Flux Health Forum

ICES questions

PEMF Basics
#17

I want to thank you that you have taken the time and expense even to buy other machines and to do those types of tests. I recommend your product all of the time and you are the reason why.

As far as simple versus technical answers, I appreciate both. Honestly, if I had thought to ask you first and received the response you just gave, I wouldn’t have bought that other device. I mostly bought that one based on Dr. Pawluk’s talking about it and based on 2 reviews. I bought yours based on listening to you talk in interviews. You had higher credibility than everyone else and not just because I believed the fake NASA story and the concept that you had invented PEMF. I started this whole process with such major brain problems and couldn’t follow anybody’s logic. I was so out of touch with reality even. I watched some of the conspiracy theorist Rife and Bob Beck and all sorts of things and felt even more uncertain of how to stabilize my sense of reality and become grounded mentally. Your just dealing with the science in a matter-of-fact way was easier for me to process than what everybody else was doing. I went to some sites and they were so New Agey and I had caution lights flashing in my brain from every bit of it. Others were so sales-pitch oriented and I felt like I couldn’t trust any of them and my family and medical model people weren’t even open to the technology, but then I would see people who got healed who seemed legitimate and I saw PubMed studies and had no idea of they would have been real or not real because of the talk of industry studies which I had been hearing about. You and your wife doing a mom and pop organization is what my family is and you remind me of my brothers. I still get fooled by things, but not to the degree that I was getting fooled at the beginning. Detailed answers, like those you have given, have allowed me to process the information better. I needed the shape matters more and the gauss/second is what matters more than gauss - because everybody else has been giving that gauss makes it penetrate farther in and my mind had a logic of wanting that. Your answer really helped me. I value that highly.

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#18

I analyzed it last night and I do buy into that low power is more effective. I needed a logic for deeper penetration.

I will probably be lending that other PEMF to a friend who is particularly heavy and particularly crippled by it.

I want to ask though, based solely on your opinion as someone who has tested so many PEMF’s and taken so many apart.

The one I bought is DC and has a burst, rather than a wave, if I am explaining it properly.

I am following that brain entrainment requires the right shape wave even more, but do you believe that there is a biological benefit from the type that I am speaking about or is it a scam? I know I am asking a question you might not want to answer or be able to answer. When I was looking at PEMF’s there were only a few in my price range and that one was one and I watched the “power” debates and chose your PEMF as the one which I trusted more, but that one was interesting to me because of the depth of penetration.

I am hearing your warning not to use it on my brain, but will it work for my friend’s back or is it just a waste of money?

I guess some of us needed to learn from experience, but I will try to be careful with my brain because I have had so much improvement and I continue to have improvement.

Can you speak frankly? I am not holding you to whatever. I just know that you have tested them and that you actually took the calculus, etc. Originally, I didn’t buy that one because it didn’t have a wave shape, but I was attracted to it because of one man’s video where he shared several testimonials, but it is hard to know what to believe on the internet. It feels like it worked for him and like Dr. Pawluk selling it was enough for me to be interested, but if I give it to my friend and it does nothing at all, they won’t try it ever again.

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#19

I would be happy to tell you what I know, but honestly, it is hard to know anything for sure about most PEMF products. They often change from batch-to-batch, and their manufacturing quality controls do not usually include the important parameters, such as the exact pulse shape, so their quality and consistency is highly variable and out-of-control.

I think the only way to really know if any specific PEMF devise actually works is to try it yourself and see. The PEMF industry has no established standards, so I would try to go with reputable manufacturers if you know of any. But even that is hard to nail down.

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#20

That is what I do understand.

I don’t have high confidence in most of the ones I could afford.

The ICES was the one I trusted.

Curatron and ones like Bemer at least have testing and seem to do something, but they were out of my price range already. The clinical ones also seem to do something but I am going by places like Truly Heal and chiropractors which have put videos online.

Some of them are $20,000 or more and my cousin went to a naturopath and used one for $1000 for 10 sessions and had no benefit. I feel like I have had so much benefit with the ICES that I hated that he wouldn’t try it because of him feeling like that experience was a waste of time. He is on dialysis now and ends up in the hospital every other week. It doesn’t look good for him. I don’t know that he will be around much longer and he is so miserable and in such pain. It is frustrating to me that once people feel “burned” by expensive trials with it they don’t want to get fooled again.

I feel genuinely blessed that I got so many real healings and have a device that I get to lend out. Though the benefit of the other device will be that I can lend that one out and still keep trying to heal my own brain.

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#21

This is an example which points directly to my main concern with the current state of PEMF:

The science is compelling: PEMF has clear benefits, yet mainstream science continues to marginalize it. This leaves PEMF open to a largely unscrutinized set of players.

The marketplace for PEMF is filled with low-integrity charlatans and profiteers who make many unsupported claims, linking their products to research that is fundamentally unrelated to their actual technology.

Profit margins are large, which attracts many bad people into the PEMF arena.

Many shiny new PEMF products are introduced on impressive web pages with glowing testimonials (which are easy to fabricate) and smiling retirees running on the beach or playing golf, followed by fraudulent, unsubstantiated claims for products based largely on pirated, obsolete, or ineffective technology.

People build up expectations for miraculous cures based on these fraudulent claims.

Then, suffering people eventually try these over-priced products or services, only to find that all too often they do not get the miraculous benefits claimed.

Quite understandably, they dismiss the potential of PEMF as just another scam.

This undermines the potential for PEMF to reduce the needless suffering of many millions of people. So, personally, I consider this low-integrity behavior in the PEMF marketplace to be nothing less than a crime against humanity.

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#22

I will tell you that I have had so many healings with the M-1. So many things. I haven’t even filled out all of the categories.

But my cousin felt so scammed by what he experienced at the naturopath that he wouldn’t even try it and both of my brothers had surgery and they wouldn’t try it and I know that when people feel scammed, they won’t even try it when it is lent to them.

I gave it to my cousin and he did not use it even once in 4 months. He spent $1000 for the professional sessions and got no benefit and really steeled his mind against it.

The frustrating part is that I can list things like circulation and inflammation and the blood not sticking together and all sorts of other things and they all understand the value of that.

If I called it a “circulation machine” or told them that it is a machine for lowering inflammation, they might be more open to it.

Honestly, I told them the truth about the things it helped me with and it got rid of my foot and ankle pain and knee pain and back and shoulder pain way too quickly and easily and it being as easy as it really was caused them to not believe me.

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#23

One of my brothers had kidney cancer and for me, it was a no-brainer. There is enough evidence of helping wound healing and pain after surgery and enough evidence with cancer itself to at least try it when someone is handing it to you for free.

Bob, I was thinking about your stroke and about a video I had watched for stroke and people have been outcomes just by increasing circulation increasing oxygen coming into the cells and lowering of inflammation.

I know that the plasticity itself is what amazed you, but your results were extraordinary and I was looking at the studies of things like circulation and your using your devices already would have set the stage for things like circulation and magnetizing the blood so it carries more oxygen, etc.

It is just a thought and I know that I am just reading PubMed studies and some of them are animal studies, but TMS is so highly effective in strokes and I spoke to someone who is using it in hand therapy because of plasticity increases.

I understand that it was the plasticity which blew you away.

Water fasting blew me away with cancer, but that doesn’t mean that the turkey tail mushrooms and modified citrus pectin and dietary changes and things like turmeric and enzymes weren’t doing something. My dog had already outlived expectation by many months. It is just that I still saw him having visible tumors still springing up and he still struggled with strength and still didn’t want to eat. Water fasting changed all of that and more in 2 weeks. The rest of it, including the M-1 kept him alive and not appearing to be in too much pain for months before I found water fasting.

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#24

When recovering from my stroke, the thought that was firmly in my mind was “why doesn’t anyone tell you the easiest, most accessible, most obvious, most effective, least expensive way to recover naturally from stroke?!?”

So, the litmus test for everything I wrote was “would this be one of those simple, helpful things that I tried that no one mentioned to me, that would be helpful to someone?” Even when I told my stories (and I told many in the book), the question I always asked was “does this make my point or put my concept into a clearer context?”

But I absolutely tried to avoid anything that remotely resembled a sales pitch. So I avoided talking about PEMF for obvious reasons. And frankly, I felt and could see the best recovery and growth from just doing simple, challenging and novel exercises all the time, starting as soon as possible. For the vast majority of people, I feel those exercises and the strategy I describe is the thing that is most accessible and most likely to be helpful.

I also avoided talking about anything where I felt I was not adding anything to the existing conversation.

So, I think you could combine what I wrote about, my activity-induced neuroplasticity strategy, with almost anything else you want to try.

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#25

Bob,

Yes, I totally understand that avoiding anything that remotely resembled a sales pitch was important. I highly respect you for that.

My perspective is that you were doing everything during a time period after a stroke, which is when there already is an environment for greater plasticity. That first month window, when the special cells, which operate like stem cells are there.

From my experience, most people are not even finding out about plasticity until after rehab has ended and that is outside of that window. When I was researching everything after my step-mother’s stroke, which was years after my own brain breakdown, they were talking about the majority of people not fully recovering and that most stroke patients feel disappointed with their recovery after 1 year and by then, they have taken rehab away from you, unless you can prove that it is benefiting you. One month after the stroke exactly is when my step-mother was released from the rehab she was in. My cousin and my carpenter’s father both had strokes and were never sent to rehab and never went through any physical therapy. They both just lost some function in their arms. Enough to make life more difficult, but not enough to have the doctors see them as needing physical therapy. The fact that I know more than one person that happened to tells me that it is probably common.

Anyway, I am just not as sure that people outside of those first month and first 3 months windows would benefit the same way you did from just doing the novel exercises. Though I suspect they would benefit some.

I benefitted from Luminosity for a while, but I benefitted much more from dietary changes and PEMF than from any novel exercises and I think looking at Flint Rehab and a rehab which helps people with spinal injuries, often it is the PEMF, TMS, acupuncture, LLLT or other thing like Vibration or Electric Foot massagers, which make a difference.

I am thinking about the novel exercises even now for myself 6 or 7 years later and I am looking for ways to incorporate them, but even reading the testimonial from today on this site. A woman uses the ICES for 15 minutes and she can talk normally for 3 hours. That is hard to figure out how to do a novel exercise to get back that type of function. Not saying that the novel exercises wouldn’t work.

Luminosity is one where I could see some change and then, it plateaus out and by then it is no longer a novel exercise and isn’t as useful and it becomes discouraging instead of encouraging.

PEMF hasn’t become discouraging to me. I went out with friends yesterday and I was telling them about the device and I started listing thing after thing after thing it has helped me with and maybe that is why I like it. I still haven’t hit a plateau where it stopped being useful.

Lowering inflammation and increasing circulation and helping with neuronal pathways never gets old and a woman today at Starbucks said, “I can see such a difference in you” and I talked about how I seem to have gotten rid of social anxiety and I am sleeping and my eyes are working better and I might have lowered inflammation enough that I just don’t have any real depression or anxiety. Those things add up to more confidence and less negativity.

Anyway, I don’t make money from your devices, so I don’t mind giving sales pitches. Not that it works, but as I change, maybe someday it will.

My high school friends said, “You look really good” and a few years ago, I couldn’t walk up and down just the two steps into a house without holding onto things and it took forever to do that and this time I saw them and I walked from the next street over to join them for lunch. That is progress.

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#26

Well, I just hit the 10-month point in my stroke recovery, and just in the past few weeks I feel that I have made some startling improvements. This arose (I think) from continual novelty in physical activity.

I am sure everyone responds in different ways, but the simplest possible, zero-cost approach has been working very well for me.

I reserve the use of ICES-PEMF for the many other physical issues I have that would otherwise inhibit the activities that are propelling my stroke recovery. In that sense, PEMF has been indispensable in my stroke recovery.

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#27

Congratulations! And that is quite exciting that you are still progressing!

Okay, I will give you that.

It might be that I couldn’t figure out what novel things to do for my brain problems and I did try some things, but got such mediocre results that it was discouraging.

I can use the social anxiety which came after my brain injury, that got worse every time I tried to socialize. Broccoli sprouts and PEMF bringing down the inflammation seems to have really helped. Maybe because there was no performance anxiety about it.

Same with my alternating exotropia and not having 3-D vision. I spent years and years trying things like staring at those posters, which are supposed to pop out at you and going to 3-D movies and I tried eye glass exercisers and video exercises and surgery and other things, then, I put PEMF near the eye without even thinking about anything and got the ability to see movies in 3-D and I have been going to 3-D movies since they came out. I might not have the creativity to figure it out without something like broccoli and the M-1 and a concept of a mechanism or something.

Trying things made things so much more discouraging. Now, I am not really trying and I am just seeing improvements in things and people now are mentioning it.

I haven’t tried the Brain Gauge this week to see if it finally shows up there, but I was getting discouraged that it wasn’t showing up, so I changed to once per week.

Having people mention it is encouraging no matter what my next Brain Gauge score is.

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#28

@Bob This new study may be of interest to you, if you haven’t already seen it.

Could Squeezing Your Arms and Legs Help Prevent Strokes?

Changes in cerebral autoregulation and blood biomarkers after remote ischemic preconditioning.

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#29

This is excellent, thanks, I had not seen it.

But I am certain this is absolutely true. I think my strokes had been caused by the fact that about 8 years ago I became much less active due to the onset of severe crippling chronic pain. I used to walk and bike everywhere, and I did a lot of physical work (I built a house, for example), but suddenly found myself sitting a lot and unable to move nearly as much. I think this brought on my strokes.

Fortunately, my second stroke cleared up my pelvic/leg CRPS, and my PEMF had reduced my back pain to virtually zero, so for the past 10 months I have been able to move a lot more. This includes working with my hands (and feet).

I really believe now that sedentary = stroke. I strongly believe that it is the reduction of normal movement and the reduced use of the hands and feet that leads to the swift decline, additional strokes, and untimely death many people go through after their first stroke.

I have combined this with the Nitrous Oxide Release exercises that Joe Mercola suggested to me last year, and I have put together a very simple, zero-equipment exercise series that takes about 2 minutes, which I do every half hour. A key part of the exercise is flexing/extending the hands and toes, which I think has the same effects you have pointed out on circulatory health: mechanical compression/release (arms/legs/hands/feet) causes release of endogenous agents related to vascular health and cerebral blood flow regulation.

I actually try to do this set of exercises every 20 minutes if I can. I no longer sit for long periods of time. It sounds like a lot, but it actually makes me feel remarkably better, and once I got the hang of getting up and moving vigorously every 20 minutes, now my body craves it! Honestly, I feel better than I had felt for decades, just getting up regularly and moving.

I plan to demonstrate this simple exercise strategy in a YouTube video as soon as I can.

thanks.

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#30

@Bob Please post the link to your video once you’ve done it. :wink:

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#31

Yes, I would be interested, too.

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#32

@Jayess, @bettereveryday, I certainly will. It may take me a couple of weeks tho…

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#33

@Bob, @bettereveryday

It seems that the cuffing approach has actually been used and developed over the past 50 years - as Kaatsu Training and Vascular Occlusion / Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) Training.

#34

Jayess,

Thanks for posting the links. I will read them later.

I was looking at something similar to what Bob was talking about, but not about stroke, about movement and neural stem cells / brain health.

It has been so rainy that I haven’t been walking. Looks like I need to renew my gym membership and not use the bad weather as an excuse.

#35

We walk every morning. Decided that a good raincoat was less expensive than a gym membership. :slightly_smiling_face:
Now I sort of like walking in the rain…

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#36

Now that you mention it, I do recall this type of work that was under active research when I was in graduate school about 30 years ago. Thanks, very interesting.