I was recently asked what I thought about the Solex AO Scan. The website for the product includes this claim:

AO Scan Technology by Solex is an elegant, yet simple-to-use frequency technology based on Tesla, Einstein, and other prominent scientists’ discoveries. It uses delicate bio-frequencies and electromagnetic signals to communicate with the body.

The AO Scan Technology contains a library of over 170,000 unique Blueprint Frequencies and created a hand-held technology that allows you to compare your personal frequencies to these Blueprints in order to help you achieve homeostasis, the body’s natural state of balance.

This is all hogwash (to use the technical term). Throwing out the names Tesla and Einstein, right off, is a huge red flag. This is a good rule of thumb – whenever these names (or Galileo) are invoked to hawk a product, it is most likely a scam. I guess you can say that any electrical device is based on the work of any scientist who had anything to do with electromagnetism.

What are “delicate bio-frequencies”? Nothing, they don’t exist. The idea, which is an old one used in scam medical devices for decades, is that the cells in our bodies have their own unique “frequency” and you want these frequencies to be in balance and healthy. If the frequencies are blocked or off, in some way, this causes illness. You can therefore read these frequencies to diagnoses diseases or illness, and you can likewise alter these frequencies to restore health and balance. This is all complete nonsense, not based on anything in reality.

Living cells, of course, do have tiny electromagnetic fields associated with them. Electrical potential is maintained across all cellular membranes. Specialized cells, like muscles and nervous tissue, use this potential as the basis for their function. But there is no magic “frequency” associated with these fields. There is no “signature” or “blueprint”. That is all made up nonsense. They claim to have researched 170,000 “Blueprint Frequencies” but the relevant science appears to be completely absent from the published literature. And of course there are no reliable clinical trials indicating that any type of frequency-based intervention such as this has any health or medical application.

As an aside, there are brainwave frequencies (although this is not what they are referring to). This is caused by networks of neurons in the brain all firing together with a regular frequency. We can also pick up the electrical signals caused by the contraction of the heart – a collection of muscle cells all firing in synchrony. When you contract a skeletal muscle, we can also record that electrical activity – again, because there are lots of cells activating in coordination. Muscle contractions have a certain frequency to them. Motor units don’t just contract, they fire at an increasing frequency as they are recruited, peaking (in a healthy muscle) at 10 hz. We will measure these frequencies to look for nerve or motor neuron damage. If you cannot recruit as many motor units, the ones you can recruit will fire faster to compensate.

These are all specialized tests looking at specific organs with many cells firing in a synchronous fashion. If you are just looking at the body in general, not nervous tissue or muscles, the electrical signals are generally too tiny to measure and would just be white noise anyway. You will not pick up “frequencies”, and certainly not anything with any biological meaning.

In general, be very skeptical of any “frequency” based claims. That is just a science-sounding buzzword used by some to sell dubious products and claims.