William Edwin Gray III is a certified loon (homeopathic “doctor”) and pseudoscientist operating in the Bay Area. Gray has combined homeopathy and vibrational woo into his own product, a set of audio recordings (“eRemedies”) – 13-second long clips of what Gray describes as “a hissing sound” that can be purchased from his website for $5 apiece and which Gray claims can cure a wide range of ailments, including “fever, influenza, diarrhea, injuries, head injury, back pain, childbirth complications, pet abscess or cystitis, malaria, typhoid, cholera.” Yes, malaria: “thirty-six out of 37 people were cured of their malaria symptoms within three to four hours with just a few doses,” claims Gray, without offering any further details (including details on how the patients were diagnosed with malaria to begin with). For good measure, Gray even claims to have cured three cases of ebola “simply by playing the appropriate eRemedy several times in an hour.”
So what’s the homeopathy connection? Gray’s website does describe his sound wave treatments as homeopathic. And apparently, he supposedly harvests the energy of various homeopathic potions by converting them to sound waves via a coil connected to an amplifier and digitizer, resulting in the aforementioned MP3 files. Right. He even includes an explanation of how homeopathy works, because careful readers might doubt that it works because it doesn’t. But according to Gray, “there is a well-documented scientific answer” (no, he doesn’t seem to understand what ‘scientific’ or ‘documented’ means; nor, for that matter, ‘well’ or ‘answer’), and it is worth quoting his explanation in detail:
“When something is in solution, water molecules form shells around the individual ions and molecules of the original substance. This is how it is kept in solution. Vigorous pounding breaks these water molecule shells into small nanometer-sized clusters. When they are diluted (by serial dilutions), their size increases. The more the solution is pounded and diluted, the more these clusters are created. Most importantly, these clusters carry the same energy as the original substance, because that is how the clusters formed in the first place! Clusters have been viewed by electron microscope, measured in size by Atomic Force Microscopy, defined spectrophotometrically, and been validated by innumerable scientific studies clinically. Hence, homeopathic remedies are an elegant way of getting rid of the original substance while putting its energy into the water as a vehicle. And, this elegant process has been used for over two centuries!”
And if you were unsure but didn’t dare to ask: No, this is not remotely how anything works.
But yes: It is this “energy” Gray claims to harvest as an mp3 file, using a “technique was developed originally in the 1990s by Jacques Benveniste”. Yes, that Benveniste – the water memory guy. And apparently the stored energy can be transmitted through sound waves (no, don’t ask). Then Gray has a questionnaire with “very detailed and specific questions” that he uses on patients to determine which recording to use – it is all very “unique and individualized to the user” – by the help of an algorithm he has made up: Note that Gray doesn’t actually examine or even see the patients, who answer the questionnaire and purchase his sound clips online. Of course, even though “63 different recordings are available, the human ear cannot distingush one from another” , but that’s no obstacle, because the different frequencies of vibration can be “picked up by the body as a whole.” Because of course it can. Apparently, the “process of creating eRemedies and then using them on humans via cellphone or computer” has been patented by his company, Coherence Apps LLC.
The claims are so silly that even Robert Stewart, founder of the New York School of Homeopathy, distanced himself from them, which takes quite a bit more than mere everyday crazy. The California Medical Board, however, failed to recognize the humor and revoked Gray’s medical license.
Diagnosis: Yes, apparently there exists woo so inane and insane that even a founder of a homeopathic school will distance himself from it (though, in fairness, that might be motivated more by a perception of potential legal and/or public relations issues down the road). At least Gray is something close to a Platonic idea of a crackpot.
Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence
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