BDORT

• Wikipedia-en: BDORT

The Bi-Digital O-Ring Test (BDORT), characterized as a form of applied kinesiology, is a patented alternative medicine diagnostic procedure in which a patient forms an ‚O‘ with his or her fingers, and the diagnostician subjectively evaluates the patient’s health according to the patient’s finger strength as the diagnostician tries to pry them apart.

BDORT has been cited and characterized at length by the American Institute for Technology and Science Education as a specific and noteworthy example of pseudoscientific quackery.

BDORT was invented by Yoshiaki Omura, along with several other related alternative medicine techniques. They are featured in Omura’s self-published Acupuncture & Electro-Therapeutics Research, The International Journal, of which Omura is founder and editor-in-chief, as well as in seminars presented by Omura and his colleagues.

Omura is registered to practice acupuncture in New York State.

In the only known full, formal independent evaluation of BDORT or of any other BDORT-related treatment and technique by a mainstream scientific or medical body, the Medical Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal of New Zealand ruled, in two separate cases brought before it in 2003, that Richard Warwick Gorringe, MB, ChB of Hamilton, New Zealand, who used BDORT (which he also called „Peak Muscle Resistance Testing“, or „PMRT“) to the exclusion of conventional diagnoses on his patients, was guilty of malpractice.

In the first case, the Tribunal found it „is not a plausible, reliable, or scientific technique for making medical decisions“ and „there is no plausible evidence that PMRT has any scientific validity“.

In the second case the Tribunal ruled Gorringe again relied on BDORT to the exclusion of traditional diagnoses, which ultimately led to the death of a patient. As a result of these findings and conclusions, Gorringe was fined and stripped of his license to practice medicine.