Medical Convention Proves Decidedly Unconventional
The World Congress of Bio-Energetic Medicine had all the trappings of a conventional scientific conference: speakers from seven countries displaying graphs to a sleepy audience, firms touting devices studded with dials and meters, knots of conferees huddling to trade business cards and gossip.
But, on closer inspection Saturday, the second day of the three-day event at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel in Universal City, everything was decidedly unorthodox.
An entrepreneur from San Diego, Jack Gibson, displayed a 3-inch-tall white plastic cone called a Life Field Polarizer and handed out brochures describing its powers.
One claim for the $75 device: “A Pennsylvania farmer reports that, one month after correcting the electromagnetic energy in his cow barn with a Life Field Polarizer, his 60 cows were producing an additional 1,000 pounds of milk per pickup” every other day.
‘I Feel a Pulsing’
At another booth, a man in a three-piece suit, sitting with a black band of electrodes strapped around his head, said, “I feel a pulsing.” The band was connected by wires to a black box that resembled a sophisticated stereo component but which is called an “Electro-Acuscope” and is said to reduce chronic pain. The test subject was an acupuncturist from San Diego.
The chief sponsor of the conference, the World Research Foundation, based in Sherman Oaks, is a clearinghouse for information on alternative medical therapies--everything from color therapy to Laetrile--many of which have been “suppressed” in America, said Steven Ross, who created the foundation in 1984.
Along with his wife, LaVerne, the foundation’s vice president, Ross scrambled Saturday to keep up with the speakers’ demands for slide projectors and the queries of the 500 registrants who paid $295 and up to attend the lectures and a series of optional seminars and demonstrations.
The conference focused on unusual uses of energy--light, sound, electricity and magnetism--in the treatment of disease. Many of the techniques and devices discussed are widely used in Europe and Asia, but have been restricted in the United States by the federal Food and Drug Administration and the mainstream medical community on the ground that the methods are unproven.
‘Nice Energy in Here’
“There’s nice energy in here today,” said LaVerne Ross, as she addressed the audience of homeopaths, holistic healers, doctors and laymen who had gathered for the second day of lectures.
The first speaker was Dr. Marianne Stattbacher, a Swiss dentist who studies the relationship between “structures in the oral cavity”--including teeth and their fillings--and the rest of the body.
She was followed by C. W. Smith, a British physicist who reported on studies of the effect of electromagnetic energy on allergy-prone patients. But his dry delivery quickly chased several dozen conferees from the ballroom into the lobby.
One registrant, Lorraine Rosenthal, came out of a lecture saying she was thoroughly confused by all the technical talk. “I wish they’d cut through that stuff and come to some conclusions,” she said, and several bystanders agreed.
Rosenthal began handing out cards and leaflets promoting the Los Angeles-based Cancer Control Society, which provides information on “alternative cancer therapies” outlawed in the United States. It sponsors frequent bus tours of cancer clinics in Tijuana.
Dr. Roy Martina of Woodland Hills, demonstrating a variety of West German devices that are said to diagnose everything from allergies to malignant tumors, said the event had attracted “a lot of real big guys and a lot of crazy guys.”
Name Is the Same
He was touting medications said to detoxify the body and which are called “Medicine of the Future.”
Martina said he was nonplussed to note that a British lecturer who reported his research on the use of sound to treat disease was using the same phrase--”Medicine of the Future”--to describe his techniques.
A highlight was an appearance Saturday afternoon by Dr. Bjorn Nordenstrom, a Swedish researcher who claims to have discovered an electrical circulatory system in the human body that is as important as the nervous system and the circulation of blood.
Nordenstrom’s work puts the conventional medical establishment in a quandary. They can find no proof of his theories, and he is reluctant to publish his work, but he is also a respected member of the Karolinska Institute, which chooses the Nobel laureates in medicine.
Many of the conferees were also buzzing about a respected British medical journal, The Lancet, having published Oct. 18 one of the first careful clinical studies that seems to show a beneficial effect of a homeopathic remedy.
Object of Ridicule
Homeopathy has been derided by mainstream medicine for more than 100 years as an impossible treatment that violates basic laws of physics.
It is purported to relieve ailments with solutions of everything from snake venom to sulfur--but the solutions are diluted so much that a dose contains not even a single molecule of the active ingredient. This, proponents say, is what makes it work.
In the lobby, Benny Favel, a Belgian manufacturer of acupuncture equipment, displayed and demonstrated gadgets used in acupuncture and other unorthodox therapies.
Favel exhibited not only traditional acupuncture needles but an infrared laser and button-size electrodes, both of which were said to produce the beneficial effect of traditional acupuncture without any needles.
He showed a small group a small, beeping box called a Beauty Stimulator. The $500 instrument was said to improve circulation and muscle tone by sending an electrical signal through a wire to a metal roller that is rubbed across a patient’s face.
A traveling exhibit of electrical devices was on display from the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, which houses a private collection of devices and books documenting the history and applications of electricity and magnetism in medicine.
Distinction Made
The collection is divided into uses of electricity in “conventional” medicine and “electroquackery,” said the museum’s director, John Senior. The line is drawn, he said, “to distinguish between a machine built to fit theories that were only later proved false and machines built intentionally to deceive the individual.”
Senior demonstrated one of the latter devices, built in 1901 in Detroit. For a penny, it dispensed a tingling electric shock as the user turned a heavy chrome-plated lever.
“Electricity is Life,” was the slogan across the face of the machine. “A Great Tonic. Cures rheumatism, nervousness.”
Senior looked down the hallway at some of the modern devices being touted in front of the main ballroom, and said the old equipment, although of questionable value, was at least easy to comprehend. “With new solid-state technology, it’s impossible to know what’s going on in those boxes,” he said.
