Opinion | How I Became Extremely Open-Minded

It is difficult to convey just how weird it was when the thing actually arrived — not just the boxy console itself, which looked like it belonged in an ’80s sci-fi movie, but the accompanying instruction booklet, whose preamble informed me that “as an American national, you have the legal right to medically treat yourself by common law according to Amendment IX of the U.S. Constitution.” After that came a lot of advice on the different kinds of frequencies generated by the machine and how to hook up the metal hand cylinders — which, when dampened and gripped, were supposed to transmit the frequencies from the machine into my flesh.

Then came the frequency list: First 873 preprogrammed “channels,” usually linked to a specific ailment, from acidosis to zygomycosis, and then a longer list, which went beyond the frequencies supposedly discovered by Rife and his followers to include 50 years’ worth of purported revelations by ordinary sick people using the machines.

It felt like something out of a paranoid fiction, a slice of invented Americana by way of Paul Auster or Thomas Pynchon. Was it all a hoax, generated by charlatans sitting down with a list of medical conditions and a random number generator? Or did all the complex frequency combinations represent the fruits of a multigenerational labor, some kind of secret investigation conducted by the sick and suffering over years and decades?

There were two channels listed for Lyme disease, each one containing dozens of frequencies. I set the machine up inside the drop-leaf desk in our back bedroom, my office, the most private space that I could find. I dampened the terry cloth and gripped the cylinders, like a robot recharging his batteries or a video game player with a control in either hand. Then I punched in the first channel and hit start.

Naturally, it worked.

What does “worked” mean, you may reasonably ask? Just this: By this point in my treatment, there was a familiar feeling whenever I was symptomatic and took a strong dose of antibiotics — a temporary flare of pain and discomfort, a desire to move or rub the symptomatic areas of my body, a sweating or itching feeling, followed by a wave of exhaustion and then a mild relief. I didn’t get this kind of reaction with every alternative treatment I tried. But with the Rife machine I got it instantly: It was like having a high dose of antibiotics hit the body all at once.

Of course, this was obviously insane, so to the extent that I was able I conducted experiments, trying frequencies for random illnesses to see if they elicited the same effect (they did not), setting up blind experiments where I ran frequencies without knowing if they were for Lyme disease or not (I could always tell).

These experiments were less rigorous than they might have been, because I didn’t involve my long-suffering wife, for whom the arrival of the Rife machine was an unwelcome development, suggesting as it did a touch of mania in her husband. But they were consistent enough that thereafter the machine became part of my treatment process — again, not as a substitute for antibiotics but as a complement, another thing to try when I felt terrible, first helping me take lower doses of the drugs and eventually speeding my slow recovery along.