Dear fellow PEMF-ICES users,
I was wondering if you could describe your experience with different protocols?
I recently started using my M1 and have only used Omini8 so far.
I would love to hear which protocol is used for what.
Thank you
Camie
It’s very difficult to ascertain such differences for me. I use alpha for relaxation but I really can’t say I can feel any difference between it and omni 8 etc. I feel the inducted current is the real value and intensity certainly makes a difference, but the frequency protocol is of little importance other than low freq for relaxation/ brain entrainment maybe. Bob goes thru the protocols in a vid on his site. Omni 8 is based on gene development I think and may be good for tissue healing thereby.
I use Omni 8 and Schumann 4 for any pain type experiences.
I will agree with Prometheus that I also have used Alpha for relaxation and I combine it with an Alpha Binaural Beats video and that is powerful.
I use Delta and Theta for sleep and I also use those for various brain things, based on studies. Some of the parts of the brain in studies for certain conditions had too much Delta or not enough Theta or not enough Gamma.
Alzheimer’s is one with the not enough Gamma and I have used pulsing Gamma with blinking Gamma light to encourage the immune system in my brain to clean up my brain. (That process of brain clean-up usually happens when we sleep and I do not always sleep.) If you sleep, you probably don’t need it, but I am recovering from serious symptoms of Alzheimer’s so I see a logic in trying it.
I have also tried the 5 setting because that was used for traumatic brain injury and I had some falls over the years and Dr. Amen said that those head traumas can affect people for years if you don’t do things to heal them.
For the brain, I have also have used the TMS setting with anything to do with mental health like anxiety or depression. That is a lower power version of what they use and I don’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel.
At times, I use settings more because they are less stimulating, but for that, I just flipped through. I sometimes get saturated by it and I either switch to a lower power or less stimulating setting or take a few days off.
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I will add that a lot of my decisions about what to use come from reading PubMed articles or Dr. Pawluk’s pages.
That is how I choose which part of my brain to put it on or whether to do Vagal Nerve Stimulation or prefrontal cortex or try to reach the hippocampus.
Those studies also help me choose when to use deep coils. I did most of the things with the M-1 and got so many results with that, but for trying to reach some parts of the brain, I need to stack coils and I ended up buying a C-5 for that and because I wanted to treat my knees and hips and the C-5 treats more sites at the same time.
The M-1 could do everything else and most of my healings I got with that.
For things like hips and knees - try to go at least 3 hours. That is based on a study where people who used it 3 hours or more were much, much more likely to see healing than those who used it shorter.
Though go shorter if you treat your brain and your eyes. That is where the TMS setting helps because it shuts off in a half hour and that prevents what happened with me where I meant to treat my eyes for 10 minutes based on a study and woke up in the morning with it still on my eyes. It didn’t hurt my eyes, but when I first took them off, the room felt so ridiculously bright that I was afraid for a few minutes. Nothing bad happened from the error, but we are supposed to be careful with our brains and our eyes.
I say that and, yes, I have treated my brain so often that I don’t think you could call me careful, but you have to start off careful with those areas and see how your brain and eyes respond.
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did treating your eyes help your vision?
Thank you so much for all this information.
Do you happen to have the link to the video where Bob goes into detail about each protocol?
I’m going to start taking notes 
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Prometheus,
It helped my night vision dramatically. I could say, “It is like night and day” and that would be accurate.
Regular vision, not so much, but, honestly, I am on hiatus. I get over-saturated sometimes and take time off. I was mostly focusing on my brain trying to improve my executive function and it does seem to be helping with that, but I am taking a break.
It started to negatively affect my sleeping, where for the first few months, it helped me sleep. Then, it just interfered. This is the second time I have done that cycle of use it quite a bit, get healed of a few things and then need a break.
This past cycle, I got healed of social anxiety, improvement in executive function and it extremely improved my night blindness. My brain feels much improved, but I still have disorganized thinking and that can quickly become clutter around me.
I still end up driving around in circles, but I am getting more done now. It still takes me ten times longer than everybody else, but I am succeeding and that is such a relief.
I will work on vision again next cycle. I think partly why I didn’t keep going is that I was falling asleep with it on my eyes and didn’t feel comfortable with the concept of having it on my eyes for 7 hours.
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I had to take a break because I think I over did it. I had placed the machine on my head for close to 4 hours and then my liver for 4 hours and then I was a mess for about 5 days. I’m just now starting to feel better.
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hmmm… i just started placing on my liver yesterday, but only for 1hr… how do you mean you were a mess? I have noticed a lot of gurgling during the time i was on pemf… i suspect it helps w/detox as it optimizes cells of the liver.
When placed on the gut for 1 hour each day for 2 days in a row, it also caused my family member to be a mess for 5 days. Believe it caused accelerated die off of bad bacteria in the gut leading to a herxheimer reaction.
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I was just about to reply “Herxheimer Reaction”. Several very experienced PEMF-clinicians have told me to expect just such a thing, and many other people have reported the same to me: Gets worse at first, clears up, gets much better after a few days. Some well-respected clinicians advise just toughing it out, I prefer to proceed more cautiously and ease into it if I have this type of difficulty.
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this is great news that pemf would induce a herxheimer reaction… to know that pemf will help the liver detox/heal was what i was hoping for by placing the coils over that area.
i think most would benefit from applying coils over liver as we rarely ever think of healing or detoxing our liver until we are dealing with some ailment and need to do so.
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I do not mean to suggest that I know this for a fact. I was simply stating that it makes sense to me, and many other people seem to agree.
the reaction described is consistent with what I’ve observed of others and my own experience in how herxheimer reaction plays out.
you do not know how exciting i find this… the role of pemf. i told my wife the other day, pemf for health may be as essential as nutrition, exercise, rest, and detox/waste management… would you say this category of health would be labeled as
“Biomagnetism?”
I find the entire topic extremely interesting too. But the world of PEMF has way too many “experts” with fantastic claims and proofs that usually fall flat like a house of cards if subjected to any serious scrutiny. I feel pretty strongly that the responsible and intelligent thing to do is to reserve my energy and enthusiasm for doing strong engineering and science, and represent it much more cautiously. No one needs to hear any more fraudulent or excessive claims about PEMF.
Regarding biomagnetism and magnetobiology… honestly, I think the fundamental mechanism of PEMF is much more related to electricity (micro-currents) and not to magnetism per se. The link is induction resulting from the change in a magnetic field, dB/dt, which is directly proportional to the induced electrical field E. This is why magnetic pulse waveform is far more important that “frequency”, and it also makes a lot more sense in terms of biological transduction. Living tissue is well known to respond to small electrical fields and micro currents. The direct link to magnetism is less clear. I write about this extensively elsewhere.
This is not to say magnetism does not have any effects on biology, that is certainly not the case. I think direct magnetic field effects are fundamentally different in nature than the direct fundamental mechanisms of PEMF. I could of course be wrong, but that is my interpretation of what I have read and seen myself first-hand in the laboratory.
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@Bob, I was trying to find some literature that gave me a framework to articulate why certain EMF are dangerous (one example is Dr. Pall’s work) but PEMF like ICES can be helpful. Do you have any pointers or can you share your own thoughts/explanation?
I try to explain it here:
I also discuss different ranges on the electromagnetic spectrum, and how the different ranges relate to different biological effects, positive and negative, and I use an EMI meter to show that ICES-PEMF does not emit EMI in the range that is generally regarded as harmful.
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I"ve been listening to Dr. Pawluk. Based on his experience and knowledge about PEMF, he seems to believe that intensity and frequency are key to pemf effectiveness on human health. this seems in conflict w/bob’s observation and experience/knowledge that shape of wave is the biggest factor determining pemf effectiveness. How can we reconcile these views? Just by conjecture, it would seem intensity and wave form are likely the two factors that influence effectiveness considering the length of treatment based on anecdotes of others in forum/in practice.
thoughts - anyone/everyone?
thanks!
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Bill Pawluk and I discuss this frequently. In general, I defer to Dr. Pawluk’s clinical observations when it comes to PEMF and health. He has a lot more experience than I do, and a lot more than anyone else I know.
However, he does not have a lot of technical training as a physicist or engineer. So, while he makes an observation such as “more power = better clinical effects”, the technical details of his observation are, in my opinion, not quite accurate. He does, in fact, have some incorrect opinions on the basic technical details relating to the physics of PEMF. To people like me these are important details, but they do not really undermine my confidence in his clinical skill or observations.
Let me give you an example:
Let’s say he uses more power and observes better clinical effects. Therefore he makes the reasonable conclusion that “more power = better clinical effects”
However, if I measure the same PEMF system (as I have done) and determine that the changes made when increasing power also include changes to the waveform shape (which is what I have observed), then if I design a PEMF system to eliminate the effects of higher Gauss while retaining the fundamental change that resulted in the more beneficial waveform shape (this is the exercise I did when evolving ICES gen 2.0 to 6.0), and I do the science, the engineering, remove all the extraneous energy from the signal, isolate its components, and identify the ones that have biological effects and those that do not, now I am in a position to say:
“What matters is the magnetic slew rate and the duration of that slew rate, not peak magnetic field.”
RECONCILIATION:
Dr Pawluk correctly observes an improved effect when increasing magnetic field amplitude using typical commercial-grade PEMF systems.
Bob does a lot of calculus and many experiments and determines that the peak magnetic field intensity is a secondary consequence of the more important parameters as I have described above and elsewhere in great detail, and many experiments bear this out.
Therefore, we are both correct, but Dr. Pawluk does not understand the technical details of how the magnetic field intensity relates to the more fundamental magnetic waveform parameters as described above and elsewhere. That’s fine, that is not his job. As a clinician, he is more or less constrained to use the tools he has available, which, in the case of commercial PEMF systems, are typically highly inefficient and poorly characterized by their manufacturers. In general, PEMF systems do not allow fine control of the fundamental waveform parameters. The only knobs are “Intensity” and “Frequency”, so it is easy to make the mistake that these are the key parameters, and that the PEMF system controls them precisely and in isolation from all other parameters. But this is not the case.
The same argument is fundamentally the case for our apparent disagreement on the matter of '“frequency”, which, in my opinion, is not a critical parameter, but at a clinical level it will appear to be.
These are not disagreements. They are differences in technical perspective.
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That was so useful. Thank you for sharing.
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