It is never too late to chase after a dream or make a difference in other people’s lives. Dr. Carolyn McMakin, DC is a testament to that. After deciding to pursue her lifelong goal at the age of 40, Dr. McMakin enrolled in pre-med courses and the University of Western States Chiropractic College. Upon graduation, Dr. McMakin opened her own practice and by 1996 began treating patients with a list of frequencies first documented in the 1920s. 

This work led her to present her results at the American Back Society National Meeting and subsequently publish the first 50 cases of neck pain treatment in 1998. To say her work has been monumental and influential in the medical world is an understatement. 

Dr. McMakin is the leading expert on frequency specific microcurrent (FSM). In fact, she discovered a specific treatment that could eradicate a patient’s pain caused by fibromyalgia as a result of spinal trauma. Not only did she discover a reproducible treatment, but one that could help a patient feel relief within just an hour. 

On this episode of Back Talk Doc, host Dr. Sanjiv Lakhia talks with Dr. McMakin about FSM and her work introducing it to physicians, chiropractors, physical therapists, and practitioners all over the world.  

💡 Featured Expert 💡

Name: Carolyn McMakin, DC

What she does: Dr. Carolyn McMakin is the leading expert in FSM. She is a published author, teacher, and practicing chiropractor. 

Company: The FSM Clinic and Training Center

Words of wisdom: “Do what you love and love what you do and everything else you need will follow. That’s it: Follow your passion.” 

Connect: Website |  LinkedIn 

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👉 If you enjoyed this episode of Back Talk Doc, check out our recent episode Neuropathy and Its Many Facets with Dr. Ki Jung.

🔎 For more information on Dr. Sanjiv Lakhia and the podcast visit BackTalkDoc.com. 

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Back Talk Doc is brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Associates, with offices in North and South Carolina. To learn more about Dr. Lakhia and treatment options for back and spine issues, go to backtalkdoc.com. To schedule an appointment with Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Associates, you can call us at 1-800-344-6716 or visit our website at CNSA.com.

Welcome. You're listening to Back Talk Doc, where you'll find answers to some of the most common questions about back pain and spine health brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates where providing personalized, highly skilled, and compassionate spine care has been our specialty for over 75 years. And now, it's time to understand the cause of back pain and learn about options to get you back on track. Here's your Back Talk Doc, Dr. Sanjiv Lakhia.

About 10 years ago, I was at the local basketball gym, not remembering to act my age and I thought it'd be great to jump into a game with some high schoolers. And I went up to block a shot and I came down on someone's ankle and embarrassingly, I was wheel chaired out of the lifetime fitness in Mason, Ohio with my wife and kids laughing at me. I did rush to see my integrated physician at the Dr. Steve Amoils at the Alliance Integrative Center in Cincinnati.

In addition to the acupuncture, he pulled out this little box and put these electrodes on me and programmed it. And then he sent me home with it. And that was the beginning of my curiosity with regards to frequency-specific microcurrent. And it certainly helped accelerate the healing of my torn lateral ligament in my ankle. And at that point, I made a mental note that I wanted to really dive into it at some point in my career.

Fast forward now to 2020. And I've talked about on my podcast, my own struggles with my low back. And I ran into my friend, Marty Kestin, a licensed massage therapist in Charlotte. And in addition to doing his typical massage, he introduced me to a combination of FSM and Phant. And that really also got the ball rolling in my mind.

And today, I want to dedicate this episode to Marty for sparking my interest and my friend Marty did recently pass away unexpectedly and he remains in my heart and Marty, this one's for you. So guys, I'm delighted today on such a short notice to bring to you an interview with the queen of frequency-specific microcurrent, Dr. Carol McMakin. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I'd love hearing stories like that.

Yeah. And it's just... When you're a physician and you have a busy life and you're seeing a busy clinic. Sometimes, we don't create enough space to explore our own curiosities. And one of the cool things about running this podcast is, it has allowed me to dive into things that some people wouldn't necessarily consider standard, but it's being done to great effectiveness, and certainly being talked about.

So I'm just tickled pink to have really the national or if not international expert on the topic. So the goal for today is to really explore FSM, introduce it to people who've never heard about it before, and just get your general thoughts on the relevant points that you want to share. Before we do that, let me introduce you to the listeners.

Carolyn McMakin decided to pursue her lifelong dream at the age of 40, when she started pre-med and enrolled in Western States Chiropractic College. Go girl, that's awesome. After beginning her practice, she taught a course at Portland State University on the diagnosis and treatment of fibromyalgia and myofascial pain, and began seeing a much more complex pain patient population.

In 1996, she began treating these patients using frequencies, resurrected from a list created in the 1920s and after teaching these frequencies and treatment protocols to determine if they're reproducible, she presented her results at the American Back Society National Meeting and published the first of 50 cases of neck pain treatment in August of 1998.

Subsequently she discovered that there was a specific treatment protocol that would eliminate the full body pain of fibromyalgia associated with spine trauma in about one hour. And these results were reproducible and she's continued to present cases and teach seminars all over the world since then, teaching physicians, chiropractors, physical therapists, and practitioners the technique of frequency-specific microcurrent.

She's an author and authored frequency-specific microcurrent and pain management, and then published in 2017 her second book, The Resonance Effect. And by accounts she's extremely accomplished and her attention and time is sought after. And I'm very happy to have you today. So again, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. This is fun. FSM is my favorite thing to talk about.

Absolutely. Your bio is great. And I want to ask before I get into the topic of it, just a couple questions so people can get to know you a little better. Number one, can you share a little bit about what was the change in your life around the age of 40, where you decided you want to get into the medical profession? Because there has to be something that compelled you to do that at that point in your life. And then number two, what has it been like to be teaching this on a regular basis and what do you hope to accomplish long term with it?

Well, the first question is the book, The Resonance Effect is the full story, but I was 39 and we were moving from San Diego, my husband and I, and my three-year-old and seven-year-old were moving to Portland and he was going to go to chiropractic college. And on a Saturday, I had lunch with my friend and told her what we were about to do. And she put her glass down and looked at me across the table and said, "That's really stupid." And I said, "Excuse me."

She said, "You've just wants a job. You've wanted to be a doctor since you were seven. You've wanted to be a doctor for as long as I've known you, you should go to chiropractic college too." And I said, "Well, that would be fine, but I have a three-year-old and a seven-year-old, how would I do that?" And she said, "I don't know how you're going to do it, but it's stupid if you don't." It's like, "Okay." And this is true. I was reading my girlfriend's brother's medical books when I was seven years old sitting in her living room.

And then I was a pharmaceutical salesman for 16 years from the age of probably 23 to 38. So then on Sunday, when my husband was at work, I took the children and I went to church and the minister was giving a sermon on vocations. Now, you have to know that throughout my 20s, I've tried to do pre-med courses. So I could somehow get back into medicine and it just at 28, I finally gave up, just closed the door. It's done. It's just not going to happen in this lifetime. So you go to church and the sermon is on vocations. Then the minister said, "If there is a what in your life that you are called to do. And you're clear about that. You do the what and you let God worry about how is not your job?"

At that moment, it's like this door that I'd closed on myself, went flying open and it was like, the sun came out and I went home and I told Ben it's like, "Guess what? I'm going to go to chiropractic college too." And he said, "How?" I said, "I don't know how is not my job." And it says, "If from that day to this, everything I needed just showed up. It didn't always look like what I thought it was going to look like, but it showed up."

So my junior year, my mom got pancreatic cancer. I took three months off of school, took care of her until she passed. And just for a lot of reasons, Ben and I got divorced and I met George Douglas in July. I knew him from chiropractic college. He was supervising the rehab of my shoulder from a skiing accident. George and I got to be friends eventually after I got divorced, we became partners.

And he had worked with an osteopath from England who bought a practice in 1946 that came with the machine that was built in 1922. And that machine came with a list of frequencies. So there were 8,000 physicians in the US using frequency medicine between about 1908 and 1925. And it was widely used. Well, the Flexner Report came out, drug companies and the FDA were formed and frequency medicine, resonance medicine, homeopathy, herbs, nutrition, basically were all outlawed.

And drugs and surgery and radiation were the only tools that were allowed for medical physicians and anybody that used any of these alternative things. By 1925, they began prosecuting him. And by 1935, the people that did all the research were dying out. The devices were either in the back room, covered with a sheet. Grandfather's library and all the research about how these people developed the frequencies that went away.

And in the rare book room we found, so George came home with a list and stuck it in a drawer. In 1995, when I started chiropractic college, he was moving his office and found the list. So I started with a list of frequencies literally, and there's a list for conditions like removing inflammation, or increasing secretions, or taking out scar tissue. And there's frequencies for tissues like the fascia, nerves, the spinal cord.

So I started with the list and we had a two-channel microcurrent device. And George had worked with Harry van Gelder in 1983 for a period of time. So George knew how this osteopath used the frequencies on the old machine. And we started treating myofascial pain in '97. We actually had 150 cases that I presented at the American Back Society. I published 50 head, neck, and face pain. And then later on published 25 low back cases, 25 nerve pain cases so that was '96, '97 was mostly muscle pain in '98.

We figured out how to treat neuropathic pain in '99. I stumbled across a frequency combination that would take away the full body pain associated with fibromyalgia. So if you have pain from your neck to your feet and you're hypersensitive everywhere, what's the only tissue that connects everything. Well, it has to be the spinal cord of a frequency for that. What's wrong with that spinal cord? Well, it's inflamed.

So on one patient, she just leaned up against me. I put a contact around her neck, because you have to get at the exiting nerve roots in the neck and contact under her feet. And in about five minutes, she started to relax. Her blink rates slowed down and in 60 minutes she was pain free. And then I did it again and then I did it again. And over 1999 I did, we had 27 cases and I happened to get invited because once I started publishing papers in my myofascial pain, one of the physiatrist at NIH had been treated with FSM was in charge of selecting speakers for grounds in building 10 NIH.

And he invited me to speak. And I think it was February or March. And so I presented the 27 cases. They come in with their pain was an average of a 7.4. They left with their pain at an average of a 1.3. If they stuck with treatment for about two to three months being treated twice a week, we kept their pain down below a four, their central sensitization adrenal function digestion, all reverted to normal.

And the fibromyalgia was gone in three months. So I presented these cases at NIH and I said to 45 doctors in front of me, white coats are protectors. And I said, "I've done this 27 times. It's completely reproducible. Here's here's the pain diagram. Here's the physical exam findings that have to be present for this to be the cause of fibromyalgia." And nobody's going to believe me unless we have something objective that somebody could measure. So Terry Phillips was new at NIH and he's a microimmuno cast.

And he said, "You send me a spot blood on bladder paper, and I can tell you what's changing." So he sent me the bladder paper. I called a patient that had not been, I treated her the year before and couldn't help her two years before and couldn't help her. So I called her up and I said, "Would you mind if I did this little finger stick and tried this new thing on you?" And she said, "No, sure."

So we did that. And that was had been May. And as I was headed out to give this lecture in energy medicine and clinical practice at the Institute for Functional Medicine, International Symposium, as I was headed out to go to the airport, the fax machine came across and there were all these values that changed. Now this was 2000. It was before Google. There was no medical library at the hotel in Phoenix where I was headed.

So there's all these cytokines that changed by factors of 10 and 20 times. Substance P, CGRP. All of these factors just change at logarithmic rates. So my lecture was scheduled for the next afternoon and Jeff Bland, who's the biochemist PhD who started the Institute for Functional Medicine was coming out of the hotel. And I handed him the list. I said, "Jeff, look what I just got." And he looked down at it and his hands started shaking. And I went, hmm. He said, "You'd have to run a long way to get those changes in endorphins because the endorphins went from eight to 88 in 60 minutes and that's universal."

The patients get so stoned after 30 minutes that they can't talk. I said, "Yeah, but are these changes easy? Can you do them with aspirin?" He said, "Call Michael Ruff. He and Candace Pert work on cytokines. And he's still in the office. So here's his office number, give him a call." So I called Michael Ruff and I said, "Dr. Ruff, this is Dr. McMakin. And I've got these numbers and Dr. Bland said to call you, I need to know if these changes in cytokines are significant." And he said, "Okay, what are the numbers?" And I said, "Well, Interleukin-1 goes from 256 down to 21." And he got really quiet.

And he said, "What timeframe?" And I said, "60, 90 minutes." And he said, "That's impossible. Cytokines are hard to change. And when they change, they change slowly over months." And I was like a puppy. It's like, "No, they don't, they'll change like that." "What do you mean? Well, Interleukin 1, 6, 8, 10 alpha, interferon-gamma, CGRP. They all change." Substance P changes and substance P is only produced in the spinal cord. I mean, it's produced peripherally, but it's produced in the spinal cord.

So we knew that the tissue and that was from David Perlmutter that since substance P changed by literally a factor of 10 times, we knew we were addressing the spinal cord. So I presented that data the next day. And it took us five years and five different journals to get that paper published. Because at first we called it resolution of fibromyalgia and nobody wanted to hear that 58% of these patients recovered. Fibromyalgia is curable.

So I started teaching in '97 to find out if it was reproducible. I kept teaching because it would be, and well not to when you could get people out of pain, like this nerve pain, peripheral neuropathies, wound healing, your new injuries. Then I treated Terrell Owens when he fractured his leg in 2005, and that got me into sports medicine and new entry treatment.

So it took me five years and about 30,000 patient visits before I believed that the frequencies always do what they are described as doing. And they only do that. So if it doesn't work, it's because you're thinking about it the wrong way. Over the last 10 years, we've found out that it's almost never the muscle. We think it's the muscle because that's what you can feel. But especially in the cervical spine, the upper cervical muscles are tight because...

And in order to get them to relax, you have to treat the upper cervical facets. You have to treat the alar ligament for being a little bit lax and uneven to get the suboccipital muscles to relax. Then you treat the upper cervical facets and the lower cervical muscles are almost always tight and sore because of a disc bulge. So the standard protocol now, we do nothing for the muscle hardly ever, unless it's scarred to a nerve or the kidney or the ureter.

And it's been 25 years. And in the last five years have treated things that are simply impossible. It's not impossible once you do it, there's a protocol that the only thing it's good for is thalamic pain after a thalamic stroke and phantom limb pain. Same frequency because it's when you cut a nerve, as when you amputate a leg, it's the thalamus starts humming to itself. It's not getting input from the nerve, from the amputated leg. So it doesn't do any good to treat the leg. That's the problem. The problem is that the thalamus has no input.

So our protocol for phantom limb pain is to quiet the activity of the thalamus. Same thing with the thalamic stroke. First thalamic stroke patient I treated was in 1999, 2000 someplace like that. And I told him it wasn't going to work. And then it worked in 30 minutes, he was out of pain so that's why I keep teaching.

Wow. And if that hasn't peaked your interest listening now, I don't know what will, let me back up the truck a little bit. Okay. Because I live, I'm a physiatrist and I practice at one of the country's largest neurosurgical groups. So I live in a physical world, right? We stick needles through things. We do surgeries with precision. So for someone who heard what you just said, an obvious question is going to be, and you may be so far advanced now. I'm going to challenge and see if you can explain this, but what on earth do we mean by cellular resonance or frequencies of tissues? Explain that to people.

That's a really good question because I started with a list. The thing that I had to get over, I'm a scientist. That's my training. I was pharmaceutical rep. My degree is in physiologic, psychology. So there's that. And I love physics. Premed physics was so much fun. When you look at how a cell operates and you read Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life by Gerry Pollack, you find out that the outside of the cell is not lipid layer.

They lied when they told you that in biology. It's covered with receptors and those receptors have little... I'm putting my fingers up like little antenna. And those antenna are built to receive things like circulating cytokines or inflammatory peptides, pathogen associated, molecular patterns. So little pieces of bacteria and damage associated molecular patterns.

They land on that receptor. That receptor is connected to kinases inside the cell that are connected to the DNA, that are connected to the RNA, that are detected to the microRNA. And that determines what the cell secretes. So it's the frequencies that we use are all too low. They're below a thousand Hertz. So it's not possible for frequencies that low to change biological tissue. It is apparent.

And the only thing that makes sense of all of the data that we have. Clinical data and the cytokine data took us really 12 years to come up with a hypothesis that makes sense. The frequencies appear to interact with these cell membrane receptors. The way that your key fob interacts with your car door. So if you take two or four ibuprofen, those ibuprofen, aren't just magic. They land on this receptor like a can lock. They change the receptor.

And when they change, the receptor like a can lock. It changes what the cell does and reduces the cell's output of inflammation. That's how Advil works. That's chemistry, physics. So you can open your car door with a key, but these days you can open your car door with a key fob that is tuned exactly and only to your car. You've got 12 gray Subarus all in a row and you own one of them, you hit your key fob and it's only your car that blinks its lights and unlocks the doors. It does that with a specific frequency, the frequencies appear to work.

And the only thing that explains the cytokine data for all of us and I mean physicists and biophysicists, and physicians, and physiologists, and neurologists all over the world that had been working on this since we got the data in 2000. The only thing that makes sense is that we're changing cell signaling with a frequency, it's biophysics, the hard part, the part I have trouble with. And I just have to let it go is, how somebody in 1922, how they knew that 396 Hertz was the frequency that will resonate with the nerve, but 562 Hertz is the frequency for the sympathetic.

So this week I had a patient that had disc bulges from T4, middle of his thoracic spine to T8. He had loss of sensation at those nerve root levels. And he had a feeling of anxiety that just really bothered him. He graduated from the Naval Academy. He was in active duty for two years and he's four years out of the military and he has all this pain and all this anxiety. So I got the nerve pain down, but he still had anxiety.

So I treated 396 the nerve. Well, the next day when I saw him, I treated 506 reduced the activity of 40 on channel A and 562 Hertz on channel B for the sympathetic nervous system. He fell asleep on the table and when he woke up, the anxiety was gone and it stayed gone for two days. So it's applied biophysics. It's not magic. It just looks like magic. And if you have ever used a key fob to open your car door, instead of a key you've used applied biophysics, right?

Yeah.

The only problem is how... And there's no answer for it because all of that research was lost by 1940, 1950. It just, it's gone. So how did somebody in... So when they treated your ankle, they treated 100 Hertz for the ligament, 191 Hertz for the round tendons and 77 Hertz for the connective tissue. How does somebody in 1922 decide or find out that those frequencies would apply to those tissues? No?

May never know.

No. So you just have to block them.

Just have to go with it.

And I tell my students that what we're involved in is clinical research because to this day I do things that I have not done before. You take somebody with spastic diplegia. So I work at Cleveland Clinic-

Yep.

... use did the... I teach seminars on the weekend and then stay and work in the clinic for two days when we had a 22-year-old that had cerebral palsy since birth and it was just waist down. So it was just one part of the brain that was associated. Well, you're a physiatrist. You understand that descending inhibition, there's signals that come down from the brain through the spinal cord that send descending inhibition that make spasticity go away. First time I'd ever done it.

I wonder if we increase secretions in the spinal cord, what will happen? Well, in 60 minutes he was no longer spastic. We had to teach him to walk again. That's a good face and I've done it so many times. Now, it's part of what you feel for when somebody has a cervical disc and you are planning on doing a C-spine fusion. They need that. But if it's a central disc, it affects descending inhibition because it inflames the motor pathways.

Sure. Some of her motor neuron lesion. Yep.

So you run increased secretes. So you feel they're pectineus, the brevis, and the quadriceps. So the upper leg muscles, and they're going to have increased tone. You run increased secretions in the spinal cord. That tone goes to normal.

The reason I think this is such an important conversation is because someone may say, "Sanjiv if you work in a surgical group, why are you talking about some of these different treatments?" And you've touched on some conditions that we have no answers for. So for example, so I diagnose in my clinic on a monthly basis, probably five cases of cervical myelopathy, where someone comes in, they've got cord compression and we get them seen, they have amazingly successful surgery.

And then the question then becomes, am I going to get better? And our standard talking point is basically the surgery is going to prevent you from getting worse. Time will tell if you get better. And I literally have nothing else I can do to accelerate that process. I've looked into things like peptides and I've tried those for some people. I do a lot of acupuncture in the clinic and it does give them some temporary reprieve, but you're touching on some patient groups that there's no home for.

And the world of pain management in particular in the United States has many, many challenges. So I think it behooves us to explore with vigor reports like this. And certainly this is beyond anecdotal. I mean, you have data now supporting it and you're giving my listeners the scientific rationale for it. And for anyone who's interested, we're going to link to your website. And you've got a whole list of references on your website, research articles.

We're going to link to your books for people. And certainly you're training course for clinicians who are interested in doing that. Yeah. Folks, when she mentioned that the spastic diplegic patient was able to stand up and move my eyes popped out of the head because it's just not something you would envision, unfortunately, from a traditional paradigm and lens. So I appreciate you sharing that.

That's actually part of why FSM has survived. And that's because I followed the rules as a pharmaceutical rep. I know what the rules were. My challenge is I've trained clinicians who won't publish, but part of the other reason that we've survived is FSM treats conditions for which there are no good solutions. There is the ataxia and the loss of descending inhibition that happens in those myelopathy patients. It's piece of cake. It's easy, it's in a course seminar and this spastic diplegia patient, I expected it to last 24 hours. It lasts two weeks.

Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. That's a good face.

Yeah.

I don't understand that.

Almost better than a baclofen pump.

Well, and they couldn't use enough Botox.

Okay.

And the baclofen pumps have complications.

Yeah.

And then the same thing with full body pain with thalamic pain. By the time you give somebody enough gabapentin or Lyrica to deal with thalamic pain. There're so Rummy-

Yeah.

... the function. So my goal in starting the clinic and training center in Troutdale in Oregon, I'm 76 on Friday. And I just opened a clinic again, is to get some of this published. FSM will pay people when they submit or have accepted for publication a paper on any condition, a single or collected case report. We will pay them $2,000 for publishing that paper. It is acknowledged, recognized, put on the website. We have to publish.

And before you can even submit to an IRB, an Investigational Review Board to do a control trial, you have to have at least a case report or collective case report already in the literature before you can do a proper control trial and nerve pain is easy. Thalamic pain is easy. Phantom limb pain is easy. PTSD, eight sessions in seven weeks. We haven't had any failures yet. I mean, it's-

Wow. Well, let me ask you about more common back pain.

Okay.

Okay. The title of my podcast. So in the world of spine care, some certain structural issues are very challenging. So facet mediated pain, the standard of care now is radiofrequency neurotomy, which in my observation has had some good results in other cases, not so much, but the one condition that I think we struggle with a lot is discogenic pain, annular tears, posterior disc herniations, that aren't surgical, but they cause that episodic knife-like pain in your back when you're bending over and disables people for a week or two and they just cycle through it. They're not good fusion candidates. They don't respond well to injections.

So two questions in, I'm assuming you have protocols that you can share your experience on number one. And number two, do you ever observe post treatment MRI changes? Let's say a disc is protruded slightly on a nerve root and the patient or client goes through a treatment protocol or course of SFM treatments. Do you observe changes on a structural level that can be verified?

I wouldn't go back to the facet rhizotomy.

Okay.

Because back when I was in my first busy clinical practice, I ordered more facet blocks for my favorite PM&R doc than anybody in the state, because facets were difficult to treat. And that was back in the day when they wouldn't just do the medial branch, they actually, they were iso-strain and they would actually go into the facet drop a steroids and lidocane. The challenge with rhizotomies is they don't last. And when the nerves come back, they arborize.

So in two to three years, the literature says, "Yeah, it comes back. And when it comes back, it's difficult." Discogenic pain and neuropathic pain, so those two. There are protocols for discs and we give patients exercises because one of the things that you have to do is get the muscles that are inhibited the multifidene and the rotatory is basically, the close into the spine muscles that are around the disc.

You have to get them to exercise green circulation to the area. So the only pre and post MRI that I have is on me. So I had a disc bulge at L5-S1 in my low back from bad, bad, bad body mechanics while I was working on the shoulder and I had L5 neuropathy and so nerve pain down my leg, and I had an MRI and there was this dark, thin three millimeter bulge, no extrusion. So there was dark and thin. And so we treated it. I did exercises, the nerve pain went away. I didn't do anything stupid again.

And then about four years later, I had an SI joint injury, but we did a lumbosacral MRI to make sure it wasn't the disc again. And there was that same L5-S1 disc that was dark and thin was now white and fat and fluffy and not bulging. And that was four years later. And you would've expected it to be worse.

And that's interesting. It's not unheard of, for disc protrusions to resorbed, and you do an MRI down the road and it's gone, but would be unprecedented, would be for a degenerative desiccated disc. For example, car tire, that's lost its tread to regain its tread or to regain its disc height, there is no fix a flat for our lumbar disc, unfortunately. So I mean, that at least certainly is another eyebrow razor.

And it's an end of one-

Yeah.

... and me, so it's automatically suspect. So would that be the case? If we did an end of 10, the challenge is doing pre and post MRIs and that's it's money in this.

Yeah. There's a lot of hurdles for doing that. Okay. Walk someone listening through what a session looks like for someone who's never seen a device or been treated before?

Oh, that's a good question. You ask good questions. In my world, it starts with a physic history and a physical exam. So FSM patients take, you have to treat the right thing with the right thing. So you do a history. When did this start? What other injuries have you had? What are your symptoms? What makes them better? What makes them worse? So there's the history. Then you do a physical exam that always includes range of motion, sensation, reflexes, and certain orthopedic tests, just like you would do.

Right.

Then microcurrent is the same kind of current that your body produces on its own. So in three different studies in animal to in vivo and in vitro. So in tissue and in live cultures, just the current by itself increases ATP production by 500% by five times, that's a good face. So just the current. Okay.

But the current is physiologic in those same studies, it showed that any current level above 500 micro amps would level off ATP. And if you went up to one milliamp above a thousand microamps ATP actually dropped off well, TENS units are milliamp. So you can't feel the current. I used to use these graphite conducting gloves. Don't do that anymore.

So patients have to put up with warm, wet towel, which is very conductive, especially if you're going to treat the spinal cord or a nerve and you hook the device to the warm towel. And if, for example, you're treating the spinal cord or the thalamus, you hook a contact around the neck, contact around the feet and you put the negative leads down at the feet.

The positive leads at the neck. If you're treating a lumbar disc, you put one contact behind the low back and they lay down on it and you put the other contact on the abdomen because you're treating the disc. If you're treating nerve pain at the same time, you have to go from where the nerve starts to where the nerve ends.

So what the setup looks like will depend on what exactly you're treating. If you're treating the vagus nerve, you go from around the nerve to down to the abdomen. And the vagus nerve is a whole nother conversation. But anyway, so then the practitioner takes your physical exam and your chief complaint. So if you come in with headaches and neck pain, we treat from the neck to the chest and you put your hands on the patient's neck and you treat to take care of the upper facets and the lower discs that makes the muscles relax.

And the headache goes away and the neck pain goes away. And if they have nerve pain at the same time, you have to wrap around their neck and you put a wrapper in their hand and you have a second machine that just treats' inflammation in the nerve. And the nerve pain goes away. And that most sessions, most physical therapists have 60 minute sessions. Mine are 60 minutes.

I used to do three patients an hour and I would keep three rooms full with one assistant. So what it looks like depends on whether you're seeing probably a third of our practitioners or MDs or DO. There's nature path, physical therapists, acupuncturist, massage therapists, psychiatrists, neurologists, internists, Owen veterinarians, because it works on horses too. So there's a great story in the resonance effect about working on an injured Irish hunter. That just makes me smile every time I read that part.

All right. I have two more questions. I want to be respectful of your time and energy. I know you had a... You're catching this at the end of a long day. I mentioned in the beginning that my friend Marty reintroduced me to FSM, but it was within the context in the Charlotte area. He had been working with a physician Dr. Flick in Georgia.

Oh yeah. Yes.

So that was where his training was. So Marty had, would rent out these devices that were combo. He called him combo pump FSM devices.

Right.

I never got to talk with him though about his general thoughts about what's the difference. Like he said, you could run the frequencies through the electromagnetic disc and obtain similar effect. So I don't know what is for someone who's a novice, what's the difference with pump and FSM?

So Bart Flick was one of Robert Becker's interns residence. Becker wrote the body electric in the 80s. So he was the reason that we had this study that was done at Mercy St. John's Burn Center in Springfield, Missouri in 2003. And finally, I guess it was five or six years ago, Dr. Flick and I met at a meeting and I gave him a mini course in FSM over the weekend. He bought, took home with him to what we call custom cares, little programmable devices.

Yes. I think that's what I was sent home with from my ankle years ago.

Right. Little custom care. And he used it throughout the week. Now he's an orthopedic surgeon in rural Georgia and sees an incredible amount of diabetic neuropathy, diabetic wounds so that he left on Monday, Friday night. I got a phone call at nine o'clock at night, which is midnight in Georgia. And he said, "We had a patient today that had a four year chronic diabetic wound, seven centimeters across five millimeters deep, four years."

He said, "We put the adhesive electrodes around it and ran what we call wound healing." And he said, "I watched it granulates from the center out. That's a good face in two. We just kept running it in two hours." And it was... So the next Monday he ordered 30 units, but he has a very quick mind. And he has a group of friends that are retired engineers and geniuses.

And because of his work with Becker, he had an interest in post-CMF, that's electromagnetic frequencies. So the combination of the custom care and there what we call a magnetic converter, it converts the specific electrical pulses into frequency specific magnetic pulses. And the whole purpose originally was to be able to put those magnetic heads on either side of wraps for patients that were in standard wound care that had compression bandages on their legs.

And so you could feel a diabetic wound in a quarter of the time. It's just not that hard. I've been doing it since '98. It's just, it never doesn't work. Then we found that you can use it. So I use mine every night to treat, to improve my vagus nerve, quiet down the nervous system because I'm still all excited. And it's what 5:15 at night, this is fun.

And so I'll treat that, the challenge that we have with the magnetic converters, the pulse team of devices is they're not as good for nerve pain or the spinal cord. They're not good at polarizing things, but for low back pain, neck pain, new injuries, and the electrical current will change an EKG.

So when we're treating somebody postoperatively and they're being monitored on an EKG in the hospital, you can't use current because it scrambles the EKG. We found out you can use the magnetic field and it doesn't touch the EKG. So I've had both my hips replaced and using the postoperative frequencies. I did not bruise from at all.

Wow.

Not even beige.

Wow.

My husband broke his hip. We ran acute fracture on the magnetic device while I came in and filled out his advanced directive, before we even called the ambulance, we ran the fracture protocol and he didn't bruise from either the fracture or the hip replacement. And that is a very good face. That's nuts. Right.

That is nuts. So it sounds like pump FSM, they both have applications.

Yes.

Okay. Excellent. I think I could talk to you forever, but-

Oh, it's so much fun-

Yeah.

... because you have solutions for people that have no other hope and you can improve outcomes. So there's a large group in India that just published last year of large control was retrospective, prospective trial on low back pain. And the numbers, the data P value with 0.005. They didn't have good success with neck pain, but then I find out that we're running the wrong protocols.

So we have to do that again. But in your world, it's really low risk because every spinal procedure, every surgery, every RF, everything that involves anesthesia or needles carries the risk. And this gives you a low risk way to start. And if this doesn't work or it doesn't work as fast as you need it to work, you can always go to the next step. But it's a good conservative thing to start with.

Well, that is a great summary. It was probably more than I even hoped for. I want to close, the last question that I tend to ask my guests and I'm crazy with is I love, if you can just share one or two, maybe health habits that have served you wealthier life, promoted your energy, your longevity and your wellbeing,

Let's see moderation and all things, including moderation. That's the first thing, go ahead and spend the extra money and buy organic, whatever you can and then exercise and sleep. All of the standard things drink water, get eight-hour sleep, moderation and all things including moderation and go for a walk.

Well, I think it serves you well, I do wish. We had put this on video for YouTube because you said you're near 70s, but I mean, you're just glowing with energy and I can tell that you're living out your Dharma, fulfilling your passion. And so it's so clear.

That's the other thing that's important for people. Do what you love and love what you do and everything else you need will follow, that it's follow your passion. And if you can't do what you love, then love what you do.

And you said earlier, take care of the what? Don't worry about the how something like that, right? Yes.

You do the what and let God, or the universe, or however you think about that life, energy, that the how will show up what you need shows up. It doesn't always look like what you thought it would look like, but it always shows up.

Well, I thank you for showing up on such short notice. I literally just reached out to you and it was amazing that we could pull this off today. And thank you so much for your time.

My pleasure. Thanks for asking. It's good to talk to you.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Back Talk Doc brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates with offices in North and South Carolina. If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Lakhia and treatment options for back issues, go to backtalkdoc.com. We look forward to having you join us for more insights about back pain and spine health on the next episode of Back Talk Doc. Additional information is also available @carolinaneurosurgery.com.