"Are you with me, Doctor Woo?*"

(*with apologies to Steely Dan)

So, a couple days ago, I was hitting some of my usual haunts, and on MeFi came across a link to something truly amazing: the most advanced personal energy system available today!

Personal energy system? Huh? Some kind of new sports drink? Maybe a reworked diet fad? Or a new way to charge your, uh, personal massagers?

Nope. They're talking Sympathetic Resonance Technology! Wow! Even the name is impressively scientifical! What is Sympathetic Resonance Technology? I'm glad you asked:

The Q-Link’s fundamental technology can be understood by imagining a tuning fork that vibrates at a certain pitch. Similarly, the Q-Link’s Sympathetic Resonant Technology™ (SRT™) is tuned to optimize the human energy system through resonance. As it interacts with your biofield, it leads to a rebalancing and restoration according to your individual needs.

Oh-oh. Woo alert! Woo alert! How does this supposedly work?

The body creates and sustains its own energy system. That system can be drained and interrupted by rival signals from other electromagnetic systems (e.g. computers, hairdryers etc).

The QLink is encoded with Sympathetic Resonance Technology or SRT™, a pioneering branch of quantum physics. This makes it act as a tuning fork that resonates with the ideal note at which the body's energy system should hum.

The body responds positively to this ideal note and pitches itself to it so that, in time, the ideal and the actual note become harmonised.

See, it's a "pioneering branch of quantum physics", so it must be good, it's so technological and sciencetific. Cool! But what exactly is you get with this QLink thingee? Let's ask a geek person who understands all about electronics and stuff:

Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it.

The eight copper pads do have some intriguing looking circuit board tracks coming out of them, but they too, on close inspection, are connected to absolutely nothing. A gracious term to describe their purpose might be “decorative”. I’m also not clear if I can call something a “circuit board” when there is no “circuit”.

Finally, there is a modern surface mount electronic component soldered to the centre of the device. It looks impressive, but whatever it is, it is connected to absolutely nothing. Close examination with a magnifying glass, and experiments with a multimeter and oscilloscope, revealed that this component on the “circuit board” is a zero-ohm resistor.

...

And that’s it. No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing. I contacted qlinkworld.co.uk to discuss my findings. They kindly contacted the inventor, who informed me they have always been clear the QLink does not use electronics components “in a conventional electronic way”. And apparently the energy pattern reprogramming work is done by some finely powdered crystal embedded in the resin. Oh, hang on, I get it: it’s a new age crystal pendant.

A QLink pendant will set you back at least a hundred bucks if you order it from the manufacturer, and they have models up to about a thousand bucks, even some little pendants for your pets, because "Animals have energetic systems too!" And of course, there's one for the golfers out there, to help improve your game!

*sigh*

You know, what really gets to me with this kind of crap is how they're perfectly happy to use scientific terms in a techno-babble stew which would make Star Trek scriptwriters proud. And yet, you can just bet that if you called them on it, they'd backpeddle pretty damned fast (and do, according to Ben Goldacre of Bad Science). Furthermore, a lot of the people who buy this crap will likewise diss science given half a chance, saying that either science doesn't 'have all the answers', or that their religion somehow supercedes scientific principles.

And meanwhile, the Shamen and the scam artists rake in the money. It's very depressing.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my blog.)