Bob doesn’t sell the 2X2 box stacked. I did what he told me to do and I wear the m1 when I’m out and I use the Sota every couple of days plus the C5 everyday. I think I’m good to go.
You are right. He sells the coils stacked.
@Bob, how do you know how much power you need? Do you feel the difference physically or is that just based on the anatomical depth of your target?
Thanks!
I base that assertion on whether or not it helps me manage my hip pain. When I am doing something right, the pain essentially fades away during the day. When I am doing something wrong, the pain steadily increases throughout the day.
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Ah, I see. Thanks @Bob.
I guess there are kind of three possibilities…
- If it feels better, keep doing it.
- If it feels worse, do less.
- If it doesn’t change, aim for more (perhaps, until one of the other 2 applies.)
A little tricky maybe when symptoms don’t vary together. I tried using the C5 (OMNI-8, level 10) last night on a swollen knee (5 hours, medial and front) and on one wrist (9 hours, tucked into a oven mitt) .
The wrist seemed better in the morning, not as painful and tender as in the past few days before.
The knee was still swollen, the sensitivity of the pain was perhaps a bit less in the morning, but I wasn’t sure if it might be feeling more swollen in the night, so I stopped, just in case. I do fret about making anything worse, since that happens not infrequently for me. I’ll keep experimenting…
I read something about knee pain and swelling, which I found interesting.
“In our study, functional recovery and pain reduction were observed in both groups and improved until six months. Nevertheless, within the first two months after TKA, results were more evident among I-ONE therapy patients, with statistically significant differences with respect to untreated patients. One of the most important findings of this study is that control patients who reported pain two months after TKA also complained of pain at the three year follow-up. Moreover, patients in the treated group experienced faster resolution of pain and joint swelling, and only one patient reported pain requiring the use of NSAIDs at the three year follow-up. These observations again confirm that the early resolution of local inflammatory response after TKA is essential to enable patients to follow an adequate rehabilitation program attain functional recovery and especially to achieve better the long-term results [4, 19, 23]. As no signs of instability or incorrect component positioning were observed in either group after TKA, and no patient was scheduled for a second surgery on the same knee, our observations confirm that medium- to long-term results do not strictly depend on biomechanical outcome only but that important functional limitations can derive from an excessive reaction of joint soft tissues, including tissue fibrosis, heterotopic ossification and synovial reaction. These complications can be prevented by I-ONE therapy, which facilitates inflammation resolution and favours joint soft tissues healing by inhibiting the release of PGE2 and proinflammatory cytokines IL-6 and IL-8 and by stimulating the release of IL-10.”
The concept of treating the knee with PEMF changes the pain 3 years later makes sense to me. When I read a study involving circulation, they said that the circulation improvement lasts for 3 years, even though they didn’t keep treating the people with PEMF after the 8 week study. (I think it was 8-weeks. The important part was that they only treated the people for a matter of weeks, but the circulation was still improved 3 years later (and I don’t know if they checked again to see if it was still improved 10 years later, meaning that the news might be better than that.)
(My friend is nearly crippled by knee pain and can’t have surgery unless she loses 100 pounds. She can’t use the ICES right now because she has chronic hives and Dr. Pawluk put causing hives to worsen as a potential adverse reaction. I also had offered her Serrapeptase, which decreased inflammation for me when I have tried it in the past, but that can make hives worse, too.)
That is my strategy: try things, see how well they work, and do more of what works well and less of what does not work well. Also, keep in mind, as you heal, your response may change, and you may find that you need to adjust (usually reduce) the intensity or coil placement.
It takes time and persistence. Pawluk, who has guided thousands of people using PEMF, assures me that sometimes things get a bit worse (more painful) before they get better. I occasionally experience this, so I think there is some truth to it. But I tend to be cautious and avoid things that seem to be making me worse.
One thing that was this way was when I used coils lined up along my spine, instead of across my spine at the point of greatest pain. Lining coils up along my spine, which seemed to be a clever thing to do, actually caused more problems. So I advise against that, for example.
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Sigh… I Get it.
My joints don’t necessarily respond to Good Things/Bad Things very quickly, which creates another level of uncertainty when using it on myself. For example, exercise can feel fabulous – for a day – but then overnight, everything goes wacky and it takes days to recover.
I’m “playing” now with my wrists and hands overnight (~9 hours), OMNI-8, at levels 8-10. I thought things were clearly improving a bit over a couple days…then…well, Not. So I’m trying just one wrist at a time to make sure I have at least one semi-functional hand each day;-).
Dr. Karen,
I am wondering if you might want to mix it up and try Schumann 4 if you have hit a plateau?
Just a thought.
I do find that somethings the process stalls and I will either take a few days off or change settings or change power level and it seems to start back up again.
Bob has often said that people seem to heal better at lower power levels (though there is individuality to that.)
Thank Deb.
I hadn’t thought to hit a plateau after just a couple of nights, but I can change it tonight and see what happens!
I was using level 6 for everything and never noticed any changes at all, so I’ve increased my setting after reading posts here.
I’ll go for a protocol change at the same setting and see what happens!
Some things take longer.
But I find that sometimes playing with different things causes a breakthrough.
I don’t know why. Maybe habituation? Maybe I hit a sweet spot? Maybe it just takes longer for some conditions to respond?
When I was doing pain-related things, my foot and ankle decreased in swelling after one session and never really went back to hurting again. I couldn’t walk up and down stairs normally for years and suddenly I could.
Contrast that to my back, that took longer and I was a little disappointed because I was already spoiled by the foot and ankle being healed in a night.
I can’t remember how long it actually took to have the back pain go away. I remember having that first thought of disappointment and the next thought I had was, “I wonder when my back pain went away?” I do know that now I can’t remember the last time I had back pain or shoulder pain or knee pain or foot and ankle pain.
I will give Whole Food Plant Based eating some props because that might be why the pain never came back. I am not sure. The pain did go away with the ICES, which I started using before I started doing Whole Food Plant Based, but I know that the Whole Food Plant Based diet is also excellent for pain relief and I just never got the pain back for any of the areas, but the back took some time to get relief in the first place.
Same thing with the brain. I solved for social anxiety and I just had an old friend visit and another old friend email me and people are coming out of the woodworks wanting to interact with me now and I had isolated myself in response to everyone blackballing me when my brain broke down and had stayed isolated for years.
People are wanting to do things with me. Some of you won’t ever understand what it is like when people don’t want to interact with you for extended periods of time because of things like brain problems. It is devastating. It was harder to deal with than the actual brain problems. I could handle the night terrors and hallucinations easier than the feeling like a social outcast with no support system. I know they were afraid that I would be needy and what I can say is that most nights, Dr. Greger having 500 videos tagged cancer was all the company and support I really needed, but it would have been nice to have had human beings some nights. I know that mental and cognitive illness scares people. So does things like Cancer and stroke and MS and maybe all of it scares people.
But people who are good socially tend to be the ones who get support and when the brain is broken in that spot, it is less fun.
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@DrKaren, @bettereveryday, I think you are generally on the right track at this point. Based on my observations for the last 8 years or so, talking to 5,500 + people, I think it is correct to say:
1- The waveform shape must be very nearly correct, so I control that tightly, but
2- I think it is important to change patterns/frequencies from time to time to minimize habituation, to keep the tissue response strong and not diminish over time.
3- Different people respond differently to different frequencies and patterns of pulses. These responses are somewhat random from person to person, but can have noticeable effects on how well people respond. So I find that people each respond to different patterns somewhat differently. I have not seen much of a greater pattern across all people, except that most people respond well to Onmi8, or Schumann4 for orthopedic injuries and pain.
4- Also, even for the same person, different types of tissues or injuries can respond differently to different pulse patterns. Some of my injuries respond better to Schuman4 or Alpha Wave than they do to Omni8.
5- For the same person and the same injury, the response can change slowly over time. I find in general that my most serious injuries require less intensity over a course of months or years than they initially did (kind of the opposite of opioids, which require higher doses over time to remain effective). Most people tell me this is also true for them if they have been using the device a long time.
6- In some cases, the pattern that works best for me also changes over time, usually from patterns that contain bursts of higher frequencies, toward patterns with more, variable, lower frequencies, such as Shumann4 or Alpha wave.
7- Sometimes the placement of coils needs to change over time too, to get the best results.
8- This all sounds hopelessly uncertain with way too many options, BUT, when I get people to experiment a bit, they almost always report to me that they only need to try 3 or 4 different things before they find one that really works well for them.
So, my advice: Start with the default settings, experiment a bit, and pretty soon you should find something that works for you.
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Yes, that I totally agree with.
And this:
“In some cases, the pattern that works best for me also changes over time, usually from patterns that contain bursts of higher frequencies, toward patterns with more, variable, lower frequencies, such as Shumann4 or Alpha wave.”
Each time I have used the devices, I started with more intensity and felt good using it and then almost felt saturated. Now, I am seriously doing better with Schumann 4 and Alpha and I never had a concept of Bob recommending Alpha. That is just the one where I had the breakthrough in social anxiety and it has worked so well for that and that has made it almost a magical setting, which Bob isn’t in favor of as a concept, but people who play sports have lucky socks for a reason.
I am a Christian and do not have lucky socks, but what I do know is that when people just plain KNOW something worked, even the placebo effect would be sweeter and better.
@bettereveryday – not a placebo effect, I’m sure. 
Social anxiety would be associated with high beta , if one were measuring predominance of brainwave elements. So alpha, which is associated with relaxing and “chilling” would be a good choice for anxiety, as far as entrainment goes.
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I am wondering about the extent to which peripheral stimulation with a brain entrainment pattern could also, indirectly, induce brain wave entrainment via peripheral-to-central or spinal-to-cortex excitatory channels.
Many people report to me that the use of alpha wave on their lower back or elsewhere has a “relaxing but alert” effect on them, characteristic of Alpha.
I do not know the extent to which this is relaxation due to the reduction of discomfort versus indirect brain entrainment.
My guess: a bit of both, synergistic effect.
My guess would be that they are experiencing vagal nerve stimulation, which would carry information and parasympathetic activation back up to the brain.
The effects would likely be similar to heartrate variability training, which also increases vagal stimulation and leads to increased calmness, better cognitive function, including attention and other executive functions.
The brain can entrain to vagal effects, as seen in measures of heart and brain entrainment in heartrate variability studies.
So I agree with you - reduced distress + possibility of vagal entrainment.
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Yeah, it is not placebo effect. That is my sense of humor.
I went for decades of shyness - to social isolation and social anxiety and now it has been over a month with zero social anxiety, even in dealing with things like going to a brand new dealer for service for my car and having it be a real testosterone zone.
That usually could be something which might throw me off.
It is not “relaxation” I can say that for sure because I ended up having the insomnia again after I stopped using the M-1 for a week or so and I got wired up and not at all relaxed, but still I don’t have social anxiety.
The alpha binaural beats video mentioned serotonin and it could be something like that, but it isn’t like I am needing to top a gas tank to stay where I am.
It is hard to explain it. If social anxiety were an unsecured sign flapping in every breeze. Somehow that single session with the alpha and alpha is like someone secured the sign to a post.
I don’t know if it will last, but I think about the broccoli sprouts study and that was where the mechanisms I was trying to accomplish were and in the particular study I was looking at, one youngster was healed of autism eating the broccoli sprouts in the study and didn’t go backwards again. The rest did go backwards when they stopped eating the broccoli sprouts.
I have been eating so many broccoli sprouts on top of trying to do this neuromodulation.
The broccoli sprouts weren’t working all that much on their own, but I ramped up on them and combined it with the ICES.
My mind is more like: Okay, was it the brain entrainment? Serotonin? The heat shock proteins? Is this related to the NRF2? Did I fix some mitochondria?
My internal list goes on and on, but either way it was the Alpha session which accomplished the breakthrough.
I had been doing gamma light blinking, gamma binaural beats and gamma wave, but that isn’t when the breakthrough happened.
It is very exciting to me. I feel normal as a social human being for the first time in years. I felt so defective. That was more painful than any of the other things and I was so out of my mind, but I was aware of the social rejection even though I was so unaware of how genuinely insane I was. I can’t even explain it.
I haven’t done the alpha or gamma ICES or Binaural Beats since that night.
I didn’t want to accidentally mess it up.
Not sure if I could, but I wasn’t willing to risk it.
It is unlikely any of the above.
regarding NRF2, very unlikely. That is far more closely related to sulfuraphane. ( a natutal anti-oxident found in cruciferous vegetable).
Yes, and I am saying it because every single day, I have been eating broccoli sprouts, broccoli slaw, cauliflower, kale, red cabbage, plus other vegetables, but I have been doing all the vegetables raw and I have been aiming for as much Sulforaphane as possible.
But I will say that I didn’t have the effect after eating dinner.
I had it after trying to do alpha ICES plus alpha Binaural Beats seeing if I could increase Serotonin. I was trying to break social anxiety off before a bridal shower I had to go to and was trying to improve my mood, and to improve my aberrant behaviors.
I did up the dose of cruciferous that night, but it was the session that I pinpoint a, “Wow, I don’t feel social anxiety” and I lost the “outcast” sense and the shame at having lost my mind and communicated ridiculously out of control, which I can still do when I am in my right mind, but I am trying to work on being more sensitive to what people are thinking without being destroyed by what they are thinking.
Bob,
If you or Mark understand more about brain entrainment, I would appreciate anything from a science perspective. The Binaural Beats community is a bit new age and sometimes creepy. Very few people over there are doing it from a science process and I am trying to learn. I know that you are traveling and doing your conference soon, so I am not asking for a real teaching, I guess more specifically, when you have time, have people used it for brain entrainment and how do they approach it?
I did look up a study, which wasn’t high quality, but they paired alpha with delta and had anxiety go away pre-surgery. Wondering why alpha and delta.
It made me realize that I don’t understand the logic.
I approached it so simplistically.
I do gamma for Alzheimer’s and alpha for anxiety, but I realize that I don’t really understand it.