I am referencing the book I wrote after I had my second stroke and was properly diagnosed, so based on my background and a lot of input from my close colleagues (notably Mark Tommerdahl) I was able to develop a lot of exercises and strategies to enhance activity-dependent neuroplasticity.
I was able to recover after my second stroke in many ways by more than 100%, for example, I am now ambidextrous. So I think my general strategy is sound, but this is information people need access to immediately (like hours) after a stroke. The only advice I ever got from the entire medical profession was: “Take your prescriptions, do some rehab, and oh, by the way, try a Mediterranean Diet.”
The exercises I describe are very simple and generally cost nothing and require no equipment, but no one gave me this type of advice during my stroke recovery, so I felt obligated to state the perfectly obvious and put it out in the form of a book. I packed as much information at the very front so people could get the key advice for free, immediately on-line, just by using the “look inside book” feature on amazon (unless they recently discovered this and blocked me). The book is called “Stroke of Luck”:
Note: there is a short version (Stroke of Luck NOW) intended for immediate use (about 180 pages), and a longer version, intended for a life-time of activity dependent neuroplasticity (about 680 pages long).
I wrote the book about 8-10 months into my recovery, so I was sure it was (and continues) to work.
I did not want anyone to have to pay for it, because this is the type of information that should be readily available for free… but it is not. So the prices posted by amazon are the minimum amounts required by them, which seems to fluctuate.
Joe Mercola interviewed me about this book:
I think it has helped at least a few people, at least I hope so.
That was a setting I included for a doc in Canada who was trying to use the devices for diagnostic purposes. This setting is exactly, precisely the same as Omni8 except that the first cycle is 2 minutes longer to allow time for his diagnostic approach.
Honestly, I only did this because he absolutely insisted. But in retrospect what I think he was doing was trying very hard to force some minor variation in my existing technology so that he could represent that this “new” technology was somehow his invention and he could charge maximum dollars for it. He even went so far as to claim that he “co-developed” this technology with me, just because he had demanded this exceedingly minor change of no real consequence. So, eventually, I decided to cut ties with him. But I retained this setting as a courtesy to his patients who may need it (or think they need it).
I no longer have any tolerance for people (and there are many of them) who try to scam people by making tiny or no contributions to a medical technology then try to squeeze outrageous amounts of money from people to allow access to their “special” technology.
In the world of PEMF, this scam takes a familiar form: “If you pay $$$, then I will give you access to the special healing frequency!”
That setting (matrix) works just fine, but it is nothing special, and no one should have to pay extra for it.
Thanks for the info Bob. I’m trying out the different protocols so was just wondering what it was!
I must admit I’ve seen many a reference to NASA when I was looking into PEMF first. Lots of people trying to associate their products with ur original tech. I am so relieved I found your page and your YouTube so I could learn more about the actual development of the technology and your work to bring it to the current ICES tech. I was desperate for anything to help and so many brands had nerve regeneration studies on their info. None of which had actually used the tech they were selling. I nearly spent a small fortune on a device until I found the ICES tech. It was only because Ben Greenfield had a link in one of his blogs to your device that I found it. Complete fluke!
Yes, so far as I can tell, all of the PEMF marketers use research done by others using very different technologies as marketing material for their pirated products, kind of sad really.
Ben Greenfield interviewed me once and did a small piece. But mainly people hear about us from word-of-mouth.
Yes. It is a MINI-USB (much stronger mechanically than a micro-USB). You can plug the M1 into a USB charging port plugged into the wall (but not a laptop or computer desktop USB output). All USB charging ports will meet the same 5.0 Volt standard. they should all work well for powering the M1. Note, when using USB power for the M1, the power switch operates in the opposite direction (UP = ON)
When using camcorder batteries, I suggest swapping for a new one every 2-3 hours on higher power settings, and every 3-4 hours for lower intensity settings.
There are many technical reasons a “battery level detector” would not work well for this device, so that is not a technical option. The best practice is to get in the habit of swapping batteries for fully-charged ones every 2-3 hours.
Hi Bob,
I think you may have answered some of these in your comments above, but I want to see if you’ve observed this with the customers or in the studies.
Is it better to use stronger PEMF intensity when the waves need to penetrate deeper or penetrate certain types of tissues, or the skull?
Any known factors that might influence how someone responses to the PEMF treatments? I’m reading through some studies, but it might save me some time if you already have a list of papers.
What I find useful (and many health e-commerce sites do) is to have a summary table with studies, along with the parameters such as conditions studied, sample size, treatment dosage/intensity/duration, outcomes, etc. Would these parameters be helpful for our customers? I know if the waveforms are different, we might be comparing apples and oranges here. It’s not like this is a guideline but it could help people start off closer to seeing the results than if they started with less info?
As for dosage suggestions, do you generally prefer that we recommend a mid-dose (e.g. 9), higher, or lower dose to start? Personally, I prefer to crank it up and really pay attention to the effects, but that hasn’t worked so far. Does the duration matter more than the intensity?
Why do you think OMNI 8 works better than B5-C5 program? I feel that whenever my pain resolved on B5-C5, it was when the frequency was higher. Is it because OMNI8 has a higher frequency throughout the program than B5-C5?
Hi Nattha. Just by way of introduction, I know Nattha and we have worked together in the past related to trying to find clear was to describe how to use and self-experiment with ICES-PEMF. Nattha is a pretty well-known self-hacker, and I recently asked her to open up a discussion with me on this forum. I have a lot of respect for her integrity, and she is good at cutting to the main questions and answers when it comes to self-hacking with ICES-PEMF (and a lot of other stuff). Basically the guidelines are simple:
Ask me a direct and honest question, and I will give you my best honest answer.
And with that I will begin to answer Nattha’s questions, one answer for each response to help widen the discussion into areas of specific focus.
1–Is it better to use stronger PEMF intensity when the waves need to penetrate deeper or penetrate certain types of tissues, or the skull?
ANSWER: Probably, but not for the simple reason that “more power is better”. The physics is a bit more nuanced I think.
First, I think the peak Gauss needs to be increased somewhat to maintain the mathematics of induction: dB/dt ~ E
Keeping in mind that all magnetic fields drop off very sharply with distance (which is why none of the “whole body PEMF” systems are really covering the whole body: this is just a provable fact), but the duration of each pulse stays the same (microseconds), then to make sure the slope (rate of change) of the magnetic field (dB/dt) stays in the therapeutic range, it is necessary to increase the peak magnetic field at the coils.
BUT, different tissues do not really block magnetic fields differently, so it is not necessary to increase intensity to penetrate the skull, for example, compared to muscle or skin.
ANSWER: I don’t think there have been any formal studies on this, but I have made a number of observations that I might be able to study and quantify in the future. The main thing that seems to influence whether or not PEMF is helpful seems to be the severity of the condition and the age of the recipient.
Briefly, the older a person is or the more severe the injury is, the more it appears that PEMF is beneficial. I have noted this many hundreds of times. I don’t think PEMF turns anybody into a superhuman, but I do think that PEMF does help people restore themselves to a normal state of youthful health. By this specifically I mean a state of health in which there is not a pathological immune or inflammatory response that interferes with healing. I do have some working hypotheses as to why this might be the case in biological systems, but it will take me awhile before I can formulate experiments to really try to elucidate what’s going on biologically at any kind of fundamental level. But my impression is simply that people who are older tend to have more pronounced inflammatory reactions than people who are younger, and people who have a severe chronic injury tend to have more inflammatory problems than people without severe chronic injuries, and all of the data that I have suggests that PEMF helps to reduce the severity of chronic pathologic inflammation. Therefore, it follows that the more severe your injury or the older you are beyond a certain age, say 30 or so, the more likely it is that you’re going to see major benefits from using PEMF.
ANSWER: This is of course exactly what everyone would like to know: exactly what settings do I use to treat or cure condition X? Stated differently: what are all possible combinations of all possible PEMF parameters and all of their effects on all possible disease conditions?
Well, I have spent many years trying to summarize this information, pouring in detail over a very large scientific literature on the subject of PEMF. I am currently writing a detailed review on more than 2,000 papers that touch on the subject of PEMF at various levels. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this entire field of the scientific literature is generally of very low quality, and most of the papers that have been published, and by that I mean about 95% of the papers that have been published in peer review, don’t actually tell you the precise parameters of the PEMF that were used in the study they are reporting. This is because most of the people who are studying the clinical effects of PEMF don’t really know anything about electromagnetism, so in their methods section they usually state something like “We used the WonderPEMF system”, and promptly neglect to mention the settings or any measurements or verifications or calibration that might have been done but probably was never done before the experiment. As a result, I would say it’s a pretty safe bet that about 90 to 95% of the PEMF literature, if you studied it very very closely and in detail, would end up telling you nothing much about how PEMF works or how to set PEMF parameters for any specific medical condition. PEMF marketers pretend there’s a whole lot of well-developed science to back up their products, but it turns out that is just fraudulent and baseless, and there’s no scientific basis for most of what people claim about specific PEMF parameters having specific biological effects. So unfortunately, right now, there really aren’t any good papers or other resources that I can point you towards to answer this kind of question. I think that if you were to collect all of the known facts about PEMF in every language from all time and summarize them concisely you still couldn’t get the answers that people really want. Sorry, but this seems to me to be the case.
I think the best source for information on this topic, and it still falls far short of what we all want to know, is the recent book by Bill Pawluk, available on amazon:
Power Tools for Health: How pulsed magnetic fields (PEMFs) help you. – November 29, 2017, by Msc William Pawluk MD (Author)
ANSWER: Excellent question, and this is yet another area where unfortunately, scientific papers provide very little useful insight. For biological systems, we need to think very carefully about what the dosage is, and unfortunately PEMF is not a well quantified or standardized technology, so defining a dosage would be difficult even if we fully understood the biological effects of PEMF. But there is another problem: we do not have a lot of good information on the underlying biological effects of PEMF, so it becomes difficult to develop either a theoretical or a practical guideline for PEMF dosage. Finally, there really is no such thing as a uniform or “whole-body” dosage of PEMF because of the physical nature of magnetic fields and the fact that they drop off very quickly over very small distances. A change in distance of only one centimeter can make a huge difference in the actual magnetic field generated at any point in space.
So I think the only thing to do is to develop an informed opinion on the matter of dosage on the basis of clinical observations and direct personal experience. But even in this we need to be careful because many clinicians use PEMF at very high power so that they can have correspondingly shorter treatment times. This way they can charge people for as many short PEMF treatments as possible in each business day in their clinic. This means there’s a strong financial bias in the clinical use of PEMF for overdosing on the intensity while underdosing the duration. A treatment time of 15 minutes allows them to charge for four treatments each hour, which is more profitable for a clinic, but is probably not the best way to apply PEMF in general.
When I talk to people who have used PEMF for a long time, either for themselves or in their clinic, and when brief treatments are not the way they make money, the answer I usually get, which is the same answer I see in my own personal experience and in my scientific experiments, is that lower intensity for longer time periods seems to result in better long-term biological outcomes.
Most people who have given this a fair try, comparing the outcomes of low-intensity long-duration against high-intensity short-duration PEMF seem to agree with me. In all fairness however there are still a few people who just disagree with me quite strongly and feel that the best way to apply PEMF is by using very high intensity, very short duration treatments, two or three times per week. But when I dig deeper, I always find that this is exactly the person’s business model for their clinic: a high-priced short duration treatment, running 3 or 4 patients through their PEMF facility every hour and charging $100 or $150 for each treatment. If you do this all day long, this is a good way to make a lot of money. However, if I exclude the opinions of people who have this very clear financial bias on this matter, I find that everyone that I know with one exception believes that longer-duration lower intensity PEMF treatments are better than very brief, high-intensity treatments.
Now of course you want to keep in mind that I sell Micro-Pulse ICES which is designed to be low intensity longer duration daily use PEMF. And therefore I also have a financial bias in favor of that approach. But I could just as easily have designed a much higher intensity PEMF system, but based on my research, clinical anecdotes, theoretical considerations, and personal experience, I think that low intensity, long-duration is the optimal way to use PEMF, and that’s why I designed ICES-PEMF the way that I designed it. Clearly I have a bias, but I’m trying to make my bias work toward the solution that actually works best.
Finally, you have to consider the fact that different people respond differently to PEMF. Really, the only way to know is to experiment for yourself. I find that some of the injuries that I have do require high intensity, but some of the injuries that I have responded very well to low-intensity long-duration use of ICES-PEMF. I think that individual variation in the response to PEMF is widely overlooked by PEMF marketers who would like to sell you a very expensive, one-size-fits-all PEMF system. But in the end, I really do think it does come down to taking the trouble to do a bit of self-experiment and making the observations of how you are responding to determine for yourself: what works best for you?
ANSWER: The Omni 8 pulse pattern was the one that was selected as “most effective” in about 15 people that I had who were helping me with a beta-test for my new designs several years ago. But the differences were very small. Most people responded pretty well to most of the different patterns I was trying at that time. Nonetheless, most people felt at the time that the Omni 8 pulse pattern was about 10 or 15% more effective than any of the other patterns that we were testing at that time.
However, keep in mind that I am continually trying to improve the technology. A few years later I developed the B5 - C5 pattern, and added that to the new B5, C5, and M1 ICES gen 6.0 systems. That pattern has more of a mix of high and low frequency components in the range of 5 to 100 pulses per second, and the variety of patterns is a little bit greater than it is for the Omni 8.
But when people try different patterns and compare them and then report back to me, slightly more people prefer the Omni 8 pattern to the B5-C5, because they say it helps them heal a bit more quickly. I have not had a chance to run any kind of formal controlled study to see the difference, but if I take into account all the comments that people have sent to me, plus my own personal experience, I sometimes do feel that the Omni 8 pattern works better than the newer B5 - C5. But then again, there are several people who do insist that the B5 - C5 pattern works better for them than the Omni 8. So once again, I would defer to each individual trying for themselves to see what works best for them personally. I can’t see what would work best for each individual person. The best I can do is to provide the most versatile PEMF tool that I can make and let people find out for themselves what works best for them.
Bob (and others), so far as you know, any research or experience that shows PEMF improves members or helps with enhancing learning/cognitive ability. Im rather forgetful and if I can reverse that, it would be nice.
The cognitive benefits of PEMF, if any, remain inadequately studied. We have very little, almost no anecdotal data on this topic as it relates to ICES-PEMF technology. But earlier this morning I was discussing with a neurophysiologist the possibility that PEMF might be beneficial for many types of cognitive decline. The theory that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the result of chronic cortical inflammation is gaining traction among some neurologists, for example. For this reason, PEMF might be an area that should be explored for the treatment of cognitive decline.
The term “inflammation” is pretty broad and non-specific, so we are probably talking about a lot of different things here, but, generally speaking, “inflammation” is gaining more and more attention as the probable root cause of many afflictions that are not easily treated by mainstream medicine, including many chronic (non-infectious) diseases, chronic pain, and many diseases of aging. Age-related cognitive decline is among these conditions, and there seems to be a steadily increasing attention given to the effects of chronic inflammation on cognitive function.
All of this being said, this is still an area that needs to be researched much more than it is. However, mainstream researchers rarely consider the use of PEMF, so it is unlikely that a significant amount of meaningful research will be able to be done in this area any time soon.
So, while it is possible that PEMF may help with cognitive function, it is difficult to study, there is very limited information in the mainstream scientific research (unlike orthopedic injury and pain, where the benefits of PEMF are pretty clear at this point), and even outside of the mainstream, this area has not really been investigated in a thorough way.
I don’t want you to get angry. I just wanted to show this and this was what I had been thinking of. But it is just something for you to see. It obviously doesn’t mean anything.
Please be very very very careful when dealing with this group. I know exactly what is going on behind the scenes, and all of the worst things I have ever told you about the PEMF marketing practices… many are understated versions of exactly what is going on here. If I told you 1% of what I know about this group…
I have had a few people die from it and my cousin is dealing with infections in his lungs now plus gangrene. I don’t mean to cause problems. I just saw that in the news.