Flux Health Forum

Long-Term Complex TBI - Best Device + Protocol?

I have a long-term complex TBI (15 years) and believe ICES could be beneficial for me as I look to heal.

I’m trying to decide which device to go for (my feeling is that perhaps a C5 could have the greatest impact on such a lasting injury) and also would like to learn more about which protocol or protocols could be most beneficial for me.

And also any general tips about PEMF and TBI that could be helpful - I’m also wondering, for example, if habituation to PEMF could be an issue if I begin too early without having addressed other potential impediments to healing first.

Thank you

In case you have not seen it yet, here is the publication we wrote on the positive effects of ICES-PEMF on long-term TBI:

Now, briefly, unless you are a scientist, there is about a 100% chance that you’ll misinterpret this (and most other) scientific papers. If you are a professional scientist, the chances are somewhat better, maybe only a 90% chance of totally drawing the wrong conclusion from any peer-reviewed scientific publication.

I’ll save you the long hours of confusion and frustration: Scientific papers generally never report the optimal protocol for anything, medications, supplements, medical devices, etc. I could give you hundreds of examples, but just as an example: look at any medications, supplements, or medical devices, and if you dig deep enough, you find that they basically just took a guess, tweaked it, and rammed it through an experiment with a large enough “N” value to get p<= 0.05. This basically summarizes essentially all of medical literature.

Finally: people have different types of injury, different life conditions, levels of health, and sensitivity to, well, just about everything. So, in reality, every medical intervention is always an experiment. That is why every physician everywhere always says when they write a prescription and hand it to you: “Let’s try this.”

So, let’s forgo any heated discussion about “you (or anyone) published exactly this protocol…” Published protocols are selected to maximize the chances for publication while minimizing the cost of the experiment. But they are not “optimal” for actually having the desired biological effect. The best you can get from looking at any scientific paper is to hope to find that something has some beneficial effect, and maybe a ball park estimate for what that might be.

So, with all of that said and agreed, if you take a look at the paper cited above, it gives pretty convincing evidence that:

(1) ICES-PEMF is very likely to help you recover from long-term TBI

and

(2) you can quantify and track your recovery from TBI using another technology: the Braingauge (full disclosure, invented by Mark Tommerdahl: and me)

Now, keep in mind that Mark and I have seen a lot of data that never made it into this (or any) publication, so we have a much better Idea what actually works best.

Basically, you could do this with a model M1 (no need to buy a C5 unless you really want to). Then place the coils across the head at:
(a) the point of impact or injury as one of the sides, if known
(b) trans-parietally
(c ) trans-temporally

Start with short sessions and low intensity and build up to at least several hours per day.
You should pick a brainwave pattern that you find comfortable: alpha-wave is a good place to start, but you could try theta, delta, beta 1, 2, or 3
NOTE: it is not the “frequency” of the pulse pattern that matters for tissue recovery from TBI, it is the shape of each magnetic pulse, which is exactly the same for all of the patterns on all of our ICES-PEMF devices. Massive amounts of data, trust me on this
(or plan to do a few decades of research)

Note the individual recovery times on the paper I reference above. You can expect the recovery process to take anywhere from 2 weeks to about 3 months or more.

Also, we know with very solid (but unpublished) observations that you need to keep applying ICES-PEMF for a long time, weeks or months, after your test scores have recovered to 100%, or you will slip back into TBI again.

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Thank you, really appreciate your help and all of the information you’ve provided, I feel like I have a much clearer overview of everything. I’m looking into a lot of treatment options at the moment but increasingly feel PEMF should be a priority - just M1 vs C5 to decide now, I think

Bob, I have an A9 (I believe it’s the 5pps) for probably over 5 years now and feel I’ve gotten significant results. I did wear it quite a lot, and well over the “insurance” time span you pointed out. It’s been a little while since I used it now, since I felt I got the gains I could out of it knowing what I knew at the time.

So I did not maximize output using the training protocol that you mentioned (above) that Mark suggests. Since I have some lingering problems with making decisions (writing this took more effort than it’s honestly supposed to) and being energized “enough” to take action, etc., and both those symptoms are highly variable (fifteen minutes from now I might spontaneously “start working” after thinking about it most of the day), do you think the situation demands an M1 (again, all my usage has been with an A9 5pps to this point) or do I simply need to engage with the suggested protocol with the device I have?

I do have access to the Brain Gauge now.

Will

Hi @Will, I don’t think you need an M1, the A9 should continue to work well, unless you want to try pulse patterns that you might find more helpful, such as those found on the M1 for brainwave entrainment (alpha and beta, for example) .

Also, it is unclear how permanent the effects of ICES-PEMF are with respect to TBI, but we definitely see indications of people gradually backsliding when they discontinue use. I just don’t have enough clinical long-term outcome data to say anything more specific than that.

those who backslide… i wonder if there are things they may be deficient in and or what their health situation, diet and supplements and age are like… if those have any influence in helping maintain results

These are all really good questions, and we definitely need more information. My personal opinion is that inflammation in the cranium can easily get locked-in to become chronic once it is turned ON, and it needs to be OFF for an extended time to reset. I am not positing anything new or mysterious, just re-thinking normal physiologic response to injury with modified time constants for percussion injuries to the head.

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Hi Bob,
I am uncertain if it makes sense for me to send my A-9 back for reprogramming, so that I can experiment with treating very long standing brain changes as a result of long term psych meds & ECT. Do you think applying the A-9 without the adjusted new program, or using my C-5 in the Omni settings (I prefer Omni 12-15) to the prefrontal cortex will provide similar outcomes? It sounds to me that consistency is the essential variable from what you have stated here.

Thank you!

I think the C5 maybe using alpha wave would work best by far. The key variables are sensible self-experiment and careful observation when trying different approaches, because different people respond differently. Persistence is far more important than consistency.

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