Just as swearing is best when old, posh people do it, so bad science is best when it’s on BBC News. The video is online, but I’ll transcribe. This is a story, delivered with all the authority of television news, about the ‘bioresonance’ treatment to help people give up smoking. ‘The bioresonance treatment is analysing the energy-wave patterns in Jean’s body,’ it begins. ‘It finds the frequency pattern of the nicotine and reverses it. That in theory neutralises the nicotine’s energy pattern, so her body won’t crave what’s been wiped out.’
Reader John Agapiou, who sent this in, wonders what would happen if this device really did work: ‘You’d need to extract the nicotine signal very carefully,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t want to have any traces of “dopamine” or “haemoglobin” in the recording, and nullify those molecules. Or you’d be in real trouble.’
I’m not sure anyone has ever calculated how many different kinds of molecule there are in the human body, but it must be over a million. So this machine, which looks like a piece of modern hospital equipment, records something through funny little pads attached to the skin, and it can filter out precisely the molecule it’s looking for. This is extraordinary signal processing.
The BBC goes on: ‘That principle has been used to treat illnesses and allergies. Trying to help smokers quit is a new development. There’s still no clinical proof that this works, but the clinic says it treats hundred of smokers every week. And of all those who left their cigarettes here over just the last few days, 70 per cent of them will never go back to smoking.’
This is a better success rate for smoking cessation than any other intervention that has ever been studied, including medication, hypnosis, gum, patches and group interventions.
But of course, BBC policy requires balance: there must be someone in the story to question these outlandish claims. This comes in the form of Simon Martin, from Complementary and Alternative Therapy magazine. ‘If you get a really good machine, with a well-educated, good, ethical practitioner, the sky is the limit really, but there’s an awful lot of people out there I think, not very well trained, using inferior equipment, and the sort of results they’re getting really shouldn’t be trusted.’ This is a news story, repeated several times, on BBC television.