In an earlier post, we told the story of Wilhelm Reich and his orgone accumulator. There’s a companion story worth telling alongside it — because at almost the same moment in history, a completely different researcher was asking a similar question about electromagnetism and the body, and arrived at a permanent place in mainstream medicine instead. Comparing the two says a lot about how “energy healing” ideas succeed or stall.
The same era, two different questions
Wilhelm Reich spent the 1940s and early ’50s building orgone accumulators, convinced he’d found a universal life-energy. His claims were sweeping — a fundamental force underlying all biology — and largely untestable with the instruments of his time. The FDA moved against him in the 1950s, he was jailed in 1957, and mainstream science never picked up his framework.
Around the same decades, orthopedic surgeon C. Andrew L. Bassett was asking a much narrower question at Columbia University: does electrical stimulation affect how bone heals? Bone had already been shown to generate a small electrical charge under mechanical stress (a piezoelectric-like effect), and Bassett wanted to know if applying an external electromagnetic field could recreate that signal artificially and speed up healing in fractures that had stalled.
Why one claim was testable and the other wasn’t
This is the heart of the difference. Bassett’s question had a built-in, measurable endpoint: does the bone heal, yes or no, on an X-ray, in a controlled group of patients compared to a control group. Reich’s question — is there a universal orgone energy underlying life itself — didn’t have an equivalent measurable endpoint available at the time. Narrower, falsifiable claims are simply easier for science to evaluate than sweeping, foundational ones.
Bassett published his findings in Science in 1974, ran clinical trials on non-union fractures, and by 1979 the FDA had cleared the first PEMF bone growth stimulator device. That’s the regulatory process working as intended: a specific, testable claim, tested, and approved for that specific use.
What each path became
Bassett’s work became a permanent, if narrow, fixture of orthopedic medicine — still used today for slow-healing fractures and spinal fusion support. Reich’s work became a permanent, if fringe, fixture of alternative wellness culture — the direct ancestor of the orgonite pieces we make. Neither path “won” outright; they simply answered different kinds of questions, at different scales of claim, and got correspondingly different receptions.
Why we think the comparison matters
We build orgonite, and we’re upfront that it sits on Reich’s side of this split — a materials-based, largely untested approach rather than a clinically validated one. But we don’t think that makes the underlying curiosity illegitimate. Bassett’s story is proof that “does an electromagnetic field change something in the body” isn’t a crazy question to ask — it’s a question that, asked narrowly enough, got a real answer. We’d rather be honest about which side of that line each of our claims falls on than pretend they’re the same thing.
Want to see where our Resonators sit on that line?