Flux Health Forum

Hair Loss Pilot Study 2023

Other Interesting Applications
#75

Hello Good Community,
As I work to help develop the ICES-PEMF hat into a product, one of my foremost considerations is of course safety. So it would be greatly helpful if you could report to me here, by reply to this post, if you or someone you loaned it to tried one of the prototypes that I made available last year, and if they had any kind of adverse reaction. If you did have an adverse reaction, please reply to this post, tell me what settings you used (intensity level), and how long and when you were using it when you experienced the adverse effects. Also, how severe was the effect, how long did it last, and any other details you would like to share.

We did not really get any reports of serious adverse reactions, and definitely nothing that lasted very long, but I want to be sure that we are aware of any possible adverse reaction.

Thanks in advance.

1 Like
#76

Scientific progress being made…

If the above link does not work, try this link directly to preprints.org:

#77

Bob, I have been a longtime happy customer of a C5, and I am eager to obtain a hat prototype for my mother who is rapidly losing function, including her ability to speak. I have seen the podcast where one of your customers helped his
Mother with Parkinson’s using IVES to n her head. So I have made a makeshift hat for her which keeps falling off of her head, but hope to obtain a C5 attachment that is more suited for purpose. I’ve read on this forum that the hat can work beyond the scalp!
Can you make any more hats? I’d be very grateful if I could eventually get my hands on one.

Thanks in advance for your reply,

#78

Hi @lulu7,
Unfortunately I can not make any more hats, by legal contract, to with the company who has licensed the rights to make them for consumers.

This is not something I can realistically make anyway: each would cost me about $15,000 to make because making them by hand is extremely time and resource demanding. That is a tolerable cost of research prototypes, but definitely not consumer goods. They need to be mass produced for them to become available at a reasonable price.

For your immediate needs, I suggest you try using a C5 with a skull cap-type hat from amazon. You can sew or otherwise affix the coils inside or outside a cap that looks like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B7DJS3T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

2 Likes
#79

Ok thanks for your response-I’ll tey the Amazon cap fix. Do you have any idea if and when they’d become available?

#80

well, as an educated guess I would say 12 to 18 months, but even that is wishful thinking for the development of a new “complex” product.

And, as usual from chatterbox Bob :roll_eyes: , a lot more detail for those who would like to gain a sense for how challenging it is to try to bring a “complex” product to a global market:

“Complex” means that the product is not just a simple piece of plastic or a simple electronic device, like a flashlight for sale in an unregulated market. A therapeutic hat product using ICES-PEMF intended for sale in a global market as a regulated medical device is a “complex” product because all of the conditions at the beginning of this sentence, plus the integration of many different mechanical and electronic components, firmware/software, human compatibility considerations in the design, etc.

There are dozens or hundreds of people involved, a lot of money that can suddenly evaporate, major international regulatory hurdles, competing intellectual property, not to mention all of the known and unknown geopolitical instability across the globe that will have a massive and unpredictable impact on global supply chains.

Developing a new product is unlike anything a normal person is familiar with. To gain an intuitive sense for the difficulty and complexity, you can think of it like this:

Imagine you are planning a wedding. But…

The wedding is for many couples involving different people living on different continents who have never met each other before. And you are not quite sure how many couples there are getting married.

They all have different religions and different marriage traditions and taboos.

You have to feed everyone, but you don’t know what they eat, and you don’t know how many of them you need to feed.

Some of these people might already be married or have other hidden legal barriers.

The wedding will snap to a halt if any single one of the gifts does not arrive. The gifts are headed in at different times in different amounts addressed to different people from all corners of the globe.

A large number of different regulatory agencies require you to take detailed pictures of each stage of every wedding, from the time of proposal until the kids get sent off to college.

And you’re not quite sure what the laws and requirements are in each location where you are hosting this coordinated network of weddings.

Meanwhile, several other wedding planners are spying on you and are actively doing everything they can to steal your wedding guests and undermine the massive wedding plan that you are trying to organize.

And all you need to do is plan all of this, find the money, and hold it all together until it actually happens, which could be weeks, months, or years.

My best guess: allow 12 to 18 months, but do not hold your breath.

3 Likes
Applying PEMF to head (Hair Loss, sleep, etc benefits?)
#81

Yikes. Ok, so the hats wil become available when they become available. Or not :grimacing:. Thanks for the explanation!

#82

Well, it really does take a lot longer than people realize to create a genuinely new product, so I think it is important to manage people’s expectations. The expectation of a new product every few months or even every year is a marketing trick used on all kinds of stuff: smart phones, personal computers, cars. It keeps everything fresh and exciting. It keeps consumers engaged.

The sneaky marketing trick is that new products take years to develop (if they are genuinely new), so the illusion is created by marketers using two techniques:

1- Resell stuff that is not really much different and hype it as new. Just a new color, a new catchy name, just one new feature, that’s enough to fool most consumers into thinking they have a fresh new product.

2- Hide the real development time: develop several new releases at the same time, but only drip-feed them out one-at-a-time while the real work is going on in the background, usually for years.

But you know me by now: boring old Bob. I’ll just buck the trend and tell you the truth.

The hat insert is really a new type of PEMF product, and we are even discovering a few things along the way about this application of PEMF, how it seems to work, and how to optimize it. Plus, juggling all the stuff that has to be done, the “complex wedding”, to get a new product to market, avoiding all of the traps, failures, and pit-falls, honestly 18 months or more is lightning fast.

2 Likes
#83

You should then sell the M1 in a new color every year or add “special editions” with blue coils, pink cables or the like. Or even signed cardboard boxes where the M1 comes in. :rofl:

P.S.: This was not meant serious :sunglasses:

#84

Better yet, change the connector type every several years so your accessory business takes off until the EU mandates compliance with an international standard and the gig is up.

*sarcasm.

#85

@hcf, @TajD, solid suggestions! You have great potential as technology marketers!

My favorite (not) marketer “add-nothing-and-charge-for it” trick was when I was in grad school, MS Excel removed several graphing and analysis resources that I had been using for my doctoral dissertation, selling it as “sleeker and better!”. Actually, it was just “less”. Then about a year later they added back in those same functions that you could pay for with the newest version of MS Office.

If you extend the definition beyond on-line platforms to include all consumer products, I think this process is called…

1 Like
#86

Dr. Dennis, could you reach out to the people at Enliven to either convince them to resume selling their various caps and wraps, or perhaps given the the high demand and market, maybe they would sell or license their product designs to you to manufacture and distribute?

#87

Hi Anthony,
Well, actually the demand for these accessories is really very low, only a dozen or so per month, not nearly enough to support the business effort. Enliven was only able to sell a few dozen, and it never made any money, and that is a failed business. This was not the first to fail, it was the third attempt by others to provide garment accessories for ICES-PEMF products. All of them failed, basically for the same reasons: not really enough demand.

This is why:

When you want to make garments, you have a few options:

(1) Make them in the free world, where the cost includes a lot of factors, is way higher than consumers are willing to spend, and the resulting products get crushed in the market by low-cost competition.

(2) Hire services from a sweat-shop in Bangladesh, but then you need to order quantities of 10,000 per batch and you need to turn a blind-eye toward inhumane work conditions.

(3) learn to sew.

None of those really work for ICES-PEMF accessories because we do not sell them in huge volumes, but we also do not make garments, and when you do the math with the available options, offering accessory garments would essentially double the price of our PEMF systems, and no one would benefit from that. Added to that is the fact that ICES-Accessories need to fit all sizes and shapes of humans, in every anatomic location, so it involves a lot of different garments. And trying to force the issue by trying to be a low-sales-volume garment manufacturer would basically bankrupt me and I would end up having to live in a cardboard box with my children.

so the deal I offer is this:

I provide the one thing that evidently no one else on Earth is willing to provide: efficient, effective, reasonably-priced wearable ICES-PEMF systems plus excellent customer support.

To use our products, you simply need to find a way to hold them where you need them.
People on this forum discuss how they do that all the time.

3 Likes
#88

I can attest to that on all counts @Bob !

#89

Me, too. Me, too !!! :sunglasses:

Fun beside, its really that way and @Bob is still highly engaged in direct customer support here in the forum.

When I had, 30 y ago, my side business going on, developing a software product that I used by myself, I was also doing direct support via a newsgroup. Only by using my software myself and having direct contact to customers, I understood the problems of my customers and could develop / prioritize the product features according to real needs.

Bigger corporations do not have that direct coupling. Its totally abstract and the goals are directed, for example, by the bonuses of your bosses or weird strategies. I know that, too, because I worked for a very large corporation for over 10 years, too. Would never go back, makes you crazy if you want to be efficient and do real stuff that helps real people.

3 Likes
#90

@hcf is exactly correct.

#91

Yes, I work for a global engineering conglomerate, and I concur that the decision makers are largely decoupled from end users. In my experience that only changes temporarily, whenever sales drop off sharply…

#92

Dr. Dennis:
Just to follow up, beat a dead horse and clarify; I realize that the “primary” purpose of the hat prototype was focused on prevention/treatment/reversal of alopecia. However, given the obvious proximity and relationship of the hat to the brain, as well as the aging population and growing interest in mitigating various age-related neuro-degenerative conditions, such as parkinsons, dementia, etc., many forum users appear to have expressed an interest in experimenting with the hat additionally for various neuro pathologies, in addition to alopecia. So from a purely technical/engineering/empirical viewpoint, what is the difference in the PEMF/ICES energy delivered from the standard, traditional coils, vs the coils in the prototype cap? As a non-EE, but given that the same ICES generators are used for the different coil types, (C5, M1, etc), would it be a correct presumption that the basic protocols and waveforms would be identical, and that the difference lies in field depth and area? When treating alopecia, it would make sense to me that field area would be more important than field depth, because obviously, for the energy to reach the brain it would have to penetrate deeper through the scalp/cranium, whereas in treating alopecia, treating a wider area, albeit with a more shallow depth, would be preferred for alopecia uses.
If my conjecture is true, then would you postulate that there could be techniques/protocols/montages/placements which A)Standard coil users might use to maximize alopecia therapy, and vice-versa B)prototype cap users might use to maximize neuro-focused therapy? So for example, presuming that the “cap” delivers an inherently more shallow/wider depth of penetration than the regular coils, could/would increasing the “intensity” level, increase the depth of penetration level, to where the cap would deliver energy further into the cranium/brain, compared to the normal intensities which might be optimal or sufficient for alopecia use?
-Thanks for all you do.

#93

maybe…
we don’t know…
I just took an educated guess at how the coils should be configured based on three decades of focused experience with bio-magnetic effects.

We just took my educated guess, tried it, adjusted the design a few times, and it seems to work pretty well for most aspects of hair retention, thickening, growth, etc

The sample size for the first set of tests was small, only about 11 people total, so we can not draw any firm conclusions yet.

The design has not been optimized, and basically you can’t model or calculate your way to the configuration we are using, simply but categorically because no one on Earth really understands why this type of application of pulsed magnetic fields work at the biophysical level.

I really do not want to discuss design details or strategies because it is a new product that needs patent protection, etc. If I say much, someone somewhere will make a crappy copy and ruin the market for everyone.

So, the answer for this and all future questions like this unfortunately will be:

We don’t know.

The hat product will be released whenever it is ready, but probably in the EU before the US due to regulatory differences… probably somewhere between 6 and 36 months from now.

We are not ready to share technical details specifically to protect your rights to be able to eventually purchase a properly designed and tested one.

So… as always: when using ICES PEMF in an attempt to get any biological effect:
if you want to try to repeat these results using currently standard and available ICES-PEMF products and coils, then: start low and slow, it is done by trial and error:

Try, observe, adjust, repeat.

#94

@Bob, noticing some thinning so back to wearing the cap. Can you share the findings on how much time per day and which protocol (if M1 or P9)? Right now doing Alpha with Intensity 9 and just leaving the cap on for multiple hours.