Adolf Hitler always maintained that people would more readily believe a big lie than a little one. I had my doubts about this when I was taught it at school, but the contention came to mind again recently, after I visited a man who claimed to possess "the most effective anti-smoking strategy on the planet".
A friend of a friend had been to see the man and his miracle contraption some months previously. It was, she had told me, a sort of electric chair, into which she had been wired for about an hour. The machine had first "read" her body's "unique bio-magnetic nicotine signature" - the culprit sending messages to her brain to smoke - and then transmitted the precise reverse current through her body, erasing every last trace of the signature. By the time she was unstrapped, 20 years of addiction had been literally wiped away. She hadn't touched a cigarette since.
I am, by nature, a sceptic - but he emotional appeal of a restorative rather than corrective medical intervention can be almost irresistible. The detox diet industry's success, for example, relies almost entirely on its promise not to make amends for your sin, but to make like it never even happened. There is also something singularly powerful about any first-person testimonial - and it wasn't just my friend's friend, either. The machine had cured her sister, and her fiance as well. It had even been featured on Richard and Judy. Which was why I found myself standing outside a terraced house in south London, stubbing out my "last ever" cigarette.
The door opened and Tim introduced himself. Tim was in his late 40s, crisply groomed in an open-neck shirt, with an extravagantly attentive manner. He sat me in the chair and attached electrodes to my wrists and ankles, which were wired up to a black box, which was connected to a laptop. While he was strapping me in, we talked about how I had given up smoking four times in the past and was desperate to make this attempt my last. He nodded sympathetically, twiddling with wires and tapping keys on the laptop. Satisfied, he fixed me with a deep, pseudo-therapeutic gaze. "So. Tell me, Decca. Have you ever tried to give up smoking before?"
Tim told me this was "the third generation" of "bioresonance" technology. Invented 25 years ago in Germany, bioresonance was initially designed to treat allergies, but has been developed for smokers in the past decade. The principal German manufacturer, Bicom, exports its products to more than 70 countries, but until recently bioresonance was barely heard of in Britain. However, since two journalists were successfully treated on Richard and Judy last year, clinics have reported a dramatic increase in interest, and other media coverage has been enthusiastically encouraging. BBC News reported the innovation last year in uncritical terms, as a legitimate health story.
The software was now so sophisticated, said Tim, that he would actually be able to tell me which brand of cigarettes I smoked just by looking at his computer screen. As I had just surrendered my last packet to him on arrival, as instructed, I was not dumbfounded when he ventured "Marlboro Lights?". I'm not sure whether he qualified that with "or possibly Benson and Hedges ... " because of what his screen said, or because 10 minutes earlier I had told him I originally took up smoking when a friend said B&H could get you high. I would be surprised if he got it from his readings, though, as I haven't smoked one in about 15 years.
The curious thing, looking back on it, was that I didn't point this out at the time. I focused on the black box of wires instead, silently willing it to work. Tim had predicted that the electromagnetic waves would make me thirsty, and his mild disappointment each time I declined a glass of water began to transmit a vague sense of guilt. There was obviously nothing wrong with the machine; it was third-generation technology. If anything was going to be faulty, it felt as if it had to be me.
Tim used to be in property management, he explained, until bioresonance cured him of smoking. He knew the future when he saw it. He had promptly invested in a machine of his own, gone into business, and been saving people's lives ever since. He said his success rate was around 90% - an extraordinary figure, far higher even than stop smoking guru Allen Carr's. It would certainly make this, as he said, the most effective anti-smoking strategy on the planet.
The machine's amazing curative powers were not confined to smoking either. He showed me a brochure listing all the different software which could be programmed to treat a quite remarkable range of ailments. Some were medically precise (encephalitis, mastitis), others less so (wrinkles in nose/mouth area or "cramp-like pains"). Some programmes had a whiff of the 19th century apothecary ("vital capacity, to improve") while others ("jaw joint, to improve") were anatomically baffling.
"It's mindblowing, isn't it?" smiled Tim. It certainly was. The technology was so ingenious, it could even be deployed for patients allergic to prescribed medicines. If he placed their pills in a cavity in the machine and added water, it would read their electromagnetic signature and translate it into bio-waves, directing the medicine into the body via the electrodes. Were there many machines like his in the country? Tim shook his head. No, he said sadly, in the UK they were still very rare.
My own research bore this out; I could find no more than 10 practitioners in the country. You might have thought that something so brilliant would have caught on, but this puzzle went unexplained, as did Tim's decision to advertise his treatment to smokers only. If bioresonance really could cure a whole catalogue of afflictions, why wouldn't he say so? Perhaps he was privately unconvinced by its more radical claims. Other practitioners certainly aren't though; one clinic in Manchester promises to cure heroin and crack addiction, with no cold-turkey side effects at all.
The treatment is not cheap. Sessions cost between £150 and £250, which is a great deal of money for something dispensed by practitioners with neither recognised qualifications, nor endorsement by the mainstream British medical profession. It places bioresonance at the more expensive end of the alternative market, and might make one wonder why anyone would be willing to pay for what sounds like a literal miracle.
On reflection, the costing is very cleverly pitched, pinpointing the emotional weak spot of hope poised between something so cheap that you know it can't work, and so expensive that you can't afford to try. And, as with all anti-smoking treatments, once you calculate the fee against the financial dividend of quitting, any amount of money spent will still look like a bargain.
An online search for information about bioresonance quickly generates internet links which indicate that it occupies the same medically ambiguous territory as reflexology, say, or acupuncture. But whereas those treatments invoke the credibility of history, bioresonance invites us to place our faith in the infinite powers of modern computer technology. Online sales literature is rich with the vocabulary of ancient mysticism - "energy", "life fields" and so forth - but it has been refashioned with a hi-tech, futuristic twist. It is an ingenious modern marketing package. Bioresonance appeals to both our frustration with the limits of conventional medicine, and our ignorance of even the most rudimentary basics about how modern technology works.
Were you to set yourself up in business with nothing but a bottle marked Snake Oil, you would do well to persuade many people to part with £250. But when people have no idea how computer technology works, the most outlandish claims on its behalf can become scarcely more fantastical than the fact that one's car can navigate its own way to the shops, or that Tesco knows when you have run out of eggs. I left Tim's house fully conscious of the absurdity of everything that had happened there, and embarrassed by my own gullibility. And yet, for all that, I couldn't help wondering whether something beyond my comprehension might have just occurred, and that the urge to smoke would now be gone.
I went for lunch in a cafe, and when a man asked me to move my chair a fraction, I bit his head off. By suppertime I wanted to cry. After 48 hours of snapping, weeping and twitching, it was perfectly clear that the nicotine withdrawal was precisely the same as every previous experience, and would have been no worse had I not been wired up to the machine.
On day three I reviewed the situation. If it was going to be a question of pure will power after all, this wasn't the weekend I would have chosen to quit. I lit up, and felt better immediately.
