Western Medicine Says ‘No Scientific Evidence’ Supports Using a Rife Machine
How, then, do we explain the fact that it helps people with chronic Lyme disease feel better?
My ambitious and once-athletic wife has wrestled with chronic Lyme disease for her entire adult life.
She has contended with unrelenting muscle stiffness, extreme chest pain, numbness in face, hands and feet, eye twitching, difficulty writing, speaking and forming words, memory loss, brain fog, incontinence, sinus and dental pain.
But mostly, almost constant fatigue: “It’s like your body is being invaded and your immune system is fighting a battle every single hour of your life,” she says. “You go to bed and sleep for 10 or 11 hours but when you wake up, you’re still exhausted. Your body’s been battling the bacteria all night long.”
For my wife, Lyme disease (named after the Connecticut town where it was originally diagnosed) first emerged when she was in her early twenties. A high school track star, she fought through the initial fatigue with coffee and pep talks as she threw herself into snowboarding, cycling, extreme hiking and triathlons. The exercise, far from building her stamina, started taking a serious toll. By the time I met and fell in love with her, she was unable to maintain exertion for any length of time; she stole desperate 20-minute naps and, for the rest of her day, just muddled through, half alive. She was the most attractive woman I’d ever seen; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But sometimes she could barely move.
For the first decade of our marriage, we operated under an assumption cast by a Vancouver doctor who had diagnosed my wife with multiple sclerosis. But she had always had doubts. In March 2010, she picked up a crucial detail in a casual conversation: Lyme could be misdiagnosed as MS. Up until that point, my wife wasn’t even aware of the connection between tick bites and Lyme disease. Her curiosity piqued, she visited the Canadian Lyme Disease Association website and compared her long-time symptoms with those check-listed by the CLDA. The association recommended medical treatment for anyone suffering from at least twenty of the symptoms. She had almost fifty of them.
[If you’re curious, here is the US Lyme checklist: https://www.lymedisease.org/lyme-disease-symptom-checklist/]
We were both convinced she had Lyme and so was a Nashville doctor friend, who recommended we watch Under Our Skin, a controversial documentary film on chronic Lyme disease. We were soon to learn that she was facing a medical condition so confusing and political that even doctors couldn’t agree on it.
Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi) is an infection carried by the deer tick, a bug the size of the head of a pin. When the tick latches on, it releases an antihistamine and numbing agent that often prevents the victim from feeling the bite. Then the insect starts to feed, often becoming engorged to five times its regular size.
Sometimes, the tick bite leaves a visible bull’s-eye rash, which is then treated by 7–14 days of antibiotics. But more often, the infection occurs without the rash, which is what happened to my wife. She has often wondered if the deer tick bit her after burying itself somewhere in her hair. According to lymedisease.org, only 25% of people with Lyme recall the initial tick bite.
Following her epiphany, my wife used whatever energy she could muster proving that she had Lyme disease, not multiple sclerosis. It soon became clear that the available testing systems for Lyme were absurdly ineffective. Sometimes, she heard, other patients with many of the debilitating symptoms would find themselves staring down in disbelief at a negative test result and be sent home without antibiotics. Some would be told that the symptoms were “in their head,” even as they struggled to hold a fork at the dinner table. They’d be prescribed steroids or painkillers. Many were referred to a psychiatrist.
It was a case of medical limbo. My wife didn’t have the telltale bulls-eye rash, so no doctor would give her a prescription for antibiotics. Her first blood draw, taken in Nashville, came back negative for the Lyme antibody. Undaunted, she hit the internet again; this time, she discovered from an online forum that the best way to get a positive Lyme result was to go on antibiotics for three weeks, then go off, go back on and then test again. The antibiotics, we learned, tended to draw the Lyme antibodies out of their hiding places (in the joints, cartilage and brain) so that the blood test could find them.
Back on the west coast of Canada in the summer of 2010 for a brief vacation with the extended family, we ran into a doctor who had a daughter also struggling with Lyme. He gave my wife doxycycline and she followed the recommendation from the online forum.
The results came back, bewilderingly, as “unequivocal.” Basically, she had the Lyme antibodies in her but not enough to officially merit treatment. “I guess they need to see me in a wheelchair before they’ll do anything,” she muttered darkly.
A breakthrough finally came from a blood sample sent to IGeneX, a top-of-the-line Lyme testing center in Palo Alto, California. Now we had a test result from a company that knew what it was doing: my wife was officially Lyme-positive. She went on antibiotics for almost two and a half years.
Over the course of her treatment, she saw a Lyme specialist over routine Skype sessions. Convention medical wisdom told her that being on a permanent antibiotic regimen would damage her body’s immune system. On the other hand, she knew that, without the drugs, her chronic fatigue, pain, brain fog and anxiety would leave her basically nonfunctional. She stayed on the the doxycycline until September of 2012 and then went off again. We crossed our fingers.
What is the Rife Machine?
In my wife’s struggle to manage the array of Lyme symptoms she was having, she tried almost every treatment imaginable: radical diets, herbal supplements, even high colonics. She began to reach out, hoping to find out how other Lyme sufferers were coping. One day, a Nashville woman with even worse symptoms introduced her to an amazing device we’d never heard of before.
Dr. Royal Raymond Rife, over the course of his medical research in the early 1930s, discovered that exposing microorganisms to specific electromagnetic frequencies resulted in the microorganism’s destruction. Think of an opera singer shattering a wine glass with her voice. The Rife Machine was a device capable of delivering these frequencies to the body. In the late 1930s, many doctors had Rife Machines in their offices to treat a multitude of bacterial illnesses. They were cheap to build and easy to use, if the physicians had a working knowledge of how the frequencies affected their patients’ various medical conditions.
The Rife Machine could have gone on to be just another useful tool for modern medical practitioners. Instead, the first antibiotic, penicillin, was invented. The Rife Machine was forced underground, where it has remained for the last 75 years. Not coincidentally, the downfall of a machine that fought illness and disease — with technology not much more complicated or pricey than that of a stereo system — just happened to coincide with the rise of the pharmaceutical industry.
Aside from a few grainy black and white photos, very little is known today about the details of Rife’s original device. But the idea behind it went on to inspire Lyme sufferer Doug MacLean to engineer the Doug Coil Machine, a device that MacLean invented and utilized to cure himself and his entire family from Lyme in the 1980s.
Imagine a stack of stereo components: There is a generator, which allows the user to dial up 432 Hz, the frequency that kills the Lyme antibody. Under the generator is the system’s control unit, a capacitor that converts the 60 Hz current coming out of the wall into the desired frequency. At the bottom of the pile is the amplifier, which increases the amplitude so that the frequencies can penetrate the human body. Finally, there’s the coil, a heavy doughnut of insulated stereo wire attached by a seven-foot-long wire to the side of the capacitor box. We bought our machine from a maker in California in 2013; it cost us less than $3,000 US.
The coil machine is, actually, quite relaxing to use. My wife lies on the floor for twenty or thirty minutes, holding the coil against any part of her body where she’s felt either numb or sore or twitchy. There are specific frequencies for a multitude of conditions; you can find them all on the Internet.
The modern coil machine is not without its detractors. Dr. Donald Liebell has developed a program for chronic Lyme disease that is so dead set against electromagnetic treatments that he won’t even begin to treat people who have used the machine. Liebell’s argument is that the coil is designed for killing (Lyme pathogens), not for healing. His treatment program favors strengthening the body’s natural immune system, instead, so it can counter the effects of the Borrelia spirochete itself.
My own endorsement of the machine began after clumsily poking myself in the eye with a sharp aloe vera frond. In the weeks following, I developed an agonizing eye infection that antibiotic eye drops had no effect on. At my wife’s urging, I tried the 880 Hz setting on our machine and, after two sessions, my eye infection was healed.
Lyme and Sexual Transmission
In 2013, I started to fall under waves of fatigue early in the afternoon. I responded by brewing a full pot of coffee after lunch and stealing a twenty-minute nap whenever I had a break between writing assignments. Then came the sharp, raw sensations on the skin of my hips and thighs. Not long afterward, I started experiencing phantom hiccups that caused me to choke on my own saliva. I made an appointment with my doctor, had a Lyme test, and it came back positive. To my knowledge, I have never had a tick bite. So how did I end up with Lyme disease? Was I just another of the 75% of Lyme carriers who don’t recall the bite?
Is it possible the bacteria passed from between us?
Medical convention says that Borrelia burgdorferi isn’t sexually transmittable. But the Bb bacteria — which presents in a corkscrew-shaped form called a spirochete — behaves very much like you’d imagine, burrowing into tissue, muscle and bone to find a safe place to hide out and wreak havoc. A close relative in the world of pathogens is the much more familiar spirochete-shaped invader, syphilis.
In a 2014 study, an international team of scientists found live Lyme spirochetes in semen and vaginal secretions of people with documented Lyme but couldn’t agree that there were enough Borrelia burgdorferi spirochetes to spread infection.
Dr. Elizabeth Maloney, president of the Partnership for Tick-Borne Diseases Education weighed in: “The evidence for sexual transmission that I’ve seen is very weak,” she told Healthline, “And certainly not conclusive in any scientific sense.”
On the other hand, dermatologist Dr. Peter Mayne posited that “the presence of the Lyme spirochete in genital secretions and identical strains in married couples strongly suggests that sexual transmission of the disease occurs.”
My Lyme disease is, at this point, manageable. My lapses into fatigue, brain fog and prickly skin sensations happen several times a year. Autumn is usually the worst. When I feel exhausted for no reason, I book myself off for a half-hour and seat myself at least ten feet away from our machine. I hold the coil in my hands and place it on my abdomen, under my armpits, behind my head, under my feet, and over my knees. I have a routine, and I stick to it.
There is usually little change to my energy level over the first 24 hours but, after two days, I feel normal again. I wake up ready to go, don’t require a mid-day snooze, and can manage a 90-minute hike after my writing/editing work is done. This regimen is how I keep my Lyme symptoms under control.
So is that proof? Or is it just placebo?
Most of us are already familiar with alternatives to conventional medicine in the treatment of life’s various illnesses, anyway.
We’ve investigated acupuncture, yoga, and deep massage. We’ve experimented with thalassotherapy, reflexology, or different dietary regimens. We look to the wisdom of ancient herbs. We ask our doctors about the latest pharmaceutical solutions and then weigh each option against the possible side effects. Lyme disease is a complex illness with myriad complicated factors, explains Bryan Rosner, author of Freedom from Lyme Disease: New Treatments for a Complete Recovery. He recommends that people with Lyme shop around for a treatment that fits, and urges them not to believe anyone who claims to have come up with a magic bullet.
My wife frames it like this: When it comes to health care, we’re pretty much on our own. I know people who have overcome chronic pain with a single chiropractic session and others who have walked away from the appointment with the same chronic pain and a brand-new case of tinnitus.
All I know is, in 2001 my wife was a 32-year-old woman with the endurance of an 80-year-old. Now, she hikes, kayaks, plays tennis and runs a real estate management company.
I am not a scientist. And this article is in no way an endorsement of Rife technology as a cure-all. But in the spirit of scientific inquiry, why not dig in and seriously investigate the potential of electromagnetic field generators in public health?
