Hi @Avi, that is an excellent question. The answer is that those protocols derived from my earliest attempts to make PEMF as biologically effective as possible for general structural tissue healing and regeneration. This started about 2 decades ago. The pulse patterns initially were based on the nerve impulse patterns of a developing fetus in utero, known from studies in Developmental Biology, which I was involved in as a graduate student.
For most of the tissue mass of the developing body, this is mainly tissues of the neuro-musculo-skeletal system. During early to mid development in utero, the fetus will twitch its muscles often, reacting to neural impulses that code for the development of fast and slow twitch muscle. The growth and development of the entire neuro-musculo-skeletal system depends on these nerve impulse patterns. If the patterns are not present during development, the fetus will not develop properly. This includes muscle, but also bone, tendon, ligament, articular cartilage, and motor neurons, as well as the motor areas of the brain. So, these pulse patterns are essential for early in utero development, and I reasoned that, since biology tends to conserve useful chemical structures, genes, and internal signals of all types, that even an adult organism would probably use these same pulse patterns to signal growth and development. That was my working hypothesis as I began to develop ICES-PEMF technology more than 20 years ago.
My first best guess was the A9 pattern (classic) to simply emulate slow and fast twitch neuro-motor patterns during development.
With testing and refinement, this evolved into the P2 by adding a rest period at the end of each pulse pattern sequence, because the fetus goes through periods of neuro-motor activity and rest. I estimated this cycle to be about 20 minutes total on average, based on my experiments.
Later, making it a bit more sophisticated by mixing fast- and slow-twitch signals, it evolved into the B5-C5 pattern.
My final best guess a few years later: Because everyone was wildly enthusiastic about Schumann frequencies at the time, I wanted to show that Schumann Resonant frequencies were not magical, and were no better than similar frequencies in the same approximate range. So, I ran a test with a few volunteers to test the difference between the A9 classic pattern, Schumann resonances 1 through 5, an offset pattern that was just Schumann but with offset (i.e., intentionally incorrect and therefore non-resonant), and few other combinations of these patterns, then a combined pattern of A9 plus the Schumann Offset frequencies (all 8 of the frequencies in sequence, thus “Omni-8”).
Using the volunteers and myself (all of us were very experienced ICES-PEMF users), we all evaluated the effectiveness of these patterns without knowing which pattern we were testing, but everyone tested each of the patterns for a week or two.
This was not very scientific, but it was practical and useful just as any engineering field test would be, because large differences in effectiveness would surely emerge if they existed. I could have spent a decade and ten million dollars to come to the same conclusion, but that’s how dysfunctional academic science shakes us all down for our tax dollars without delivering much of value, so I refrained from that latter approach.
My findings:
Almost everyone felt that the Omni-8 was best, but only by a small amount. All of the pulse patterns were thought by everyone to be effective, but Omni-8 was qualitatively assessed to be “about 10 to 15% better” than the others. This finding has been reinforced thousands of times since anecdotally: Omni-8 is the go-to default pattern to try first because it helps most people with most things. If you subsequently find a pattern that works better for you, then that’s great. But everyone has a good chance at getting major benefits right off the bat just with the Omni-8 pattern.
Note; The Schumann resonances worked well, but not quite as well as a very similar pattern with slightly adjusted frequencies (comprised of a sequence of one sub-harmonic and the first four harmonics of the Schumann Frequency). This demonstrates categorically that Schumann Frequencies are beneficial, but only because they are in the general range of beneficial developmental frequencies, and they absolutely do not resonate with the Earth, or anything like that. That claim about Schumann Frequencies, like so many others in the world of PEMF marketing, is just plain fraud.
Summary:
Those first four pulse patterns arise from my working hypothesis that neuro-motor impulses during early development would encode signals for neuro-musculo-skeletal growth and development. They are not magical. They are my best guess, and they represent the evolution of my development of ICES-PEMF over the period of many years, starting with the A9 (classic) pattern, then evolving ultimately to the Omni-8 pattern.
These patterns are my best educated guess at pulse patterns for promoting general tissue growth and regeneration, and they were refined on the basis of continual field testing and feedback over many years. I included all of these “legacy” pulse patterns on the M1 and C5 simply so that people could experiment with them for themselves to see what works best for them as a unique individual.