actually not only don't kill these cells, they stimulate them to grow and cause other cells which were not cancerous to become cancerous. I also find it funny why noone talks about the congressional investigation into the FDA/AMA/ and the pharmaceutical companies that took place in the 1940's or 1950's after a Senators son was cured from "incurable" cancer by a "rogue" physician still ilegally using one of the original Rife machines. He was infuriated to think that it could been his son that died because of the unwanted cures that this machine provided people. The investigation ended and found that indeed, there was a coverup(which is so obvious it should not even have to be stated).

In closing, I would like to say what most people are talking about as a Rife machine or Rife frequency, is actually a Crane machine or Crane frequency. Rife's original frequencies from his lab notes started at 400,000 Hz and went to 13,000,000 Hz. Crane's frequencies are at 20 to 10,000 Hz, and Clark's Frequencies are from 80,000 to 800,000. For example, from Rife's original notes, the Bx Virus(the virus that was shown to cause cancer under Rife's microscopes) was destroyed at a frequency of 11,780,000 Hz, and not the 2180 that most machines call for(this is a Crane Frequency). This may be why some people claim his research is wrong, because 95% of the machines out there use the wrong frequencies. The frequencies Rife used ARE NOT AUDIBLE to the human ear. If a machine uses frequencies that are audible, then you can rest assured it is not a true Rife machine. In addition a lot of machines using the Crane frequencies are transmitted thru an electrode, while Rife utilized a phanotron plasma tube that needed no attachments, but would shoot the beam thru the air at the intended target(there have been many improvements made today in that area, as the antennas no longer discharge X-Rays as the phanotron tube did). Indeed, Rife was astounded to see that the wave passed thru everything and killed microbes thru walls, cabinets, etc... To those who wish to dismiss Rife's work, and now those who utilize the ergonom 500 who see exactly the same thing as Rife and support every one of his findings, go ahead. Just pray that you come to your senses when you get cancer and don't become another statistic of the pharmaceutical companies and FDA...

Sorry to tell you: optical microscopes cannot have a resolution better than around 300 nm, the reason is Abbe's law. Even your cited Ergonom 500 from Olbrich in Germany seems to have a resolution of around 250 nm (their own claims). Recent developments (confocal microscope, STED, 4pi) may reach under certain circumstances 50nm, but they have limitations. The picture of claimed HI-virus Olbrich's company show on their own webpages

  • [4], shows us that such a Olbrich-HI-virus (yellow particles) should be sized around 1µm (=1000 nm). This is nonsense, HI-virus is sized 100-120 µm. Bechamp, Enderlein and other pleomorphists-ideas have been disproved even before they were born. Serology and PCR show clearly that virus, bacteria and body cells have different DNA (some virus even only RNA). Redecke 13:17, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

The Ergonom microscopes claim to have a resolution of 100nm, not just 250nm. They backup their claim of 100nm resolution with images of a German test slide from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), an official German government institution for scientific testing *[5] as well as images from a Richardson Test Slide that proves at least 150nm resolution *[6]. Both slides are accepted standards for referencing optical resolution and scientifically confirm the 100nm optical resolution claims made for the Ergonom microscope.

You comment that the confocal microscope can reach 50nm in certain cases, yet do not cite this. The Ergonom microscope also clearly shows significantly better resolution than a confocal microscope on a test image of a computer chip *[7] while showing true colors in an image photographed on film in real time.

Further, the Ergonom microscope was also used to confirm the working principle of the Rife microscope's use of monochromatic light, as shown in their scientific film Symbiosis or Parasitism at the location starting at 33:55 *[8]. --LetsGetItRight (talk) 01:00, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

this description of him amounts to ...

"became known for his unsubstantiated claim of finding a 100% effective cure for terminal cancer by means of his "beam ray" device, which was supposed to work by methods which conflict with contemporary and subsequent scientific theories."

That is a long way of saying "fraud and quack". Midgley 09:58, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Most people will come away with that impression. But this is what we can source. Your version is WP:OR unless you have a source to which we can attribute the statement. This also applies to your revert to "unnecessarily complicated". As you know, we're not only looking at the limitations of optics, we're also looking at the limitations of WP:NPOV here. I don't like it either.
Do you think there's a chance that the true believers will allow us to apply WP:IAR? AvB ÷ talk 23:44, 24 January 2007 (UTC)


I am no expert on Rife, have done a little reading, have used a device once (and was very impressed) and have a general idea of his theories, ideas that I find profound. I think that the article as it now exists is badly biased against Rife. Since his work, if proven, would put the "Peer Reviewers" out of business it is surely needed to approach the subject from unconventional angles if a balanced article is to be provided. D.E.H. 208.238.205.131 13:35, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it is worth mentioning that the aforementioned "Peer Reviewers" are almost exclusively tenured faculty at various universities. That is, they cannot be fired except for egregious behavior (e.g., sleeping with their students). The idea that the reviewers want to prevent scientific realizations that challenge the status quo is a little unfounded. I think we should mention that some people swear by these things, but that the peer reviewed scientific literature cannot substantiate his claims. --Selket Talk 07:29, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

While I'm a proponent (and user) of these machines, I'm trying to simply edit this article into something encyclopedic, which strikes a balance between viewpoints and allows the reader to make up their own mind. As it stands, even after my edits this evening, this is not even close to NPOV. I agree much of the tech is unproven and likely unprovable. Anecdotally, it's been a tremendous boon for my family. Please note that I'm not editing to make the article a billboard for Rife, simply to remove the dripping venom. Fredsagirl 05:07, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Please note that this article was a compromise between true believers and skeptics. One could say that the venom is a conditio sine qua non - I have defended a friendlier approach in the past, and this is the balance we struck. FWIW, I'm a skeptic too, and I have seen Lyme disease patients spend a lot of money on "Rife" machines to no avail. I'm all for letting the reader decide. Please read previous discussions on this talk page. My IAR question to Midgley was a very real one and I'm now asking the newly arrived contributors to consider it. The problem is simple: we do not have sufficient sources to build a scientifically sound article. Mainstream science long ago debunked "radionics" and related nonsense and did not spend another minute on what is and remains impossible without changing the laws of nature. We can hardly cite any sources and should remain silent regarding the impossibilities. Yet, the WP:Consensus process has resulted in an article that does so anyway, in both directions (scientific criticism and popular belief) which constitutes WP:OR. As such, some WP:IAR tendencies are already visible here. My question is, basically: can we talk about this and rewrite the article, ignoring many rules where necessary, into an article we all think is encyclopedic, written from a neutral point of view, and - I hate to say this - as TRUE as we can make it?
Please forgive me if I'm rambling a bit, I haven't really thought this through, and others are very welcome to come up with their own ideas. The only alternative I see is to put the thing up for AfD. And the lack of good sources per WP:V, WP:RS, etc. will be a better argument for deletion than many editors here seem to think. AvB ÷ talk 14:15, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Not sure if AfD is apropos either. That's simply tossing up one's hands and admitting defeat. There are plenty of excellent and important articles here w/o superb sourcing. To continue to use radionics as the guidepost however, is a little misguided. I'm being called away; more later. Fredsagirl 15:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

We have many articles without sufficient sourcing that are nevertheless superb. But I doubt this applies to articles that cannot and will not be sufficiently sourced at some point in the future due to their being based on myths on partisan websites and the like. I mean it: if we throw out everything we can't source per our rules, there will be very little left. AvB ÷ talk 18:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Recent unnecessary reversions

I just made a series of edits to the language here in order to neutralize some of the obvious bias and bring the article more into standard.

Unfortunately they were reverted by a bot, as I'm clearly too new here to be trusted. Can someone please revert my edits?

Also, how long until I'm in the bot's good graces?

Thanks! Fredsagirl 03:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not conversant with the inner workings of this bot. You may find more info at User:VoABot_II or ask its operator, User:Voice_of_All.
However, as far as I can see, it only reverted you once (diff). AvB ÷ talk 13:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Quack

My concerns with the term quack is two fold. First, it is unencyclopedic. That is, the term inherently violates NPOV and is otherwise unprofessional. I doubt you will find anyone in Britanica called a "quack". Second, comments about Albert Abrams should go on Albert Abrams, not here. Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout#See_also seems to support this idea but is not explicit. Wp:npov#Let_the_facts_speak_for_themselves leaves no ambiguity about whether such labels are appropriate. -Selket Talk 16:36, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

"comments about Albert Abrams should go on Albert Abrams, not here." - why not?
"inherently violates NPOV" - how? Wikipedia is not Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wp:npov#Let_the_facts_speak_for_themselves - my favorite! How does this apply to someone who is a quack and a fraud, period? This guy was as much a fraud and a quack as Einstein was a physicist. His claim to fame and the sole reason why he's included in the encyclopedia is the fact that he was a fraud and a quack plus the fact that he fooled a lot of people, some of them even now. Very few people can be called a quack on well-sourced scientific grounds, but he is one of them. We can't say the same about Rife.
Will you be disputing the same language in the lead of the Albert Abrams article? How about Charlatan and Electrical quackery?
Thanks, AvB ÷ talk 17:08, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I doubt you will find anyone in Britanica called a "quack".
True. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, however: "Brodum, William (fl. 1767–1824), quack ... Case, John (c.1660–1700), astrologer and quack ... Paul Chamberlen 1635–1717, born on 22 October 1635, was a quack doctor ... Crippen, Hawley Harvey (1862–1910) ... his professional life as a quack dealing in patent medicines ... Donald, Adam [called the Prophet of Bethelnie] (1703–1780), spiritualist ... also acted as a quack physician ... Graham, James (1745–1794), quack ... unbalanced woman-hating American quack, Francis Tumblety c.1833–1903 ... the German quack uroscopist Theodor Myersbach ... Long, John St John (1798–1834), quack and painter ..." Tearlach 18:20, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Tearlach, very well, I concede that point but reply that, as AvB points out, "Wikipedia is not Encyclopedia Britannica." The difference between quack and physicist is that if Einstein were here, he would almost certainly not contest the idea that he was a physicist. Whereas, if Rife were here, he would almost certainly contest that he was a quack. I would encourage you to go read the Wp:npov#Let_the_facts_speak_for_themselves link. We should be in the habit of stating facts, not our own conclusions to comply with WP:OR and WP:NPOV. If Quackwatch calls him a quack, say "Quackwatch calls him a 'quack'." Say that he was convicted of selling unapproved medical devices. Say that no peer-reviewed research has been able to substantiate his claims. The analogy is that the Hitler article should say, "Hitler oversaw the systematic murder of 6,000,000 civilians" not "Hitler was a very bad man." I think the first not only satisfies WP:NPOV, but makes for a more powerful statement. --Selket Talk 19:24, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
That would be a good point if we were talking about Rife. But this is about Abrams. As a matter of fact I have consistently removed the word "quack" from the Rife article. AvB ÷ talk 19:49, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
So, post the critcism on his page and take it up with the people there --Selket Talk 19:54, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Another non sequitur. The Abrams article is fine in this respect. AvB ÷ talk 20:35, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
You still haven't answered my questions. In addition, Tearlach has shown that Wikipedia is not the only reference work qualifying proven quacks and frauds like Abrams as such, which you have conceded. I consider the actual dispute here (see links above) of minor importance, but your reasoning seems to follow from a faulty understanding of NPOV. That's why I think it would be important for you to either give an explanation, or concede the point that (the use of) "quack" is not inherently violating NPOV, unencyclopedic or unprofessional. Thanks, AvB ÷ talk 11:15, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Revert of lead: no consensus

I reverted (diff) an edit (diff) that did not provide any reason besides the assertion that it "cleaned up a biased intro". In my edit summary I asked for consensus and discussion on the talk page. Selket then reverted (diff) my reversion providing no other reason than "for NPOV" and without discussion on the talk page. This is not the way to reach a WP:Consensus. Please revert back and discuss here. AvB ÷ talk 18:06, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The edit was made because Rife's machines are not alleged to work by controverting established theory, but by a means which I explained. The sentence was poorly grammatically constructed and misleading. If a sentence promises to describe how something works, it should then describe how it works, not leap immediately to criticism. Also, the liberal use of words such as "purportedly," "unsubstantiated," and so on serve the same function as "ironic" quote marks - it allows the author to take a POV (in controvention of WP standards) without explicitly taking one. It's an old editorializing trick employed by "purportedly" neutral newspaper writers. Fredsagirl 19:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Please do not act as if I have written this article. There is no need to lecture me on writing (or reading for that matter). You seem unaware of the finer points of cooperative writing on Wikipedia. The crazy thing is, when I first edited this article, I tried to make it more neutral in much the same way you're doing. Yet now I'm defending the current status quo (i.e. the one before your edits) simply because I know what will happen if I don't. The article will end up worse than it was, or be deleted. AvB ÷ talk 19:41, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm sure it was not your intention, but as I read your posting I can't help but think some people would think you were implying I was acting in bad faith. I just want to point out that I had posted discussion on the talk page (see above) almost two hours before your posting. --Selket Talk 19:56, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
You're right, I thought (and think) you were editing in good faith and did not want to imply otherwise. However, and I hate to point this out, while you did post discussion, it was not about the reversion I am defending in this section (linked above). You only discussed the second reversion in the same edit (regarding quack and fraud Albert Abrams). I stand by what I have written: a simple observation of fact and a comment primarily intended for Fredsagirl as a new editor. I did not imply a specific reason why you did not discuss the reversion. In fact, the point is still outstanding since you, unlike Fredsagirl, still haven't given any other reason for the reversion than "for NPOV" which is much too vague and could easily be reverted back with the same reason, in essence creating an edit war which I have prevented by insisting on discussion (and practising 1RR as usual for me). But you don't have to comment; I accept Fredsagirl's reasoning regarding the lead. However, I'm not so sure certain other regulars here will accept what now is a consensus between the three of us. Time will tell. AvB ÷ talk 14:07, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

AvB, Nowhere did I contend or imply that you wrote the article. I wasn't lecturing you, I was defending my edit. Fredsagirl 20:35, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Please stop gutting the article

User:Fredsagirl, please stop inserting your partisan minority POV into this article. You actually removed information from Quackwatch because "Quackwatch is not peer reviewed": If we are going to apply such self-created rules, please note that the article as you have rendered it now has NO peer reviewed sources whatsoever and should be put up for AfD. I have no time to do much about this but I'll be back later. AvB ÷ talk 18:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

PS I've just reverted two of your edits. More later. AvB ÷ talk 18:30, 21 February 2007 (UTC)


AVB, I did no such thing. I restructured the quackwatch ref because it was in the same sentence, and followed, the phrase "peer-reviewed." I did not "remove it", as you assert. I cleaned up a sentence which was incoherent. The sentence was poorly constructed and implied that quackwatch is peer reviewed, which in fact, it is not. Quackwatch has a place in this article, and I have most clearly not "gutted" the article. I am attempting to bring it into NPOV. I was appalled upon my initial read at how sloppy and one-sided the existing article was. I do not want the controversy "whitewashed," as you imply, but am attempting to bring balance to the subject. I'm paid to read critically, as an attorney, and small words can bias an article. I removed no peer-removed sources, so the presence or lack thereof was not of my doing. It is my opinion that quackwatch is now in an appropriate place. If you would please take the time to re-read the edit I made, you'll find that information was added, while subtle editorializing was removed.
Further, just because a POV is minority does not make it de facto invalid. Just because your viewpoint may or may not be in the majority does not make it de facto valid, either.Fredsagirl 18:56, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I think it is worth noting that while Quackwatch is not peer reviewed, the American Cancer Society study they cite is. I'll add a reference when I track it down again. I'm not sure who it was that keeps putting medical device fraud back into the article unsourced. I'm sure this was a good faith edit and the phrase medical device fraud probably quite accurately describes the conduct of the "practitioners". If you have a source for this please include it, otherwise leave the phrase medical device fraud out (See Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden_of_evidence). I think it is unlikely that you will be able to find such a reference, however, as the crime medical device fraud does not appear in the United States Code and googling for the phrase -- in quotes -- returns only six links, none of them related. --Selket Talk 19:10, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
It's in the source. I wouldn't know if it should be in the article, but as a RC patroller hereabouts I do know that extensive changes without clarification or discussion are suspect. AvB ÷ talk 19:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Again, while the DFA doc mentions them being charged with MDF, the convictions were or a different nature. MDF is not a statutory violation, but a colorful turn of phrase by a prosecutor. Fredsagirl 19:13, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it's further worth noting here, that in spite of my perspective being noted as being in the "partisan minority," the net is full of newsgroups and boards populated by people who, with nothing to gain, happily discuss their cures from Lymes and other pernicious ailments using Rife instrumentation. Granted, this is all anecdotal, and this stuff will likely never be peer-reviewed. However, the mere presence of so many enthusiasts with no personal horse in the race is indicative that there's more here than meets our eye. Fredsagirl 19:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

<edit conflict> :If I've misread anything amidst the miriad of changes I apologize. But I still view your activities as gutting the article. It is quite possible I and other users here would agree with some of your edits, but you still have to discuss such extensive changes and reach a consensus on the talk page. Instead, you have once again not honored my request for discussion on the talk page, in blatant disregard of our rules. Currently you are operating a single-purpose account clearly intended to infuse the article with a pro-Rife (whatever that may mean) viewpoint while ignoring information from other editors.

On Wikipedia it doesn't really matter what you do for a living. This is a collaborative project where consensus and sources are the main ingredients.
Please read up on our rules. It is clear you have no idea how Wikipedia works. You may also want to read the talk archive above before making inferences about my beliefs.
I was not arguing that you removed the article's single peer-reviewed source, just that editors who insist on sources for this article being peer reviewed will end up without an article. AvB ÷ talk 19:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)


You are flinging unsubstantiated allegations as fast as you can type, my friend:

1. My account is not "single purpose." This is my first foray into WP, and I thought it might be useful to help refine my skills by shaping an article on something with which I'm familiar, and which is in dire need of shaping. I'd be willing to bet that when your account was new, you only appeared on a few articles as well. Were you then operating a "single purpose" account? This amounts to character assassination on your part, and I don't appreciate it one iota. You'll note that I'm not only leaving criticism intact, but in some cases, making it clearer. As it still stands, the article is rife (no pun intended) with subtle bias and undercurrents, which need to be leveled, in order to bring this article into compliance with the WP standards as I understand them. Please re-read my edits. You'll note a significant about of things removed and clarified, and very few "pro" things added. You are misreading my intentions and making incorrect inferences, simply because I disagree with you.

2. I did not remove the cite. I merely made it coherent and not misleading. The source is still there.

3. I did read the rules. Over and over again. Particularly the parts about "be bold!" You appear to be getting prickly because a favorite shibboleth of yours is being deconstructed a wee bit. I'm sorry, but balance was necessary. I am reading this exhaustive talk archive as I have time between hearings. Do you truly mean I need to obtain consensus before repairing mangled syntax and misleading statements? I doubt it. I apologize for duping a cite. But not for much else I've done here. This article is a long way from ready for prime-time. Fredsagirl 19:36, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You seem to have missed the part about reaching consensus on the talk page. AvB ÷ talk 19:44, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Re shibboleth: nonsense, and you would have known it if you had read the discussion above instead of typing an incredible number of words I will never be able to keep up with (and not because I can't type fast, my friend). AvB ÷ talk 19:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

AvB, I'm sorry if I'm stepping on toes. My read of the consensus page included a flowchart which essentially says to make the changes, then reach consensus on them. Not to reach consensus on each change prior to making it. Please correct me if I'm wrong. And please accept my apology if anything I'm writing reads as a personal attack. I don't mean it that way. I'm trained to express and defend my position strongly.Fredsagirl 21:16, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

No, I don't even know if I have any toes left after some 4,000 edits here. The idea is to edit until challenged, then discuss, reach consensus and/or compromise. As an alternative you could do edit-revert-adapt cycles but that's asking for trouble on controversial articles. What you have interpreted as my shibboleth was actually a somewhat trigger-happy version of what many editors do when someone seems to ignore their challenges and continues to make extensive changes to the article - apparently without realising it is already a compromise and a work in progress being developed by many editors. I admit I was a bit trigger-happy though; I've been seeing too much conflict here on Wikipedia lately (not even involving myself, I'm following an ArbCom case that doesn't make me feel any happier). All I wanted was to engage you on the talk page. I think you're there now :-)
An inherent part of "being bold" Wikipedia style is to be prepared to see one's edits changed, disputed or reverted. The general idea is to discuss disputed changes on the talk page. This prevents edit wars and allows editors who are not experts to work together and still create good articles. Problem areas are articles on controversial subjects; such articles take more time to mature.
You express your position clearly and defend it strongly. That is a good thing in my book. But there's one thing you will not like about Wikipedia, and that's the fact that its rules are enforced by editor consensus. Stalemates are solved via WP:DR, but it can be time-consuming.
So, no hard feelings? I'll review your edits later on and comment (and hopefully apologize regarding "gutting") here on the talk page if necessary. AvB ÷ talk 00:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Hard feelings? I live in an adversarial system, and don't take anything personally. No, no hard feelings. Fredsagirl 05:06, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Medical device fraud

Ok, I found it on the FDA site. The phrase is not "medical device fraud", it's "device health fraud". The relevant section follows:

In a felony prosecution for device health fraud, the three men--LER's top distributors--were convicted and sentenced in 1993, 1994 and 1995, for selling unapproved medical devices and drugs.

— FDA, [9]

My reading of his is that the conviction was for selling unapproved (i.e., misbranded) medical devices in violation of 21 U.S.C. 331(a) and that use of the term "device health fraud" is dicta. Anyone agree? --Selket Talk 19:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Even less than dicta; it sounds like a reporter made it up. But note that interpretations by Wikipedia editors arë not allowed per WP:NOR. AvB ÷ talk 20:05, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
No reporter involved. These are, by my read, FDA and courts docs. Again, while the prosecution was for device health fraud, and other counts, the convictions were statutory and not for "device health fraud." Sorry all, I was trying to edit for accuracy. Fredsagirl 20:38, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, Dixie Farley (who "compiled" the quoted Unproven Medical Claims Land Men in Prison) is an FDA staff writer. In some instances she uses newspaper articles as a source. What I was trying to say is that it was probably phrased by Farley or a newspaper. We don't know that it's dicta, it could be even less important. Nevertheless, the best way to quote this on Wikipedia would not be to rephrase it (as had been done in the article) but to make it a direct quote. AvB ÷ talk 23:19, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, my rewrite was from an appellate court decision, not re-written. I'll look for the appellate court cite Thurs or Fri; I'll be traveling 'till then. Fredsagirl 23:31, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Pseudoscience link

I've removed the Pseudoscience link under "See Also". It's pretty blatantly POV, as it indicates to the reader that Wikipedia classifies Rife's work under that heading.

I only recently began reading about Rife, but it's clear already that the man's grasp of optical microscopy and the building from scratch of complex machines involving then-state-of-the-art circuitry and vacuum tube usage puts him onto a level on which the Pseudoscience moniker must be shown, not assumed. For a very reasonable treatment of the questions involved, please see http://www.xenophilia.com/zb/zb0012.htm ... I'm quite far from being a defender of "alternative" medicine and such-like, yet I believe it's quite unscientific to deny claims out-of-hand because some self-appointed "experts" have declared such-and-such "quackery" simply on their own authority and without providing real, thorough debunking. Sadly, because of these practices, there is a growing need for a quackwatch-watch.org... Anyone feeling up to the task? JDG 17:12, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Assume for the sake of arguing that hist "grasp of optical microscopy" included inventing results that violate other well established laws of physics and that nobody else has been able to reproduce. What type of reference would you requirer before including the pseudoscience category? --Selket Talk 17:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
I would need to see a good source documenting that Rife in fact "invented results", and a source that did not simply pontificate about the "Abbe limit" without considering Rife's approach to it, which involved an angled transmission of UV light onto the specimen target, while all the Abbe talk assumed the straight-on light sources of conventional microscopes. JDG 17:52, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
I have to agree w/JDG. I think the psuedoscience tag violates NPOV in spirit and in letter. With proper citation, I'd support it. Otherwise, the article is biased from "go." Fredsagirl 20:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I would encourage you (both, now) to read Pseudoscience as it does not in any way require inventing results -- only lack of repeatability and a gross departure from the Scientific consensus. The American Cancer Society article referenced in the Quackwatch reference does a pretty good survey of the lack of repeatability. --Selket Talk 20:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Note also that the article does not make any assertion of whether or not his work is pseudoscience. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Selket (talk • contribs) 20:09, 26 February 2007 (UTC).

Ah, but by including the tag, we imply it's pseudoscience. After all, if it's not pseudoscience, why would WP link it that way? Fredsagirl 20:23, 26 February 2007 (UTC) I would also argue that the cite I just posted to Milbank's results demonstrates repeatability. Fredsagirl 20:24, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I wanted to add that although a bare "See Also" Pseudoscience link is a bit much as applied to Rife himself, the article could probably stand more material describing how all kinds of frauds and fakes have used Rife's work (or more exactly their misrepresentations of his work) as backing for their scams. JDG 16:28, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd agree, except that so far, the only frauds I can find have been covered relatively well; the people who have been tried for making unsubstantiated claims for the technology. Who has misrepresented the work, in a way we can verify? Fredsagirl 21:49, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Unsubstantiated claim

I removed the uncited claims about Milbank removing the eye of a patient who relapsed, and added a cite to a study by Milbank indicating kill of typhoid.Fredsagirl 20:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I think if you take out this claim, you need to take out all of the claims that he cured cancer as well. --Selket Talk 21:26, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I removed the claim because I couldn't locate a cite for it, and the tag requesting one has been there for quite some time. Read also the numerous cites I added today. IMHO, this is retaining NPOV. Not claiming that he cured cancer, but claiming that HE CLAIMED to cure cancer. Those claims are citeable. Big difference Fredsagirl 22:03, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Abrams

I removed the Abrams link. After reading it, I can't justify the linkage. Abrams was an outright fraud. His machine claimed to diagnose disease, while Rife's machine claims to treat. Rife's other machine is a microscope. No evidence indicates that either man knew the other, or that Rife based any of his thinking upon Abram's.

I think this is enough of a distinction to remove the link. Retaining it only serves to imply fraud on Rife's part via guilt by association, which none of the editors has provided a cite for. Fredsagirl 21:15, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

They were close in time and space; the claim of study or degrees at Heidelberg was applied to each, without truth in either case; their quackery involved assertions about resonance. Those are the links. Midgley 23:50, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Other Devices Using Rife's Name

The section cites a newspaper article in Australia re: $15. Upon inspection, the Australian article covers a wide range of quack people selling and self-medicating using various equipment, only one of many in the article involved a $15 Abrams-like device. The Personal Electro Therapy or PET machine costing more than Aus$1200 used by one man supposedly put his existing cancer into complete remission, but then sometime later somehow cancer returned "with a vengeance" to a number of other places in the man's body.

As a possible explanation for this, the "Beck Protocol" speculates that some bodily tissues can host dormant pathogens for some time (up to 5 years), enabling the pathogens to re-infect the patient at some later time, and so the "Beck Protocol" addresses this with some kind of microsecond magnetic pulse treatment that is supposed to induce micro-currents of electricity in these tissues in hopes of eliminating the dormant pathogens. While certainly a pulsed magnetic field will induce currents into a metal conductor, I slightly doubt that anyone can be certain that any such currents would be generated deeply in live tissues whose electrical conducting properties are uncertain. See blood electrification. Oldspammer 11:01, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I just re-read some Rife statements. (http://www.rife.org/rifelab/alliedreportfull.html 9 th paragraph) Rife said that he had induced cancer to form by just providing chemical toxins and radicals. Rife knew at that time that BX and similar microbial pathogens were indirect causes of cancer. Oldspammer 17:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

So, another explanation for the man mentioned above's cancer relapse might be that according to Rife, micro-organisms are only causally linked to cancer, (an indirect cause). Should a cancer patient's organs be unable to cope with the leftover toxins and radicals, the patient will ultimately succumb to the illness. Someone (perhaps in describing treatments with a "Doug" machine) wrote somewhere else that if treatment halts illness in one area, illness can often reappear in the next-most likely part of the body to be invaded either by the toxins / radicals or by suitable form-transitioned instance of a microorganism. Some alternative medicine people have a theory that certain toxins attract certain micro-organisms? Who knows? Oldspammer 02:50, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

PET machine used in Rife scientific clinical trial on Arthritis. http://www.rife.de/preface.html Oldspammer 11:10, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Cancer Journal cited by Quackwatch Flawed

I have read a cancer journal where the author(s) state that radio frequency devices such as Rife's 50 to 500 Watt ray beam setup had insufficient energy to inactivate or kill any microorganisms based solely on "examining descriptions" of Rife's machines, but not by trying it in any experiments. Even if they were to experiment, it all comes back to the ability to actually witness the affect such a device has on live organisms. Some videos are available on the internet do show paramecium swimming around, then start spinning around out of control, and then finally rupturing their guts out were supposedly subjected to square wave contact-based form of electrotherapy, but there is no step-by-step demonstration of the apparatus, nor a split screen view of the apparatus being switched on so that any video shows the direct cause as to why the paramecium behave in this way or from what they are eventually killed. Also, in order to see this happen on live viruses, you would need something that supposedly duplicates the functionality of the Rife Universal Microscope; but that equipment now would cost about $1 to $2 million to build supposedly because of the quartz optics. Oldspammer 02:50, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Also, in the external links "Rife devices National Council Against Health Fraud" by William T. Jarvis, Ph.D. has virtually identical wording to the 1994 CA Cancer Journal for Clinicians, i.e., it does not provide any evidence to support its statement that RF energy is not powerful enough to destroy microbes. Yet, there are the John Bedini video clips of experiments using Rife-Hoyland Beam Ray tubes on Bedini's web site showing quite the opposite for even larger single celled microorgansims. The article also says that the Barry Lynes book "The Cancer Cure That Worked, Fifty Years of Suppression" would require an army of investigators to check--well, welcome to the Internet, dude! We're your army... The author also states "Rife is said to have claimed having a Ph.D. from Georgia tech," (no citation given!) but Google search reveals that mention of "Georga Tech" +"Royal Rife" appear only in articles critical of Rife, and no OCR'd web content seems to have Rife himself making these claims. I have not encountered video or audio files that have this supposed claim by Rife either. Oldspammer 04:24, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:RoyalRife.jpg

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Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot 10:32, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Clearly written by someone who doesn't understand what they write about

I do not think that an article about which the above would be generally said by those who do understand what is being written about should be found in an encyclopaedia. This is such an article, at present. Midgley 09:55, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

It is. Content creep in optima forma resulting in a mix of quackery, real-world OR, WP editors' promotion of quackery, and NPOV efforts. A fine example of undue weight and other policy violations, missing WP's remit by 180 degrees. What can we say about the majority (scientific) POV and the minority POV (Rife tech works, or can work) based on reliable sources? What can we say about quackery under the Rife name? Can the article be rescued? I'm one of those who wanted to save it, preferring to inform our readers about the facts. But no information is better than what's there now I'm afraid. AvB ÷ talk 14:00, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
When dealing with quacks and quackery being promoted in articles that violate NPOV so grossly, a solution may be what happened to the David R. Hawkins article. I don't know the background and was surprised to discover that it was pretty much gone. It was a one-man show with ownership, OR and promotion written all over it. -- Fyslee/talk 16:21, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Google search as references

Hit results from Google are not considered reliable sources and should not be used as citations. Searching Google is fine for researching material in an article, but you need to take that research a step further and cite to a website found in the google search, not the search itself. I have globally removed all Google search results used as citations and replaced them with citation requests. Blueboar 16:02, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Reverted Edit Done by IP user

NMR - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is not nonsense.

This method is in scientific use today. Chemical nuclei are induced via Radio Frequency (RF) electromagnetic transducer to vibrate, and the echoed return signal is used to determine the chemical constituents of the sample under analysis.

On every single web page that attempts to discredit Rife's work, no mention is ever made that individual chemical constituents of a sample have a resonant frequency (either absorption or emission). In fact these sites always popularize the view that the entire microbe resonated--that is utter nonsense.

A PHYSICIST'S VIEW - Gary Wade PhD. indicates that usually viruses are coated with a protein and that the protein structure under resonance conditions will disintegrate:

The Rife frequency instrument when set to the frequency which corresponds to the most stressful oscillation mode for the virus of interest, as illustrated in Figure 8B, will destroy that virus capsid coat and therefore destroy the virus.

Since it is the protein that is disrupted, and not the entire microbe, the resonance must be happening to the chemical bonds. In NMR analysis, the bonds and neuclei are what is induced to vibrate.

The opera / human singer shattering a wine glass is always mentioned on these sites discrediting Rife--but this analogy is still correct and should stay. The article on wiki has always had mention of this even before I did any edits.

If required, I can practically cut and paste this discussion into the article text. Oldspammer 05:07, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Lousy refs and links

I have done some clean-up and deleted a number of commercial links and small non-RS sites. The references are problematic as they include references to non-RS sites and forums. Please read WP:RS and WP:EL very carefully before adding more links of any kind. -- Fyslee/talk 10:30, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

I think it needs even more stringent work. Reliability is one issue, rife.org being a non peer-reviewed partisan source. Even when it offers material that's authentic primary source, there are a bundle of problems. Is what it offers representative, or a scrapbook of pro-Rife material? Is it being selected fairly, or being used to synthesise an original argument? A number of these sources - http://users.navi.net/~rsc/, http://educate-yourself.org/, http://www.dfe.net/index.html, http://www.icehouse.net/john34/rife.html, http://www.jimfurey.com/ - are just personal websites, and are completely unacceptable as RS.
Also, looking at it fresh, large chunks of the current article are polemical and POV. For instance, the "Pseudoscience claims" section is blatantly pushing an argument explaining away Rife's non-acceptance. While the information in it about medical practice may well be true piece-by-piece, it's assembled in a manner in breach of WP:NOR#Synthesis of published material serving to advance a position. 81.132.105.6 16:53, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes, this article is a complete mess and an embarassment to Wikipedia. I removed an unsourced claim against Dr. Morris Fishbein which was clearly libelous (unless a source is provided. "citation needed" is not a blank check to say anything with.) Unsigned edit by SeaAndSand (Talk|contribs) 13:06, 23 July 2007
This article in its current state is indeed appalling. You can't libel the dead though, can you? Midgley 11:45, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Article Critique

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/this_is_why_you_should_never_s_1.php —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.74.76.178 (talk • contribs)

DELETE THIS ARTICLE:
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/07/this_is_why_you_should_never_s_1.php
Townblight 19:27, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
The Critique author cannot read properly? The WP article on Rife never says that RF did anything to cancer cells 'directly.' Why is he claiming so?
The so called BX and BY cancer viruses had invaded the cancer cells and the RF was acting upon the viruses.
It could be that this technology is too complicated for him?
Unfiltered heterodyning up twice, then down twice--is it impossible for Rife to have elicited the florescence that Critique author mentions by Rife using his staining with light concept?
Critique author 'could' be acting like a caveman who has the theory of the operation of television told to him by a child. The child knows TV works, but just cannot explain it in terms that skeptical caveman will accept. Is TV magic? No, but it might seem like the child is telling him that.
MRI is different than NMR spectroscopy using pulsed Earth's field NMR chemical analysis. Look it up Critique author! One uses a static powerful magnetic field the other does not.
Again, no scientific experimental data is used to back Critique author's claims that the Rife technology could not work. If Rife was a quack, then all of the M.D.s, scientists, and news paper reporters that Rife was involved with must have been fools when they looked through his microscopes and saw first hand what they had reported?
How are the modern day videos of microbe destruction explained away--ahh, trickery also? Each done by different tricksters?
Critique author's own blog commentators even say that their post-Lyme disease chronic suffering is reduced by the technology. And those comments are just waived away--right?
I do not have the explanation or the evidence, so I think that further exploration should be undertaken to determine the facts about all of these Rife claims--maybe the guy was screwed the way the article claims? I don't know.
Why not investigate the claims? Some feel it is better to suppress any interest in this stuff than have it gain any momentum? Oldspammer 02:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

what OR and NPOV mean

They mean, in short that it is not the job of these article to prove or disprove his claims, but to present in appropriate fashion the evidence. The scientific evidence needs RSs. The validity of the theory cannot be shown by old and discredited sources, but they can of course be used to show the importance at the time.

As a personal observation on one corner of this, a UV microscope is certainly possible, and it would have an improved resolution, and would be capable of visualizing some viruses. A number of working ones were constructed in the 30s and 40s and described by the standard books on microscopy. There were refracting ones with quartz optics, & reflecting ones which weren't limited by the transmission of glass. This might well go in a separate article. This of course became a less important approach after the invention of the electron microscope.

DGG (talk) 22:25, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

This page is a MESS.

This page is an absolute mess. Since fixing it would require a far-ranging revert, I've requested a revert and full protection from admin. --Angio 20:09, 3 August 2007 (UTC)


I've done a huge trim-down. It gets it... sort of verifiable, and kind of NPOV... Needs a lot more work, but it should be a bit easier now. Adam Cuerden talk 05:57, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
I've finished Phase I of fixing this article, which is cutting out all of the material that is supported by obviously unacceptable sources. Phase II will be turning it into a proper biography article. As it is, it is still an ugly patchwork of potential POV and OR problems and irrelevant information. I would encourage those who support Rife to look for direct, reputable sources, not a link to a pro-Rife website with a note saying "Buy these CDs, then go to 17:04 and listen for the word 'chartreuse.'" Also, this being a biographical article, the consensus version should be free of pro- and anti-Rife polemic, merely attempting to describe the man's life without taking a stand on the validity of his work. --Angio 18:23, 7 August 2007 (UTC)


I don't think that selling the set of audio enhanced / filtered CDs is going to make anybody as rich as Bill Gates. It is not as though they are a multi-product, large capitalized company with shares on NASDAQ or NYSE whose end product is a must-have item that everybody is salivating to buy. They may not even be selling enough CDs to run a big operation, so may only be doing this on a cost recovery, one-off basis? Are not the CDs roughly like copies of an unedited historical (book) document(s)? They are supposed to be recordings made by John Marsh in the 1950s or so of some of the witnesses to history?


It is not obvious to me that what you consider 'unacceptable' is necessarily unreliable sources. It is extremely foolish to think that so called "suppressed information" will be wide-spread, plentiful, and provided by 'the establishment.'


Suppose for example, that X-Rays were "taboo." Suppose that the inventor was rendered penniless, that no scientific discussion was available, that machines that produced x-rays worked, but were forbidden, and that people making semi-reliable home-made experimental x-ray machines were forbidden to say what the machines did or anything about the modality of their operation. Do you follow me so far? Maybe experimental research on x-rays would find the scientist de-funded, degree in science revoked, and chastised / shunned as being a delusional person, never to have a science job again. Then nobody who wants to keep their science job is going to promote x-rays, or experimenting with such machines. Suppose also that a substantially more costly and dangerous alternative means of accomplishing the work of x-rays had been developed, and that a multi-billion dollar set of industries, and enforced laws were on its side. There would be no money available for funding experiments with x-rays. The government would rather choose to side with an industry who employs millions of people and holds the invested equity of millions of its citizens, than investigate x-rays that might jeopardize all of this wealth on the say so of a few experimental, home-made x-ray machine manufacturers and scientists who dare go against the doctrine of their profession. Still with me? The biography of the inventor of x-rays and x-ray machines would be lacking without some mention of the "taboo subject," mention that "x-rays actually work," "produced the actual claimed results," and how the person came across the discovery--otherwise, why would this inventor be noteworthy?


In WP the arguments can be described. For example, anti-Rife believe X, and Y, but pro-Rife identify that X has counter example A & B, and similarly, so Y has counter example C & D, still permitting Rife to be possible. Seems to me that anti-Rife X and Y are still featured prominently in the article, but A, B, C and D have been either deleted or watered down completely. The source of A might be RS, but B, C, and D might come from ("x-ray") experimenters who have invested some time and effort and high amount of risk into the endeavor. It would not surprise me that for the WP reader to know about B, C, and D that such web sites have to be cited since no one else will be knowledgeable, willing or foolish enough to mention any of it.


It would be a polemic article if there were "strong evidence against" the possibility that Rife equipment could work at all, or that Rife's findings were completely untrue, or unsupported by anyone. However, human cancer viruses have been known to exist for a number of years, other scientists theorized about what he reported about pleomorphism, other scientists have subsequently duplicated some of his observations about pleomorphism, and some have duplicated his treatment work. Arguments against that say "there is insufficient energy levels to have any effects" are refuted by recent (referenced and cited) scientific and medical advances. Arguments against pleomorphic forms of pathogens are theoretical with no supporting scientific experimental results. Microscope arguments are similar: spherical aberration countered by parabolic lenses, diffraction limit countered by UV plus light-staining / heterodyning / dark field / florescence / luminescence. But the point and counter point argument descriptions are gone now. Now only anti-Rife seems to remain.


I do not see anything wrong with citing legitimate historical documentation and providing someone with a searchable bit of text to wet the appetite. If anything, these documents are more honest than many carefully edited accounts of history written by third parties (whose motives and biases are unknown).


It is possible to find these recordings for free on the Internet elsewhere if you know how to look for it. That the text is also available, albeit at a site that directs the web visitor to purchase the audio recordings (possibly through a third party), so be it. Oldspammer 02:06, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
As far as "wet"ting the appetite, it's a nice thought, but that's not how we do things here at Wikipedia. If the article cited really supports the claim, the user should be able to find it fairly easily for him or herself. But that's a formatting issue. The real problem is that most of your citations are to unsuitable sources.
I don't care who produces the recordings, or how rich they will become by selling them. The question is, have you, yourself, listened to them? And do they constitute an acceptable source? If the recordings can be found for free on the Internet, then link to the recordings in the citation, instead of to a web page that asks me to BUY the CDs. Or download the recordings, host them on your web site, and link to that. Even then, we might have problems verifying that the recordings are legit, and they probably don't meet Wikipedia's standards for verifiability, but without having the recordings themselves, it's really no different from a rumor. You seem to be confused about what constitutes an acceptable source. Read the Wikipedia policy on verifiability of sources, WP:V.
Look, man. You can go on and on about your "suppressed information" and "establishment" and your conspiracy theories as long as you like. And I will continue removing such nonsense from pages, because it violates WP:V and as such, doesn't belong here. The burden of proof is on you, not me, to show that your information is reliable. As it is, all of your supposedly strong proof for the functioning of the Rife device comes from completely unsuitable sources, and there is apparently no confirmation from reliable, third-party sources. This should tell you something. Come back when you have properly-sourced, verifiable, non-OR information. --Angio 04:14, 11 August 2007 (UTC)


Looks pretty good. Adam Cuerden talk 02:49, 8 August 2007 (UTC)


NPOV means "providing all points of view" and letting the reader judge the case for themselves what they want to believe. What deletionist 'contributors' have done is excise large portions of the article so that the article POV lacks lots of the well-sourced information that some people would like to suppress for occult reasons. What is left? "Quackwatch reference" that links the flawed ACS article (the QW reference does not support the "unscientific" claim made in the article text--it rambles on about a radionics device for the feet and its operator using Rife reference literature to sell the treatment), the "More information" section of the current Rife article implies that Rife was a Quack, used unscientific methods, and "all Rife's results" conflict with that of modern science. This is strictly anti-Rife POV. None of these anti-Rife items qualifies themselves as theories, claims, opinions or beliefs, but rather as facts--which they certainly are not.


What would happen if a book were used. A book is a RS? Barry Lynes book could be used. Each item used in the article might be cited to a specific page in the book. Why would this book not be RS? Well, hmmm, I'd be interested in that answer.


The book itself is nicely sourced with lots of footnotes, and references that can be checked too. Many of the referenced web pages whose references that were claimed to be not RSs are probably paraphrasing the Lynes' book or original / historical documentation archived by www.rife.org . It is not my fault that the ACS article upon so much weight is placed by the anti-Rife faction is weak, has no authors given, no author credentials provided, is not based on scientific experimental data, nor provides any laws of physics or biology, nor even cites any known theories to support its claims that insufficient power levels were used by original Rife equipment that would render it impossible for the Rife equipment to have worked in the ways described.


Wait a minute--the book was used to reference some things, but that / those part(s) was / were all deleted! Oldspammer 02:06, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
The burden of proof is on you, not me, to prove that the Rife device worked. Aside from the fact that such arguments do not really belong on a biographical page, if you suggest to me that a device existed which could cure cancer, or that the unifying theory of microbiology for the last 150 years is wrong, you had better be able find some good support for it, and it had better be verifiable. If you read WP:V, you will see why that particular book is not an acceptable source. And for what it's worth, I have no objections to your removing the Quackwatch bits if that is your desire. I might even do it myself, since I have my doubts about its worthiness as a source. --Angio 04:23, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Now the Rife article certainly looks a mess because what was the "Cancer cure claims" section no longer mentions _anything_ about cancer--in fact another disease, TB, is prominent. What an editing job? The detailed description of the microscope is gone. The well-sourced pro-Rife information about the successful 1934-cancer treatment trial is gone. No mention on the modality of disease treatment remains--why is that part gone? It looks like anything that the "negative Rife POV" faction did not want in the article is gone with the excuse that the sources were "bad" or pro-POV for Rife. WP:RS is a guideline. That alternative medicine web sites are not RS (even for alternative medicine) strongly seems only a deletionist POV and way to suppress information that they do not like publicized or exposed. There are several documentary videos that show Rife working in his lab doing scientific animal cancer experiments, animal cancer micro-surgeries, detailed design diagrams of his microscopes, Rife is pictured in the "Kitty Hawk the fifth" speed boat, BX cancer virus photomicrographs, and so on, and no mention in the article any more. No more mention of Rife's discovery of pleomorphic micro-organisms or colleagues who supported the ideas--why? John Bedini experimental support of Rife's treatment therapy is also gone--why? I notice that the negative POV ACS article is still indirectly linked via Quackwatch, and that the specific QW article is mostly about an Abrams-like electrode contact pad machine-operator who used Rife literature as a reference--so this reference does not actually show that peer reviewed pro-Rife literature does not exist as the location of the reference might imply--it just serves to involve more negative-Rife POV seepage. Articles that are uninformative due to being artificially shaped into "executive summaries" are a poor approach to building a reference work worth using.
No such burden of proof is not on me. This is just a POV issue. There is the POV that Rife technology never could have worked, and there is the POV that it could have worked--plus thousands of anecdotal accounts of people successfully treated with the / related technology.
To me, the scientific theories that say that certain things Rife did with his microscopes could not have worked are not conclusive. EM radiation absorption and emission (resonance) is routinely done on harmonic fractions of a wavelength in radio electronics (and now probably in modern cancer medicine). To me, this evidence makes it probable that Abbe's diffraction limit is not a conclusive element in preventing Rife's microscope from working. The "New Microscopes" articles from the science journals/ magazines of the time show the detail that Rife was able to achieve supposedly at 6000x or so power. If his microscope worked, then his observations and treatment methods cannot be dismissed as garbage. So called medical "facts" are disproved all of the time. So what passes for medical "facts" are just current medical opinions (or held POVs). These authoritative opinions are so strongly held that anything (fact, evidence, other opinion) not in line with them is rejected out of hand--this is what happened to Rife, Kendall, Johnson, et al, vis a vis any medical journal submissions they tried--if they even did so.
The 70-day spring/ summer 1934 Scripps Annex clinical trial conducted by the Special USC Medical Committee saw a 100% cure rate of terminal cancer and a couple of TB cases. The former edition of the Royal Rife article explained how/ why/ that the AMA head and JAMA editor, Morris Fishbein, insured that no medical journals would publish such startling results because he and the AMA could not gain control of the technology. In the years prior to this, the Kendall-Rife medical journal reports of pleomorphic forms of TB met with extreme opposition from the establishment--particularly those persons/ groups funded by tax-exempt charitable foundations (Rockefeller Foundation, Sloan Foundation). Further suppression of this information seems on-going? The circa 1934 Special USC Medical Committee is known to have existed and is even cited by the AMA / newspaper obituary of Milbank Johnson. Just that all of the committee's findings were suppressed.
The Royal Rife article had information deleted from it that I know should have stayed. For example, in the introduction, "someone" deleted the following:
Rife also claimed that these cancer viruses were pleomorphic--microbe pleomorphism was a theory put forward in the 1850s by famous French scientist Professor Pierre Jacques Antoine Bechamp. Although these claims are not all currently supported by the mainstream scientific community, some of Rife's cancer therapy work was repeated[3] by Dr. O.C. Gruner, M.D.,[4] Archibald Cancer Research Committee of McGill University of Montreal, Dr. Milbank Johnson, M.D., and Dr. James B. Couche, M.D. San Diego. And Rife's pleomorphic germ-origin of cancer research was confirmed or supported by Dr. O.C. Gruner, M.D., Dr. E.C. Rosenow, Mayo Clinic, professor Dr. Arthor I. Kendall, Ph.D.,[5][6] Northwestern Medical School, Dr. Virginia Livingston Wheeler, M.D.[7] and Quebec, Canada, Somatid researcher-biologist Gaston Naessens.[8]
Gaston Naessens is still in practice today, and still has his microscope. People using Naessens' microscope have also viewed the forms that Rife described. The opposing theory that has germs having only one form is unproven--but has historically had big money supporting it, giving it large political momentum, and but this opposing theory has no hard scientific evidence what so ever.
References 5 and 6 were from Pub-Med and were "supposedly reliable sources." Reference 4 was a newspaper article reprint (another form of RS). Some of the persons' names in the above text were linked to WP articles that supported the verbiage given (also supposedly RS).
Adam Cuerden talk had his prior edits deleted huge portions of the article text that had solid references scattered through out the deleted bits. Large numbers of the references were named references that were cited elsewhere in the text, including the pub-med references in the opening introduction paragraph. When AC's deletions were done, he "broke" quite a number of the repeated named references. An IP user, supposedly Angio, came along and "fixed up" the broken citation links / URLs (by "deleting even more" of the article--leading up to my current complaint about sections of the opening paragraph that were deleted by the IP user. Instead of repairing the article from the damage that AC caused to it by his massive deletions, the IP user found it quicker to do similarly, and delete more text. This stupid deletion editing style is an effortless, and lazy way of editing, unless you properly clean-up your edits more carefully, and actually check that references are indeed not RS.
Wetting the appetite or not, the amount of money made by the selling of audio CDs of historical recollections of the witnesses to history is key in determining if the given web site is non-profit or a highly commercial enterprise that indirectly could be using WP as an advertising funnel. If the recordings are historical, relatively unedited interviews, then an argument could be made that the site is only "providing educational literature" on a cost-recovery basis, and not engaging in huge volume commercial activities. Oldspammer 18:58, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Poor quality references on web

This strikes me as pathognomic. It was offered to me as proof that Rife studied at johns hopkins - a famous medical school...

http://www.google.com/search?q=Rife+deposition+John-hopkins+bacteriology++I+studied+bacteriology

Note that each reference repeats the incorrect spelling.

Zero times a million would still be zero, and zero credibility is what these references have. Midgley 18:32, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Ignorance is bliss, ehh? The original documents were on http://www.rife.org/ under the Crane trial section, but were in "scanned image form" (JPEG or GIF or TIF) and left there as such--not text searchable, nor Google cached. The stenographer of the deposition could have been a local Mexican person. The steno machine may work like shorthand that symbolizes sounds. The person who transcribed the deposition could have been a foreign speaker rather than a native speaker of English. That person may not have knowledge of the exact name of the famous university? The steno transcription could have been converted by machine? Obviously OCR by computer is not 100%, and there are a number of pages where a spell-check would not offer to correct the spelling of "John" to "Johns." Just because humans know about a famous university does not mean available OCR software is knowledgeable about it too. I cannot accurately account for the "spelling error." But it is safe to guess that one of these possibilities could have been the cause of the trouble that you identify as invalidating the entire reference which would be an intentional pulling the wool over one's eyes to hide one's self from unpleasant information from your POV.
Some other records were kept as noisy (tape hiss) 1950s reel-to-reel audio. Some parts were no doubt converted by automated methods: "automatic voice recognition." This software is not 100% error-free either. In fact, some of the spelling is terrible. However, I believe that some of the audio recordings (available as CDs) are the only lasting information from the witnesses to history who have since died of old age.
Some of the documents at some of these Rife sites are "protected" by an image copy protection scheme using dynamic JavaScript image variables that almost completely prevents the documents from being copied. The image files are deliberately kept low res for the web. This makes things difficult to spread the word that these web sites are promoting--because the original pages are hard to grab, they cannot be OCR'd easily and posted to the web for Google to index and general members of the public to "find," thereby somewhat defeating the purpose of the web site to publicize Rife's "true stories."
Consider this... If the deposition were read to you from the image files by a Mexican person with a thick Spanish accent, you would probably forgive many of their mispronunciations, but still get the gist of what was being said, Ok? Oldspammer 23:04, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
Oldspammer, as far as your scanned primary documents, I tried to leave in all of the scanned documents that were linked to at www.rife.com, www.rife.de, and elsewhere, since those should be verifiable with a reasonable degree of effort (although I have not checked them.) However, after your and other Rife supporters' edits, this article had become a disgraceful mashup of incorrect citations, bad links, and shameless, tortuous OR. Wikipedia was even singled out for criticism on Science Blog, a widely-read blog, for the poor quality of this particular article. It was clear that some pruning was required. I approached my task with an even hand. Here is a breakdown of the citations I took out:
1. Dead links - Many of the web links you provided gave me 404s when I tried to follow them. These are obviously unsuitable to be in a Wikipedia article.
2. Links to unpublished OR - You had a lot of links which fell into this category. Any unpublished crank can write anything he or she wants, but the fact that you agree with him/her does not make it eligible to be cited in Wikipedia. Not even if he supposedly has an engineering degree, or is a "crystal researcher," or what have you. Read WP:V if you're confused on this point.
2a. Links to uncited articles - You need to acknowledge that a web page such as www.rife.org or www.rife.de is inherently biased in Rife's favor. Accordingly, when you link to an essay on one or another of these non-neutral web pages that does not cite any of its sources, we must assume that the opinions expressed in that article do not belong to any citeable, previously-published authority, as required by WP:V, but by the author of the web site, who is a partisan nobody.
3. Links to inappropriate sources - I'm sorry, but I don't think it's appropriate to include a citation which instructs us to skip ahead to a certain time on a recording - which we must purchase as part of a set - at which time we will supposedly hear SOMEBODY say SOMETHING that supports an already dubious claim. You can ask the other editors, but I don't think that flies.
Here is a breakdown of the content I removed:
1. Unsupported claims - Many of the claims in the article were completely unsupported. Others became unsupported after the removal of unacceptable citations. I removed the particularly egregious claims; those which should be verifiable with an acceptable citation were left in place with a citation request.
2. OR, OR, OR!!! - The last section of this article was nothing but a single gigantic paragraph of un- or poorly-cited OR. I'm not sure if you're the one who wrote it, but I'll say this anyway: this article is not a soapbox for you, or anybody else, to express personal belief that Rife was or was not a genius. That is not what Wikipedia is about. Yes, NPOV is about expressing multiple viewpoints, but only those viewpoints which can be verified by citation of reliable publications. Your viewpoint, as well as mine, is frankly unimportant. Unless you can properly document a statement with a citation to a reliable third-party publication, as specified in WP:V, that statement does not belong in Wikipedia.
There is still a lot of work you can do to make this article better. It is still in rather bad shape, and needs the attention of somebody who actually cares about Rife's life. I cannot say that I count myself in that number, but perhaps you do. If you really want to help Wikipedia, please flesh out this article with properly cited, verifiable, NPOV, biographical detail about Rife. After all, that is what this article is for. If you still want to fight about the Universal Microscope, or the Beam Ray, give them their own articles and we can fight it out there. --Angio 04:06, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
The primary reference for a court case is the file in the court. The legal profession and system are very good at identifying these, and given that identification anyone who needs can go and look at it.
The primary reference for a degree, or enrollment in a university, is the records of that university. Heidelberg is I think a leakage from an adjacent fraudster - Abrams.
I don't want to discuss this article on my talk page for at least two reasons. Midgley 23:21, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
If I am not mistaken, the cited reference item was a deposition. A deposition is a sworn statement given. The http://www.rife.org/ site states that a number of depositions for the John Francis Crane defense were supposedly rejected for no proper reasons by the presiding judge and each such rejected deposition is marked with an asterisk on the Rife.org site. As such, the depositions would not be considered "court documents" on record for the given trial unless they had been admitted into evidence. The cited reference shows that Rife claimed these education and background things and not that they were true. If it can be shown that Rife lied about attending these institutions, then that information can be included too so that a full picture of Rife can be judged by WP readers. I am not opposed to showing that Rife may have lied about his education (for whatever his reasons--to gain respectability for his work and opinions--who knows?). I have never thought of Rife as more than a tinkerer who wanted to see small things. Certainly Rife made discoveries, certainly Rife tried to inform people about his discoveries. He professed such knowledge. A teacher and professor of knowledge is the definition of a doctor. Did he earn a degree, probably not. Should this be paramount? It is paramount to nit pick negatively about his reputation and put into question his results if these results had not been witnessed and reviewed by doctors who had earned their credentials at higher schools of learning who worked along side Rife. Remember that these learned men used Rife's equipment and saw motile, independent, living organisms--not faked-up paintings all simultaneously wiggling side-to-side. One of the reasons Rife failed was that he was not able to properly inform enough people, he did not properly value publicity, nor was he able to mass-produce proper working versions of his UV microscopes to get them into the hands of enough people who could figure out how to use them properly to reproduce Rife's results.
A reference web citation should provide an accessed date. The web is a dynamic place. That a site dies off, goes away, does not mean that it did not exist at all. Some sites go down and give timed-out errors from your browser. It is too bad that some of these sites are not perminently cached somewhere for WP to use later (including photographs). Some of the reference links were broken by huge deletions done by one 'contributor.' The original links probably still work in the original, full, non-deleted version from long ago? In any case, please try to replace the links by researching your own suitable replacements if 404 errors come up now. Oldspammer 19:56, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
That's exactly it. IT says that they have these depositions that were rejected - how do we know they're accurate? That's taking on trust a site cribbed together from who knows what sources, with no particular reason to attribute particular care to it in its selection of what to use. Adam Cuerden talk 20:28, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Notability

Thousands of lunatics and charlatans have claimed they could cure cancer — why is Rife notable? If you don't want this article to be deleted, please read Wikipedia:Notability (people) and Wikipedia:Verifiability, find at least one reliable, published source that discusses Rife's claims, and rewrite the lead section to establish why Rife is notable enough to warrant an encyclopedia article. (If we can't find at least one reliable, published source that thinks Rife is notable enough to talk about, the article is unlikely to survive when I nominate it for deletion.) Sideshow Bob Roberts 16:47, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Do you want all knowledge of alternative medicine deleted? If yes, then go at it and state that this is your intent. If you want to assist the development of the Royal Rife article, then please review the discussions done so far, and please review the historical content of the article prior to its most recent massive deletions by clicking on the article link, then the history link, then click on a version of the file that was considerably larger a few weeks ago or so. If you feel that some of the recent deletion edits have ruined notability, then feel free to Undo some of these deletions.
Notability: Rife & Kendall discovered by observation micro-organism pleomorphism. Other researchers later independently reported similar results, sometimes many years apart. As I stated above, some 'contributor' massively deleted well-sourced (Pub-Med sourced) parts of the article. The references were 'named' and referenced in a big chunk of the introductory paragraph. The chunk subsequent to this had broken links--so an IP user deleted the big chunk portion of the opening paragraph.
Notability: Rife also accomplished a 100-mile speed-boat record that supposedly lasted 60 or so years--but this too was deleted.
Notability: Rife's very high magnification UV heterodyning microscopes were written up in scientific journals as a break-through. Franklin Journal (or similar such name). Supposedly these microscopes could view live organisms at magnifications comparable to the electron microscope--permitting their life cycles to be "properly documented." This differs "notably" from the electron microscope where the preparation, vacuum, and electron bombardment will present the observer with no live sample of anything. This was well documented in the article prior to the massive deletions done recently.
Notability: at the time and for some decades later, cancer malignancy was though to be caused only by cellular mutation brought on by ionizing radiation or spontaneous carcinogenic chemical agent mutations. Rife isolated two different cancer viruses: BX for carcinoma, and BY for sarcoma, and found that Kendall medium and a specific set of steps could be used to culture such viruses. In the 1960s and 1970s from germ warfare labs it was discovered that many cancer viruses existed and new human cancer viruses could be created via gene splitting and cross-species culturing of animal cancer viruses.
Notability: Rife discovered numerous micro-organism disease treatments. Each such treatment must simultaneously treat all pleomorphic forms of the given pathogen or the disease would persist or the treatment could kill the patient. (TB rods and all other forms needed to be destroyed or the released toxins could kill the patient).
WP:RS is a guideline and not a policy. All of the stuff deleted in the article that was sourced should not have been deleted based upon the POV that a guideline should be an enforced policy. To me this form of article text deletion that breaks references without repairing them was vandalism. This was pointed out to the 'contributor' but no reparations have been forthcoming in regard to restoring particular IP-user deleted text, and repairing the contributor's broken Pub-Med references.
To me, alternative medicine web sites are authoritative on alternative medicine. To treat them otherwise is to deny their POVs. NPOV is a WP policy. Policy out weighs a guideline. To me, recent article text deletions should have moved such text into another related shorter article or whatever.
It is one thing to claim to be a skeptic, but another to deny things based solely upon one's existing beliefs or out-dated schooling. Some alternative medicine web sites claim to have quotations from Nobel prize winning scientists stating that cancer research is BS. Other Nobel scientist quotations are similarly harsh about other areas of medicine. Would your opinions change about current medical research and practice if these quotations are accurate?
One's schooling can be quite inaccurate. I checked some of my physics text books and they wrongly explain the modality of refraction. Usually text books want to present informational material in ways that are understandable--in so presenting complicated information, a simplification is usually made that can often lead to misconceptions of scientific principles. When these misconceptions are too closely guarded as truths or facts, science and Wikipedia later suffers from contradictions and conflicts that arise. Question everything, especially your schooling. Oldspammer 21:21, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
Rife is extremely notable as one of the biggest quacks of modern times, and a pervasive influence within alternative medical quackery. Just ask any scientific skeptic or check anti-quackery websites. That is reason enough to have his article here where all sides of the story can be told. You can bet that alternative medicine sites do not tell about what a quack he was and how worthless his machines are in their many versions and variants made by lots of quacks who copy him. You can also check out the FDA and FTC who regularly bust people for using and selling such machines. It's criminally dangerous activity which they attempt to stop. -- Fyslee/talk 21:59, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
"all sides?"--I beg to differ that all sides will be permitted. Mixed reasons were used to delete all sorts of entries in the article that were pro-Rife. The anti-Rife side is not based on science. If it were then sets of scientific experiments would have demonstrated that Rife was wrong by now. All of Rife's work is based on resonance of one sort or another--the microscope used frequency mixing to elicit fluorescence in the constituent chemicals of the microbes under observation--the treatment method used RF EM fields to elicit resonance (or whatever property) to devitalize microbes. Even history in the article was excised to suit the anti-Rife side. All that need be done by the anti-Rife side is to say that his life was not written up in Pub-Med. Although newspaper articles at the time called Rife a doctor--any such "Dr." references, because of the anti-Rife side, have to be treated as though Rife was a fraud. I grant that filterable forms of bacteria were probably mycoplasma and not necessarily viruses. I also grant that maybe mycoplasma living inside a bacterium may have made it appear to Rife that there were pleomorphic forms of pathogens happening?--I don't know. Oldspammer
The "properly designed" devices being peddled are said to work a sizable percentage of the time! (As compared to the success rates of drug treatments for the same diseases.) It is just that the literature and sellers cannot make claims that the machines work because the machines have not undergone any organized double blind clinical trials to prove such claims (for some machines, this is just a technicality). The only people who should test this stuff are M.D.s on patients known to be properly diagnosed with a given disease, and the M.D.s are often required to request authorization to do such clinical trials from the AMA. But the AMA (a professional union for allopathic doctors) is not about to put themselves out of a job, nor to threaten the pharmaceutical industry, and so the AMA will never authorize such trials, so the machines are doomed to remain "experimental" or educational or for well-being purposes only. In addition, there is the questionable claim that these machines are harmful. This claim was explained in the Royal Rife article that in the California dept of Health held hearings on Rife based equipment, all consulted science labs declared the equipment safe, yet the state AMA person claimed the equipment was unsafe--yet the state AMA person had not even examined the equipment--how scientific is that? Certainly there are quack versions of the machines--but without proper oversight and approval, who can tell which ones are OK without consulting an engineer to inspect the designs? Oldspammer 11:54, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Oldspammer, it's true that "WP:RS is a guideline and not a policy", but Wikipedia:Verifiability is a policy. It states that any material that's likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source.
I don't want "all knowledge of alternative medicine" deleted from Wikipedia, but we can't just repeat every claim made by some lunatic with a website. If a claim is notable, it will have been discussed by a reliable, published source.
If you have reliable, published sources to support your claims about Rife's achievements, please add them to the article so that we can establish his notability. Sideshow Bob Roberts 12:44, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
There may indeed be too much dependence on pro-Rife sources, IOW the article may be rife with Rife propaganda...;-), but that has nothing to do with notability issues and can be fixed. The problems may be more of undue WP:WEIGHT and POV. His notability is well-established by anti-quackery and scientific skepticism sources. -- Fyslee/talk 19:16, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
If Rife was not a quack, but people using his name were / are, then you will likely not find documentation finding or proving that Rife himself was a quack. You will note that the American Cancer Society (ACS) web articles that mention Rife often talk about people using his name, or devices that are not strictly Rife Beam Ray tube devices driven by proper RF power and designated Rife frequency waveforms. ACS article authors are careful not to give their names, nor qualifications should it turn out that someone out there exactly duplicates Rife's original work in later years proving all the ACS authors foolish, dishonest, and unscientific.
The science blog author who was critical of the Rife article was critical of the information sources, and called into question Rife's credentials, but did not go so far as saying that Rife did not do what was documented.
There is fear too that the Rife technology could be put into warfare technology and used by nefarious individuals or organizations or nations. This was one of Rife's greatest fears. Oldspammer 00:45, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

"But, when he announced his findings his troubles started. Local medical doctors who recognized the value of Rife's discoveries, and tried to apply them to their clinical work, soon found their relations with the local medical society cancelled. Rife was called a quack. No doctor was permitted to use his apparatus or methods on penalty of ostracism." -http://www.rife.org/magazine/kerbs.html Page 3. So even the pro-Rife sources admit he was known as a quack. Adam Cuerden talk 02:46, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

"A quack electromagnetic frequency device from the 1930s also has been resurrected for use in treating Lyme disease. These rife machines are marketed through the Internet." Quackwatch —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Adam Cuerden (talk • contribs) 03:25:37, August 19, 2007 (UTC).

Quackwatch is far worse than the alternative medicine site references that were in the article that you were compelled to massively delete. If you check, people calling themselves chronic Lyme disease patients, or post-Lyme disease sufferers universally claim some relief from the symptoms of "the disease" using the "Doug" magnetic Rife machines. Search for >Lyme Book<. You do your argument very poorly being critical of Rife using Quackwatch.
"Local medical doctors who recognized the value of Rife's discoveries..." Hmmm... Seems that some far away AMA officials decided unscientifically that what was being done was taboo? These unscientific, far away AMA persons are the reason that any good of Rife's work was wrongly suppressed.
What science was used to condemn Rife's work as fraudulent? Oldspammer 10:43, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Translation: Quackwatch does not support your viewpoint. But, fine. Two more things. Rife lived long enough ago to make him only really visible on sites that support quackery, but here's two U.S. government sources: Federal Trade Commission injunction against a business claiming Royal Rife-inspired treatments

NIH report. "Royal Rife Research Society Web site, a blatant example of quackery on the Web. Quote: The site offers a "miraculous" universal electronic cure for arthritis, diabetes, tumours and other afflictions (the end to all disease), and claims that the University of Southern California has sponsored research into this electronic therapy on the terminally ill, with astounding results Adam Cuerden talk 11:32, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

No translation--just "What science was used to condemn Rife's work as fraudulent?" Oldspammer 13:44, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
*sigh* Short answer: Biology and physics. Long answer: I'll tell you after I get into the Surgeon's Hall Library Adam Cuerden talk 17:14, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Pub-Med article on cancer cell growth after exposure to low power wide-band and narrow band microwave RF EM radiation The swept wide band exposure had positive (anti-cancer) effects, but fixed frequencies did not. Oldspammer 12:28, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Right. Which, naturally, disproves Rife, given the radiotherapy was in the XHF band, not the lower bans Rife used, and "low-intensity" does not by any means mean as low as Rife suggested. Adam Cuerden talk 09:40, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Nope! Do you not know of harmonics and resonance? Please study some radio electronics, physics and math--then build some radio transceivers that use a "transceiving" antenna, then tune this for optimal performance so that you gain some kind of appreciation for the concepts involved. Rife himself wanted to accurately select the most lethal frequency that his equipment could produce. He remained uncertain if he was using a fractional wavelength or not of the "true" MOR. This discussion was on the reel-to-real audio (MP3 CDs now) made in the 1950s, and summarized in text on the web. That the microwave frequencies used in the Pub-Med article had to be swept meant that they too had to happen upon the "correct" harmonic in order to cause trouble for the cancer involved in the experiments. This resonance destruction phenomenon has to do with absorption and emission spectrums of the molecular and atomic bonds for fragile parts of the given pathogens. It may well be that different parts of the given pathogens are negatively affected by different frequencies and harmonics. Perhaps due to their small size, the pathogens have numerous weak spots as compared with that of our own, sizable, more resilient cell structures? As long as the energy absorbed is greater than that emitted, a resonance condition with the applied waveform exists, where after a certain build-up of this situation, and sustained energy input, something has to give. Usually a bond or two breaks, et voila--damaged pathogen. Oldspammer 17:14, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Oldspammer, it is painfully obvious that you don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Of course, Rife et al. probably didn't either, but you have the benefit of 50 more years of accumulated scientific understanding. Before you castigate Adam for not knowing about "harmonics and resonance," let's go over a bit of basic electromagnetic physics. You can follow along with the accompanying Wikipedia articles if you like. Except by heating, radio waves cannot break chemical bonds. You will soon see that it is quite impossible.
All electromagnetic radiation, from light to radio waves, are mediated by photons. And according to Planck's equation, the energy of a photon is directly proportional to its frequency. Since a certain threshold amount of energy is required to destroy a chemical bond, this suggests that there is some frequency threshold below which electromagnetic radiation is not harmful. And in fact, we observe this to be the case. While high-frequency radiation such as UV light and gamma rays can indeed break chemical bonds, and are therefore harmful, we observe that visible light does NOT break chemical bonds. Otherwise, we would get sunburns from fluorescent lights and flashlights, yes? And here's the kicker: the lowest frequency visible light, usually given as 700nm red light, has a wavelength of over 400 TERAhertz. That means that, according to Planck's equation, a photon of red light, which we know wouldn't harm a flea, carries over sixty thousand times more energy than a 60 Ghz radio wave.
So we have shown that radio waves cannot, on their own, break chemical bonds. --Angio 21:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Only that a single photon of RF energy will very likely not have sufficient energy to cause damage. Oldspammer 17:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
"But what about resonance," you ask. "The glass and the singer's voice!" That is actually a very poor analogy, since electromagnetic waves and sound waves have completely different properties. An electromagnetic wave can induce resonance, but as you can see when you turn on your microwave, that resonance does not break chemical bonds, but merely heats the subject.-- Angio 21:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Actually the sound wave example seems fine to me. Sound travels at different velocities in different mediums. So also light travels at different velocities in different mediums. The sound wavelength is quite long compared to the size of the crystal glass receiver / resonator. EM RF radiation antennae are usually a nice fractional wavelength of the intended reception frequency. The incident RF radiation wavelength is quite long compared to the size of the chemical constituent of a microbe. An intense single cycle of sound cannot destroy the glass crystal, like a single photon of non-ionizing EM RF energy cannot destroy a microbe or chemical bond. Destruction requires sufficient, prolonged, exposure to one of many harmonic frequencies (at a suitable amplitude for that harmonic) to build up the resonant energy in the structure of the vibrating part of the crystal glass. Similarly with EM RF energy subjected to a chemical constituent of a microbe--a harmonic frequency of sufficient power must be sustained until resonance damage occurs. Sound waves can reflect. EM RF energy can also reflect. Sound waves can be absorbed. EM RF energy can also be absorbed. There are no doubt differences in the properties of the waveforms and energies and mediums and so on.
The properties of different materials determines EM RF radiation absorption, reflection, emittance, emission, and so on. Consider metal conductors versus air--their reactions to EM RF radiation is completely different. A combination of these properties makes water heat up in the presence of certain wavelengths of RF radiation. It may be that a combination of these properties causes one or more of the constituent chemicals of microbes to devitalize the microbe in some way instead of heating it. Oldspammer 17:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
As the pubmed article you have cited shows, radio waves CAN have interesting biological effects, but as the article also admits, they are very poorly understood and are the subject of ongoing research. Making up hocus-pocus nonsense about how "resonance" and "harmonics" break chemical bonds, or how "due to their small size, the pathogens have numerous weak spots as compared with that of our own, sizable, more resilient cell structures" is not just wrong, but also does a disservice to the interesting topic of bioelectromagnetics. --Angio 21:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD-dVXIcVng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S00XN-0kWg
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=royal-rife+Discover+new+hope Oldspammer 10:50, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Those soundless videos which show organisms dying are so very convincing. I mean, there's not a single chance that they've been edited to remove, say, a voice talking about the chemicals being added to the solution, or other such things. No, naturally, it must be what they're labelled as. There can be no other explanation. And as for the other one - show me some evidence that his discoveries are still used in optics/electronics/radiochemistry/biochemistry/ballistics/etc, that he actually got the honourary degrees claimed, etc, and I'll watch past the 2:30 mark. Adam Cuerden talk 12:10, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I do not disagree with what you have said about Rife's educational background--so what? Unorthodox experimental science is usually ground breaking, and Rife actually performed lab experiments. A new theory will no doubt come about that will account for any repeatable observations.
"so very?" I have made videos where the sound part turns out to be a distraction or the audible comments foolish or wrong. Sound tracks can be concocted afterwards anyway. But this would give you additional things to fault about the videos wouldn't it?
What chemicals are you suggesting were added to have each exact effect shown in each of the various videos?--and others elsewhere like http://www.squarewaveresearch.com.pa/video_clips.html A chemical would have to act on the microbe requiring some elapsed time. A powerful chemical would disintegrate everything instantly and not leave the dead body debris that we see in the videos. Any chemical would have to spread through the liquid medium, involving time, and possibly some visible effect. It would be interesting and more convincing if you could debunk this properly via demonstration video or recipe / procedure instead of saying "it is a fake" out of hand. Show us a similar example done by a special effects person or something--the experience upon which you are judging these as being faked.
The Beam Ray documentary video producers want to praise Rife too much without mentioning any checkable details--that is for certain. Rife's ballistics influence(s) are not of interest to me even if they would have been specified. I do not think that Rife had a great deal of electronics knowledge--but he had a lot of help from others like vacuum tube pioneer Lee De Forest, inventor of the triode. http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Lee+Deforest%22+Royal-Rife
http://www.rife.org/otherresearch/JeanClaudeMainguy.html German experimental research into EM and pulsed magnetic field influence on tissues in vitro, specifically a comparison of normal healthy cells versus cancer cells when exposed.
Planck's law and the Stefan-Boltzmann law are derived assuming blackbody properties--an ideal, whereas in reality most materials do not have close to these properties. I argue that, possibly, the emittance property provides the observer with the wavelength(s) key in causing destructive resonance.
A flea can be harmed by microwave-heating. The flea, or parts of it, however, are not in resonance with the any of the applied energy--excepting the water molecules. On a photon by photon basis you are probably correct that ionizing radiation is key to causing "ionizing" damage. However, in a resonance situation in a lossy system that can radiate some of the energy into its surroundings, the stimulus, incident, coherent energy stream of photons must be appropriately maintained for the kind of damage or devitalization that Rife was talking about. It is probably the resonance energy that builds up that directly causes the bond breakage or whatever is the damage, and is caused only indirectly by the incident supply of energy (the RF photon radiation).
An AC mains electrical wall outlet can have a x-ray machine plugged into it. The AC electrical power is converted via known means into ionizing x-ray radiation. Do the resonating items convert their energy to a more intense form which in-turn causes damage? Would the resonance alone cause damage and not need any conversion to a higher intensity wavelength?
To determine if RF energy and pulsed magnetic fields "affects biological systems" was the subject of the above referenced German experimentation. The Pub-Med experiment with the devitalizing swept frequency microwave-effects on subject cancer cells was unexplained. Both results seemingly reproduce Rife's, but remain unexplained by any theoretical work that I can find except those of Rife supporters like physicist Gary Wade, PhD Masters Physics. That these results remain unexplained by current physics and biology reflects badly, shamefully on current theories that should be suitably updated--not defended as infallible. Would Planck have to adjust his equations after the news of these experimental results? Maybe not because he was addressing the black body case. This area of investigation should be more widely be explored so that we gain a better understanding, and possibly be able to predict unforeseen, possibly useful phenomenon. Oldspammer 17:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
Oldspammer, Oldspammer. Where to begin? Your evidence is truly a sorry shambles. I really couldn't care less whether "Gary Wade, PhD" (as you insist on calling him, even though his degree is a masters) is a Rife supporter. Do you know how many papers "Gary Wade, PhD" has written - or even coauthored - in reputable, peer-edited journals? Well, I'll tell you: none. And as for this "German research," the name of the journal Acta Medica Empirica turns up 0 references in Academic Search Premier, which is a tip off, and also brings up no English website on Google.
Your not-so-implicit suggestion that a video of the killing of paramecia and other protozoans by some unspecified method somehow proves the validity of Rife's work is utterly absurd. Without accompanying materials and methods information, and preferably a SCIENTIFIC PAPER, such a video is completely useless, and here are the first few reasons why:
1. It's not hard to kill cells. There are many ways to do it, and microwave heating is as good as any. The problem here is that cancer cells are also human cells, so many of the things, such as heating, that will kill a cancer cell will also kill normal cells and are therefore toxic. The goal is to discriminate between normal and cancerous cells, not kill indiscriminately.
2. What on earth does killing paramecia have to do with killing cancer cells? They are completely different organisms! This is like concluding that since chocolate is toxic to dogs, that it is also toxic to humans.
3. Neither you, nor I, has ANY IDEA what was done in that video. It was pulled off some unpublished crank's website with little or no accompanying information.
I try to explain the principles of science to you, and you tell me that Rife simply discovered new physics?! If I told you that I have learned to create hurricanes by flapping my arms, and you told me it was scientifically impossible, how would you react if I told you that I have simply discovered new physics? I fear you are living in a fantasy world if you really believe that Rife's quackery is a pioneering discovery. I don't know why you brought up Boltzmann's law, other than that it happens to be mentioned in the same Wikipedia article as Planck's law, but it is really not applicable here. The point was that frequency and energy are directly related. Blackbody or no, without the assumption that frequency and energy are directly related, all of modern physics falls apart.
Rather than responding to the substance of my concerns, you picked up on key terms and drew together a melange of superficially related scientific concepts, none of which is actually applicable here. --Angio 22:48, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
electric fields that treat cancer
Pub Med article on the topic
Some of the videos were pulled off of John Bedini's web site and these are reasonably well described. Are you calling Bedini a crank? That is defamation of Mr. Bedini's character and reputation. Bedini actually conducted lab experiments with the original Rife-Hoyland Beam Ray Tube and frequency generator equipment in the 1970s while John Francis Crane was still alive. Bedini, to my knowledge, was an investigator of Rife's work and not a supporter from day one. I don't think that Bedini is involved in selling any Rife equipment. Are there reasons to doubt Bedini's videos (other than his research was not funded by non-profit, tax-exempt charitable foundations, and that he does not have a medical doctorate--and therefore is not permitted to submit articles / papers to peer-reviewed journals)?
Science may not always be published by professional societies who restrict their article content to those authors having a particular kind of doctoral degree and who are funded by / under the control of tax-exempt charitable foundation monies. Absorption and emission spectra are key in using resonance or other electrochemical means to cause pathogen damage or deactivation. You have only addressed (with physics laws) the ionizing radiation case where a highly energetic photon causes a particular kind of damage. A black body radiates and absorbs energy universally. Such a body model will not resonate or store / build up potential energy as is happening in the case of resonance. The web is available to all--peer or not. If people such as physicist Gary Wade, Masters, support Rife, they are not necessarily also quacks--are you also defaming his character and reputation as well? The "educate yourself" web site seems to have gathered a group of Mr. Wade's articles. Please tell me what you fault with key parts of them?
"the slightest idea?" This is uncivil. I have not insulted your intelligence. Why have you done for mine?
"a sorry shambles?" This too is uncivil. I agreed with some of your concepts--I did not need to address those in an adversarial way. I tried to put forward / establish that resonance was a plausible explanation to why pathogen damage or devitalization is happening. I can add that another plausible explanation is electrochemistry. It has been found that RF EM fields facilitate other reactions to occur that otherwise might not at the same temperature, pressure, etc.
You did not see me contradict anything about the per photon energy intensity and frequency did you? Energy per photon is not the sole issue in the case of resonance damage. Isolated heat energy might be what may be what is observable in a resonance overload situation. A rapid temperature change causes structural stress that can also shatter glass crystal--perhaps such a temperature change is induced by the application of EM fields? Oldspammer 19:31, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Simply putting the organism in distilled water would likely be enough to produce the effects of the second video. As for the first - membrane protein uncouplers, which open the pores allowing things in and out, heavy metals... there really isn't that much detail in the first video, so it's hard to say exactly how they died, and hence hard to know what caused them to die. Adam Cuerden talk 20:53, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Would the addition of such chemicals to the specimen slide not be more visible in the video? If an addition is made would not this cause a fluid flow visible in the video that would obviously make the video more questionable? "Putting the organism in distilled water" would be easily visible in the video, and it does not seem to me that this is so. The square wave research people's video is pretty slow acting. Maybe they could switch the waveform off for a while to show the micro-organisms swimming normally again before re-applying the power to their electronics? This might better indicate that the effect can be turned on and off with a switch rather than there being a chemical agent added to the medium?--that presumably cannot be easily undone like the turning off of the circuit power for the applied square wave signal?
There are web sites dedicated to Rife conferences. Have any of you anti-Rife faction paid them a visit to see and pose questions to the presenters?
One of the Rife conference topic presentations given by Gary Wade was supposed to be about making videos of pathogen destruction via ultra sound transducers and a lab bench frequency generator and a microscope and a video camera with an on-screen time display. I would like to see some of the resulting videos--it would be interesting--wouldn't you think? Oldspammer 19:31, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Why do you care so much?

It's curious to me why some users seem so passionate about proving that Royal Rife was correct. I ask in all sincerity: why do you care so much? I mean, really, why does it matter? Because the AMA and the FDA are willfully obscuring a "cure for cancer" from the American people? Because someone you know and love is suffering from cancer and you're willing to accept anything as a possible treatment? Is it simply that you've found something to believe in and it upsets you to have your beliefs challenged? Is it a personal quest for truth? Or is it somehow related to personal financial gain? That some users seem to care so much about the public opinion of this one man is more than curious, actually, it's fascinating. Morbidly fascinating. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.239.133.107 (talk) 18:30, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Rife treatment is not a universal cure for anything. Anecdotally it is said that some people respond positively and others do not. Just as for allopathic treatment of disease, if Rife treatments were put into wide-spread practice, resistant strains of pathogens would no doubt come into being, and become virtually immune to such treatments. Germ warfare labs are no doubt addressing these 'problems' to come up with pathogens that will wipe out the enemy regardless of Rife therapy treatments or not. Trouble is that it will likely wipe out 'everyone,' not just 'the enemy.'
Science, it seems, is as much a political football as you will ever find. What motivates suppression of information?--Money, jobs, reputations, politics, existing paradigms, closely guarded false beliefs, etc. Rife's discoveries were never published in peer reviewed journals maybe because he wanted to hide the fact that he was not a real PhD and only self-educated? Who knows? It is one thing to prove via scientific demonstration someone is a fraud and another only to claim out of hand that a person is one. Oldspammer 20:21, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I mistakenly referred to BLP as the basis for deletion of material. Nevertheless, the material was unsourced. To re-add, please find suitable sources. See WP:V. Thanks. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 14:47, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

  • Thank you to Oldspammer for your thoughtful and articulate response, from the creator of this section. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.239.133.107 (talk) 17:29, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Not consistent with source

This text:

Other devices using Rife's name
In the late 1980s a company by the name of "Life Energy Resources" mass-produced a device they called the "REM SuperPro Generator", ostensibly on the foundation of Rife's work (the acronym REM reportedly stood for Rife's Electromagnetic[1]). Three of the company's top distributors: Pat Ballistrea, Michael Ricotta, and Brian Strandberg, served prison time for selling unapproved medical devices and drugs as a result of their trials in 1993, 1994, and 1995.
Is not supported by this source [10] and is a good example of WP:OR. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:07, 12 September 2007 (UTC) (FDAC URL fixed by Fyslee -- Fyslee/talk 05:48, 13 September 2007 (UTC))

The source consists of several stories; the info you seem to have missed can be found at the bottom of the last one. I've restored the para and moved the cite down. Avb 16:33, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

PS I didn't see any problems with the rest of your cleanup at first glance. The article does look sort of empty without the OR, doesn't it? Avb 16:35, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

The text is OR. There is no indication on the story that indeed they based their scam on this device. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 23:52, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
??? You must be joking:
"To support LER's claims that the REM SuperPro cured cancer and other diseases, the underground materials routinely referenced a book about the SuperPro Generator, precursor to the REM SuperPro. The book described work by the precursor's inventor, Royal Raymond Rife, who died in 1971. "REM" reportedly stood for "Rife's Electromagnetic.""
What is there to doubt about? The whole section describes the scam in detail and it centered around the sale and distribution of this device using a pyramid system and false claims. Are you suggesting the FDA made a mistake? -- Fyslee/talk 05:45, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
If we presume the REM Super Pro devices work properly as described, but have not clinically been proven as doing so, then the FDA is acting only to protect the drug companies.
The medical treatment efficacy claims might well be substantiated if the device(s) had undergone clinical trials that must be supervised by M.D.s, but those M.D.s must have the permission of the AMA for approval of such trials. I am fairly certain that no such approval would EVER be granted from such an allopathic corporation as the AMA (corporation) that could provide definitive proof that electromagnetic treatment of disease was many more times effective and safe than currently used drug treatments. That such clinical trials have not and will not be conducted is only the fault of the legislation that gave the AMA / FDA authority over safety and health issues rather than permitting freedom of choice. This makes it possible to have a cure that works but is unapproved by authorities based solely on it not being allowed to be conclusively tested under controlled conditions.
On the other hand, if the REM Super Pro device was dangerous, then deaths and injuries, and law suits would no doubt be publicized everywhere, especially by competing treatment scheme supporters.
On the other hand, if the REM Super Pro device was a hoax, then few if any treated patients would provide any supporting anecdotal praise for the device. However, I read accounts that some have been saved by this very device.
We must therefore conclude that the device probably works (for some people) but is not approved because clinical testing has not substantiated its very valid claims of efficacy, and so it is just a technicality that protects the drug companies from competition through the enforcement actions taken by the FDA agents charging otherwise innocent people with trumped-up charges.
If some of the monies that were put into such enforcement actions were invested properly into testing of devices, our society would be better off today. It seems, though, that conservative cut-backs have reduced FDA testing lab personnel over the years so that huge backlogs for device testing / approvals have existed since the late 1970s.
There should be a severe punishment for people, companies, and government organizations who knowingly suppress such legitimate health treatments. The punishment should be based on the number of lives lost or the wellbeing of survivors put at risk from having it withheld--similar to that where polluters have killed off people and ecosystems via chemical spills--fines and imprisonment and possibly murder charges. Oldspammer 05:26, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
A few points to ponder (and I will quote you):
  1. Read the sources and you will clearly see criminal intent spelled very loudly, regardless of what you think about the device.
  2. You are "presume"ing an awful lot based on misunderstandings of how the real world works:
  3. The AMA has nothing to do with approving or overseeing research.
  4. A conspiracy to hide effective cures would be impossible to effectuate considering the hundreds of thousands (actually millions, since their families are also "in the know") of individuals involved and how such a decision would affect themselves. Doctors and their families get sick and they would not countenance such a conspiracy if it could exist, which it does not.
  5. One cannot presume a device works as claimed if it has "not clinically been proven as doing so." Such presumption is merely worthless, self-deceptive, and rather dangerous wishful thinking that costs real lives.
  6. Based on such false assumptions, we cannot "conclude that the device probably works" (even "for some people"). Far from it.
  7. Those who allow their false presumptions to lead them to promote or use devices of unknown efficacy while making false claims of efficacy should be severely prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license and for endangering others by their claims.
-- Fyslee / talk 06:20, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
From what I've been given to believe, the AMA must give the go ahead for clinical trial participation of its members. No go ahead, then no conclusive trials conducted with the participation of any licensed M.D.s or M.D. peer reviewed journal articles submitted!
Money and facilities are needed for such trials--there is no money pot from which to draw to sponsor such research, and nameless facility administrators seem always to cancel the projects in favor of something that in the long run can make the facilities money. If you check the web, you will see that one cancer medical researcher has been trying to get funded for years for his electrode treatment of the disease. No trials, no FDA approval.
AMA identifies the disease treatments that are valid for a given condition or disease--if never mentioned anywhere, then the treatment is not going to be covered by health or malpractice / liability insurance--ergo, deemed a risky, seldom used, or experimental treatment--then it is an uncovered medical procedure / practice. Many skeptics of the AMA's actions point out that the drug companies seem to control them completely.
M.D.s and FDA commissioners can afford to fly their sick family members to wherever a working, FDA unapproved cure / treatment is in regular use. Regular people who know nothing of the subject at hand will be unaware of their options, and may not be able to afford to pursue such alternative treatments. If you search the web, there is mention of some of these people flying their family members to Europe to undergo treatments that are not approved in the USA. Oldspammer 12:56, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

That's... an interesting conspiracy theory, but without some solid evidence, it's hard to give it weight. Adam Cuerden talk 16:19, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

It's a fanstastically preposterous theory. It begins with a variety of incorrect precepts and follows them to their logical, but unsound conclusion. I will show that almost every single sentence written above is incorrect.
1. The AMA must approve all clinical trials.
Simply put, this is FALSE. Human clinical trials are subject to the authority of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), which are convened by the institution at which the trial is occurring. The AMA has no say on these boards. It's possible that the author has been confused by the JAMA's requirement that clinical trials register with the journal in advance (http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/292/11/1363), but this is actually a safeguard designed to preserve transparency - without having to sign a promise to release their results, teams whose trials had unfavorable results might be tempted to sweep valuable information under the rug.
2. Facilities sponsor research, and there is no "money pot" from which to draw.
Also FALSE. Having worked in a major research institution for some years, I can tell you that this is bunk. Most public life sciences research in the United States is funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, a government organization that funnels tens of billions of dollars a year into the public sector. Any researcher can submit a grant application, which is then reviewed and scored by an evaluation board consisting of academic and clinical experts in the relevant field. If preliminary results suggest the research might be promising, the board will award a grant to the researcher, who must, upon expiry of the grant, report on his/her progress in order to obtain renewal.
3. Nameless administrators cancel projects that will not make the institution money.
This idea, as expressed, is so full of weasel words that it's hard to pick any single thing that makes it FALSE. Institutions are principally after the prestige of publishing important (read: commonly-cited) papers. While patents are a plus, they are usually not a serious source of revenue. The use of the word "nameless" lends the idea a hushed, conspiratorial tone. If you believe this, I have a crashed flying saucer to sell you.
4. The AMA determines which procedures are valid for which diseases, and which will be covered by insurance.
FALSE, on both counts. Medical treatments are licensed by the FDA, but doctors are able to use the treatments for any condition they see fit. This is called off-label use. While insurance may not cover certain cases of off-label use, this is exclusively up to the discretion of the insurance companies, which have a financial incentive to refuse coverage for as many treatments as possible. This is definitely a bad thing, but it's not the AMA's fault, and it's not a conspiracy to cover up magical cancer treatments such as that advocated by the author.
5. To preserve their own persons and families against the harmful effects of their anti-Rife conspiracy, the wealthy members of the FDA and AMA cabals arrange routine international flights to countries where Rife and other alternative treatments are available.
... wow. This is completely ABSURD, and completely made up. Unless, of course, the author can present proof for these presumably massive airlifts. On second thought, I'm sure the evil FDA/AMA cabal covers up all the evidence, so there's no way to disprove it. I guess we'll have to assume the author is right, then.
And this is only to correct the author's misrepresentations of public research. Keep in mind that government funded and academic research accounts for only about a quarter of yearly medical research in this country, the rest being funded by private industry. Private industry has a lot of money, and can spend it however it sees fit. Does the author REALLY think that the drug companies would pass up the chance to make beaucoup bucks on a cancer treatment if it could be shown to be as effective as he believes? Utter hogwash. (Wow, I'm starting to sound like Midgley.) Angio 19:11, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I inserted a rewrite of the disputed paragraph in the hope it will satisfy Jossi's OR dx. I left out the REM acronym ref (reportedly stood for Rife's Electromagnetic) as too vague. Avb 14:02, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Andean Anthropological Expedition, Inc.

I have revised rather than deleted the mention of the Andean Anthropological Expedition, Inc. based purely on an extremely liberal interpretation of WP:SELFPUB, definitely not because of V & RS. We have no outside corroboration of this organization (corporation), which at best was a local group, definitely not nationally recognized. If anyone can turn up more information that would be great. Revise accordingly at that time. Otherwise this mention is very tenuous at best, so I have therefore attributed it to Rife himself. Its inclusion is questionable..... -- Fyslee/talk 21:02, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

http://www.rife.org/crane/johncranetrial.html at a point 99% down the page...


135. Have you been awarded a Research Fellowship in Bio-Chemistry by any nationally-known Institute for Scientific Research?

Yes

136. What is the name of it?

Andean Anthropological Expedition

137. Is this a copy of the award, together with a copy of the covering letter or transmittal from the Andean Anthropological Expedition? (Attach as Defendant's Exhibit C).

Yes

Presumably item 137 would demonstrate that at one point some supporting documentation was available that proved Rife's claim of such a fellowship.
Google search of >Andean Anthropological< does turn up results not relating to Rife, so presumably it is legit and not just a local company? Oldspammer 15:59, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Your search terms are incomplete. A correctly formatted search needs to be done: Andean Anthropological Expedition. There are only two that might not be related to Rife. One is a mention in a library archive which mentions it as a corporation, and the other is the JSTOR link, for which we have no access. If you can get access, I'd love to see what it says. -- Fyslee/talk 23:26, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Very often an organization might have an award or grant name that is discontinued, or the organization shortens its name slightly. If poorly managed, it is very probable that monetary funds ran out for awarding such grants or awards for scientific investigations. The "expedition" part of the name might have been part and parcel to the award or grant that they gave out for various fields of research. "Ped" is a root that has to do with the foot or feet. "Ex" is a root that has to do with outside. Expedition - "Undertaking a journey for a particular purpose." It may have been that this part of the name had to do with exploration of geography where locals are hired to carry baggage on foot to the places being explored. When more and more of the world had already been mapped, this part of the name no longer held any importance / meaning / relevance.

http://www.dfe.net/RifeHist.html about 70% through the page:

By late 1940, Rife had been named a Fellow (or possibly a Royal Fellow) of the Andean Anthropological Expedition, an Institute for Scientific Research based in Phoenix, Arizona. The society's Advisory Board looks like a Who's Who of the Southwestern US's medical and business community of the 1940 era.

No definite indications seem searchable on-line as to what happened to this organization, yet not everything is online though. It might have been better if the above site had a link or citation to the sourced material for this passage of text. The "society" could have merged into any one of a number of scientific organizations still in existance. This does not mean that the original organization did not exist and so that mention of it must now be discarded from the wiki article text--so what you've done seems fine with me until better orignal source material emerges. Oldspammer 17:12, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, many things could have happened. I wish we had some outside verification. Rife alone is a weak source, especially considering the propensity for quacks like him to exaggerate their own importance. It sort of comes with the territory - the "misunderstood genius" syndrome. I don't doubt that some organization existed, but I do doubt it was national or well-known. If it had been, we'd still find many more traces of its existence and actions. Right now the inclusion could be contested by anyone and removed summarily with their actions based solidly in Wikipedia policies. But just because we can't verify its existence doesn't mean it didn't exist, but it doesn't mean it did exist either. The evidence is weak that it did exist as some type of local group in the form of a corporation. Maybe he gave a donation to a fundraising effort to sponsor an Andean expeditionary group, and they gave him a certificate for it. We have no idea what the significance of this mention really is. A certificate of appreciation for helping at the local bake sale, presented by the local Kiwanis club, would have been more significant, simply because Kiwanis is more significant. Rife did fool some people while alive, but was also rejected in his own lifetime. His work has fooled far more people after his death. -- Fyslee / talk 17:43, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
I have deleted it for this reason: a poor source, no verification, no evidence to believe organisation is/was notable. LeContexte (talk) 16:53, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

www.rife.de as RS

The referenced magazine / journal article written by an MD at the Mayo Clinic says that a virus was seen using one of the Rife microscopes of that time. AC, please do not delete article text that is verifiable like this, science journal / magazine article reprint(s) from a RS. Mentally come to terms with the content of that article and adjust your mindset regarding Rife accordingly. Two links were provided: 1. A web text extract of the article, and 2. A scanned image pdf file supposedly from the original science journtal / magazine article. All of those photo micrographs did come from Rife's microscopes, whether or not they accompanied the Science magazine article or not. As a compromize, I will link to only the pdf version of the scanned article text. The web site is RS since it specifically states in its introductory text that after the article reprint the pictures presented are from a Canadian Rife collection. The multi-column magazine write-up of Rife's microscopes appears to occupy several pages--this is not normally the length of an op-ed piece. It is a short article with a title.

As for Rife not getting a PhD from a German university, it is only speculation of Midgely that Rife did not since Midgely was supposing that Rife=Radionics=Albert Abrams has not demonstrated any verifiable evidence to back his speculation. Oldspammer 12:28, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

It's not accurate to say that that Science article says that the virus itself was seen. Rather, the article says that "blue bodies" were seen in filtrate drawn from samples of the virus. After reading the article through, it's not clear what these "blue bodies" are, since the author also mentions that they aren't detectable by regular light microscopy.
There's another important point you seem to be missing, and that is that the author is using a different definition of the word "virus" than we are. To Rosenow in 1934, the word "virus" meant the causal agent of an infectious disease, a definition that, unlike our current one, would have encompassed bacteria as well. (If you don't believe me, look at the top of page 3 of the PDF.) Keep in mind that in 1934, biology was in what we might call its bronze age. While DNA was known to exist, its vital role as the keeper of genetic information was not confirmed until Hershey and Chase's landmark 1953 experiment. It was only after this and other developments in molecular biology, as well as the invention of the electron microscope, that the nature of the distinction between the virus and the bacterium became known.
Since the true causal agent of polio and herpes encephalitis would not have been visible to scientists in 1934, it makes sense that they would misidentify larger bodies as the "virus." But we should not be confused and believe that they were talking about a virus in the modern sense of the world. Science tends to progress forward, and this is especially so in the case of biology, which has undergone a revolution in the last 40 years. Many conclusions made in the earlier part of the 20th century now seem quaint at best, and outright wrong at worst. Angio 20:28, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Speculation. No, I asked Heidelberg. They keep records of graduates, as does Oxford and no doubt American universities. And no, and no... Midgley 19:31, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Rife speed record

These are nice easy things to discuss. Start with who - Rife, where ...? How fast ....? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_speed_record does not, today, contain the word "Rife". Further and better details, please. Midgley 19:45, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Resolution and diameter

"confirmed by calculation to be at resolutions of 8,000 diameters". What does that mean? Midgley (talk) 17:22, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

It means that this article needs a ground-up rewrite, starting with axing the references to rife.com as a reliable source and re-structuring the article around reliable, independent secondary sources... MastCell Talk 19:21, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Response to Midgley-Not MastCell--If object "A" appears 900 times bigger in Lab microscope with its Ziess stated magnification, and then appears 8,000 times bigger in the Rife microscope, the doctor doing the comparison must have computed the ratio of the viewed specimen, then multiplied by the 900 times factor to get the 8,000 number. The ratio would have been 8,000 / 900 = 11.25. It is not difficult to view one item in one observation and see that it is 11 to 12 times the size in the next. Oldspammer (talk) 21:45, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Response to MastCell--You mean that reliable sources should be cut out so that only the POV that Rife was a fraud can be conveyed by the WP article? The report is a scanned image of original library archived journal report / article. Will you intend to delete all mention of this report from this science / medical journal based only upon the web domain / site hosting the article? What if it shows up elsewhere? Delete that too? Slippery slope and all of that... Oldspammer (talk) 21:44, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
No. I mean that rife.com is not an independent, reliable secondary source. Wikipedia articles should be based on independent, reliable secondary sources. Do you see the issue? MastCell Talk 02:34, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Firstly, I must point out that the site domain name is not "a commercial dot com site," but a dot org domain name. So if you are mistaken in that regard, you must not have even bothered to visit the site at all to even pass unbiased judgement on its independence from Rife!
That is a domain name reliability claim against the host organization of the information. The information is available there for your convenience--you could also look some of it up at a library where the old copies of the journal are archived.
WP:NOR? The original source is a science or medical journal. The writing is by a third-party, from a third party journal, and is hosted by third parties interested in Rife (Rife is long dead and had no off-spring to carry on his legacy) who seem not link to commercial sites selling the equipment or promoting its use. Only a few snippets of information from there are original historical documents scanned in from Rife's worldly possessions--and who else is expected to have this information? They are acting like a Rife museum. Where better to get the information?
Your argument of independence of the hosting organization could easily be proposed for pub-med since many non-mainstream historians believe that the US government is not independent from the owners of the Federal Reserve System, Oil money, European aristocracy, Citigroup, media run by moguls, and so on, many of whom are involved in the pharmaceutical, chemical industries, cancer therapy industry, and involved in the US educational system via endowment grants via the tax exempt foundations. It is simple for me to show that studies in medical journals housed at pub-med are biased against certain natural dietary food remedies as cures for disease.
Rife.org seems to just present the uneditorialized historical information as it concerns Rife--otherwise who else would act as a clearing house of such information--certainly not the pharmaceutical industry-run science and medical journals who BTW are not independent providers of science or medical knowledge, but are quite biased as to what articles they will accept for publication. That you did not visit the site indicates that you pre-decided the issue that they were pro-Rife rather than independent museum-types.
The same would go for Rife.de--the European clearing house for Rife information.
The same argument could be made about a Native American museum site run by Native Americans who scanned in articles from third-party journals, had historical photos on file, and hosted the information on their web site. I do not see that the Native Americans would be unreliable about their history, rather they would be best at knowing it in an unbiased way. Oldspammer (talk) 06:49, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I think that, in principle, old reliable sources can still be used to verify old information in the encyclopedia. However, why should we trust rife.de and rife.org? How do we know that the material found there faithfully reproduces old sources? Has anyone here actually checked (in paper archives) if they do? Would it be useful if e.g. Oldspammer would go find the original sources and reproduce them on Wikisource? Avb 12:54, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
You have changed the subject / issue to Rife.org now. I'm no where geographically where I could lay my hands on any original source documents--I elect you if you are so interested. Again, this comes back to the argument that Pub-med could be accused of having false reports published and indexed, yet I don't see deletionists wanting to delete content that uses that site? If skeptical are concerned, then have them waste their time doing confirmations. As I said, I can demonstrate that pub-med has misleading studies thereon, so why not let the deletionist people ravage articles based in part on that demonstrably unreliable source? If some interested skeptic wants to, they can probably write to Rife.org or Rife.com to find out / challenge where their original information came from. Right now there is no reason that I can see for this tact other than to have alternative medicine removed from WP so that only allopathic medical treatments can be pursued. (ie., Rife.org shows no signs of demonstrable dishonesty, checks facts, cites sources of their information, and is web accessible for convenience)
A compromise would be to keep all article text and cite the references to their original verifiable old information / paper documents by name / title, date, and origin. In this way the skeptical person can do away with having to visit Rife.org, and instead visit whatever friendly library they want to in order to unearth the original information that they desire. Oldspammer (talk) 16:32, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
What? You're saying that peer-reviewed medical literature from PubMed ought to be discarded as reliable sourcing based on... their links to "the Federal Reserve System, Oil money, European aristocracy, Citigroup, media run by moguls, and so on"??? This is an encyclopedia, not a conspiracy-theory discussion forum. We use reliable sources as defined here. Rife may be long dead, but people continue to make money by selling useless devices bearing his name to cancer patients - as made clear by one of the few independent, reliable secondary sources actually cited in this article. In fact, rife.de is replete with ads from such outfits. I'm not interested in yet another round of conspiracy theories, primary-source synthesis, etc. Wikipedia articles need to rely on published, reliable secondary sources. Rife.de is a manifestly unreliable source - in a brief glimpse at one page thereof, which we actually cite as a source, it states that Rife "isolated and photographed the tuberculosis virus". As every undergrad who's taken a microbiology course knows, TB is caused by a bacterium, not a virus. This is not a reliable source, and it has no business as the foundation of a Wikipedia article. MastCell Talk 17:26, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
The Rife.de site is not being dishonest or inaccurate for that matter. Rife claimed that TB consisted of pleomorphic forms of pathogens. The Kendal-Rife medical journal article outlines the information--read that at pub-med if you like. Rife isolated a filterable form of the pathogen (not necessarily a virus, but what Rife at the time considered a virus because it got through his Berkefeld-000 filters). Rife said that all three pleomorphic forms had to be killed quickly to defeat the disease. Do a search of
TB pleomorphic
The tax-exempt foundations that fund universities have board members on most university boards. These board members are closely associated with of the major shareholders of the drug companies. Curricula in universities was / is shaped to exclude these other theories not because the theories are necessarily wrong or discredited. PCR tests discredited recently in part for analyzing DNA out of band debris does not rule out the pleomorphic theory, and the pleomorphic theory provides some hint as to why TB is difficult to treat with conventional medicine.
As for medical journals one of them was run by Morris Fishbein (who it is said originally studied to be a clown), disgraced AMA head. How was he disgraced and / or forced to resign? What other treatments that were claimed to have worked (successfully for years) did he quash when he and his AMA cohorts could not gain exclusive control over them? Were any of these treatments subsequently published in the journals?
Not conspiracy theories--just historical facts, and generally accepted business practices originating from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Search
"John D. Rockefeller" pharmaceutical farben Flexner Simon
You may add or remove some of these search terms and still get some hits that outline historical events.

Q. Federal Reserve System--who owns and controls it?
A. A group that also controls major cancer treatment centers, controls the drug industry, and funds many universities.

Oldspammer (talk) 18:44, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Please take this nonsense to Conspiracy-pedia, or somewhere without policies on verifiability and original research. Whatever Rife may have called TB in the 1930's, the rife.de site which you rely on to source this article calls TB a "virus". Today. Right now. 2008. That's wrong, and an example of why self-published websites don't make a good basis for accurate Wikipedia articles. MastCell Talk 21:02, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

AC deletes without discussion

Rife's microscopes

August, 1932, Science magazine published a report by Dr. Edward C. Rosenow, M.D. (1875-1966). It compared identical slide samples with a conventional 900 times diameter magnification Zeiss lab microscope, and observations with the Rife #2 microscope were confirmed by calculation to be at resolutions of 8,000 diameters[2] (higher than is theoretically possible for an optical microscope)[citation needed] It also stated that, in addition to other microbes viewable with the standard lab microscope, small bodies were seen in the filtrate from the herpes encephalitis virus.[2] The Rife #2 operated using the UV light source with a single pair of adjustable angle prisms. Several unique principles were used to allow the microscope to view at this level of optical resolution / magnification:[3]

1. It used a tuned / selected wavelength or frequency of light to illuminate the microbe, which caused the chemical constituents of the microbe to fluoresce / to be or become luminescent as in a Fluorescence microscope.[3]

2. Magnification was not done by allowing the light collected by the objective lens from the microbe to be brought to a focus point, but instead just before the light beam is brought to a focus the Rife microscope optical assembly continually expands the cross sectional area of the light beam about the center of the beam, only keeping the very center cross sectional area of the beam. Thus the greatly expanded center area is then brought to a focus by the microscope eyepiece. This eyepiece is part of a matched pair. It is exactly the same as the objective lens and the retained expanded light beam travels through it in the opposite direction than it did with the objective lens. This odd way of bringing the retained expanded beam into focus essentially eliminates a phenomenon known as Fraunhofer diffraction limit, which does not allow the common optical lab microscope to magnify with the same diameters resolving power.[3]

3. Deep monochromatic ultraviolet sources prevented many of the familiar optical aberrations common to optical microscopy. Blurring and fringe degeneration when passing through the optical resistance of lenses would be minimized so that all optical components in the microscope were composed of pure quartz crystal in order to flawlessly transduce the deep ultraviolet rays. Even the specimen slides were made of thin quartz glass.[4][5]

The #3 'Universal' was Rife's highest magnification microscope. It operated using 2 pairs of adjustable angle prisms to frequency-filter/select light from his patented UV source. It claimed to have a resolution of 31,000 diameters and magnification of 60,000 diameters[6] (higher than is theoretically possible for an optical microscope).[citation needed]

Refs

  1. ^ Investigators' Reports, FDA Consumer magazine, September 1996
  2. ^ a b Rosenow, Edward C., M.D. (1932-08-26). "Observations with the Rife..." (Adobe/PDF). Science Magazine (Column 2 first page, last paragraph, fourth line, "herpes"). Retrieved 2007-09-26. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ a b c Wade, Garry, Masters Physics (2000-11-14). RIFE MICROSCOPE ADDENDUM. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ Vassilatos, Gerry (1999). Lost Science. ISBN 0-932813-75-5. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  5. ^ Desforges, Sylvain (2007-12-13). Ultra Microscopes and Cure Rays--Alternative Cancer Treatment. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  6. ^ "THE SMITHSONIAN REPORT - From the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of The Smithsonian Institution". www.rife.org reprint of Smithsonian Institution documents (search for "a resolution of 31,000 diameters"). 1944. Retrieved 2007-12-03. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

The reliable sources for the information were provided. The article text involved the Smithsonian, and Science Magazine, published reports by physicist Garry Wade, a book by Vassilatos and a published report by Desforges.

Also, the information about the Rife #2 and #3 microscopes were erased for no good reason either?

Place appropriate template tags on the small bits of text to which you object. If you object in principle to all mention of alternative medicine on WP, then say as much and provide grounds for your beliefs. Certainly not all of these were unreliable sources?--yet all the text was removed / ravaged.

I must remind biology and medical people that physics is a different science than medicine. When a theory is demonstrated by experimental observations, the theory and observations stand as true until a counter example experiment demonstrates otherwise.

Freedom of speech allows persons with credentials to report their opinions as to what physics theories apply in circumstances suitably outlined. You can find any reliable origin to source that information that you want to have. I do not specify any commercial websites, or book stores to get the information. The opinions identify plausible reasons why Rife's microscope was able to work as reported by Rife and reported in the Science magazine report and Smithsonian Institute reports.

From earlier discussions way above, optics / microscopy, for example have progressed. Several UV microscopes have been shown to have higher magnification levels similar to Rife's so that Rife's claims have been supported repeatedly. Richardson, the somatid guy, and others all have / had such machines. The theory of why this works / worked is as valid as why without these features the microscope would not have worked. When the microbe constituent chemicals are themselves the source of luminescence seen, the diffraction limit no longer applies because refractable, indirect lighting is not what is being observed / viewed anymore. Erasing article text to support an opposing POV is not good. You may present opposing theories if you can cite any references at all that counter those given in the article.

Maybe some wikilawyering argument is being used to wipe out the text? This is a strong mojo method of attack! Please explain further your step by step lawyering arguments--Thanks. Oldspammer (talk) 17:27, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

In recent years researchers in the department of NanoBiophotonics at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have been able to break the Abbe resolution limit of far-field optical microscopy, as applied to fluorescent imaging, using a technique known as Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscopy. The STED microscope used to obtain data for both publications is able to attain a resolution of 50-70 nm; the original fluorescent spot, roughly 200 nm in diameter, is reduced in surface area within the imaging plane by roughly an order of magnitude using the STED technique.

Above was a recently found quotation via Google search. It is said that the smallest virus has size approximately 20 nanometers, and the largest virus have size approximately 400 nanometers. Google searches reveal patents for high-resolution optical microscopes with resolving power to below 100 nanometers. Oldspammer (talk) 08:06, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Mention in the blogosphere and the medical literature

While we're dealing in unreliable sources, it may be worth noting that this particular article was mentioned in a high-profile blog as an example of Wikipedia's poor reliability and susceptibility to pseudoscience/crankism: "This is why you should never source Wikipedia". MastCell Talk 17:40, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

And speaking of realible sources: see PMID 8124604. See pp 119-120, in which the article describes interest in the Rife machine generated by The Cancer Cure That Worked. Here's an excerpt:

The book, written in a style typical of conspiratorial theorists, cites names, dates, events, and places, giving the appearance of authenticity to a mixture of historical documents and speculations selectively spun into a web far too complex to permit verification by anything short of an army of investigators with unlimited resources.

Sound familiar? MastCell Talk 17:58, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Yes--If you had bothered to have looked somewhere above: Cancer Journal cited by Quackwatch Flawed
and
Article Critique
and
Poor quality references on web
Do a text search of this page for 'blog' and voila--same old, same old...

To me, Rife's treatment thing probably works once for cancer because it is like a certain type of medical treatment that addresses symptoms and not the underlying cause of disease.
The ACS article was written by no given authors. If it turns out to have mistakes--no one is blamed or looks foolish.
The ACS article mischaracterizes the Rife treatment device as "a radionics device." Since Rife used 50 to 500 Watts of input power to his treatment Beam Ray device--there was nothing "subtle energy" about it.
"It is clear from descriptions of how Rife's Frequency Generator supposedly functioned that it was simply another radionics device."
So the authors conducted nothing more than guess-work and reading to examine someone else's written descriptions of possibly Rife's original equipment, and possibly someone else's machine altogether--sources and fact checking were not provided.
"The Rife Frequency Generator allegedly would generate radio frequencies of precisely the same vibratory rates as the offending bacteria and destroy them in a manner similar to an opera singer's voice breaking a crystal glass."
Rife did not say bacteria (a non-filterable form of microbe) caused cancer. The article has a bunch of stuff in it that inaccurately attributes post-Rife activities to him. Some gullible people read this crap and think that it is the gospel and honest. This is yet another reason why pub-med is a shady slippery place.
The ACS web site is worse, and relies on this publication as one of its sources. The web site talks about "electrical impulses at the feet to break up the supposed accumulated deposits of toxins at nerve endings. During treatment, the patient places his or her feet in a plastic box attached to the Rife unit."
Rife did not have plastic, nor did he target the feet, nor did he target toxins.
Another ACS web passage: "Practitioners claim the Rife machine, another electronic device, can diagnose and eliminate diseases, including cancer, by tuning into electrical impulses given off by diseased tissue. The Rife machine then directs energy of the same frequency back at the diseased tissue. Promoters claim that the device kills microorganisms that cause disease."
Yeah, one device doing both diagnosis and curing? Rife used his microscope to analyze tissue samples, and used a separate device to try to devitalize pathogens present. Rife never used radio wave emissions from the microorganisms to kill them. Rife used florescence of the constituent chemicals of the microbes when tuning his "staining with light" / heterodyning UV microscope to view them. Modern day science has invented Electrical impedance tomography. H. Clark had some goofy oscillator / synchronizer or something that could have been primitively been measuring some small part of this kind of thing. But I'm sure that she read too much into the oscillator frequency that she was getting from her gizmo. Rife did mention somewhere that some diseased tissues exhibited differing impedance characteristics, and made use of this for more closely setting up his treatment device to target the affected area of bodily tissues.
Another ACS web passage: "The Rife machine (or Rife frequency generator) was created by Royal Raymond Rife, an American who asserted that cancer was caused by bacteria. The machine supposedly emitted radio waves at the same frequency as those discharged by offending bacteria. According to Rife, the radio waves created vibrations that "shattered" the bacteria."
Here there are minor mischaracterizations. Bacillus X and Bacillus Y were filterable forms (not bacterial forms) and according to Rife were not the direct cause of malignancy--according to Rife apparently some toxins and radicals may have been directly causing cancer. The microbes were not necessarily ruptured or shattered, but could have been merely inactivated, or slightly disrupted. Garry Wade stated that the toxins and radicals within the BX / BY pathogens (situated within cancerous cells) would be released in cancer cells, killing the diseased cells via cytotoxic effects. A deleted section of article text said that Rife found multiple harmonics that would cause damage to pathogens, but wanted to find the optimal frequency that used the least amount of radiation exposure to kill the pathogens with his given equipment. Rife is quoted as having said as much, thus no microbe-discharged frequency was used as the ACS web page would have one believe. I noticed, however, that the web authors never mention resonance? Oldspammer (talk) 04:03, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
OK. So you don't accept the American Cancer Society's opinion on the subject. Which is fine. Your personal disapproval of the source does not negate the fact that it is a reliable, peer-reviewed, PubMed-indexed secondary source provided by an organization with a national and international reputation. Next. MastCell Talk 04:08, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
What is wrong?--Dubious info accepted?--Renowned and accolades for deception?--Flawed, discredited articles and studies? Cutting, burning, and p? Would anyone go with the p-patenting industry's list of doctrines, policies and dogma? The oil, chemicals & dyes, food additives, munitions industries, the large banks--are not these the people who own and control the patented p-industry and who have successfully lobbied most governments to permit only one kind of practice? Search the following conspiracy theory info--it may explain Dr. Robert (Bob) C. Beck, DSc. Physics' views on drug cartels
Nelson Rockefeller Syndicate Columbian-drug
Oldspammer (talk) 17:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
This isn't conspiracy-pedia, and there's no way we're going to ignore a published, PubMed-indexed, reliable secondary source from the American Cancer Society while basing this article on dozens of references to a self-published Rife-promoting website. Please see WP:V, WP:RS, and WP:SOAP for more. MastCell Talk 18:09, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

This article is just disgusting. Hardly neutral, it just bashes and bashes a sincere and brilliant man who had ideas which went beyond the beliefs of the medical community. If vibrations and harmonics can help people get well then the medical industry is in deep financial trouble. It is not surprising that the medical industry will attempt to smear their competition. Medicine is a business, after all.

Maybe Rife's theories work, maybe they do not. But insisting that they are bunk because they are different is hardly scientific. The only great pathbreaker whose theories were quickly adopted by the scientific communitity was Einstein. It is hard to argue with mathematics. Elsewhere, science finds it much more comfortable to keep it's gaze set firmly backwards.

Rife deserves a fair hearing and this article should revert to the much more detailed and fair July 28, 2007 version. David 208.238.205.35 (talk) 09:37, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

You seem to misunderstand Wikipedia's role; it is not here to uncritically highlight ideas which have been ignored by the scientific community, regardless of how well-founded you believe those ideas to be or how many analogies to Einstein and Galileo are drawn. MastCell Talk 23:30, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Quote=Wiktionary: Encyclopedia -- From Latin encyclopædia < Ancient Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία (enkyklios paideia) < ἐγκύκλιος (enkyklios) "circular, rounded, round" < κύκλος (kyklos) "circle" + παιδεία (paideia) "the rearing of a child", or "education", from παιδίον (paidion) "child".

- I take that to mean rounded education, education including all topics - including those disliked by the mainstream. I never said "uncritically", I said "fair" - if science's objections to Rife are valid then let them compete on the level playing field of ideas, with respect for mainstream science's evidence but not blind subservience to it's whim.

And while we are at it: (paragraph 2)".....and blamed for the deaths of cancer sufferers who have used it." Accusing the man of murder based on a newspaper article from a different country published 29 years after his death???? Lets get rid of that line, as a start. David 208.238.205.25 (talk) 16:45, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

The article states that devices bearing Rife's name, and purportedly based on his beliefs, have been blamed for the deaths of cancer sufferers. Not only is that verifiable, but it's one of the small handful of items in this mess of an article that's actually linked to a reliable secondary source. So I don't think we should remove it. These ideas have competed on the level playing field of ideas, and have evidently lost - nothing's been published on them since 1938. I don't see how minimizing the scientific implausibility of Rife's ideas, or falsely "balancing" the debate, contribute to this article or encyclopedia being more well-rounded. MastCell Talk 19:09, 23 January 2008 (UTC)


Read the WP line in it's entirety: "Rife's treatment has been unanimously condemned as worthless by mainstream scientists,[4] and blamed for the deaths of cancer sufferers who have used it.[5]"

The clear impression given is that Rife's treatment was blamed for the deaths, when it was actually an unknown treatment by others many years later. The WP statement then gives the impression that it is a consensus of mainstream scientists doing the blaming when it is in fact a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. And the deaths are of terminal cancer patients who likely would have died in conventional therapy. There is no basis for including the highly misleading and inflammatory statement "and blamed for the deaths of cancer sufferers who have used it.".

There has been a lot of work on Rife's ideas since 1938. This work has taken place outside the peer reviewed journals. I cannot imagine a large pharmaceutical company funding research that could make its' products obsolete - or funding a university where such experiments were allowed. So the cry of "quackery" is applied, longly and loudly enough that no establishment researcher dare oppose it.

But, much as the powerful interests would wish it otherwise, "the level playing field of ideas" is not bounded by the journals and those who profess to do our thinking for us. And neither should Wikipedia - the rounded source of education, accept such artificial boundaries.

Let the mainstream state it's case. And let the Rife backers state their's. That is a neutral point of view. David 208.238.205.241 (talk) 16:36, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

No, actually, it's not - see WP:WEIGHT. And this article and talk page have seen more than enough proof-by-assertion-of-conspiracy, so please confine yourself to a discussion of reliable sources, as defined by Wikipedia, and their use in this article. MastCell Talk 18:54, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Verifiability / Burden of evidence / Sources / Reliable sources: ... (par 2) "All articles must adhere to Wikipedia's neutrality policy, fairly representing all majority and significant-minority viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in rough proportion to the prominence of each view. Tiny-minority views and fringe theories need not be included, except in articles devoted to them."

By the posts on this talk page I would say that the mainstream and pro-Rife camps are roughly equally divided, so pro-Rife and pro-fairness is not a "tiny-minority view". Since this is an "article devoted" to Rife, his views should be fairly represented.



Evidence admitted in a court of law should be considered "reliable", as should first person recorded statements of participants. These provide ample evidence of AMA attacks on Rife and suppression of his work. See "Claims of government cover-up" in the removed July 28, 2007 version of this article. And I would agree that "government" in that section title should change to "AMA".

With the AMA actively opposing Rife's theories there can be no journal articles. Nobody wants to risk their license. So in order to provide "all majority and significant-minority viewpoints" the best available sources must be utilized, with caveats if necessary. There are 55 citations in the removed July 28, 2007 version of this article.

You seem to be insisting that the medical community is the sole source of truth. Many medical treatments of the past are now widely discredited (leeches?). Is it so difficult to imagine future advances in unexpected directions? David 208.238.205.220 (talk) 14:37, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Actually MastCell is right about the secondary source of the Sidney Morning Herald, but the hosting web site is not reliable. Quackwatch and associated sites have had occasions where one of their group writes a book, then the book is used as a source even though some statements from the book might be unfounded. Not only that, but mainstream medicine is not reliable, so the SMH article author is only parroting this same propaganda approved by those opinion makers. MastCell is also supporting the majority view of mainstream medicine that Rife's claims are quackery. It is only because Rife has been labeled as a quack in media that this article is not deleted altogether since viewpoints other than this are not covered by mainstream media. Please refer to the Articles For Deletion (Afd) discussion of this WP article on possibly numerous nomination times... MastCell is also accurate about mention of conspiracies. Some are careful not to characterize conspiracies as inaccurate or theoretical. Many secrets are not widely known. Like who switched JFK's coffin on the plane from Dallas to Washington? Why? When? Who could have done this?
When one carefully examines history, we see that the CIA is used by the US government to support the interests of its most powerful and wealthy citizens. Ever heard of Guatemala and United Fruit Company and banana republics? Who is to say, for example that the CIA or NSA did not poison Rife's toothpaste and cause his untimely death to have Rife and hopes of reviving his technology permanently quashed? The mainstream media tend not to publish evidence of government conspiracies (not theories, but successfully executed "strategic" plans). Sometimes though, a foreign media outlet will let the cat out of the bag--but attention is rarely paid to it except by those today in non-mainstream media and non-mainstream historians--so called "fringe reporters." The criminal justice system routinely uses strong circumstantial evidence to draw conclusions and convict offenders. The thinking public: what should they do when such evidence is presented even by non-mainstream sources?
However, the policies of WP have been constructed to reflect a certain common knowledge as reported by and benefits certain people because the voices of these particular people are notable and are reported in mainstream media. WP is not necessarily focused upon "the gifted" and neither is mainstream media. Mainstream media often focuses upon famous celebrities (sexy singers with mental or behavioral problems)--a nice distraction--but hardly important in the greater context--yet notable for WP purposes. Common man. Common language. Does common = vulgar? There was a radio show where I live named "The sacred and the profane." A sacred man is an important person--notable. Does a profane man = a common man--an unimportant, non-notable person? Do kings, and important scientists and doctors view the common man as their inferiors, unable to understand important strategic things--preferring to know about sexy celebrities, or easily offended or confused by contrary views or contrary observations or evidence of government conspiracies or strong circumstantial evidence that might cast doubt on closely held beliefs or cast a lack of confidence in government leaders? For example, mainstream newspapers and science journals will always consider the impact of article content so as not to offend the genteel sensibilities of their audiences, financial backers / owners, and advertisers, and so excise any articles or other content that remotely may offend or contradict long held underpinning beliefs or cause worry by shaking faith in government. Discussion of such arcane topics are often done in whispers lest one should be accused of being a conspiracy theorist, or believing in unusual things--even if later on proven to be true. "No one ever expects the Spanish inquisition!"--Monty Python.
E.G., EC Rosnow column 2 page 1 of the cited report / article

Examination under the Rife microscope of specimens, containing objects visible with the ordinary microscope, leaves no doubt of the accurate visualization of objects or particulate matter by direct observation at the extremely high magnification (calculated to be 8,000 diameters) obtained with this instrument.

mention was quickly deleted:
10:25, 16 January 2008 Adam Cuerden (Talk | contribs) (12,766 bytes) (→Rife's microscopes - "Virus" in the 1930s - as clearly explained in that paper - simply meant "infective agent". It does not say that the diameter was "confirmed by calculation".) (undo)

Although the word "confirmed" is not specifically within the cited reference, you will note that it does say accurate observational comparison was employed to do the calculation. In column 1, page 1 of the report / article it outlines the technical details:

... the ordinary Zeiss microscope equipped with a 2 mm apochromatic oil immersion lens and x10 ocular giving a magnification of about 900 diameters.

and that they performed a (verification) check via using known / reference specimen sample types for accuracy of the 900 diameters figure to compute the 8,000x diameter of the Rife instrument. To me, verification checks and accurate calculation coalesce to mean "confirmed via calculation," but my brain via thinking just put that together for me!--paraphrasing.
Other people thinking similarly might not have agreed with the deletion, but do not want to be seen supporting Rife in any way shape or fashion, or want to form consensus with the mainstream opinions expressed by the given editor, and so let this deletion edit go through unchallenged. And so it goes, on and on. If it is demonstrated clearly that Rife's more primitive #2 UV microscope could have magnified as Rife had claimed, then his more powerful #3 UV Universal microscope might have also magnified as Rife had claimed. Further, then if these microscope claims are declared true by a science journal article / report (a.k.a. a slip up in mainstream journalism that got out by mistake and offended the genteel sensibilities of the mainstream medical science community of both then and now), then more of Rife's claims might be seen as possibly being true also.
Here is some of the math / physics involved in the magnifications involved:
  • The smallest virus measures only 20 nanometers in length.
  • The largest virus measures about 400 nanometers in length
  • If the magnification is 60,000x, then 1 mm final image size can be obtained when looking at (1/1000) / 60,000 = 16.67 nanometers.
  • if resolution is 31,000x, then 1 mm final image size can be obtained at (1/1000) / 31,000 = 32.2 nanometers.
  • if excitation energy via heterodyning light via addition via 4 prisms: FarUV = 190 nanometers, and 4 x FarUV = 190 nm / 4 = 47.5 nanometers, and if the diffraction limit is at 1/2 wavelength, then divide that number by 2.
  • if excitation energy via heterodyning light via multiplication via 4 prisms: (FarUV)^4 = (190 x 10^-9)^4 meters = 1.303 x 10^-27 meters (which is way small--a very small fraction of a nanometer)
However, the human eye can resolve better than 1 mm when looking at things, so substitute a fraction of a millimeter that your own eye would be able to see, then redo the math. Obviously, viruses now are the same size as viruses then. So if the magnifications are 8,000x diameters, or 31,000x diameters then certainly viruses within those constraints would be viewable regardless of being the 1930s or other dates. Oldspammer (talk) 10:35, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

I note the "Do not discuss the Evil Conspiracy" box that has appeared at the top of the page. I guess someone thinks it is/was a "good" conspiracy. The suppression of his work is a central (and well documented) part of the Rife story. Sorry if that bothers someone. I expect that it bothered Rife a lot more.

I am way behind you, old spammer, in understanding Rife. But it worries me when censorship is threatened. It also worries me when an apparently sincere man is accused of murder. I make three points above as to why the line "and blamed for the deaths of cancer sufferers who have used it.[5]" should be deleted - the most telling is that the "therapy" in the Sidney Morning Herald is not connected in the article to Rife other than his name being used to promote it. Regardless of how reliable the source is, it does not say what it is being cited as saying. Rife had been dead for over twenty years when the events of the article happened.

It is a small victory in a ugly ugly article, but I intend to remove that line (keeping the part about mainstream science's opinion) unless someone can explain to me how Rife (not unauthorized equipment sold using his name) is responsible for the deaths in that SMH article. David 208.238.205.141 (talk) 13:44, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

The article says that "Rife's treatment" was responsible. Which is what the source says. Like it or not, it appears that the most notable thing about Rife is that fraudulent treatments and devices bearing his name are being sold, and in the words of one of the few reliable sources this article contains, are being blamed as a factor in the deaths of cancer sufferers who used them. If you'd like to make clearer that these are devices sold using Rife's name, rather than devices Rife himself marketed, then we can do that. As to conspiracies and suppression, if there is a documented and verifiable conspiracy to suppress Rife's work, then we can include it. So far, though, I've seen zero reliable sources to that effect, and just a lot of unsubstantiated claims of a conspiracy here on the talk page from involved editors, as an excuse for the lack of reliable sources supporting their arguments. You see the difference. MastCell Talk 19:23, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

The change in the "cancer deaths" line is appreciated.

So, why do mainstream sources regarding Rife cluster around the "fraudulent treatments and devices bearing his name"?

Does the AMA suppress medical ideas that compete with it? Yes, says Time magazine, the AMA and chief Rife basher Morris Fishbein received an indictment in 1939:

"The A. M. A., said the indictment, "condemns as 'unethical' group medical practice on a risk-sharing prepayment basis principally because such practice is in business competition with . . . doctors engaged in [private] practice."

Source: TIME Magazine: Monday, Jan. 02, 1939 Article: "A. M. A. Indicted" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760551,00.html

Does the AMA suppress medical treatments that compete with it? Yes, says the New York Times newspaper, the AMA lost a lawsuit in 1987:

"The American Medical Association led an effort to destroy the chiropractic profession by depriving its practitioners of association with medical doctors and by calling them unscientific cultists or worse, a Federal district judge has ruled."

"The decision said the nation's largest physicians' group led a boycott by doctors intended to contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession.

source: New York Times August 29, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DF1130F93AA1575BC0A961948260

These reliable sources show that the AMA has been proven in courts of law to use tactics very similar to those that they are accused of using to attack Rife. This means that the idea that the AMA actively and deliberately suppressed Rife's work is plausible (not proven, yet).

Then add the first person voice recordings, court documents and the rest of the 55 footnotes in the removed July 28 2007 version of this article and the gauge moves to "likely". Still not proven, agreed, but getting within sight of it. David 208.238.205.91 (talk) 13:04, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

OK -- It is NOT acceptable to censor someone. My above comment regarding AMA suppression was removed by another editor. My post was a direct answer to his request for verifiable, reliable sources. I object to the suppression of Rife and I most certainly object to the suppression of myself.

You said: 

"As to conspiracies and suppression, if there is a
documented and verifiable conspiracy
to suppress Rife's work, then we can include it."

The above links document and verify very similar conspiracies by the same institution (AMA) and in one case the same man, Morris Fishbein. These are Court decisions, published in two of the most reputable general-readership publications in the USA. Short of a confession by the AMA, this is the best evidence that could be imagined in the situation, since Rife had neither the finances nor the health to clear his name in court.

The above cases prove that the AMA engaged in spurious suppression of ideas and medical treatments that competed with their members. That is exactly what they are accused of doing to Rife. That is pure fact, not theory -conspiracy or otherwise.

I would hope to continue this discussion as gentlemen (and ladies, if present). The talk page guidelines state: "There is of course some reasonable allowance for speculation, suggestion and personal knowledge on talk pages, with a view to prompting further investigation". I would insist that my comments are relevant facts, but I note that the talk page guidelines allow a much looser standard.

David 208.238.205.199 (talk) 12:00, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

You are not being "censored". You are being asked to observe the talk page guidelines, as all of us try to do. This is a place to discuss specific improvements to this article. It is not a general discussion forum, nor a platform to expound on one's conspiracy theories. If you showed up at a city council meeting with a megaphone and started going on about the AMA and Morris Fishbein, you'd be "censored". If you wrote a lengthy diatribe to your local paper trying to connect the dots between Wilk v. AMA and Royal Rife, you'd be "censored".
Please re-read the policy on original research and synthesis. Claims must be directly backed by a reliable source to be used in the article. Editors cannot string together individual items and try to advance a novel position (e.g. that the AMA or Fishbein suppressed Rife) without a reliable source to that effect, so please stop trying to do so. Produce a reliable source asserting that Rife's claims in particular were suppressed, and we can discuss incorporating it. If you continue to use the page as a platform for general debate and discussion on tangentially related topics, and you continue to focus on unacceptable original synthesis rather than material actually potentially usable to improve the article, then your posts may continue to be removed. MastCell Talk 20:32, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
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