How Johan Boswinkel is using biophotons, the faint light waves emitted by cells, to help the body heal.
Jurriaan Kamp | July/August 2011 issue
Warning: this story is about a man who has developed a groundbreaking new therapy: healing with light. The man is not a doctor. Nor is he an accredited scientist. His proof is rather anecdotal, and, yes, there are countless skeptics eagerly lining up to attack his results and conclusions. Yet Johan Boswinkel might just hold a key to the medicine of the future in his hands.
Why should you read on, after a warning like that? Because modern medicine, despite all its progress, often remains powerless against the many chronic illnesses spawned by our modern lifestyle. Albert Einstein said it well: You can never solve a problem on the same level of thinking on which it was created. My son’s T-shirt puts it more baldly: “It’s usually the oddballs who change the world.”
That’s a description—I say with all respect—that fits Johan Boswinkel to a “T.” “Oddballs” don’t fit neatly into known structures or frameworks. Boswinkel is the personification of the independent ­autodidact. He asked questions no one else asked and found a solution no one else found. He built an instrument that can measure disturbances in the body and correct them. Using that instrument, he and the hundreds of people he has trained in the past 20 years have helped thousands of people banish serious diseases and troublesome ailments. “Our approach should become primary health care. We have a success rate of 80 percent without harmful side effects,” Boswinkel says in his apartment overlooking the Maas River in central Rotterdam.
In the early 1980s, Boswinkel worked as a director of a travel agency in New Zealand. Suffering from exhaustion after a particularly busy period, he visited an acupuncturist at his secretary’s urging. The man treated him, but more important, he asked Boswinkel to translate an article for him from German into English. That article was written by German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, and it discussed his research proving Russian embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch’s hypothesis that all cells emit an extremely faint light. Popp called that light “biophotons” and demonstrated that these biophotons direct the body’s biochemical processes.
That bit of translation brought about a radical change in Boswinkel’s life. He had always wanted to understand more about the way human beings work. He had studied economics but quit the program before completing it, after discovering that “the models never worked in the real world because they never took people into account.” He then studied medicine, only to discover that “people were missing there, too.” Psychology also failed to answer his questions, and he finally went to work for a bank. But his desire to understand what makes us tick kept burning. Popp’s article got him thinking. “If all the information required to control the body’s biochemical processes is in the light that the body emits, and if disturbances in that light disrupt ­biochemical processes and cause disease—as Popp claimed—then it must be possible to “examine” the light and remove the disease. Then you return the “repaired” light to the body. If it works, it will have enormous consequences for everything.”
Though he didn’t know it—therewas no Internet 30 years ago—Boswinkel was following in the footsteps of several pioneers who, based on the realization that bodies ultimately consist of vibrations, had been experimenting since the early 19th century with instruments to combat disease using electromagnetic frequencies. Independently of one another, American inventor Royal Rife, San Francisco doctor Albert Abrams and British engineer George de la Warr had produced striking results using machines they built themselves. More recently, in the 1970s, Franz Morell in Germany developed a similar instrument. All these pioneers suffered the same fate: Despite results that invited further investigation, they were zealously attacked in courts by the medical establishment and their work fell largely into obscurity.
Boswinkel dove into Popp’s work, searched in vain for information on biophotons in the physics literature—“There wasn’t any then and there isn’t any now,” he growls—and began studying homeopathy and acupuncture. Using his acquired knowledge, he built his first machine in 1983 to measure and repair a body’s light emissions. His first experimental case involved a terminal liver cancer patient in New Zealand. “I measured and treated, measured and treated, and after about twelve sessions, the man was clearly improving,” Boswinkel recounts. And it was no accident, as his subsequent successes with AIDS patients proved.
Nearly 30 years later, Boswinkel’s instrument is on its sixth generation and he’s done enough “miracle working” that scientific recognition for his therapy is beginning to trickle in. The Medical University of Graz in Austria added Boswinkel’s biophoton therapy to its complementary medicine curriculum in 2007. In Wageningen, the Netherlands, researchers are investigating the effect Boswinkel’s therapy has on growth in plants and fowl. In addition, the first, limited observational studies are being conducted on people, and there are mainstream doctors using Boswinkel’s machine in their practices.
Biophotons are barely measurable. The light they emit is comparable to that of a candle flame 12 miles away. For this reason, Fritz-Albert Popp devised an ingenious amplifier to study cells’ biophotonic emissions. With it, Popp can demonstrate that cells emit either a coherent—healthy—light or a chaotic light that indicates disease. The explanation is simple: When biophotons direct the body’s biochemical processes in a chaotic manner, those processes are disrupted.
Popp’s amplifier is fine for a laboratory where cells can be viewed using a microscope, but not for the practical applications Boswinkel had in mind: a body—millions of cells—continuously emits electromagnetic radiation across a very wide spectrum. Boswinkel found his solution in an instrument developed in the 1950s by the German founder of ­electro-acupuncture, Reinhold Voll. Voll demonstrated that the electrical resistance at acupuncture points clearly deviated from that of the surrounding skin. He also determined that every ­acupuncture point is connected to a specific organ or gland. There are two possible outcomes for measurements made using Voll’s instrument: Either the device displays a straight line, indicating a steady resistance, or it displays a downward curve corresponding to a declining value—called an “indicator drop”—that indicates weakness at the point. Boswinkel says, “That was a breakthrough for me. Popp demonstrated exactly the same thing using his light amplifier: a steady line in the case of orderly, coherent light, and a drop in the case of chaotic light. That led me to conclude that measurements taken at acupuncture points correspond to biophotonic measurements.” Since then, other researchers have indeed determined that acupuncture points—and the eyes—serve as special windows for absorbing light into the body and that explains the difference in resistance that Voll measured at those points.
In case of a dropping measurement, there is a disturbance in the body, and that’s where Boswinkel’s diagnosis begins. In his instrument, he has combined Voll’s measurement method with an archive of homeopathic potencies. In the homeopathic tradition, bacteria, diseases, toxins and heavy metals are homeopathized: Their frequencies and information are stored into the homeopathic medicine. That homeopathic information—for some 500 substances—is stored as “counter-frequencies” in Boswinkel’s machine.
An example: A stomach acupuncture point displays an indicator drop when Boswinkel measures it. This means there is a disturbance in the stomach. If he includes the counter-frequency for salmonella in the measurement, and the line straightens and becomes coherent, Boswinkel knows the stomach disturbance is caused by salmonella. The sum of the disruptive frequency and the counter-frequency should be zero, because opposing waves cancel each other out. If the measurement including the salmonella counter-frequency still displays a drop, then Boswinkel must look for another cause. “Your body is like a radio; you only hear music when you’re resonating with a specific station. You only hear music if you’re properly tuned,” he says.
As soon as he knows what’s causing the bodily disturbance, Boswinkel can treat it. The patient holds two glass electrodes, one in each hand. One electrode records what the body is emitting. That light is subsequently “inverted” in the machine and fed back into the body through the second electrode. The process is repeated with the feet, which are placed on two glass plates. “You’re treated with your own light. Every dysfunction can be identified,” Boswinkel says. His therapy is based on the same law of similars that underpins homeopathy.
Boswinkel needs less than an hour to diagnose and treat illness, and he can resolve most problems in five or six sessions. He estimates his therapy’s success rate at 80 percent and notes, “We treat precisely the chronic cases, the people who’ve already exhausted the entire mainstream medical gamut.” He grows thoughtful. “In principle, you can always heal everything. There are very few people who can’t get better. You can intervene at the last possible moment and restore the body’s ability to heal itself.” In his ideal world, everyone would undergo a checkup every six months. “No disturbance can build over that period of time into something that can’t be corrected simply.”
The greatest challenge to successful treatment using Boswinkel’s therapy is making the diagnosis. “That’s the trickiest part,” he says. In the human cellular organism, millions of processes are taking place at every moment. “You can compare it to a tree, where each leaf can display a particular symptom or disturbance. You can focus on each sick leaf and realign it. That will quickly relieve specific symptoms. But leaves get sick because there’s an underlying disturbance in the trunk and the roots of the tree. You have to look for that core. That’s where the real solution lies.”
He cites an example. “In mainstream medicine, the helicobacter bacterium is known to cause peptic ulcers. But when I want to treat a peptic ulcer, I treat the gall bladder, not the helicobacter. When organs or glands are exhausted, the immune system no longer functions optimally, and the body develops a receptivity that bacteria can exploit.” After 30 years, Boswinkel sees many connections that mystify the lay person—and even mainstream doctors. To Boswinkel, there’s a connection between Crohn’s disease and chronic appendicitis, between asthma and whiplash and between an enlarged prostate and a potassium deficiency. He sees the cause of liver cancer in pituitary malfunction, and that’s also where treatment begins for alcoholism caused by the pancreas in overdrive—because the pituitary gland influences the pancreas.
It takes extensive knowledge of the human body to make the right diagnosis, which Boswinkel painstakingly taught himself over many years. This is far from true of the hundreds of people he has since trained to operate his instrument. Several conversations with practitioners reveal that those who are most successful in using Boswinkel’s therapy are those who have completed a specific medical education—from natural medicine to physical therapy to nursing. That’s why Boswinkel is so enthused that his training program, which takes an average of 21 days spread over several months to complete, has become part of the complementary medicine curriculum at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. He has plans for even wider university exposure. “Such an integral approach offers the best chance of success,” he says.
An observational study conducted by two therapists who completed the training program in Graz illustrates the effect of Boswinkel’s therapy. Twenty patients of different ages with a variety of chronic complaints—from allergies and skin problems to sleeping disorders and fatigue—were treated for two weeks. After three months, symptoms had disappeared or radically diminished for 90 percent of participants. A test like this one doesn’t meet strict scientific standards, but it does indicate promise that invites more rigorous double-blind, controlled studies.
Boswinkel’s critics point to the danger of the “experiment effect”: the observer who influences the measurement. “That effect absolutely exists,” Boswinkel responds, adding that it plays a role across the board in science. The operator and his intellect are part of the diagnosis. “Every measurement is subjective, and that’s why it’s so crucial that the therapist makes himself as objective as possible,” he says. “When you’re taking measurements with the machine, you have to keep yourself open to every possible outcome; that gives you the most information, and makes a great deal possible.”
Boswinkel’s approach reaches far beyond the boundaries of medicine. Similar to a predecessor, George de la Warr, who drove ravenous Colorado beetles from a potato field by surrounding it with transmitters that produced the appropriate counter-frequency, Boswinkel had success fighting a plague of locusts in Morocco in the 1990s. The opportunities for ridding agriculture of chemical pesticides are evident. When we spoke, Japan had just been hit by the severe earthquake, and the danger of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant dominated the news. Boswinkel reached out to his contacts in Japan and offered help. “Every frequency can be inverted,” he says.
We stroll into Rotterdam’s city center on a sunny spring day, where people are walking down the street wearing sunglasses. “You shouldn’t do that,” Boswinkel says. “The eyes are precisely where the solar radiation that feeds life enters the body.” Nor is he a fan of sunscreens that cover up those other important windows to the sun, the acupuncture points. Johan Boswinkel knows that without light, there is no life. Not only are our food sources dependent on the sun, but our bodies cannot thrive without daily exposure to sunlight. It’s generally accepted that a lack of daylight causes seasonal affective disorder, or “winter depression.” Blind people whose pineal gland does not transmit the light entering their eyes to the brain can exhibit significant disturbances in their physiological and emotional stability. The late Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi said in his 1937 Nobel Prize acceptance speech for discovering vitamin C, “A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure. Without energy, life would be extinguished instantaneously, and the cellular fabric would collapse. The source of this energy is the sun’s radiation.”
Sunlight may be healthy and vital, but the artificial lighting in which so many of us spend so much of our days undermines health. Sunlight offers a balanced spectrum; in contrast, artificial lighting—depending on the type—provides only a limited portion of the spectrum. That limitation disrupts the body’s harmony, which is the start of all disease. That is: Disease begins with a lack of light. Johan Boswinkel’s message is that light is also the remedy.
We arrive at an outdoor café for lunch. Boswinkel chooses a table in the shade, and I raise my eyebrows. He laughs. “I already produce so much light.”
Ode’s publisher and editor-in-chief Jurriaan Kamp is hereby resolved to get out more.
Photo: Pieter de Swart