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This past Saturday night, someone, presumably the President of the United States, posted a video clip to Donald Trump’s TruthSocial account that seemed to show the President appearing on Fox News’ My View with Lara Trump to announce “America’s first MedBed hospitals,” as well as the imminent release of “MedBed cards” so Americans can access said hospitals.
“These facilities are safe, modern, and designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength,” Trump says in the clip.
The video was clearly AI-generated, Fox News confirmed that the segment had never aired on any of their platforms, and the TruthSocial post was deleted on Sunday. While this incident raises a variety of questions, I’m only going to focus on one: What the hell are MedBeds?
Real MedBeds vs. fake MedBeds
While there are actual “medical beds” that do things like tilt patients to prevent bed sores or provide constant vital sign monitoring, the MedBeds mentioned in the video are not these. MedBeds are a deep-cut from the world of conspiracy theorists: wonder-beds that use quantum field theory, vibrational energy, and/or holograms to cure all diseases and injuries. They can restore missing limbs or reverse aging—and all you have to do is lie down in one for half an hour. Neat, but not a real thing—no evidence of such technology exists.
MedBeds are predominantly a far right theory with a lot of crossover with QAnon and NESARA/GESARA, but there are plenty of folks on the far left who believe in MedBeds too. Different theorists may have different ideas about where MedBeds came from, as well—sometimes they are back-engineered alien technology and sometimes they were made by the military—but nearly all MedBedders agree that “The Elites” are hiding the technology from us proles, hoarding all the youth and health for themselves. As belief in MedBeds grew in over the last decade, grifters predictably arrived.
The scammy kind of MedBed
You can’t have a bunch of people believing in a fake thing without folks trying to profit from them, so there are companies like “Tesla Biohealing” (no relation) that will sell you a “Biophotonizer-M” MedBed so you (or your pet) can enjoy “your own quantum healing environment at home.” There’s also this anti-aging bed, or you could book a session in a “ThetaPod” that looks like this:
These companies seem to carefully avoid making specific medical claims for their MedBeds, but they definitely suggest medical benefits, and these claims are highly dubious (and some MedBeds are part of the “antichrist system“?).
It’s easy to see how these kinds of sales pitches hook people. The sites look legitimate, the claims sound real, and the people spreading MedBed nonsense can seem legitimate too. But they aren’t.
It always goes back to science fiction
If you’re wondering where MedBeds really came from, it’s science fiction movies. The current MedBeds conspiracy theory is basically the plot of 2013 science fiction flick Elysium. But there are MedBeds in older science fiction too. In the original Star Trek, Dr. McCoy’s sick bay is full of “biobeds” that could cure things his tricorder could not. In 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort revives Klaatu with a chamber that looks very much like descriptions of MedBeds. And if we expand the definition of “MedBed” from a physical object to a description of what the object does, the history of MedBeds goes back at least to ancient Sumeria.
The eternal allure of the fountain of youth
The earliest surviving great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, details the title character’s search for a substance that grants eternal youth. In Gilgamesh it’s a thorny plant at the bottom of the sea instead of medical device being hidden by rich people, but the idea is the same. People have been looking for the literal Fountain of Youth, a source of water that cures all diseases and reverses aging, since at least 500 BC, and searching for an anti-aging elixir motivated the alchemists who laid the foundation for chemistry that led to all the actual medical advances that keep us alive longer.
The ultimate lesson of MedBeds
There are no MedBeds hiding in secret military bunkers, about to be rolled out by some shadowy cabal, and the government isn’t going to send you a “MedBed card” either. But the desire that drives people to believe in miracle cures is very real, very old, and nearly universal. Judging from the comments on MedBed videos, the people drawn to this stuff are sick and old and scared. The real doctors have told them to get their affairs in order; you can’t blame them for reaching for hope—we’re all going to be asking for a little more time eventually.
Gilgamesh was driven by the same fear as MedBed believers. The hero travels to the bottom of the sea and finds the plant that grants eternal life, only to have it stolen away by a serpent before he can return to the surface. The lesson is clear: We don’t get to live forever. Rather than despair, Gilgamesh concludes that people don’t get to live forever, and the meaning of life is in living virtuously and the legacy we leave behind.
