Medbeds: Sleeping in Bunk

by Brian Dunning
November 4, 2025

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Healthcare remains an issue in American society that is politically both controversial and divisive, with some saying it has been weaponized. And as tends to be the case with many such topics, one small tendril of it has flourished in conspiracy theory communities. This is the concept of the so-called medbed, a bed you can lie in that will, through technological wizardly, amazingly heal your body of everything that ails it — including aging! It eliminates cancer, it regrows lost limbs, it restores youth and vitality no matter what your medical problems were. But that's only half of it. Where it really comes to a head is that the people who believe in this are typically people who feel marginalized when it comes to their own healthcare; and they further believe that society's "elites" have these devices and use them freely, yet jealously keep them all to themselves. And so the conspiracy theory itself just adds to society's divisiveness — despite the fact that the entire concept is 100% pure, unadulterated fiction.

If you are the average person on the street, you give but little thought to science and are hardly current on what's new in most technology fields. You know what's in pop culture, what's in the movies and on TV, what your friends talk about, what your favorite influencers are saying online, and you probably know a good amount about whatever your particular interests are. In fact, surveys say that about half of Americans believe that aliens actively visit the Earth; yet they don't seem to be very interested in it or excited about it; it's something they casually happened to overhear. Most people simply aren't both interested in, and knowledgeable about, science and technology. So you don't have to be stupid to believe that such a ridiculously miraculous device as a medbed exists — you just have to be an average person who's more interested in other things.

The concept of lying in a bed and being healed of all your maladies is a very old one. The Greeks built a shrine to their god of medicine, Asklepios, at Epidaurus, the remains of which can be visited today. Stone tablets survive that document healings performed there. Patients would sleep in a room called the abaton and so-called "dream healing" would occur, curing such conditions as lesions, blindness, paralysis, and more. However it was sleeping in a special temple and being visited by a god that was credited, not the bed itself. The Egyptians had sleep temples in several cities. Priests would take patients through rituals which culminated with what may have been hypnosis, leading to sleep; then while they slept, the god Imhotep would visit their dreams and heal them. Again, the bed itself played no special role.

If you go online to search for the origins of the medbed story, you're probably going to find that everyone says it was in the 2012 movie Prometheus, which featured a bed-type pod called the Pauling MedPod 720i. It performed automated trauma surgery with little robot arms and lasers, but it couldn't cure cancer or reverse aging like the medbed is claimed to be able to do.

The following year, the 2013 movie Elysium featured the Med-Bay, a similar machine, except that it did have the ability to cure anything at all. Not just broken bones but any disease; and it could reverse all the signs of aging as well. People with access to it were effectively immortal, as they could keep going back and having their body regenerated as many times as they needed. The movie simply skipped over how it worked or what technologies it might have used, as it would do things like rearrange the atoms in a cancer cell to restore it into a normal, healthy cell — things that are (in reality) completely impossible using any technology yet theorized.

The 2016 movie Passengers also had a pod-type bed called an Autodoc, but unlike the Med-Bay, it appeared to provide care using existing medical technologies such as administering drugs and performing surgeries. It did, however, use a nonexistent and unspecified technology to scan a patient and determine everything wrong with them.

The aspect of Elysium's Med-Bay that separates it from the others is that the movie was a social allegory depicting class warfare. The wealthy elites all lived on a luxurious orbiting space station named Elysium and had free access to Med-Bays, while the poor working class toiled and suffered on the dystopian world below with no healthcare at all, and in post-apocalyptic conditions of deprivation.

And this is, fundamentally, exactly the same model that today's medbed conspiracy theory posits: miracle cure-all devices that are freely available to the elite, but jealously guarded and hidden away from regular people. The timing of the movie's release (2013) is consistent with the genesis of the medbed claims, which originated in the online QAnon community.

There is a complete Skeptoid episode on QAnon, #738, but here is an abbreviated summary. In October 2017, the owners of the message board website 8chan (today called 8kun), began posting on their own website as a fake persona they called Q or QAnon. They claimed to be a government insider whose job was to reveal all the actions the government was taking against various elites in politics and Hollywood, and who would be arrested tomorrow. Not one of these predictions ever came true, obviously, because of course these guys — a father and son team plus a friend of theirs — had no connection to the government and no real knowledge. Nevertheless, the idea of elites being punished for their elitism was appealing to many. To this day, a huge number of people still believe that QAnon is a real person, tasked by the government to leak the most sensitive information to the world via a message board that's known for overt racism, antisemitism, misogyny, pornography, hate speech, and assorted illegal content. It's also known as a place where at least three mass shooters have posted their manifestos before going off and doing their thing.

Sidebar: Multiple investigations have found the identities of who Q actually was, and have been substantially determined beyond reasonable doubt using multiple lines of computer forensic evidence, and other circumstantial evidence. But we're not going down that path today because we're talking about medbeds.

QAnon influencers (the true believers who made it their mission to promote and amplify these alleged predictions) began talking about medbeds in volume around 2020 (though there were earlier scattered mentions ever since the release of Elysium). The elites, they said, had access to medbeds and were hiding them from the regular people of the world — practically a word-for-word regurgitation of the plot of Elysium. This has continued unabated on QAnon-associated channels on TikTok, Telegram, and Truth Social. One of the most common medbed beliefs of the QAnon community is that JFK, Jr., the son of President John F. Kennedy who was assassinated in 1963, was actually not killed in a 1999 plane crash, but instead remains alive, kept in stasis in a medbed, awaiting revelation to the world when he will save America.

We actually have decent data for how many people believe this. According to a 2024 survey by PRRI, some 16% believe QAnon is a real government insider posting truth, QAnon being the umbrella conspiracy theory for medbed believers. That works out to around 50 million people — so even if you've never heard of medbeds before today, it's deserving of an episode; because one 1 in 6 people around you believe they're real, and secretly being used to keep the elites forever young and healthy, for free. And thus, once again, we see the value of critical thinking and basic science literacy.

A 2023 paper published in the Psychological Bulletin gave the results of a huge meta analysis of many studies looking at conspiratorial thinking, and it's pretty eye-opening how precisely it fits the QAnon mindset. QAnon believers see themselves as under threat from the elite deep state; they hold weird beliefs like these medbeds (and the existence of QAnon himself); and they're angry about it. Here's what the paper found:

The strongest correlates of conspiratorial ideation across the motivational and personological domains pertained to the following tendencies: (a) to perceive threat and danger, (b) to rely on intuition and have odd beliefs and experiences, and (c) to be antagonistic and feel superior.

So not only do QAnon believers have the perfect personological and motivational traits to be conspiracy theorists, they also tend to be among the very least educated segment of the population, and thus less likely to be able to understand the implausibility of medbeds. The same PRRI survey found that people with only a high school education or less were most likely to be QAnon believers; that people with some college but no degree were 2.5× as likely to be believers; and people with four-year degrees or higher were least likely to believe.

So they're poorly equipped to comprehend that medbeds are, of course, both nonexistent and scientifically implausible. No cogent explanation for how they might work has ever been offered; the only explanations given have used meaningless nonsense terms like "biophotons," "life force energy," "teleport healing," and listings of various "healing frequencies" such as 432 Hz, 528 Hz, basically any old number. Why would people believe things like this, when it's so easy to look them up and find that they're meaningless? Well, again, science topics like this are not something that most people take any interest in. Someone wearing a labcoat on TikTok states that scientists say a frequency of 432 Hz cures cancer, that's good enough for some folks.

This also makes such people prime targets for the scammers. There are any number of companies out there selling fake medbeds. One, called Tesla Biohealing which has received FDA warning letters for selling products with false claims of medical benefits, sells gold-painted metallic canisters filled with cement — which they call "medbed generators" — and a futon-style bed resting on four of these, for $11,000. (They have lots of other related products on their website, but the links were broken for everything but the bed.) According to the FDA, the "devices are marketed with indications that these devices activate cellular self-repair mechanisms to treat a wide variety of chronic illnesses and diseases, such as terminal cancers, stroke paralysis, Lyme Disease, Alzheimer’s/Dementia, and Epilepsy." There are many other companies using comparable strategies to take advantage of the uneducated with similar useless products.

But for me, the tippest tipoff that medbeds are fake goes back to something we've talked about time and time again here on Skeptoid; and that's that when some product claims to treat everything, it's virtually a given that it actually treats nothing. Or, in this case, that it doesn't exist.

So the short answer on medbeds is not to waste your money. They're not real. If you really really really want to try one, go watch Elysium. I wasn't a fan, but your mileage may vary.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning