OK, the first thing people need to do is a deep and profound reality check. First thing is to modify and accept new realistic expectations. ICES-PEMF (and everything else, fraudulent claims notwithstanding) is not a mystical way to make a person younger. I assert this, because many people seem to behave in a way opposite to this reality. So, step one is to adjust expectations and behavior.
Many, many people watch YouTube and hope to find the secret of youth. That’s fairly harmless, until older people start acting like they are young, and perpetually harm themselves. And this is the main risk of using ICES-PEMF: it will make a person feel so much better that it literally feels like they are young again, and that therefore they can behave like they are young again. Let me help adjust this expectation by giving two clear examples of people who have actually harmed themselves this way:
Example 1: An 84-year-old woman was pretty much crippled with back pain. Nothing else worked, so she decided to try ICES-PEMF. I coached her through it, gave her the answer to the question to which I am responding (above), and she was off and running. Initially the feedback was excellent: her back pain was nearly gone, and she was able to become active again. Then, she went silent for a few weeks. I finally got in touch with her son, who told me that the ICES-PEMF system was not really working for her anymore. I offered to talk to her to help her adjust her usage strategy, or test the device for correct function, so she could get back on track with her initial excellent results. But there was a lot of resistance and avoidance of communication.
I finally got her on the phone. She briskly told me that the “thing didn’t work, but she would just keep it as a life lesson…”. I asked her why her initial results were so excellent, followed by weeks of failure and avoidance. She was evasive, saying things such as “It never really worked…” etc. But finally she narrated the problem to me:
She felt so good for the first few weeks that she decided to take up mountain biking again. A bit dangerous for an 84-year-old IMO, but who am I to judge. She had gone out a few times and on their third trip to bike trails with her grandchildren, she abruptly told me that she hurt herself unloading all of the mountain bikes from the back of her SUV, by herself.
Summary of findings: 84-year-old woman hurts herself by unloading mountain bikes by herself from the back of an SUV.
She now had pretty severe back pain again, and therefore concluded “that thing really does not work.”
Example 2: A 93-year-old woman similar to Example 1 (above) started feeling so good that she decided to start cooking for her family again. Evidently ICES-PEMF didn’t work for her either, because she fell down a staircase while carrying a fully-dressed turkey, by herself, with both hands, and ended up in the hospital.
My conclusions:
First - adjust expectations to align with reality
Second - make corresponding adjustments to behavior
I hear stories like this so often that I have come to understand that the first thing to fix is what people have in their heads. ICES-PEMF can really help reduce pain and improve function, sometimes dramatically. But ICES-PEMF does not transform an 84-year old into a 24-year-old. People can end up hurting themselves worse with the wrong mindset.
Once you have that straightened out, the rest is pretty easy. Collecting my advice and experience with this from various locations on this forum to answer your question:
Set to default settings. I basically used Omni-8 (or the equivalent) for 90% of the time over the past 15 years. I experimented with a few other pulse patterns, but always ended up returning to Omni-8.
Get your nutrition and supplements adjusted for your individual needs: I use a Magnesium threonate formulation, zinc citrate or zinc gluconate, collagen peptides, explicit addition of 6 grams of L-glycine in addition to the collagen peptides with NAC for reasons discussed in detail elsewhere on this forum, vitamins D3 and K2. I also take 3 to 6 grams of creatine every day for the well-researched and firmly-established benefits to strength and cognition. This has evolved over the years and a full accounting would take a book, but basically, take what your body needs and adjust as you age. Determining this for yourself will be a life-long occupation and can be discussed on this forum as many other people have many excellent opinions on the matter.
Then, I simply wear an M1, originally an A9 until I developed the M1 a few years ago, pretty much doing Omni-8 set to intensity 8 or 9. I wear it all day long, sun rise to bed-time, held in place on my lower back where I individually need it to be by cloth taping it to my firefighter-red suspenders. All day, every day.
I also used occasional spinal decompression (Teeter hang-ups inverting table or equivalent, I have both). But mainly I use common sense to prevent further behaviors that lead to injury. I keep moving, but carefully. I use both hand rails when going up or down stairs. I watch where I place my feet. I am aware of bending and twisting movements. I do them within the limits of 60-year-old Bob, not in the wishful dream space of 25-year-old Bob.
Also, your final question about using two different (unsynchronized) devices on your spine: there should not be any problems doing that.