Raymond Royal Rife – A Conman’s Legacy Lives On in Quack Devices and True Believers

In 2005 I wrote this article and it has been so popularly received on the net I thought I would post it again.

by Jack Lee

BE ADVISED: There is no confict of interest here in my opinion on Rife - unlike the Rife scammers who are selling snake oil.

Here are some claims made by loyal Rife supporters:  Raymond Royal Rife, doctor of medicine, man of science.  The first man ever to cure cancer virtually single-handed.  His great legacy grows despite every attempt by the AMA to discredit him as a fraud.

Although Rife died a convicted conman and a proven liar there are still people out here who fall for his scam devices.

One doesn’t need to look very hard to discover that Mr. Rife lied about his education, he lied about his medical diploma’s, then again he lied just about everything in order to create a grand illusion that he was some kind of great medical genius, an inventor of medical devices that could cure absolutely anything.   That great illusion lives on…especially on the internet where other con-men are still trying to make a buck off Rife’s quackery.   These are people without any medical training, but they know how to sell BS.

Thousands of true-believers still tout his wacky science as fact and a medical break-thru.  They want to believe it so much, they even declare his obviously phony medical credentials as the real McCoy, despite contrary evidence.

Well, it must be one dandy conspiracy to hide Rife’s college records and get everyone on his alleged campus who might have seen him, heard him or been a classmate to lie and say they never heard of Rife.   That takes some doing!   Well, if you believe that hokum, what’s the point of reading any further?  Your mind is closed, rusted shut, but for those who are not quite so clueless here’s the true  story about ol Raymond:

The original “Rife Light Machine” was destroyed under very suspicious circumstances well over 70 years ago, probably by Rife himself in order to avoid being exposed as a fraud.   However, many similar products remain in use around the world, but not one has ever been proven to work as claimed to cure anything.   Did you hear that?  Not one ever cured anything!   Now how clear is that? I’m open to a complete retraction if you have any proof, but I’m not too worried about it.    Of course there will be people who swear they were cured of something by a Rife Machine, but without knowing  what they had or under medically accepted standards of testing this is just worthless testimonial baloney, the kind used by diet ads all the time.   You can’t know the truth about a Rife machine unless it’s tested under controlled circumstances according to the best scientific standards and when they were tested…they all flunked.  The AMA has plenty to say about these quack devices.  See my links at the end of this article.

Sadly, there are dozens of internet sites that will either sell you this “do nothing’ machine for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Or they advertise expensive treatment at a Rife Clinic near you for whatever ails you, from cancer to dandruff! No malady is too much for a miracle Rife Light Machine (I’m being sarcastic)! I said this was [sad] because in so many cases the people buying this quackery are sick and desperate. Some will die because they took the quack course of treatment.

Who was Raymond Royal Rife and what exactly did he invent? Well, for starters, we know Rife was no doctor as he so often told his many gullible followers. Despite his claims of attending Johns Hopkins and the University of Heidelberg, no student records were every found and they keep really good records. Not one person has ever remembered him as a classmate, isn’t that odd? Not if he was never there! Rather Rife’s education was limited to that of a machinist, an optical instrument maker (optician) and a part-time chauffeur. He was a pretty clever machinist so we have to give him credit where credit is due!

Next, his bogus theories for the cause of cancer and it’s cure was NEVER proven in any sort of medically supervised, double blind study and it was rejected at various times by the best medical science as sheer quackery. However, Rife was a clever conman (as many are) and he had an aptitude for selling and for mechanics, which was later displayed in his “wonder machine” that almost made him rich, thanks to his own glorious self-promoting. Yes, he almost pulled it off, but science kept getting in his way. Time and again he used his gift for promotion to overwhelm his less entertaining, but highly educated and skilled medical critics who said he was basically full of BS.

Rife was brought to prominence back in the 1930’s, during the depression era, when he was working as a chauffeur for Timken family of the Timken Roller Bearing fortune. He devised a scam that involved faking his education and using the discredited work of another quack to obtains thousands of dollars from Mrs. Timken to develop his machine. Allegedly, all the money went into the construction of a special microscope with the ability to focus on heretofore invisible bacterium! Rife claimed “he could see bacterium change over the course of their life and he claimed that this bacterium goes through 4 phases before it becomes what he identified as a cancer bacterium.”

What’s a bacterium? Who knows.

After a 100 years of medical research on cancer cells nobody other than Rife ever saw this so-called bacterium, even to this day it looks like he just made that word up. No! He really made stuff up? Yes, he made wild medical claims up all the time. But, trying to prove a negative is impossible. You’re trying to prove there are no Space Bats. You can assert it, but how do you prove it? What we can say with certainty is cancer is not “bacterium” bacteria. If it turns out at some point in the future that somehow a rare form of virus might be related to a cause of cancer then wonderful, but it does nothing for Rife’s credibility. Even a stopped clock can be right twice a day!

“Well-known debunker Peter Bowditch points out that no single virus, even Rife’s hypothesized ‘BX’ virus which allegedly “caused all cancers”, can actually account for all forms of cancer. According to the current medical understanding, viruses are only responsible for approximately 15% of all cancers.”

But, remember Rife was pushing “bacterium” and his so-called vibrations generated by light were supposed to cure any disease.

Rife didn’t come up with any evidence at any time to support his claims. Not one person since his time on earth, those many decades ago, has ever been able to see what he claimed he saw. But, if you are that gullible never mind the facts. Charlatans have a good con-job to promote here and so people continue to pat with their money.

Rife claimed his first machine was mysteriously vandalized just before it could yield results, hmmm…how coincidental? Until that vandalism, it was on display, viewed by hundreds of people as Rife proclaimed it’s wonders. It was considered by all that saw it as quite impressive, just, nobody except Rife ever actually saw it work and nobody ever would thank to that vandalism.

How it worked became another closely guarded secret and another red flag for spotting a con-game, although Rife openly “talked” about his theory and how it worked. Like they say, talk is cheap. The destruction of the machine should have been one more red flag, but this actually played out fairly well for Rife, because he often found himself dealing people who bought into the great medical conspiracy theory.

Rife’s original (albeit naive) benefactor may have provided him with all the money he needed to complete his first grand deception, but, it was Rife’s showmanship that won the day over the critics. And it was all done in a manner that would have made P.T. Barnum proud! Prior to his work being actually proven to work, Rife had convinced a fairly large number of investors to give him money to develop his science even further, part two of the big con.

His game went over almost too well, because the notoriety that followed brought a certain amount of unwanted attention on Rife and his unproven medical theories. This scientific oversight ultimately was Rife’s undoing, and his pack of lies came tumbling down. Rife was indicted for fraud and convicted. Rife was a broken man and died an alcoholic.

Since Rife’s fall from grace many imitators have emerged to champion his work and reap the financial rewards with their own version of a Rife machine….and the testimonials keep on mounting, adding new credibility to an old fraud.

Rife original work said cancer originated from bacteria and further, that all pathogens, including the cancer causing bacteria, emanated a certain frequency. By dialing in on this unique frequency and targeting the pathogen it could be immediately neutralized. Actually this idea was not even Rife’s, it was first hypothesized by “Dr. Albert Abrams (1864-1924), an American physician who became a millionaire and was branded by the American Medical Association the dean of gadget quacks”.

His research was refined by Royal Rife and a New Mexico chiropractor, James Bare. They drew up tables giving the…”frequency of 30,000 organisms they said caused every condition from dandruff to leprosy, strokes and syphilis. AIDS, for instance, is said to be cured by a frequency of 2,489 kilohertz in as little as three three-minute sessions.”

Of course with all that we know today about the causes and cures for various cancers, Rife’s medical ignorance was pathetic, but in the 1930’s his claims were much more difficult to refute. But, despite this current knowledge, the Rife legacy lives on in con’s seeking a quick buck from their willing dupes from around the world….thus fulfilling P.T. Barnum’s most famous prophecy!

For more information on this article I suggest the following sites:

http://amr2you.blogspot.com/2005/07/will-that-rife-machine-2005-plus-model.html

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/rife.html

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

http://www.devicewatch.org/reports/aquadetox.shtml