An Extremely Suspicious Looking Technology: QUEC PHISIS TM
After reading around longevity science for a few years you start to develop a feel for what sounds suspect: one of the first flags is for something to be so far removed from the spotlight of the mainstream that it would be hard for any mainstream researcher to evaluate it, for example. New technologies have to come from somewhere, however, and they start with small groups of knowledgeable developers and researchers. By their nature these new advances are hard to evaluate at the outset. Mainstream researchers aren't all that interested in spending significant time on serious evaluation given that most radical departures from the norm are in fact wrong directions, or just flat out wrong. Of course sometimes the new and radical departure is the right way forward, an advance that will reshape the whole field for the better - such as the SENS vision for aging. Then progress is as much a matter of slowly gathering support and making your case over a matter of years, bootstrapping a mass of supporting evidence incrementally as you can convince funding sources and researchers that you are right.
This process applies between all groups. I may know enough about the underpinnings of SENS rejuvenation research to judge that it is a good plan, but I'm all at sea when a group starts to talk about modulating cellular activities with low-frequency electromagnetism. So let me say that if QUEC PHISIS TM was not an accepted abstract at SENS6, and not the subject of a paper in the Rejuvenation Research advance publication queue, I would have written this off as exceedingly dubious after the first paragraph. It still looks exceedingly dubious to my eye, based on its similarity to several well-entrenched lines of medical quackery that have been ongoing for decades now. See what you think:
It has been known since long time that electromagnetic fields characterized by extremely low frequency (ELF) and intensity are able to trigger Molecular Cyclotronic Ion Resonance phenomena. However, only in the last decades, biophysical studies have shown that Molecular Cyclotronic Ion Resonance, thanks to the ELF waves, activates some fundamental elements (proteins, vitamins, mineral salts..) and makes them enter more easily through the cellular membrane thus guiding all the biochemical reactions essential for the normal cellular activity.The QUEC PHISIS TM QPS1 treatment is programmed to emit specific frequencies of electromagnetic waves tailored to research the most proper approach to restore the cellular metabolism, the optimize the redox balance (rH2) and the acidity (pH) of body fluids. Preliminary clinical data suggest the significant and sudden impact of this device on cardiovascular parameters (flow mediated dilation) in healthy volunteers, a stronger and quicker antioxidant effect than antioxidant drugs, improvement in muscular coordination and performance through better recruitment of neuromotor units in neuromuscular diseases, increase in body (muscular) mass in unhealthy or frail people and enzymatic activation of the basal metabolism and of the fatty acid metabolism has been proved, in aged rats.
Am I qualified to evaluate this in any way? Absolutely not. My decade of reading around longevity science publications doesn't give me much of a footing to say how valid this research is - it is way off in left field in relation to the molecular biology and health studies I normally peruse. I'd have to go and read up on the relevant areas for a few months: it seems that investigation of cyclotronic ion resonance in the context of medical research is an ongoing concern, for example, though sparsely populated. All in all I'd want to see a few other research groups showing the same sorts of results before I'm prepared to treat this as more than a curio.
This trips my 'bogus science' detector. Odds that this is a legitimate and useful phenomenon: 0.1% (1/1000). I suspect SENS did itself a disservice by accepting it.
This Quec Physis certainly sounds like quack physics to me too. But I have no way of accurately judging whether it is or not. It's possible that it is legitimate.
Fraud has been presented at SENS before (that faked Korean cloning), but everyone else was fooled by that too.
I have been in the lab of one of the pioneers of the cyclotron resonance phenomenon. He was an intelligent, accomplished scientist - certainly no quack. A number of experiments were underway showing effects on plant growth. The effect is complex, and can cause problems (e.g., cancer) rather than benefits. A very nonlinear, noisy, non-stationary effect probably involving many multi-variable/dimensional interactions - worthy of more research.