Richard Saunders reports on health gizmos and their true believers and conspiracy theorists
Monica Smit is best known as being an anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protester during the COVID-19 years. She is the founder of Reignite Democracy Australia (RDA), an anti-lockdown and COVID-19 conspiracy group.
Recently, Monica and her mother, Lise Smit, have made videos to promote and sell various patches and other devices that are claimed to protect from electric ‘frequencies’ and other so-called harmful energies, via monicasmit.com/shop. (Monica says that “I use the profits from this shop to fund all my activism work, including ongoing court cases.”)
Many of the products on sale are based on so-called Orgone Energy, a term made up from “orgasm” and “organism”, a pseudoscientific concept for a universal life force or esoteric energy, concocted by Wilhelm Reich in the early 20th century.
According to Wikipedia: The scientific community dismissed Reich’s orgone theory as pseudoscience. James Strick, a historian of science at Franklin and Marshall College, wrote in 2015 that the dominant narrative since Reich’s death has been that “there is no point in looking more closely at Reich’s science because there was no legitimate science from Reich”.
It is also worth noting that the late racing car driver Peter Brock was a believer in Orgone Energy and won the Australian Skeptics’ Bent Spoon Award in 1986 for his promotion of an “energy polariser” which, he alleged, when attached to the firewall of a car, improved its performance in all fields. It didn’t.
Many of the Orgone devices sold by Smit are sourced from a business in Victoria called Orgone Effects and can be seen at MindBody Spirit festivals. The overriding sales pitch from this company is that our modern society is flooded with bad energies and their products can protect you from them.
The claims made and products spruiked in their videos would be impressive, if they were true, but they’re not.
One of these claims include a block of curved resin, infused with frequencies (a meaningless term) and with a sticker on the base, to reflect biophoton light, can protect from energies that are detrimental to our Chinese Meridians (a fictitious part of the body). These energies supposedly come from vaccine shedding, 5G radiation, wifi radiation, streetlights and smart meters.
The effectiveness of Orgone devices can be tested with dowsing rods, ‘biotensors’, and applied kinesiology. (All are debunked modalities based on self-deception. One of Smit’s videos includes a demonstration of a biotensor and it is clearly being moved by Lise Smit.)
A bracelet (infused with biophotons) can add energy to your Chinese Meridians to protect from other people’s energy.
A block of resin with an embedded plug (sold as Geoclense by Orgone Effects) can be plugged into a household power socket to protect from bad energies and attract birds to your yard. Also, it is claimed, “Neutralises Earth Radiation, human-generated Bioplasmic Radiation, and Solar and Planetary energy imprints that may silently affect your emotional well-being and long-term health.” This product was the subject of a Choice magazine report in 2017 and to quote the report: “Our testing shows Geoclense has all the effectiveness of a tin foil hat (and lacks the hat’s potential for use in food preparation)”.
Our bodies are negatively-charged, Lise Smit says, and technology puts out positive energy. This messes up our meridian system and clumps the blood.
The products on sale can protect from Epstein–Barr virus, also known as human herpesvirus 4. Doctors will often not detect Epstein–Barr virus, but naturopaths and homeopaths can.
A small round sticker placed on a mobile phone can protect you from 99.95% of radiation and reduces heat by 80%. The ‘shield’ it creates extends out to a metre from the sticker.
It would be all too easy to put all of these products through a simple double-blind test. In 2016, I offered Orgone Effects the Australian Skeptics’ $100,000 challenge while visiting the festival of Mind Body Spirit. Six months later security was called when I again visited their stand. When I ordered one of their phone patches online, the order was cancelled when they realised I was from Australian Skeptics.
We can suspect that Monica and Lise Smit truly believe these products actually work. But be that as it may, what they are selling via the web site, in our opinion, do not and cannot work as claimed. They are based on pseudoscientific concepts and debunked modalities.
Orgone Effects have been in business for many years, and we can only wonder why action has not been taken against them by Consumer Affairs in Victoria. They use the fact that they are still in business to validate their products. There are laws against selling products that do not work as claimed and surely it can only be a matter of time before Orgone is gone.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/@ReigniteDemocracy/videos
https://tinyurl.com/Choice-Geoclense
https://tinyurl.com/SkepticOrgone (page 8)
https://tinyurl.com/LuckyLosingSmit2021
Richard Saunders is chief investigator for Australian Skeptics Inc.
