The Zapper and the Syncrometer

Hulda Regehr Clark was born on 18 October 1928 in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, and died on 3 September 2009 in Chula Vista, California. She claimed that a single parasite caused all human cancer, and that the same organism, in various guises, was behind HIV/AIDS, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. She wrote The Cure for All Cancers and The Cure for All Diseases. She has been described as perhaps the first person to market a cure for AIDS. Her clinic, her credentials and her litigation are documented in QuackeryWatch's full Hulda Clark investigation.

She also built two machines, and it is the machines that put her in this section.

The two machines

The Zapper — marketed in one version as the Super-Zapper Deluxe — is a small battery-powered generator that passes a low-voltage current through the body by way of handheld tubes or wrist straps. Clark held that this killed parasites, bacteria and viruses, and that killing them cured the diseases she attributed to them.

The Syncrometer is the diagnostic half. A sample — a household solvent, an animal tissue preparation, later saliva — is placed in the circuit, and the operator listens to the tone produced when a probe touches the patient's skin. A change in the sound is read as the presence of that substance in that organ. The apparatus supplies the pairing: the solvent identifies the toxin, the animal tissue identifies the site.

This is the same trick as the sealed-vial step in Vega testing, and it fails under blinding for the same reason. It also has a specific consequence that runs through Clark's published case reports: the diagnoses in her books were made with the Syncrometer, not by recognised diagnostic criteria. Whether the patients in those cases had cancer at all is therefore an open question, and one her own method is incapable of answering.

The claims, and what is actually true

Health Canada joined the campaign that prosecuted her

In 1997 the FTC began an initiative called Operation Cure.All, aimed at health fraud on the internet. It was publicly launched in June 1999. It was not an American-only effort: the FTC's own announcements describe it as a coordinated undertaking with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, and a long list of state attorneys general, and the Commission repeatedly recorded its appreciation for Health Canada's assistance.

The work was substantial. Two Health Claim Surf Days in 1997 and 1998 identified around 800 websites and newsgroups promoting products for heart disease, cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis; the figure later rose past 1,600 worldwide. Sites were emailed warnings that their claims required scientific substantiation; a follow-up survey found that 28 per cent of the 1998 sample had removed the claims or gone dark. By 2002 the exercise had been folded into an international sweep led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, with nineteen consumer-protection agencies participating, Canada among them — roughly 1,400 questionable sites, and over 280 advisory letters.

Canada was, in other words, at the table for the better part of six years.

January 2003: the case

On 27 January 2003 the FTC announced a complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, naming three defendants:

• Dr. Clark Research Association, a California corporation using a San Diego address
• Dr. Clark Behandlungzentrum GmbH, of Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, trading as Dr. Clark Zentrum
• David P. Amrein, individually and as an officer of both companies

The FTC pleaded four products. Two of them were pleaded as devices:

The conduct alleged ran from at least 1999. The matter was resolved by settlement: a final order prohibiting the defendants from making unsubstantiated health or safety claims for any food, drug, dietary supplement or device, together with recordkeeping provisions to let the FTC monitor compliance. As is ordinary in FTC consent resolutions, settlement is not an admission of the allegations.

And one more term, which is the reason this page exists.

The refunds stopped at the border

That is the asymmetry in one sentence. Participation in an international enforcement campaign is not the same thing as enforcement. Canada contributed to the surf days, appeared in the press releases, and was thanked. It did not bring a case, and it could not deliver a dollar to a Canadian who had been sold a cancer cure.

What Health Canada did about the devices themselves

Nothing that we can find.

We have searched Health Canada's advisories, information updates, recalls database and enforcement announcements for Hulda Clark, the Zapper, the Super-Zapper Deluxe, the Syncrometer, and the Dr. Clark corporate names. There is no advisory, no information update, no recall, no licence suspension, no seizure and no prosecution. A search of the recalls database for “zapper” returns insect zappers — including a 2018 recall of an outdoor bug killer whose electrified grid could come loose inside the housing.

So the federal record on a Saskatchewan-born naturopath who sold a diagnostic device and a cancer cure consists, in its entirety, of a shock hazard in a patio insect trap.

The Canadian arm

Clark's operation had a Canadian division, and it did not close when she died.

Health In-Sync states on its own website that in 2005 it acquired the Canadian division of the Self Health Resource Centre from Dr. Clark, and that it has spent roughly twenty years providing consulting services including Syncrometer testing, along with the products needed to follow Clark's protocols. Syncrometer training seminars were also held in Toronto during Clark's lifetime, according to the published account of an American practitioner who travelled to attend one.

The site's description of how it handles Canadian regulation will be familiar to anyone who has read our page on the supply chain. It says that only natural health products carrying the required Natural Health Product Number are offered online, and that:

Clients are told to make contact directly to discuss their situation, with the arrangement framed as practitioner counselling under Health Canada regulations. The pattern is identical to the one the German-device network described in its own words: whatever cannot be listed in public is not withdrawn, it is moved into a conversation.

We make no assertion that any of this contravenes any Canadian law. What we record is that a Canadian business has openly offered Syncrometer testing for two decades, describes its own catalogue as partly withheld from public view, and has never appeared in a Health Canada enforcement action.

What this case adds to the record

1. The devices were reachable. They were pleaded as devices, in a real court, by a real regulator, on the basis of real evidence. The obstacle was never that these machines are too obscure or too marginal to prosecute.
2. Health Canada was in the room. This is not a case where Canada was unaware. It was a named partner in the campaign for years and was thanked by name in the announcements.
3. Presence is not jurisdiction, and jurisdiction is not remedy. Canadian purchasers got no notice and no refund, because the only agency that obtained an order was the one whose consumers it was empowered to protect.
4. The channel outlived the enforcement. The FTC order is twenty-three years old. The Canadian arm was sold on in 2005 and is still trading. That is the recurring finding across this whole section: enforcement lands on a company, and the practice moves.

Related pages

• Hulda Clark's Tijuana cancer clinic — QuackeryWatch's full investigation: the parasite theory, Century Nutrition, the patients, and the litigation. Start there for Clark herself; this page covers only the hardware.
• EAV and the Vegatest — the wider electrodermal family the Syncrometer belongs to, and the blinded trials that refuted it.
• The supply chain — how devices and training reach Canadian practitioners, and the same catalogue-withholding pattern in the German-device network.
• Who has actually acted? — the full ledger of college and Health Canada actions.