The history of electromagnetic therapies

Starting in the late 1800s there was a tremendous upwelling of interest in electromagnetism and electrical effects. In the early 1900s, medical physicians and osteopaths were interested in using electromagnetic therapies and frequencies as a way of treating patients. The devices and techniques were used by thousands of doctors but were not accepted by the medical establishment. Albert Abrams, MD used electromagnetic therapies in his San Francisco clinic from 1914 until his death in 1937. He founded the Electromedical Society and the journal Electromedical Digest as a way for practitioners to communicate and share their research and treatment findings (ERA 1980). In 1934 the American Medical Association, in its efforts to standardize medical education and treatments, decreed that drugs and surgery were the accepted tools of medicine and anyone using electromagnetic therapies would lose their license to practice which at that time was granted by the AMA. The research and clinical use of electromagnetic therapies in medicine came to a halt and by the early 1950s the necessary devices were rendered illegal in the United States by the FDA, after which, electromedical practice gradually died out although the early devices remained in use in private medical and osteopathic practices around the US, Canada and England.

Where the frequencies came from

In the late 1940s, after his service in World War II, Harry Van Gelder, an osteopath and naturopath trained in England and Australia bought a small private osteopathic practice in Vancouver BC that came with one of these early electromedical machines and a list of frequencies. He taught himself to use the machine and apply the frequencies, and achieved a degree of notoriety as a successful healer. Using the machine, the frequencies, osteopathic manipulation, homeopathy and nutrition he treated patients from all over Canada and the US for ailments ranging from back pain to cancer and his fame grew along with his success. In 1955 he moved his practice and his family back to Australia, returning in 1972, to practice in Ojai, California. Using the same tools and achieving the same level of success, his notoriety grew and patients once again found him from all over the US and Canada.

In 1980 a chiropractic student named George Douglas heard about Dr. Van Gelder’s practice in Ojai and spent three months working with him to learn his methods. Dr. Douglas came home with the list of frequencies and put them in a drawer as a memento. After graduating from Western States Chiropractic College in Portland Oregon in 1983, he began teaching in the student health center where I met him in 1991 when I was a third year chiropractic student. In 1992 Dr. Douglas purchased a Precision Microcurrent instrument because it had two channels, as did Dr. Van Gelder’s antiquated machine, and he had the idea that it might be useful as a way of delivering the frequencies.

Figure 1.1 • Albert Abram’s, a medical physician practicing in San Francisco from 1910 until 1937, founded the Electromedical Society and Electromedical Digest. The “Electronic Reactions of Abrams” pamphlet was published in the 1960s by the now defunct Borderland Research.

First uses of microcurrent and the frequencies

Microcurrent was introduced in the United States as a physical therapy modality in the late 1970s by a chiropractor and acupuncturist Dr. Thomas Wing. Dr. Wing used four low frequencies such as .3Hz, .6Hz, 10Hz, and 30Hz delivered with single channel microcurrent unit using cotton tipped probes and eventually a double channel microcurrent called the “Myomatic I” (I = interferential). Because of its ability to increase ATP production (Cheng 1982) microcurrent was being used by Dr. Wing and others to increase the rate of healing in injured athletes, to control pain, to increase the rate of fracture repair and wound healing and to treat myofascial pain.

Figure 1.2 • The original Precision Microcurrent could deliver frequencies accurate only to two digits. If the switch was set to 19 the .1, 1, and 10 multiplier could form 1.9, 19, and 190 but not 191, which was needed for tendons or 195 which was used for the bursa. The two-digit specific unit gave way to the three-digit unit in 1999.

Microcurrent delivers subsensory current in millionths of an ampere compared to the milliamps current, one thousand times stronger, used in other widely used electrotherapies such as interferential and TENS which makes muscles contract and can be felt as a buzzing or pulsing. One micro amp (μA) is the same 1/1000 of a milliamp (mA). The current cannot be felt and is the same level of current that the body itself produces in every cell and tissue.

Microcurrent and the frequencies were used on family and friends for two years starting in 1993 when I graduated from Chiropractic College producing some positive response and no negative effects from use of the frequencies or the current. I bought a small chiropractic practice in 1994 and introduced microcurrent into my practice in 1995 as a way of treating fibromyalgia and myofascial pain patients. We used standard adhesive electrode pads to connect the machine to the patient and set the microcurrent machine for various frequencies and observed the responses. Not all of the frequencies produced beneficial results but none of them produced any adverse effects so we felt comfortable exploring further to see what was possible.

Open-minded friends interested in the treatment concept volunteered to be treated. A family friend came over one afternoon and after hearing about our new discovery asked us to try treating his back. Twenty years previously he had fallen off of a ladder and landed flat on his back creating a massive bruise the length of his trunk. His back was still sore and tender to touch 20 years after the injury and he wanted to see if it could be changed. The muscles in his back felt stiff, hardened and almost crunchy as the adhesive electrode pads were applied on the four corners of his torso and microcurrent and the frequencies on Van Gelder’s list for reducing fibrosis, “deep old bruise” and mineral deposits were used on the injured tissue. Much to our surprise, the pain disappeared and the tissue became soft, non-tender and pliable in 30 minutes giving a glimmer of what was to come.

Clinical practice using frequencies

By 1996, I had a typical suburban chiropractic practice focused on musculoskeletal pain and injury. The joint manipulation, adjusting, massage and manual trigger point therapy taught in Chiropractic College were the tools available to treat patients. I was a new practitioner in a small practice, seeing about 35 patients a week, and wanting to expand my patient services, I bought a microcurrent device used by estheticians intended to provide facial anti-aging skin treatments. This skin care microcurrent used a pair of graphite conducting gloves to carry the current to the patient’s skin. Before and after photographs showed dramatic improvement in lines, wrinkles and jowls, and it was likely that patients would pay cash for such treatments and increase the practice revenue. I never suspected where it would end up.

In January 1996, one of the afternoon patients was a crane operator who had been injured in an auto accident four months before. His job required that he look down from his control station at the top of the crane and turn his head as he moved train cars and ship containers around a large freight yard. The auto accident had injured the muscles in his neck and created myofascial trigger points that made him dizzy when he activated these muscles. He had a sturdy thick neck, and three months of manual trigger point therapy had produced only minimal improvement in symptoms. His neck muscles felt firm, hardened and almost crunchy. In fact, they felt exactly like my friend Chuck’s chronically painful, long-ago injured back muscles had felt the week before.

The similarity between the feeling of the neck muscles and Chuck’s back muscles made me think of using the frequencies and microcurrent. The graphite gloves were attached to the skin care microcurrent unit across the hall and fit perfectly when moved to the leads on the two-channel Precision Microcurrent machine in the patient’s treatment room. I wondered out loud if the frequencies would have the same effect on this patient’s neck muscles as they had on Chuck’s back muscles. The patient asked whether it would hurt, and when told that it wouldn’t, he encouraged me to give it a try.

The frequencies we used to treat our friends and family were written on the back of a business card stored in the top of the machine. The frequencies were set on the machine, it was turned on, the gloves were moistened to allow proper conduction of the imperceptible current and the gloves were placed on the patient’s neck. The treatment had the immediate and totally unexpected effect of making the muscles go completely soft or “smooshy”. It was as if the tissue changed state from a solid to a gel. The taut bands disappeared instantly, as did the patient’s pain, and the treatment was complete in 30 minutes. In five years of training and practice doing manual massage and trigger point therapy no tissue had ever changed the way this tissue did. Surprise and disbelief were replaced by curiosity when the effects proved to be permanent and the symptoms resolved completely in one additional treatment.

The next patient who came in with pain from myofascial trigger points had the same positive response to the same frequencies. The muscle went smoosh, the taut bands disappeared, the pain went away and the changes became permanent in a very few treatments. Within the week every patient who came in was being treated for their muscle pain with microcurrent and frequencies. In every case muscles went smoosh, taut bands disappeared, pain went away and the changes were sometimes permanent and sometimes not. Local doctors began referring their fibromyalgia and myofascial pain patients to the clinic after hearing me speak at a continuing education course on fibromyalgia offered at Portland State University in 1995. The small chiropractic clinic became the Fibromyalgia and Myofascial Pain Clinic of Portland, developing a reputation and a client base of difficult to treat chronic pain patients. Soon, every patient who came into the clinic with pain was being treated with the graphite gloves and the frequencies and the positive responses grew more consistent. By March, dozens of patients had responded well and there was some real excitement about our results. Then quite suddenly, two people changed the practice forever.

Figure 1.3 • The original frequency list was written on the back of a business card for reference.

FSM clinical practice expands

Dr. Paul Puziss, an open minded orthopedic surgeon specializing in arthroscopic shoulder surgery, worked well with chiropractic physicians and had an appreciation for the effects of myofascial trigger points as pain generators. Dr. Puziss operated on a clinic patient and, following the six-week surgical recovery, Dr. Puziss sent him back for what he thought would be months of standard manual trigger point therapy. Dr. Puziss saw the patient for his follow-up after only two microcurrent treatments and called the clinic immediately asking, “What did you do? I have never seen anyone recover motion so quickly after a surgery!” He listened to the explanation of the new treatment method and responded by sending every failed shoulder pain patient in his practice to the clinic in the spring of 1996. Shoulder patients, as it turns out, have very particular patterns of muscle, nerve and joint dysfunction and learning the techniques to treat them successfully took the better part of a year. The lessons learned from these early patients formed the basis of what has been taught in FSM seminars ever since.

In March 1996, a colleague at a local continuing education seminar asked politely, “How are things going?” She listened to the stories of our incredible success using microcurrent to treat myofascial trigger points, and within weeks she started referring patients. Over the next six months she referred dozens of her most difficult, impossible-to-treat, post-injury, chronic pain patients and their response to frequencies and current taught us how to use FSM.

In 60 days, the small chiropractic practice became a chronic pain clinic, doubled in size from 45 patients a week to 90 patients a week, and maintained this pace for the next four years. The lessons learned about treating chronic pain patients during that period are the foundation of what is taught today as Frequency-specific Microcurrent.

Developing the protocols

The results produced in treating simple myofascial trigger points were nothing short of miraculous and the patients for whom it was not effective eventually became the exception not the rule. Patients who had been helped told friends and family and the practice continued to grow. Assistants were needed to keep the office working efficiently. In June of 1996, Kristi Hawkes, a student at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, began working ten hours a week in the clinic, helping with FSM treatments as a student “preceptor”. We wanted to demonstrate to ourselves that our positive results were not due to the placebo effect from the patient’s or the doctor’s positive expectation. We set up an ongoing experiment where Kristi operated the machine and the patients were treated with the machine facing away from me. For a few months, nothing was said in the treatment room that would give the patient encouragement and in some cases somewhat discouraging comments were made to see if expectation made a difference. Some treatments were started with the machine turned off to see if there was a noticeable difference in tissue response. Each time the machine was off the usual softening of the muscles did not occur and it was noticed immediately. The pain reduction and tissue softening response only happened when the machine was on and never happened if the machine was off. It became apparent that it was not any positive expectation or magic hands that produced the changes in tissue. It had to be the treatment itself, and we closed that experiment.

The technique needed to be fine tuned and standardized. There were frequencies to remove pathologies such as inflammation, fibrosis, chronic inflammation, toxicity and scar tissue and frequencies for tissues such as muscle, fascia and nerve. The machine had two channels that could deliver frequencies. Channel A fired 2 milliseconds before channel B fired. Which frequency went on which channel? Did it matter? In what order did we need to run them to achieve optimal results? What conditions would respond and what conditions would not? In June of 1996 none of these questions had answers. The clinic spent three months trying different combinations of tissue and condition frequencies on A and B channels in different patients on different days until we found that we achieved the best responses with the condition on channel A and the tissue on channel B.

The results became more consistent but patients still needed ten or fifteen treatments before the improvements became permanent. How could we get faster, more long lasting results? One of the interns went to the rare book room at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine (NCNM) and looked up frequencies in Electromedical Digest. This journal was published from 1920 to 1951 and had articles by physicians who treated patients with electromagnetic therapies. One of the interns, Ryan Wilson, found a list of frequencies used by Albert Abrams in his San Francisco clinic in the back of a 1927 issue of the magazine.

Albert Abrams was a controversial figure in his day but attracted the attention and support of the famous muckraking writer Upton Sinclair. Sinclair went to San Francisco in 1922 intending to write about Abrams and expose him as a fraud and a quack. What he saw in Abram’s clinic caused him to write an article for Pearson’s magazine titled “House of Wonders”. He saw Abrams diagnose and successfully treat pain and lethal conditions of the day such as tuberculosis, cancer, pneumonia, and influenza. Abrams founded the Electromedical Society and Electromedical Digest and funded them until his death in 1937. When we added Abrams’ frequencies for tissue fibrosis at the beginning of the myofascial trigger point treatments, our outcomes improved and patients began to recover more quickly.

Why use graphite gloves?

Wanting to find out if the way the current was applied made a difference, we tried adhesive electrode pads such as those used on TENS devices and we tried the graphite conducting gloves that came with the facial microcurrent machine to connect the leads from the machine to the patient. The two red, or positive current, leads were plugged into the jacks on the back of one of the graphite gloves and the two black, or negative current, leads were plugged into the jacks on the back of the other graphite glove. The practitioner wore latex gloves inside the graphite gloves to prevent the current from going through the doctor instead of the patient.

The graphite gloves consistently produced a better response than the adhesive electrode pads for reasons that are still not clear. There is a theory but there is not an easy way to test it so it will remain a theory. The graphite gloves are effectively cylinders of conductive material that allow the electrons in the current to flow around them before going into the patient. Physics tells us that moving electrons create a magnetic field that is perpendicular to their path. When the current flows through the gloves the electron path is circular and the magnetic field created has to be passing through the patient. Adhesive electrodes create a point of current entry on a flat surface and do not create a circular path. It seems likely that the magnetic field from the circular path creates the enhanced effect seen with the graphite gloves but not everyone agrees with this theory.

The first FSM course

By October of 1996, it was apparent that this treatment technique was extremely promising. But was it real? Could the results be reproduced or was there some complex placebo effect operating in our clinic that had not been discovered? In a fee-for-service clinic you cannot ethically conduct the double-blind placebo-controlled studies that are the medical gold standard for proving efficacy of a treatment. Patients and insurance companies pay for treatment, not research, and there wasn’t enough clinical data to attempt university collaboration or grant funding for a controlled research trial even if we had known how to apply for one.

The most obvious way to tell if the treatment was reproducible was to teach it and see if people new to the technique could achieve the same results. There were some hurdles before we could teach the technique and make equipment available. The graphite gloves were only available to the purchasers of the $7000 facial toning machine sold by Bio-Therapeutics. David Suzuki, president of Bio-Therapeutics and Microcurrent Technologies finally relented in the face of impassioned pleading and agreed to sell the graphite gloves to practitioners who took the FSM course.

A logo and a name for this new technique had to be created so the flyers to advertise the course would look professional. On a Friday night in November, Ryan Wilson and Kristi Hawks joined me for a brainstorming session at a local pub at the end of a long and busy week. With the noisy Friday night happy hour crowd chattering in the background, Frequency-specific Microcurrent emerged from the long list of crossed off names on the pad as the simplest and most descriptive. As the three of us talked, Ryan doodled on napkins with a felt tipped pen. Variations on a theme were tried and discarded until the current form of the Frequency-specific Microcurrent logo took shape and was voted in. A grateful patient who owned a sign shop took the napkin and turned it into a graphics file and “FSM” had a name and a face.

Figure 1.4 • The FSM logo was devised in felt pen on the back of a napkin in a local pub on a Friday night in November of 1996. A patient with a graphics business turned it into the FSM logo used today.

The first FSM seminar was scheduled in mid-January 1997 at NCNM, the Portland Naturopathic College. We sent out flyers to licensed chiropractors, naturopaths and naturopathic students in Oregon. Twenty-five students attended the first one-day course. The syllabus totaled 17 typed pages. Part of that syllabus presented the early microcurrent applications promoted by Dr. Thomas Wing when he introduced microcurrent to the US in the 1970s. The most commonly used frequencies were .3Hz, for increasing healing, .6Hz for stimulation of acupuncture points, 30Hz for pain control, and 300Hz for reducing edema and stimulating lymphatic flow. Dr. Wing’s protocols were all included in the first syllabus.

The flyers, syllabus and frequency summary sheet were created on the clinic computer at night after patients had gone home and the flyers were folded, sealed and stamped at home on the kitchen table. The copy shop printed the ten page syllabus the day before the seminar and the summary sheet was two short columns on one side a sheet of paper. The first class was taught on a chalk board and included demonstrations, a practice session and a very nervous instructor. Dr. Douglas purchased a fruit platter at a local grocery store for the snack breaks, and brought an electric tea kettle, paper cups and tea bags from home for warm drinks. We made it up as we went along and somehow got through the day. A few attendees caught the bug and contacted the local distributor for Precision Microcurrent to purchase a machine and began using the technique. By June of 1997 the answer to our question appeared in the form of practitioners reporting successful, reproducible results. The frequency-specific response was real.

Teaching the seminars

FSM was first taught to discover whether it was reproducible. The classes continued because it would have been immoral to stop teaching them. So many pain patients were helped with FSM in the clinic that it seemed important to train other practitioners so they could pass along this relief to many more pain patients. The seminars became easier and attracted more students when we gained approval for continuing education credit in Oregon for chiropractors and naturopaths later in 1997.

The two-day seminars were presented as a low key home grown event four times a year in Portland at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine until 2000. NCNM resides in a grand 1900s vintage brick building tucked away on a side street in central Portland. Sometimes the boiler didn’t work in the winter and we wore coats and gloves in the frigid lecture room, sometimes the guard would forget to open the building on Saturday morning and the group would stand in the rain for 30 minutes awaiting his arrival. But the room rental price was right, the staff was friendly and supportive and the school setting was familiar and comforting. The syllabus grew to 40 typed pages, the summary sheet increased to two columns of frequencies and protocols on both sides of a sheet of paper; Dr. Wing’s material was deleted and only FSM treatment protocols were presented.

The practice became overwhelmingly busy with more and more difficult patients referred from chiropractic, medical and naturopathic physicians all over Oregon. Every patient we helped seemed to know six people like themselves and they sent their friends and family in droves. It was the perfect learning environment and a wonderful, if hectic, place to practice and gather experience. Interns, assistants and associates came and went. In 1997, Kristi Hawks, now Dr. Kristi Hughes, moved back home to Minnesota to set up practice and eventually became a captivating teacher and lecturer and one of the busiest most knowledgeable naturopathic physicians in the country.

The first collected case report presentation

In February 1997, a Chiropractor who belonged to the American Back Society (ABS) heard me talking about FSM at a medical meeting and suggested that our results would be perfect for a workshop presentation at the ABS national meeting in San Francisco in December 1997. FSM outcomes in the treatment of myofascial trigger points were collected for the year and the following is an excerpt from the resulting paper.

Results in clinical practice – 1997

Further refinements in treatment techniques and frequencies resulted in improved patient response and reduced the number of treatments required. Data was retrieved from the charts of 100 new patients seen between January and June of 1997 and the results are quite encouraging. There were 50 patients with head, neck or face pain resulting from chronic myofascial complaints. There were five acute cervical and 21 with chronic low back complaints. The rest were shoulder, other extremity or thoracic pain. Most of the patients were referred to the clinic by a medical physician, chiropractor, naturopathic physician or another patient. We defined chronic as pain lasting longer than 90 days after the precipitating trauma.

The outcomes were described as simple averages. The average chronicity was 4.7 years in head, neck and face pain and after 11.2 treatments over a 7.9 weeks treatment period the average pain levels decreased from a 6.8/10 to 1.5/10. There was no control group but the patients in some sense served as their own control since 88% (44/50) had failed with some other therapy. Seventy-five percent of patients (33/44) had failed with medical care, 54% (24/44) had failed with chiropractic, 38% (17/44) had failed with physical therapy, 11% (5/44) with naturopathic care, and 6% (3/44) with acupuncture. Many patients had used two or more of these therapies with minimal to no permanent relief.

The outcomes were better in low back pain than in neck pain group even though the low back pain was more chronic at 8.4 years versus 4.7 years in the neck pain group. Patients with myofascial trigger points in the low back muscles were treated an average of 5.9 times in 6 weeks and the average pain was reduced from 6.8/10 to 1.6/10.

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