The woman talking into the expensive microphone says she didn’t want to do the “regular stuff,” so she met a doctor whose belief system was “outside the box.”
She is sitting in a plush podcast studio, where neon signs in the background spell out “What’s Stopping You?” and “This Is a Sign to Keep Going.” Diagnosed with breast cancer using a novel technique, she refused chemotherapy. She talks about the acupuncture she received and the machine she meditated in front of. It’s called the BioCharger, and the healing was a miracle. She said she saw “beings” and suddenly felt that she was at one with her god. In that moment of divine bliss, it no longer mattered if she had cancer or not.
When she touched her breast, she says the tumour was gone. She also lets it slip that she is both a chiropractor and an energy medicine facilitator.
This is how testimonials for ineffective interventions metastasize. The company behind a specific gadget may tread around the legal minefield carefully, but users of the device get to go on podcasts to talk about how it cured their cancer.
The BioCharger made me laugh. It looks like it was stolen from the set of Doctor Who in the Tom Baker era. The base of it resembles the kind of equipment you find in a molecular biology laboratory, but it is topped instead by a red cylinder surrounded by fragile glass vials and crowned by a shiny metal doughnut. The similarity with the TARDIS’ time rotor is undeniable, but unlike that bit of Doctor Who set dressing, this thing is supposed to work.
I sure hope so, given what it costs. The base model is US$ 17,990, while the professional edition is 2,000 dollars more. And don’t forget the accessories: a metal cart (US$ 249.95), a sound baffle (US$ 349.95), and a rug (US$ 325.00), among others. If you’re going to splurge, you might as well ask the BioCharger to charge up your water, and that is precisely what some people do: they leave a glass of water near the light show this device produces and drink from it.
Does any of this work or are we just mesmerized by fancy amulets?
Frequencies, man
It’s a cliché to remark that the BioCharger is promoted as a cure-all, but that’s only because that’s what all of these “outside the box” interventions are said to be. The BioCharger’s official website mentions that it “supports recovery, better sleep, increased energy, and overall well-being,” and that wiggle word, “support,” does the (legal) heavy lifting. Only proven medicines treat diseases; everything else can be sold as “supporting” this and “helping with” that, and the governmental regulatory agencies are satisfied.
Scrolling the website, you will read that this innovative technology is “backed by science,” but don’t go looking for the scientific papers reporting on tests done on this device. I found none, and the request I emailed the company a week ago remains unanswered. That’s because they don’t need studies to sell you a big hunk of metal and glass and tell you that you’ll feel better after using it.
So, how is this thing even said to work?
You select a program from a list of over 1,400 “recipes.” You sit in front of it for 15 to 60 minutes and enjoy the flashing lights—unless you have epilepsy, in which case I worry this thing could trigger an episode. The device is said to emit light, voltage, pulsed electromagnetic energy, as well as “frequencies and harmonics.” All of this fancy scientific jargon is meant to improve the voltage inside your cells—to recharge your body’s batteries, basically—and bring you back to health.
Pseudosciences oversimplify, and the BioCharger is no exception. It is based on the old canard that sickness is due to your cell’s voltage getting closer to zero and that a healthy voltage is between -70 and -50 millivolts. This is the same falsehood behind the Healy, yet another wellness gadget with an array of recipes meant to give you good frequencies. The BioCharger is not the first and it won’t be the last. Its differentiating feature is that it combines four different energies into one device, but bundling up four things that haven’t been shown to work does not make a machine more useful.
Using the BioCharger does not require you to understand basic science. Case in point, this is a machine that cranks out electromagnetic frequencies. Yet, one of its users and promoters, Lynn (who describes herself on YouTube as a lifelong researcher), admitted to having difficulty downloading the recipes for the BioCharger from the cloud. You see, she doesn’t have Wi-Fi in her office, where the device sits. That’s because she uses a different device to block electromagnetic frequencies in her home and office. So, electromagnetic frequencies bad, but also electromagnetic frequencies good.
If you’re open minded enough, you may still be impressed by videos of people touching the BioCharger with one hand and holding onto a fluorescent tube with the other. The tube lights up, just like it would if it were plugged in. That’s because the BioCharger is built around a Tesla coil, which generates a strong electric field that can travel through the air. You can see a similar demonstration done at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade with a much more powerful one. If the voltage inside the coil is high enough, you don’t even need to touch it: you can just stand nearby and hold onto a fluorescent tube, and the electrical field generated by the coil will excite the gas inside the tube, lighting it up. If this was indeed a medical device, the museum would convert into a spa and likely make a lot more money. (This demonstration is often done in physics departments, as you can see here and here.)
What I personally found interesting with the BioCharger is that its adepts keep mindlessly repeating the same impressive factoid without fact-checking it. If they had, they would question the very existence of an important person in the BioCharger story.
The mysterious Dr. Orville Fitz
Jim Girard, according to the official BioCharger website, studied applied mathematics at the University of Akron and at Kent State University, both in Ohio. He is the father of the BioCharger, having accumulated “25 years of subtle energy research and development,” whatever that means.
But Girard is not just anybody. Much like how a lightning bolt connects earth to the heavens, Girard’s name is pronounced in the same breath as Nikola Tesla’s. In 1988, Girard is said to have lived with and studied under Dr. Orville Fitz, a protégé of Tesla’s. This appeal to dead geniuses, as I like to call it, is popular in pseudoscientific circles: invoking the wisdom of Tesla or Hippocrates to infer you have been touched by their intellect, and the value of your wares is thus beyond doubt.
I could find no trace of a Dr. Orville Fitz. According to BioCharger lore, the man would have been born around 1900, and he would have worked with Nikola Tesla in the 1930s, only to find himself in his 80s living with Jim Girard for six months and showing him the ropes. Searches on Google and DuckDuckGo came up empty (except for the reminder that Tom Skerritt played a character named Orville “Fitz” Fitzgerald in The Birdmen). No trace of Fitz in print media, according to Factiva. Nothing on the Internet Archive. An Orville Fitzgerald died in Kincardine, Ontario, in 2015 at the age of 80, but he would have been too young. Pepijn van Erp, a Dutch mathematician and skeptic, tells me that the biographies of Tesla written by Bernard Carlson and Richard Munson make no mention of an Orville Fitz… but that Tesla in the 1930s did correspond with a young army private named Bloyce Fitzgerald who was, supposedly, heading up a top-secret project in Ohio and who became his protégé. I was unable to find out what happened to Bloyce after World War II.
I emailed the Tesla Museum in Belgrade and was told that its staff could not find the name “Orville Fitz” in their records. Their senior archivist, who could take a deeper look at their archive, is away until October.
I am not accusing Jim Girard of lying: it’s possible this Orville Fitz was misrepresenting himself. The bottom line is that I could not find any confirmation that Girard was an indirect heir to Tesla’s knowledge, and even if he had been, it would be no guarantee of the BioCharger being a panacea.
A much more telling name-drop in the BioCharger story is Royal Rife. His is the name invoked, like an incantation, by people who believe that sickness comes from “bad frequencies” and that devices that pump you full of “good frequencies” will bring you back to health. Rife’s devices have been debunked, and the mention of “frequencies” in this context is always a reliable marker of nonsense.
It is no wonder that the usual suspects can be seen endorsing the BioCharger like it’s the Second Coming of healthcare. Dave Asprey, the biohacker behind the Bulletproof brand, says the machine knocks him out when he puts it on the sleep setting. Tony Robbins, the self-taught and ultra-rich motivational speaker behind an AI-guided diagnostics service, says the BioCharger is like the fireplace in his home. And then there’s Australian celebrity chef Pete Evans, who peddled the device at the height of the pandemic and who was fined tens of thousands of dollars for promoting false COVID-19 cures, including the BioCharger. Last I checked, he was preparing to open up his own healing clinic two hours south of Brisbane.
A parallel healthcare system
The BioCharger’s marketing material is so familiar to me, I could predict it in my sleep.
I have heard this pitch a thousand times and I will continue hearing it for a thousand more. The outline is the same; only the details change. Here’s what this wellness pitch always sounds like:
“Pharmaceuticals are bad, and modernity is killing us. We must remember that nature heals all, and this new gadget is at once natural and cutting edge, designed by a fearless maverick who rediscovered suppressed knowledge from a dead genius who had also been maligned. If you want to believe in divine healing energy, we’re right there with you; if you’re more scientifically minded, we’ve got you covered, too.
“Our device is a cure-all because every disease can be traced to a single root cause that doctors don’t even know about. We promise we are not misunderstanding and grossly oversimplifying human biology. Everything taught in medical school is wrong: cancer is a sign of acidity in your body, and you should breathe through your butthole.
“Our gadget is personalized to your unique body whereas medicine is not, and you can use our device with all of the other alternative medical nonsense out there, even though they all contradict each other. We will never poo-poo our competition, only modern medicine. We will run small, lax studies to reassure you that our device works, but at the end of the day, science can’t measure its benefits: you just have to feel them for yourself. For legal reasons, we are not selling you a cure, wink wink; we are helping your body heal itself. And it’s especially good with the thing that was rolled out in 2020 during the other thing, you know….”
Every. Single. Time.
The CEO of the company understands the game. In interview after interview, he reminds us that the BioCharger is not a medical device. If it were, it would have to satisfy a few criteria. No, the BioCharger is a “health optimization platform.” The wellness industry is quickly building a parallel healthcare system stripped of its regulations and guardrails. They have learned that lawyers will dock points for saying “cure” and “disease,” so they are creating their own seductive language that is not bound by rules. Freedom, man.
And they don’t care if you can’t buy one of these gadgets for yourself. Instead, the BioCharger is meant for the wellness spas of Los Angeles and New York City. It’s a device you might encounter next time you travel to Bangkok, inspired by watching the squabbles of posh people receiving lavish massages on The White Lotus. On their website, the people behind the BioCharger invite anyone who owns a wellness or functional medicine “clinic” to buy the device in order to “build [their] bottom line,” and they provide a spreadsheet to calculate your return on investment. This Doctor Who prop wannabe is perfect for the spa: you can crowd five or six clients around it; you don’t need to pay a technician to operate it; and its bank of nearly infinite “recipes”—stackable and soon to be augmented using AI customizations—means a customer can always come back to try a different setting. It pays for itself.
At a time when our species has more knowledge about the human body than it has ever had, dissatisfaction and distrust pull people away from it and put in their hand the talismans of old, refurbished to look scientifically validated. Some people pray in front of the BioCharger, or meditate, or read their Bible, not unlike laying down a prayer mat in front of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s a mindset filled with contradictions. These ideas are ancient yet cutting edge. The science of medicine has been corrupt, but the science of frequencies is dependable. Waves are bad when they give you Internet access, good when they can be tied, uncertainly, to the genius of Nikola Telsa. To quote Christopher Nolan’s frustrating film Tenet, “don’t try to understand it; feel it.”
Feeling your way to benefits is useful not just to the end user but to the service provider, too. At a biohacking conference, the CEO of the company behind the BioCharger and the inventor of the machine—both named Jim—were interviewed on a podcast in what looks like an overgrown tanning bed. CEO Jim told the story of the “clinics” that keep the BioCharger near the front desk while they chat with potential customers. Apparently, when the BioCharger is running its “abundance” program at the front desk, twice as many people decide to sign up to use it, putting more money in the pockets of the spa owner.
All you have to do is believe.
Open your mind wide and let your brains fall out.
Take-home message:
– The BioCharger is a wellness gadget built around a Tesla coil, and it is claimed to emit light, frequencies, harmonics, electromagnetic energy, and voltage to help your body heal itself.
– There are no readily available studies of the potential health benefits of this machine, which is not an approved medical device but a “health optimization platform,” a meaningless phrase.
– It is based on the false notion that disease is caused by altered voltage in our cells and that so-called good frequencies can bring us back to health.