I know a number of you have Bemers, as I do, and I know that Bob has mentioned that they are very low Guass for the money. Unlike you all and MindAlive, however, they are not user friendly or easily contacted beyond the basics. They only come with one general protocol, which only goes up to level 6, but there are quite a few more levels in the settings. I’m wondering if anyone has used any of the higher levels or other programs, and if so, what their experiences and thoughts are. We’ve done well with the basic program, but every time I drop back down I feel like I’m losing ground. Then again, I think some folks (including Bob - bless you, Bob, for your willingness to share and educate!) also mentioned that our bodies tend to attune to the pemf frequencies, which I’m assuming is why the protocol calls for bouncing up and down. Any thoughts, experience or conjectures welcome! Regardless, the difference for both me and my husband now that we are using the pemf tech daily is incredible, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone. 
@LWM Sorry I think I misunderstand your question. Are you asking about Bemer settings but then acknowledging that @Bob with his ICES PEMF tech doesn’t focus on high Gauss (per his many education articles) and that he has built his ICES PEMF (not same as Bemer) technology to prevent habituation? Which PEMF tech are you using daily - @Bob’s ICES PEMF or Bemer?
I own a Bemer, and have 6+ years of experience with it. I’ve detailed my experiences with it in the post below:
I’ve found that generally the higher settings bring about more observable results. I generally follow the basic protocol, but if I want to elicit a specific, immediate result, I go with power level 7 generally. Settings 1-4 don’t really elicit immediately palpable results for me. Having said that, I still use the lower settings as a part of a general long term protocol; Just because I don’t immedately feel it doesn’t mean it’s not good for my immune system, for example.
I don’t feel like i’m losing ground when I go back down. I also don’t feel much of a difference in results between levels 7,8,9,10. My personal opinion is that if you’ve been using the Bemer for a long time, there’s no reason not to extend the basic protocol all the way up to 10. I sometimes extend the general protocol to those higher levels. I also don’t feel compelled to use it every day. I take breaks from the bemer for a few weeks on occasion. I’ve learned that with just about anything you do to your body (supplements, exercise, pemf…) you gotta take breaks.
Incidentally, after trying ICES for several months now, at various levels, programs, body parts, I feel similarly about my M1: it I really don’t get palpable results unless i crank it up, contrary to Dr. Bob’s usual guidance about going low-power and long duration.
Out of curiosity, @lwm can you tell us a bit more about what you mean when you say that you feel like you’re losing ground when you go back down?
Not at all! I’m saying he pointed out that Bemer has low guass and acknowledged that the habituation was an issue - probably as with pretty much anything. Absolutely NO CRITICISM of Bob or his tech.
@BartM THANK YOU, this was exactly the type of information I was looking for. I did read your other posts and agree to some extent. I definitely feel a negative difference when I miss a day, so I’m not ready to try that again. I mean that I start to notice the general aches and soreness coming back a bit when I drop down, but to be fair, I’m also battling chronic, cycling long covid and the colder weather has set in, so it may just be coincidence. I had managed to get off of my daily anti-inflammatories, but this last time once I went back down, I had to start them up again. My husband also has had a general sense of not feeling as much boost from the sessions this time when we dropped down. But he is also dealing with long covid issues, so it’s hard to be sure there is a direct correlation. I just wanted a general reassurance that playing a bit looser with the settings might be worth trying. Your advice is spot on with what I was thinking, so now I feel a bit more confident trying that route. I think I’ll try going up to 7 today, as it’s my switch day, then drop back down less this time and see how that goes. I really appreciate your input! 
Thanks for explaining that. Yeah, it makes sense. I think generally, “official” recommendations are a good starting point, but with experience, we all figure out our own tweaks that work specifically for us, and it’s good to “improvise on the theme”, so to speak. I think we both are having a similar experience: You are maybe finding a way to improve upon the basic protocol of the bemer, and I’m maybe finding a way to improve upon Dr. Bob’s general recommendation for ICES. And those tweaks may not be best for most users, but they work for us personally. Cheers!
One observation that I might offer is that, as described in the scientific literature, the effects of PEMF tend to be a bit longer lasting than just one day. This has not been described well, but the effects of PEMF have been noted to persist by several researchers. When using ICES-PEMF, the effects seem to persist for me for at least 2 to 4 days (for some things longer, for others shorter; its not well described). But several people have noted, as LWM has, that one day away from BEMER seems to have back-sliding sensation. This is not the first time I have heard BEMER described this way. So, it makes me think that the fundamental biophysical mechanisms that BEMER is activating may be somewhat different than the more standard PEMF sharp square or delta-function pulses. This is perhaps a bit more evidence that BEMER is somewhat different from PEMF. That is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just interesting to consider.
When I use M1 for a while, the effect on what I use it for lasts maybe a week or longer. The longer I use it the longer it lasts. I often end up taking breaks from a day to half a week, depending on what I’m doing.
This interesting persistence of PEMF is one thing that sharply sets it apart from other “pain relief device” technologies such as TENS, which presumably just block pain signals: when you remove the nerve block stimulus, the pain tends to return in just a few minutes. This is what people point out with TENS: remove the signal and the pain returns in 5-15 minutes or less.
But the persistent effects of PEMF suggest that the mechanism is not simply “pain blocking”, that something more fundamental to the origin of the pain is being influenced by PEMF. In one study on rabbits, the significant effects of PEMF on healing were seen to last for up to three years after discontinuing the stimulation.
I do wonder, though, if other things might be going on with me. When I was first using the Bemer, I was only using it one or two times a week (I didn’t own one) and felt like the effects did last longer between sessions. I am also one of those folks who is highly reactive to pretty much ANYTHING, which is why I felt safer going with something I’d already tried. I already found that upping to the next highest setting, as discussed in this thread, was too much for me. But I’m hoping that my sense of “losing momentum” may have just been the change of season coupled with a long covid relapse. Regardless, I am definitely better WITH the use of pemf than I was before it, and I am so very thankful and appreciative for you and this forum!
I think you are almost certainly correct. Many people (myself included) have multiple, complex, overlapping conditions, some known, some presumed, and some completely unknown and unsuspected. A big part of my mental and emotional energy goes into trying to untangle these multiple problems, trying to figure out which ones are more fundamental, and which ones need to be solved first.
Added to this, I also think PEMF has multiple, different mechanisms of effect. It is clear to me (but I cannot yet offer proof) that different types of PEMF (mostly different waveform shapes) have different biological effects. I think this is similar to the different effects of food or supplements or drugs.
This is one aspect of this forum that I hoped would be helpful to people: to help untangle these levels of complexity when using PEMF and other things.
wow… now that you mentioned it, THAT hypothesis makes a lot more sense to me than only modulating power, frequency, duration, etc for helping the body heal. there is so much “mystery” in pemf that it’s becoming more evident we need more authentic and scientifically driven research put into this field.
have you experimented much with these different wave forms? as i have understood it, the one you chose to drive all your devices was the one you found most effective (or efficient… or?) in helping with pain and inflammation. do you ever plan to include other wave forms in your devices?
i don’t know what i don’t know, and this may be a naive question that may require more time to develop than i expect.
on a side note, do you work with a team and if not, have you considered it for developing your pemf tech?
Have I experimented much with different waveforms? A bit of history: I got pulled into PEMF research in 1996 by colleagues who asked me to help researchers at NASA who were trying to grow human cells on the space shuttle in “micro-gravity”. NASA wanted to try PEMF to help induce normal human neuronal cells to grow in culture, because normal primary human cells generally do not grow well in culture. They specifically asked me to "try PEMF, that might work.’ I asked them to tell me specifically what they needed and they replied “Figure it out (please).”
So, I made a comprehensive scientific study of the state of the art of PEMF at that time (1996). I read everything in all languages (I had translations done through a service at UM) relevant to PEMF and biological effects. This amounted to 660 scientific papers, which made a stack about 3 feet tall.
I summarized all of that to try to figure out the scope of the field of PEMF, and where to start. The main findings were:
1- PEMF really does seem to have a biological effect, but it is sketchy and unreliable and difficult to replicate.
2- that PEMF waveforms basically fall into one of six types, based both on biological effects (or not) and calculus.
3- The PEMF scientific literature, taken as a whole, is of very low quality. It was no surprise to me at that point that as a result, PEMF was widely dismissed by the scientific community.
This helped me to zero in on the waveforms to test. I carefully designed instruments and experiments to test the six basic PEMF waveforms. This resulted in the famous NASA publication:
and the paper that I recently published to finish the work of providing a permanent archival scientific record of the experimental methods and the results:
https://www.josam.org/josam/article/view/5
The experiments at NASA matched pretty well with the total body of PEMF research: some PEMF waveforms seem to work well, some seem to work sort-of, and some seem to have no scientific support beyond what could be attributed to placebo.
This result prompted me to focus on the single key waveform feature that really has the best, most measurable and repeatable biological effects. This is the waveform I have been developing since then, and the waveform that is used in all ICES-PEMF devices.
Have I studied other waveforms? Let’s have a look at the key result of my paper that gives an estimate of the number of different variations on PEMF: about 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000). Many of these relate to the specific waveform parameters. Many of these relate to very complex relationships between waveform and other parameters. For example, most very high frequency pulses (MHz, GHz) will tend to be sinusoidal pulses for practical reasons.
I may be the only person on Earth currently studying and experimenting in a serious and systematic way with PEMF waveform shape. I will only live for another few decades at best (fingers crossed). I can only do so much. I have to put my time and energy into the areas that are most likely to yield the best result to help the most people suffering with the most serious crippling conditions.
It is entirely possible that other PEMF waveforms may have subtle effects on many areas that could be teased out by careful scientific study for a few decades. It would be a bad decision for me to chase after these wispy possibilities. My effort needs to remain focused on the main message: One form of PEMF works very well and very repeatably for a large range of very serious, crippling, and otherwise untreatable medical conditions.
continued…
part II…
Do I work with a team? Well, that’s a good question and a very hard topic.
My laboratory at U-Michigan had grown to enormous size by the time I left for UNC in 2004. I had 24 people in my lab: undergrad and grad students, post-docs, junior faculty, surgical residents, and technicians. I had massive DARPA funding, lots of space, etc. But I became a manager, and the way academia works is that you always end up creating a very hungry monster that you spend full time feeding. This requires consistent and massive federal funding, which requires you to gravitate toward “safe science”: reliable results, not too controversial, not too game changing or disruptive. You really can not do hard-core disruptive high-risk (of negative results) science in academia at scale.
I left for UNC to get a “hard reset”, and to right-size my lab so that I could be a scientist again, and not just an academic-administrator-federal-money-hustler-pop-science-ringmaster-showman.
I gave it my full effort for more than a decade to build a team of colleagues to study PEMF (with almost no success) and tried to get DARPA and NIH funding (with some small success). This decade of effort never got anywhere. The only forward movement I was getting was with private funding and consulting dollars for this work.
That was OK, sort of, but any private entity that puts money into PEMF wants to lock it down and charge outrageous amounts for it. Basically if I went the route of using private external funds for this research, you would need to pay about 15 to 20 times as much for far less capable PEMF systems than what I offer for ICES-PEMF.
This is not like building an electric car or a space ship. A huge team and huge dollars are not the answer.
After decades of trying, the only way that I can make good progress and leave something for current and future generations to build on is to go it alone and fund it out of my own pocket.