If I had a dollar for everyone who has written in to tell me about their amazing new ‘quantum device,’ I could retire tomorrow.

Everywhere you look, there are products claiming to heal you via newly-tapped-into ‘frequencies,’ or ‘standing waves,’ or electromagnetism, and managing this by way of wands, tuning forks or anything else that sounds vaguely ‘quantum.’

They’re right in one regard. The body is an energy system, and, what’s more, this is hardly a new idea. Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch first discovered what he called ‘mitogenetic radiation’ in onion roots in the 1920s. Gurwitsch postulated that a field, rather than chemicals alone, was probably responsible for the structural formation of the body.

Although Gurwitsch’s work was largely theoretical, later researchers were able to show that a weak radiation from tissues stimulates cell growth in neighboring tissues of the same organism.

German-born physicist Herbert Fröhlich of the UK’s University of Liverpool was one of the first to introduce the idea that some sort of collective vibration was responsible for getting proteins to cooperate with each other and carry out instructions for DNA and cellular proteins.

Fröhlich even predicted that certain frequencies (now termed ‘Frohlich frequencies’) just beneath the membranes of the cell, could be generated by vibrations in these proteins.

In his view, wave communication was the means by which the smaller activities of proteins – the work of amino acids, for instance – would be carried out and a good way to synchronize activities between proteins and the system as a whole.

Nevertheless, all these theories and more were ignored because no equipment had been sensitive enough to prove they were right –  until the accidental discoveries of German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp in the mid-1970s.

Popp stumbled upon the fact that all living things, from single-celled plants to human beings, emit a constant tiny current of photons – tiny particles of light.

He called them ‘biophoton emissions,’ and for more than 40 years until his death in 2018, Popp created sophisticated equipment to measure this light, maintaining that this faint radiation, rather than biochemistry, is the true driving force in orchestrating and coordinating all cellular processes in the body.

Popp theorized that this light must be like a master tuning fork setting off certain frequencies that would be followed by other molecules of the body.

Popp carried out years of impeccable experimentation that demonstrated that these tiny frequencies were mainly stored and emitted from the DNA of cells. The signals contained valuable information about the state of the body’s health and the effects of any particular therapy.

Initially vilified for his theory, Popp was eventually recognized by the German government and then internationally. Eventually he formed the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB), composed of scientists from international centers all around the world. After his death the work carries on.

Nevertheless, until recently, any medical applications of the energetic communication in the body were utterly swept aside with the ascendancy of biochemistry, which proposed that everything could be explained by hormones or chemical reactions.

But with the public’s increasing interest in all things quantum, the marketing folks have spotted an opportunity.  A raft of new products are now on the market purporting to heal all manner of illnesses by fiddling with our frequencies.

Many come with extraordinary professional testimonials. For instance, Hawaiian integrative doctor Linda Nadia Hole initially claimed to be ‘unabashed sceptic’ about ‘scalar waves’ in an online paper: ‘How can sitting in a room with computers incessantly flashing iridescent colors across the screen possibly be healing?’

But then after experimenting with the EESystem scalar energy device  on a load of patients, including six veterans and the wife of another veteran, Dr Hole says she transformed into a true believer.

According to her case notes of 10 such patients, the equipment was able to heal symptoms of bladder cancer, restore hearing and memory loss, normalize blood sugar and lower extremity numbness for a diabetic, recover paralysis, and help a patient get off of a cocktail of meds for bipolar, high blood pressure, thyroid and more.

Extraordinarily promising, no doubt. The problem is, with the exception of companies Rayonex and BIOCOM, which offer copious clinical evidence for their products, not all devices have much in the way of transparency about how they work or even proof that they actually do.

Some have complex scientific and patented processes; others are, essentially, hair dryers.

Dr. Robert Verkerk, founder and head of the international Alliance for Natural Medicine, and his team have patiently examined 23 such products to see what we know about them.

The answer is very little (see: www.wddty.com) and he and the Alliance have impressed upon this burgeoning industry the need for self-regulation before they are ‘kneecapped’ by the regulatory authorities.

Energy medicine is clearly the medicine of the future, particularly in light of the sheer size of the damage wreaked by prescription drugs, now the third leading cause of death in America and elsewhere.

But to offer anything superior, this new medicine needs to be put to the clinical test and regulated by the industry.

Otherwise, it is no improvement over what we now have, nothing more than a quantum pharmaceutical industry, pocketing a quick buck at the public’s expense.