Hello all,
This is my first message on this great community. For a bit of backgroud: I’m a male aged 47, I live in Europe, and a couple botched operations on the ball of my foot 30+ years ago left with zero padding under the bones of my forefoot as well as massive amounts of scar tissue, making every step painful. 12 years ago or so, I found out about Bob’s research and purchased a A9 unit (at the time the only model available) with the idea of improving both the state of the tissue and the pain.
I was particularly impressed / inspired by Bob’s research and the case of the “impossible” broken bone regrowth. I am science-minded and have personally experienced enough things that MDs told me should / could not happen to understand there are many modalities of healing that are not yet understood or even studied by the mainstream.
In the end, I didn’t use the unit much as other modalities appeared that helped me improve my quality of life.
Fast forward to May 2024, when I injured my foot for utterly stupid reasons (walking too far on hard terrain in inappropriate shoes, which I should not have done). I don’t know exactly what happened (bursitis? bruised bone?), but the pain was so high suspected I may even have a fracture - though x-ray didn’t confirm this. However, for the past two months the ball of my foot has been incredibly sensitive and inflammatory. I therefore deceided to apply the A9 to the problem, with a regime of 7-8h continuous every night (I tried stacked coils under the ball of the foot at the big toe, as well as coils on opposite sides - ball of foot and top of the big toe).
Whatever the setup, I have noticed the inflammation felt notably HIGHER upon waking up in the morning. When I discontinued the regime for a day or too, the inflammation would go down.
This puzzles me, and I am hoping to collect insights frop the forum members’ collective wisdom. Is this a phenomenon akin to what’s seen in detox regimes, in a “gets worse before it gets better” kind of way? If so, should I continue, and when can I expect this effect to subside? I would welcome any feedback or anecdotes that could shed a light on what’s happening here, and what protocol I should adopt. Thank you!
You are correct to point out that initial reactions can be unusual and unintended. When that happens, I use lower intensity for shorter periods, and gradually adjust up or down as necessary as my injury equilibrates.
If I’ve learned anything from this forum and from life in general, is that ICES, just like every other healing modality, works differently for different people. There’s no healing modality on this planet that works for 100% of people 100% of the time. When seeing lots of people having great results with a certain modality, it’s easy to fall into a trap of thinking that “if it’s not working for me, i must be doing something wrong”, or “it must be detox”. Where in reality, that modality may simply be not the thing for you, in that particular application.
Personally, I’ve learned that if I’m not having good results with something, then it’s just not for me and I move on to something else.
In my personal experience “detox” has a very particular arc. For me, it comes on quickly and starts subsiding and getting less and less intense very quickly. It’s always much less intense than any real non-detox symptoms. If it persists, and especially if it gets more intense as the days pass, it’s a sure sign that it’s not a “healing reaction”.
I think that is a very good way to look at PEMF, and other health products as well. We all need to try to use them in a way that works best for us as individuals. With ICES-PEMF, I try to make it as a generally useful tool, that works well for as many people as possible. It does not do all things for all people, but some people develop a lot of skill using ICES-PEMF as a tool that works very well for many different applications, and sometimes they can give us all advice on how they use it with the benefit of their extensive experience, that may also work well for other people too.