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Disclaimer: The variable-wavelength wellness therapy is not intended to treat any disease or disorder.
The people in the interviews gave me personal permission to share their stories about their recoveries from chronic pain and impaired functioning.
Their stories may be intense for some viewers.
Our "best fit" model suggests that homeostasis actively maintains the signs and symptoms experienced by the people you will meet on this page.
The therapy "works" at the basic functioning level of biology:
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The homeostatic set point can change over time. (Aging, for example, may be reversed via diet and exercise.)
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The therapy prompts homeostatic set point to revert to an earlier state, sometimes fully normal.
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The rest is automatic.
Allan Gardiner
Restoring Lives
By Allan Gardiner
I am grateful for the hundreds of volunteers who shared their often-tragic stories with me in feasibility studies that I funded. Many told about their devastation from being excluded from research and any possibility of a promising future. They arrived reflecting a widespread sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
I am especially grateful for the people who departed from the studies with their impairments or pain unchanged.
The outcomes speak for themselves.
Getting on with their lives
Hearing well intentioned “no one can help you” and “get used to it” had challenged their hopes.
Watch and listen to Beth, Lois, James, George, and Mark talk about their restored lives.
Each had volunteered to learn if a few photons might nudge their life’s trajectory in a better direction. But it was homeostasis that restarted healing. The photons merely prompted homeostasis to refocus back to an improve or restore normal functioning. The rest was automatic.
Please share this page or links with your family, community, and help find practitioners.
Allan Gardiner
Beth: From a life of being fed to helping others.
"Beth" had been in a car accident the first time that her parents let her ride with a teenage driver. The driver was not at fault but the accident left Beth with C5-C6 quadriplegia. Beth started PhotoMed's therapy about 18 months after her injury and after her physical therapy progress had plateaued. Beth showed improvements that were sufficient for her to resume insurance-paid physical rehabilitation.
Figure 1. Beth achieved progress from her first session. She transitioned to a manual wheelchair about 13 months after starting PhotoMed's therapy. (8:38)
Beth tugged at my heart as she worked hard to regain her strength and independence. She made steady progress during the year. Her efforts and progress were exciting and gratifying for everyone.
Lois: 75 years PTSD flashbacks vanished
Lois had pain and PTSD flashbacks each time that she touched a scar in her right knee. The flashbacks had occurred for 75 years. Each flash-back took her back to the episode when her older brother pushed her off of her tricycle and the pedal gouged her knee. Lois's PTSD and pain vanished while she watched.
Figure 2. Lois tells about her relief after her 75 years of PTSD flashbacks simply vanished. She describes her relieved memories during her 2-month followup interview. (3:15)
The unrelenting "now" of Lois's pain and PTSD quickly switched to the "past tense" of ordinary memories and emotions. This switch in tenses commonly occurs with non-painful impairments like forgetting, within minutes, a limited ability to turn one's head.
James was in a program to "get used to his pain" - he didn't expect it to vanish.
James had been sent by his insurance company to Dr. William Conard's pain specialty clinic in Sacramento, California, to learn how to live with his chronic back pain made worse by surgeries. He had no expectation that his pain might disappear. Especially during his second session.
Figure 3. James tells about his relief and about how his pain and medications affected his time with his kids who had little memory of him before his injury. (2:35)
James's recovery of sensation is common with the release of post-surgical pain. Our model suggests that the sensations can go "offline" when the body stops recognizing the need to turn sensations back online.
George: Protective sensations resume after 8 years but are misaligned with his feet
"George" walked into PhotoMed's study at Dr. Conard's pain clinic looking at his feet because he could not feel them after 42 years of diabetes. He and his wife had gotten used to his limitations and never expected improvements. George had enrolled to learn if the therapy might relieve his back pain. His back pain resolved in a few minutes. The remaining time during that first session let him try the therapy on his feet.
He returned a week later having minor sensations in his feet. His nearly-normal sensations came back online within a few minutes of therapy. However, his revived sensations but were misaligned with his anatomy. Watch as George tries to identify where he is being touched, the realignment, and how he talks about his "new pair of legs".
Figure 4. George shows how the body can abruptly restore sensations lost to diabetes. But the sensations resumed so quickly that reports the wrong touch location. His sensations realign correctly (@ 2:00) with his feet upon looking at where he is being touched. (4:31)
"George's" recovery of misaligned sensations challenges conventional notions about chronic pain, neuroplasticity, and how touch maps are updated. George shows that realigning sensations takes zero time or effort, like how a multilingual speaker switches languages. However, his map realignment occurred as it ordinarily would have each time he looked at where he was being touched. That's homeostasis in action.
Updating of maps isn't special, rather it is the delay that needs more research.
Mark: Huntington's - restoring functions improves his quality of life
The events and discussions below may be shocking to doctors who care for patients having Huntington's disease. The following presentation may help families and practitioners observe the progression of improvements that peaked after about two years. The disease progression is usually considered to be irreversible.
Our model suggests that homeostatic processes actively attempt to maintain basic coordinated functioning of sensations and movement that are eroded from the neurodegeneration, such as from Huntington's disease. Loss of coordination appears when the sensorimotor maps become late, corrupted, or missing. Homeostatic corrective mechanisms may not notice the slow erosion.
The model suggests that the therapy prompts homeostatic processes to switch its set point back to an earlier, better coordinated, state. Recorded data show that progress is marked by relative improvements that are incremental in a positive direction. Ultimately, the improvements cannot be maintained in the continuing erosion by Huntington's disease.
The aim of the therapy is to improve quality of life for as long as practical.
Watch and listen to how Mark's improved gait, swallowing, and speech improve his quality of life.
In retrospect, I am embarrassed that I self-censored presenting Mark's story for 20 years for lack of an explanation. How many families affected by Huntington's might have had improved quality of life if I had been more bold?
Allan Gardiner
Mark and Debbie were on the Huntington's path to immobility and early death. Their mom had died of Huntington's at age 46. Mark wanted to be a good father to his kids. But living in a nursing home to be fed and bathed wasn't how he wanted to live his remaining life.
I'll focus on Mark because his improvements showed me the importance of including people in studies even when no one expects even the slightest improvement.
I was funding the feasibility studies such that the team didn't need to have a hypothesis beyond learning if the therapy might improve quality of life, or not.
I met Mark, Debbie, dad, and stepmom in October 2003 at Constance Haber's clinic (co-inventor of the therapy) where the early development of the therapy took place. We didn't take before videos of their walking or other impairments because we couldn't imagine any significant improvements. (Today, I'd be disappointed if there were no response.)
In year 1, Mark moved from a nursing home to live independently again.
In year 2, Mark's speaking and movements improved enough to get back custody of his kids including his 16-year-old daughter who was pregnant. He became the father that he had dreamed of being despite the decay from his Huntington's.
Even at Mark's final interview, in 2008, he was optimistic that showing his improvements might help others believe that improvements are possible. He regularly expressed his gratitude for the team giving him years of quality time with his kids. He still lived independently with increasing support from his family.
My advisor, Robert E. Florin, MD, neurosurgeon, met Mark and Debbie in year 3. Dr. Florin was ##**!! that Mark's neurologist wouldn't talk with him to confirm his improvements. Dr. Florin later realized that the neurologist's reputational assets would be lost if she told anyone what she had observed. Mark's improved functions were waning by year 5 (2008) but he still lived in his apartment with his son. Nearing the end of the study, he visited Constance Haber's clinic (my co-inventor of variable-wavelength therapy) nearly weekly until the study ended. I have self-censored Huntington's discussions until now for lack of a "how it works" explanation. It took 20+ years for me to recognize that the therapy simply gets the body's attention to check out and fix impaired functioning. The team's model that homeostatic processes can slowly "get used to it" accounts for the slow erosion of coordination. The therapy draws homeostatic attention to recognize and improve physiological impairments. It is homeostasis that does the "work".
The clips show only highlights. This page is about quality of life. I have unedited interviews for researchers to learn more.
Before the first therapy - family interview
I met with the family to go over study details. I thought that nothing would improve and that the study might last 2 only weeks. You can decide for yourself why I continued to fund Dr. Haber for 5 years of therapy for Mark. Debbie decided to "let go" after about 2 years because she didn't have kids as reasons for continuing.
Figure 5. Mark and Debbie have Huntington's disease. Their mother died at age 46 and they know what lies ahead. Watch Mark's unintentional mouth movements. You are welcome to sample the conversations. (11:28)
Reactions to the improvements achieved after the first 40 minutes of therapy
Mark demonstrates his walking and then drinking from a Styrofoam cup that he reported was previously challenging for lack of dexterity and crushing the cup. The family describes their observations.
Figure 6. Mark demonstrates his improved walking and drinking from a cup. His family tells us why they are surprised. (6:03)
At the first anniversary interview
Mark's family talks about the observed improvements during the first year. After the first session, the family went to a buffet restaurant. Mark surprised everyone by carrying his tray and eating without choking.
By this anniversary, Mark had moved out of a nursing home to live independently again in an apartment.
Figure 7. Mark's family recalls their surprise at the buffet restaurant where he carried his tray and didn't spill anything. Life changing, he moved out of a nursing home where he had been fed and bathed. (2:58)
Involuntary movements
Slow-motion data from the interviews yielded clues about how the body recognizes and corrects unintended movements. That is, homeostasis and the sensorimotor processing systems detect errors (involuntary slow mouth opening) and corrects the error (mouth closes quickly).
Figure 8. Data extracted from Mark's family videos show a reduction in his unintended movements of his mouth beginning after his first therapy session (about 40 min). Mark was not aware of the movements. The improvements parallel the improved coordination in his swallowing and gait.
Mark was not aware of his unintended and uncoordinated movements. Like how you would not notice your own limp, the choreic movements present a "learned non-awareness" of the spontaneous unintentional movements.
Real-time recordings show a slow opening with a rapid shutting. The measured motions look to me, an engineer, like his mouth "servo" system's position sensing loop had been interrupted until the positional errors became large enough to be detected. Upon detection, the error was corrected by rapidly closing his mouth.
Homeostasis depends upon accurate low-level recognition impairments that can then be corrected. George, above, shows two sequential events of recognition and correction of impairments. First, George's sensory awareness resumes but with sense of touch maps misaligned with his anatomy. Second, George observes the error and homeostatic processes automatically realign his touch maps.
For both George and Mark, their loss of awareness was separate from the diseases that were suspected to have caused the impairment. The therapy prompted awareness to resume but did not treat the disease.
After nearly 2 years of therapy
Mark demonstrates his ability to walk forwards and backwards. He reports on how his renewed ability to talk allowed the courts to give him back custody of his kids again. He talks about why this is important to him.
Figure 9. Mark's walks for the record. He talks about his ability to testify to get back custody of kids. Custody was given up when he entered a nursing home. His gait is affected by an injury to his foot. (6:51)
Mark continued with the therapy for 5 years. His physical abilities and strength declined despite an increasing frequency of sessions. However, he still lived in an apartment with his son where he enjoyed time with his grandchild.
Mark and his family may be unique. Mark's intentional efforts were a key to improving the flows of information and energy. He was able to become the father that he wanted to be.
A Closing Note
I am grateful for Beth, Lois, James, George, and Mark who exemplify more than 20 million people in the U.S. waiting for an improved quality of life.
I invite you to share the good news.
A non-profit organization has a project to lend devices to families, small, and underserved communities.
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