Talk:Royal Rife

Any source for the statement that it didn't replicate?
The article states that "Rife's claims about his beam ray could not be independently replicated, and were discredited by independent researchers during the 1950s.[7][8]"

Neither of the two sources cited seem to mention any attempts to replicate the alleged findings, or these "independent researchers in the 1950s". This statement in one form or another has appeared in the article since at least https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Royal_Rife&oldid=273211790, and I've looked through the article history a bit but haven't managed to find any reference given for it that actually, y'know, refers to it. Where is this claim coming from?

The mention of "the 1950s" might relate to the State of California Public Health Department hearing in 1958, which led to the devices being banned from the market. (I've only been able to find unreliable sources for that, too). Apparently that did involve investigation by independent labs, so it might be what the statement about "independent researchers during the 1950s" refers to. But if so, there's no mention of it in the article.

Anyone got a proper source for this claim, please? If not, maybe it should come out. It may be true, but usual Wikipedia rules are that you can't have things you don't have references for. (Last time I put a "citation needed" on this, took it off again and said to post on the talk page and ping them.  So here you are, Valjean, and I'm sorry I didn't see the message before  :-D ) Wombat140 (talk) 01:36, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the ping. I have totally reworked the content from both sources and gotten rid of that old wording. The matter is covered quite well elsewhere in the article, so that wording is unnecessary. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 15:37, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Looks good, good job! I also added a direct citation for the Electronics Australia article (it was available on archive.org), not sure if I did it right or not. Wombat140 (talk) 20:29, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Good work. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 15:49, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Difficult to find reliable sources
The material about the modern so-called "Rife machines" is useful, as "Rife machines" of varying levels of nonsensicality seem to be still going around, but the article's rather short on information about the person himself or what he did. As it is, I'm not sure what the source is even for things like his date of birth! There are several websites that have collected large numbers of (to all appearances) original documents, but since none of them have any particular credentials it looks like they would count as "self-published", and some of them also sell Rife machines or accessories and are thus "biased sources". https://rife.org/ https://rife.de/  https://www.rifevideos.com/

Could these sites be used as sources for fairly uncontroversial points such as what the original machines were like (which is supported by numerous photographs) (might be useful to underline the fact that the things currently on sale are mostly nothing like them)? Or are they altogether unusable?

Where they show newspaper articles, can the newspaper articles be used in their own right, at least? If so, can they be used as links when citing the newspaper article, or would the newspaper article citation just have to be given without a link, as some of them already are? Wombat140 (talk) 20:29, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
 * It would be safest for you to first propose, right here, the wording and source you'd like to add and see what other editors think.
 * We should avoid websites that sell products. We're dealing with fringe ideas rarely dealt with by RS, so due weight considerations apply. Unreliable sources have zero weight, but if RS have gotten information from such sites, we can cite that info as it has been filtered by the RS. That way we include the information with the POV of the RS, rather than the original, often misleading, views pushed by the unreliable source. We should use the mainstream framing. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 16:16, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Not from those sources, but I thought I might add a scrap more factual information about the nature of the microscopes, from the Smithsonian article. Makes it clearer what kind of thing is being talked about and that he did appear to have at least some acquaintance with how microscopes worked.  What do you think of this?
 * The Smithsonian Institute reported that one of these microscopes was equipped for "transmitted and monochromatic beam dark-field, polarized, and slit-ultra illumination, including also a special device for crystallography". They added that several doctors had attended a demonstration of another of Rife's microscopes and had been impressed by its clarity and high magnification, though at least one doctor who had tested it had expressed doubts about whether the magnification was quite as high as Rife claimed.
 * However, some of the observations Rife claimed to have made with his microscopes do not remotely match modern findings. For instance, he reported that under certain conditions typhoid bacteria changed into a much smaller form (typhoid bacteria are not spore-forming), and claimed to have observed a microbe present in most cancerous tumours that had five forms, one of which was indistinguishable from E. coli while another resembled a fungus.
 * While I'm about it, OK to change "through vibration" to "using radio waves" in the lead and/or in "Life and work"? The San Diego Evening Tribune reference confirms that.  Makes it slightly clearer what he was going on about, and also indicates that some of the things going around as "Rife machines" (using sound waves, coloured light, or what have you) aren't even the same thing as this, even for those who think there might have been something in the original thing.    Wombat140 (talk) 05:26, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Edited. Wombat140 (talk) 01:29, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Despite all the criticism of Rife's claims that using resonant frequencies can be used to treat and destroy disease, for some reason physicians, researchers, even musicians. All clearly based on the Dr Rife's claims, discredited and mocked herein. If, as this article claims, Dr Rife's attack on disease using resonant frequency is "medical quackery," then why are his ideas and his discredited prototype, upon which these "recent breakthroughs" are based, without crediting Dr Rife's work, not supportive of Rife's original work?
 * These are NOT a NEW PHENOMENONS.
 * These "breakthroughs" follow the work of Dr Royal Rife, who's work was surpressed decades ago.
 * Capitalizing on Rife's concepts, the Soviets built an ultra low frequency (ULF) weapons that destroyed living organisms. It was tested on the battlefields in Afghanistan, first causing nausea, then vomitting and diarrhea. Within another 48 hrs, it was followed with bleeding from the bowel, and shortly thereafter, disintegrated organs evacuate rectally, then agonizing death.
 * This is precisely why humans can't live near wind farms; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97107-8 wind turbines emit ULFs]. SecretInfoWarrior (talk) 17:18, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure about any of the following.


 * There's no need to be so aggressive about it. It might be unreasonable not to consider these as evidence if they were the same thing as Rife's method, but they're not.  Not everything that can vaguely be described as a "resonant frequency" is the same thing.  A lot of "frequency" enthusiasts seem to assume that anything that can be measured in Hz is pretty much the same thing.  A lot of people seem to think that Rife's method had was about sound waves, for instance, which isn't true.


 * Rife's research was about radio waves, and the frequencies he used were in the range between about 100,000 and 10,000,000 Hz (or sometimes 1,000 to 25,000 Hz, depending who you ask). Some people have extended it to using oscillating electric currents (that one started in Rife's time and he thought it would probably work) or oscillating electromagnetic fields of the same frequencies, which apparently are partly equivalent to radio waves in a way I don't know enough physics to be sure about.


 * Also, all of these are early research by single teams. Things aren't allowed to be used medically until they've been pretty thoroughly confirmed by multiple researchers, and none of these are there yet.  And Wikipedia imitates that policy, requiring a fairly high level of scientific evidence before something can be described as a recognised medical treatment.


 * First link - Dr. Lee Bartel. I actually recognise this - as it happens, I've seen a paper of his about the use of 40 Hz vibrations for fibromyalgia to reduce pain and improve mobility https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4325896/ .  (I saw it thanks to another person who was under the impression that it was the same thing as Rife machines and was quoting it as "scientific proof" that Rife machines worked!)  That seems like a very promising development, though it's still pretty new and not confirmed by many other researchers.  But it's sound waves (or vibrations - it's at such a low frequency that they start to be the same thing), at frequencies of less than 100 Hz.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibroacoustic_therapy )  Very different animal.


 * Second link - John Kanzius. Not heard of this.  This is radio, but not in the same way as Rife's method - rather, its idea is that if you could develop a chemical that contained a metal atom and bound itself selectively to cancer cells, you could use radio waves to heat up the metal (and only the metal - radio waves do do this, apparently, under certain conditions) and kill the cancer cells.


 * Third link - Anthony Holland. He seems to be the only person who actually is doing formal research on Rife's original radio-frequency theory, or something similar, at the moment.  It's progressing very slowly, the lab is run on a shoestring and they recently put up a GoFundMe to raise money, but they've claimed to have some interesting preliminary test-tube results.  This is in its very early stages, though, and he doesn't pretend it's anywhere near ready to be officially approved.


 * The Russian superweapon sounds made up, and is also not Rife. The wind turbine thing is interesting if true, but is also not Rife.  Wombat140 (talk) 23:33, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Categories and see-alsos
There are a few other articles that it might make sense to have in "See also", now that there are solid references for what, exactly, Rife claimed to be doing. Medical applications of radio frequency, Electrotherapy (as it is or as Electrotherapy), and/or Pulsed radiofrequency might make sense. Mind you, as the article currently stands, Electrotherapy or Electrotherapy might not be justified - there were, in fact, contact high-frequency current devices based on Rife's work being used quite early on, 1950s, but I'm not sure I have a Wikipedia-type reference for that at the moment! :-D And the later devices might come under Electromagnetic therapy (alternative medicine), which is already there, rather than Electrotherapy or Electrotherapy. Wombat140 (talk) 04:49, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Stuck them in. And removed "Ruth B. Drown" as there seems to be nothing linking her and Rife except that she made vague mentions of the word "radio" (in a way that gave the impression that she didn't know what it meant) - she seems to have been more in the radionics line, distance healing by sympathy and what not.  Wombat140 (talk) 02:27, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 22 December 2022
Bibliography section is empty. Either remove the heading, or if the heading has to remain, remove the spurious "=" Thanks 76.14.122.5 (talk) 04:53, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 05:00, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Royal Rife Education history left out?
Royal Rife went to John Hopkins University- why is that not included here? 2605:59C8:30EB:D610:8466:D0CE:9607:D6D4 (talk) 17:57, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Probably for the same reason that most other information about his background is left out - there's a weird shortage of what Wikipedia calls "reliable sources" to back it up, even the newspaper articles that give biographical information about him contradict each other.
 * Apparently, we can't even get a reference for whether he had a PhD or not - I've heard it said, in an account that sounded as if it had done its homework, that he had an honorary PhD in parasitology from Hamburg University for doing the microphotographic illustrations for a book they were publishing, and that's why some contemporary sources call him "Dr" and some "Mr", but anonymous websites cannot be used as references and I can't trace this back to anywhere more reputable. It's also commonly said that he was a protege of Henry Timken who paid for him to apprentice at one of the Zeiss lens factories in Germany, but there aren't references for that either.
 * If you can find reliable sources for the Johns Hopkins thing or any of the rest by all means put them in or post them here. Wombat140 (talk) 20:06, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

FDA-approved TheraBionic treatment
advancements in RF radiation research show biological interactions beyond thermal effects. For example, the FDA-approved TheraBionic treatment, which employs RF radiation at power levels up to 1000 times lower than those emitted by cell phones, effectively treats inoperable liver cancer through non-thermal interactions at the cellular or molecular level. This includes resonance effects, disruption of cellular signaling, and potential modulation of the immune system. This challenges the traditional view that non-ionizing radiation is biologically inert except for its heating properties. 35.140.28.63 (talk) 14:03, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Apparently, what it actually has is a Humanitarian Device Exemption, which doesn't require proof of effectiveness. Still, interesting, and unlike some things that have been mentioned on this page this is obviously along the Rife machine lines, though it doesn't use those words.  It seems like, there are a few articles from respectable-looking medical news sites mentioning pilot studies with this thing showing some benefit and no side effects - e.g. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210730/Study-shows-safety-and-efficacy-of-radio-wave-therapy-for-liver-cancer-patients.aspx https://www.thelancet.com/article/S2352-3964(19)30342-1/fulltext https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-radio-wave-therapy-safe-liver-cancer.html - but I'm not sure whether that's considered 'notable' enough to put a brief mention of in this article, perhaps as something like 'ongoing research' - I know Wikipedia has particularly strict rules about what's 'established' enough to mention about medical research.  Would this be considered 'notable', does anyone here think?  Wombat140 (talk) 01:41, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

NSF funded research by Boston University scientists (c. 2015) uses Rife's pathogenic index for evaluating samples
See official video clip (Youtube, National Science Foundation News, 9 March 2015, "Biophotonics poised to make major breakthroughs in medicine", https://youtu(dot)be/7OR1tiDIK_g), where Rife Index is shown from 1:55 in the video. The research being conducted is described in the video description, and seems to share many of the principles Rife put forth, like the germ theory of cancer or the ability of resonant frequencies to identify and selectively eliminate harmful pathogens in the body. This appears to be a modern validation and continuation of Rife's theories and research by modern, well respected scientific institutions.

Description copied here:

Imagine having the ability to manipulate light waves in order to see through a skull right into the brain, or being able to use lasers to diagnose a bacterial infection in a matter of minutes. At the Center for Biophotonic Sensors and Systems (CBSS) at Boston University, you might say that technologies enabling these abilities and many others are "coming to light."

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), mechanical engineer Thomas Bifano and his colleagues are developing optical microscopes that can image deep into biological tissue, helping scientists observe molecular-scale activity. Their goal is to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

The research is multidisciplinary. For example, virologist John Connor is working on a method to tag and fingerprint viruses, such as Ebola, using a tag that responds to a certain wavelength of light. Chemist Larry Ziegler and his team are working with a company called BioTools to develop a test that uses lasers to diagnose a bacterial infection accurately and quickly. Biomedical engineer Xue Han is attaching light-sensitive proteins from algae to neurons in the brain to observe, and even control, certain brain activity with the hope of better understanding Parkinson's disease.

CBSS is a joint venture of Boston University and the University of California, Davis. Funding comes from the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program and industry partners to investigate fundamental research questions that are relevant to multiple technology sectors. Bifano says he expects much of the center's research will move from the lab into the field within five to 10 years. The research in this episode is supported by NSF award #1068070, IUCRC Collaborative Research: I/UCRC: Center for Biophotonic Sensors and Systems (CBSS). Publius D. Liber (talk) 14:52, 25 June 2024 (UTC)