@Bob, I have had nerve pain for 20+ years now, due to overgrown fibroids (tumours) growing on my uterus. I was on the wait list for over two years before they shut down the hospital where I was waiting for surgery, and then I had to move to another city where they scheduled the surgery for me on the third day. The gynecologist told me the uterus had grown so big it got wedged in my spine and took them four hours to remove it, but unfortunately, it compressed and caused irreversible damage resulting in peripheral neuropathy.
I suffered debilitating pain 24/7 that has been alleviated with exercise, stretching and heat therapy, so for the last several years, it’s been tolerable and I thought I was on the mend.
Unfortunately, the last couple weeks the pain has gotten worse in my extremities so that I have trouble picking up eating utensils or typing on a keyboard without tingling pain.
I tried the M1 coils, side by side bumpy sides out on my spine where I think the bulging uterus did the damage, omini 8, intensity 5 about 10-16 hours a day, but I still don’t see any effect.
I know my body tends to react much more slowly to any form of treatment, but it’s been about a month now, and the pain has not lessened. So I’m wondering if I just need to give it more time or the intensity is too low and I should try higher? Or place the coils stacked?
I also just yesterday found out about someone else, an 80-yo acquaintance of a friend suffering excruciating pain. Several years ago, he recovered from a bad case of shingles that left him with peripheral neuropathy. The pain located on his inner left thigh radiates from crotch all the way to his knee. He says he has had this for 7 years now and has tried everything to alleviate it, to no avail — painkillers, acupuncture, massage, etc. It plagues him 24/7.
I suggested for him to try the M1. But where would he place it and at what intensity and protocol, and finally for how many hours? He doesn’t even care if there is a cure, as long as he can find something to lessen the pain.
I am very sorry to hear that you are dealing with that. I think you have tried ICES-PEMF long and diligently enough to justify a change of tactic. If it were me, the next thing I would try is:
1- Stack the coils bumpy-side to bumpy-side and tape them together
2- Maybe try switching to the Alpha Wave pulse protocol, but from time to time also consider going back to Omni-8 for a day or two
3- Definitely increase the intensity to 9 or 10
4- Continue daily use for as many hours per day as you have been if possible.
Try moving the stacked coils up your spine from the supposed point of injury, about 1 cm or 1/2 inch up the spine every 2 days or so until you start to get an effect, then remember that spot.
You may find the higher intensity setting is somewhat irritating (too high makes me feel a bit twitchy and almost itchy). If so, dial it down one notch and continue.
I think that strategy will give you a very good chance to get a satisfactory result. Let me know how it goes and we can adjust the strategy as necessary.
For your friend’s friend, ouch, that sounds extremely uncomfortable. But I think ICES-PEMF will help.
I think given his level of discomfort he will be highly motivated to try this diligently, which is what I think will be necessary, because it is really making him suffer.
I would start with default settings on the M1: Omni-8 at intensity 9. I would stack coils and tape them together bumpy-side to bumpy-side. He should plan on using it for at least 8 hours per day, so given its anatomic location, I am thinking that maybe during sleep would be convenient, but whatever works for him. Longer use per day is better of course, but I would shoot for at least 8 hours/day.
Here is where the work starts: coil placement will likely require quite a bit of experimentation. My thinking is that the irritation radiates outward (relative to the neuro-anatomy), so, since his description is that it “radiates outward from the crotch”, I would start by placing the coil stack over the problem area closest to the crotch. He should try different coil locations, changing every two days or so. But when he hits the right location, there is a good chance that he will get significant relief pretty quickly. From there he can zero in on the best locations for the coils (there may be more than one), but that is how I would start: from the most centrally-located anatomic position that is causing the discomfort and work outward changing positions every day or two.
If the PEMF irritates him (compared to the shingles this should be very minor), but if it is a problem, he can adjust the intensity down a notch and keep going at it until he hits on the best location for the coils.
Other strategies for coil location might be that he could try the location where his shingles initially broke out (it may actually have been somewhere else than where his problems seem to be now), or also he could try putting the coils on the location where the shingles were the worst, or also try the location where they were the longest lasting, or the last place to clear up.
It will likely take a bit of work, but I am confident that this will help him a lot if he keeps at it diligently. And either way, I think it would be very helpful for me and many people on this forum to hear how it went for him, whether or not it worked, and any additional observations or successful strategies he has to share.
Thank you again, @Bob for this valuable information. I will advise him to get the M1 and I’ll instruct him how to use it accordingly. To have to bear with pain in such a sensitive and awkward area for seven years, wow! At least the M1 will now offer him relief even if it does take eight or more hours a day to get results. He doesn’t speak English but I will keep tabs on his progress and then post to let everyone know how it turns out for him.
Pain can be very draining and debilitating, but in one way, it may have been a good thing for me, because it led me to ICES-PEMF, you and this forum! And if I can help others in the process of treating my own pain, then while I don’t welcome the pain, but at least others can hopefully benefit. Definitely, I will post what works for me.
One question I have, I know you mentioned in other posts there is a risk of habituation, but I also remembered you saying that it wasn’t as likely with Omni-8? Is there a reason for changing protocols and then switching back to Omni-8? Is this something that should be done with other treatments in general, as I also use the M1 for arthritis and peripheral neuropathy in the knees.
That is a very interesting topic… habituation.
Many people enter into the PEMF world with the belief that they need to find a single, secret frequency, something that is resonant with a type of cell or a disease particle or an energy field, or something like that. In my experience that is not really true, because there is a lot of scientific evidence that PEMF can be very effective when applied at a range of different frequencies, so long as the waveform is correct. But there is actually a potential problem with mentally fixating on a specific frequency, and it is that the body may initially respond to that frequency, but over time the body may habituate, and progressively become less sensitive to that one frequency. In general, biological systems tend to do that: if a stimulus is monotonic and contains no information, such as a single continuous frequency, the body eventually tends to tune it out as if it were just background noise, and reduce the sensitivity to that signal eventually to zero.
I was aware of this general physiological phenomenon when I started working on PEMF back in the 1990’s. So, from a very early point I began to incorporate variations in frequency content in all of the ICES-PEMF pulse protocols. Over time, I gradually began to experiment with pulse patterns that had physiological and developmental importance, especially for mammalian neuro-motor development in utero.
As a result, many of the pulse patterns that are programmed into the A9, M1, or C5 are based on pulse patterns you would see in a developing fetus during neuro-motor development. I studied this a lot, especially when I was at my lab at MIT with colleagues at Harvard and BC.
The interesting thing about using these pulse patterns with variable pulse frequency and with developmental relevance is that they tend to completely avoid any problems related to habituation, while also triggering some unknown but deeply conserved developmental mechanism that signals a state of cellular growth and development rather than a state of inflammation and decay.
So, by avoiding the habituation problem with the pulse patterns I have programmed into the ICES-PEMF pulse protocols, we also seem to get the benefit of this deeper developmental signal that promotes tissue regeneration. This is one of the main reasons that I very firmly reject the marketing fraudulent claims about special secret frequencies, because if you subscribe to that nonsense, then you lose a lot of the potential benefits of PEMF that you would get by using sensible variable frequency patterns.
Now, to answer your question: Changing pulse patterns occasionally would certainly help eliminate habituation, though that is rarely a problem with the pulse patterns we use now. Beyond that, I think changing pulse patterns every few months is probably a good Idea in some cases because I think different people with different types of injuries seem to respond slightly better to some pulse patterns rather than others. The reasons for this remain largely unknown, but may be related to some type of cellular signaling information that seems to be encoded with different physiologically-relevant pulse patterns. And sometimes it seems that people benefit from an occasional change in patterns, maybe because their cells respond better to more than one of these physiologically-relevant signal patterns, and by alternating between them you can benefit from each in a different way.
Or it may simply be that your tissues generally contain many different types of cells, and different pulse patterns could have different benefits for the different types of cells. For example, an injured muscle probably has injured nerve, vascular, connective, and muscle cells, each of which may have different sensitivities.
The fundamental reasons remain unknown, but sometimes this is an observable effect. For example, it helps me a small but noticeable amount when I change pulse patterns on my lower back every 2 or 3 months.
Ahh, thank you for the explanation! Even before I learned about PEMF, I had thought about habituation, at least for myself. Prior to using the M1 and other PEMF devices, I relied on herbs and massage to help get through some of the worst periods of my pain, but it didn’t matter what I tried, they would work for varying amounts of time, and then as time went on, they became less and less effective. So I suspect that habituation doesn’t just occur with different pulse patterns but with many other things as well.
Take food intolerances, after my surgery, I suddenly developed a rice intolerance that would aggravate my pain to the extreme. Ironic because as an Asian, I grew up with rice as a daily staple, but it wasn’t until a couple of years of being intolerant, I found out there’s this phenomenon occurring all over the world: in Asia, a growing number of Asians are developing an intolerance to rice and in the western world, a significant number of Westerners are developing an intolerance to wheat products.
I call this a “rich man’s disease” because 60 Minutes did a documentary about malnourished children in African countries being fed peanut-based “Plumpy Nut;” interestingly, there has never being an incident of any peanut allergy among these children, maybe because their bodies needed the nutrients so badly.
But back to my own story: not being able to eat rice, I turned to eating more breads, which I loved, and surprise, surprise, in the past couple of years, I found myself developing an intolerance to breads and the reverse, I have become more tolerant to rice!
Having lived with neuropathic pain for so long has helped me to develop a high tolerance to pain and I will push past it to test myself about once a week or two on foods that I’ve been intolerant just to see how far I can go with it. I suspect these food intolerances are very much a reaction just like habituation — too much of the same foods and I start to react negatively to it with inflammation and pain.
So now, I vary my diet, and every now and then, do a cleansing fast. So far, it seems to be working as my intolerance to certain foods have been much reduced.
I think this is a good insight, and I have similar experiences. Generally I think occasional variation is a good thing.
Please look into trying LOW Dose Naltrexone. Research it thoroughly, it can be a lifesaver for Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (a nasty neurological pain condition) and many other conditions. This might be the answer for you. Start with very lose dose, .5 mg, work up to 4mg over a few months. This helps avoid side effects like insomnia.
Thank you for the suggestion but I don’t generally take western prescriptions with so many potential side effects.
I wouldn’t rule out it out universally because it’s “western”. It’s a novel treatment and it saved my wife’s life when nothing else worked.
So I did as you suggested, @Bob and at first I wasn’t sure if the pain had lessened, as it had been so intense. But into a week with stacked coils Alpha Wave at intensity 10 positioned on my back slightly above where the uterus would have been has been a game changer for me. While the pain is still there, it’s significantly reduced so that I’m able to use my fingers once more.
You don’t realize until you no longer have the use of your fingers how limiting it can be and how many adjustments you have to make to daily habits like brushing your teeth, slicing vegetables or trying to pull up a pair of pants, let alone using buttons, zippers or shoelaces!
All I can say is thank you very much @Bob. You’ve given me my life back!
As for the man with the radiating pain, I told him what the M1 could do for him, and then did not hear from him again. I guess the pain was not getting his attention as much as his wallet! Me, I’ve invested over $10,000 in devices and therapies with far less effect than this tiny little gadget and the way I see it, what quality of life would you have with your money in your pocket, but not much else with unending pain?
I am extremely happy to know that it has helped you so much. I am very glad that I was able to help. I think just the fact that you are willing to relate this story on this forum will also help a lot of people.
I do know exactly what you mean about the fact that it is impossible for most people to grasp the huge loss of basic daily abilities when you lose the function of your fingers, or a hand or a foot or your spine.
It’s a funny thing about human psychology, as you point out. I guess that so many people have been ripped off so badly by snake oil salesmen that their willingness to risk another few hundred dollars on another device is pretty much worn out. I guess the best we can do is to relate our honest stories to people who need to hear the truth.
It’s sad really, because the nonprofit organization where I volunteer was the one who referred me when they couldn’t do anything for him. They saw what the M1 could do for my pain and for two people I referred to, one for PD and the other MSA.
Average life expectancy for MSA patients is reportedly 6-10 years. My friend’s husband has had it for almost 10 years now, but while he isn’t recovered, he showed some signs of improvement: he can now walk to a limited extent when before he was in a wheelchair, no more constipation, and he’s no longer hallucinating, all common symptoms of MSA. We are cautiously hopeful he will continue to make small but significant progress, just have to be patient.
With the PD, after I gifted my friend with M1, his symptoms all stopped when he was doing it once a day for about an hour, though they would return if he did not do them for a day. When I asked him to do more hours, he said he couldn’t go around with the coils on his head while working with clients (he’s a realtor) and he had trouble sleeping with the coils on his head at night. But he’s more than satisfied with the results. Pretty amazed, actually, as he experienced results within three days of using the M1.
That is really astonishing, thanks.
I had a nagging case of sciatica from my left hip to left foot for a month. Tried a number of things that provided modest but not lasting relief including acupuncture and 45-degree inversion. When I received the A9 kit I went right for the 2x2 assembly and placed it just above my tailbone with the rings on both sides of two or three of my lower vertebrae. I had it on a good part of the day for a week and slept with it every night. Voila, that did it for me. I was pretty stunned actually and it’s been well over a month with no pain. I’d be doing more of it prophylactically but I loaned it out to someone who needs it more than I do. I’ll report back if it works for his healing.
Outstanding! That is very helpful, thanks.