Why You Should Listen
In this episode, you will learn about Frequency Specific Microcurrent and how FSM is used in optimizing health.
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About My Guest
My guest for this episode is Dr. Carolyn McMakin. Carolyn McMakin MA, DC is the clinical director of the Fibromyalgia and Myofascial Pain Clinic of Portland, Oregon. She developed Frequency Specific Microcurrent (FSM) in 1995 and began teaching FSM courses in 1997. In addition to maintaining a part time clinical practice, she teaches seminars on the use of FSM in the United States, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. She has lectured at the National Institutes of Health and at medical conferences in the US, England, Ireland, and Australia on the subjects of Fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome, Fibromyalgia associated with cervical spine trauma, and on the differential diagnosis and treatment of pain and pain syndromes and sports injuries. Her peer-reviewed publications include papers on the FSM-induced changes in inflammatory cytokines and substance P seen with FSM treatment of Fibromyalgia associated with spine trauma, treatment of pain in the head, neck and face, and low back caused by myofascial trigger points, delayed onset muscle soreness, shingles, and neuropathic pain. She consults with various NFL and MLB teams and players on the use of Frequency Specific Microcurrent in the treatment of sports injuries. Her textbook Frequency Specific Microcurrent in Pain Management was published in 2010. Her book The Resonance Effect was released in March 2017 and describes how FSM was developed and provides case reports and frequency protocols for the visceral uses of FSM.
Key Takeaways
- What are frequency and resonance?
- What are some of the conditions that FSM can help a person with?
- What role might FSM play in SIBO, Ehlers-Danlos, and MCAS?
- How does FSM impact ATP production?
- Can FSM influence gene expression?
- How might FSM benefit those dealing with traumatic brain injuries or concussion?
- How might FSM play a role in supporting detoxification?
- Can FSM be used to support those dealing with interstitial cystitis?
- Is Shingles responsive to FSM therapy?
- How does FSM affect the limbic system and the vagus nerve?
- How might FSM be used as a "rebooting" strategy?
Connect With My Guest
Interview Date
July 17, 2019
Transcript
Transcript Disclaimer: Transcripts are intended to provide optimized access to information contained in the podcast. They are not a full replacement for the discussion. Timestamps are provided to facilitate finding portions of the conversation. Errors and omissions may be present as the transcript is not created by someone familiar with the topics being discussed. Please Contact Me with any corrections.
[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Better Health Guy Blocgcasts, empowering your better health. And now, here’s Scott, your Better Health Guy. The content of the show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or is information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.
[00:00:34] Scott: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode number 102 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. Carolyn McMakin and the topic of the show is Frequency Specific Microcurrent. Dr. Carolyn McMakin is the clinical director of the Fibromyalgia and Myofascial Pain Clinic in Portland, Oregon. She developed Frequency Specific Microcurrent in 1995 and began teaching FSM courses in 1997. In addition to maintaining a part time clinical practice, she teaches seminars on the use of FSM in the United States, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. She has lectured at the National Institutes of Health and at medical conferences in the US, England, Ireland, and Australia on the subjects of fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome, fibromyalgia associated with cervical spine trauma, and on the differential diagnosis and treatment of pain and pain syndromes and sports injuries.
Her peer-reviewed publications include papers on the FSM induced changes in inflammatory cytokines and substance P seen with FSM treatment of fibromyalgia associated with spine trauma, treatment of pain in the head, neck, and face and low back caused by myofascial trigger points, delayed onset muscle soreness, shingles, and neuropathic pain. She consults with various NFL and MLB teams and players on the use of Frequency Specific Microcurrent in the treatment of sports injuries. Her textbook, ‘Frequency Specific Microcurrent in Pain Management’, was published in 2010. Her book, ‘The Resonance Effect’, was released in March, 2017 and describes how FSM was developed and provides case reports and frequency protocols for the visceral uses of FSM. And now, my interview with Dr. Carolyn McMakin.
[00: 02:31] Scott: I have had the opportunity to meet Dr. Carolyn McMakin several times at conferences over the past few years. Everyone that stops by and works with her at these events says that she has healing hands, and I'm excited today to talk with her about FSM or Frequency Specific Microcurrent. Thanks for being here today, Dr. McMakin.
[00:02:49] Dr. McMakin: Thank you so… thank you so much, Scott, it's good to be with you.
[00:02:54] Scott: Thanks.
[00:02:53] Dr. McMakin: Nice to see you again too.
[00:02:54] Scott: Nice to see you as well. What drew you personally to doing the work that you do today and made you so passionate about helping other people through Frequency Specific Microcurrent?
[00:03:04] Dr. McMakin: Well, that's a really good question. I started chiropractic college at the age of 42, did 2 years of premed and I'd always wanted to be a doctor. So, my call to medicine, I was a pharmaceutical salesman for 16 years, so my call to medicine and education in medicine was very long-standing. So, when I got to Chiropractic College and then I graduated and started a practice, I think I was 47, a friend of mine gave me a 2-channel microcurrent device as a graduation happy start your practice present, and that same friend had a list of frequencies that he got from an osteopath 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, when George Douglas went down to California and worked with Harry Van Gelder for 3 months in 1983, he brought home this list of frequencies and put it in a drawer. Well, when my practice began to focus in like as soon as it started on chronic pain patients, one day when I was working on somebody, George said, “Here, try this frequency,” I was like, “What that's from?” “It's from Harry's list,” “Okay.” So, I had tried it and I had broken a blood vessel in this lady’s leg. I was working on her with my thumbs to do a trigger point in the gastrocs. And I used the frequency 18 Hertz on channel A and 62 Hertz on channel B to… I found out later to stop bleeding, and her pain went from a 6 to a 0, the trigger point was gone, and it's like, “Wow, that's different.” And then we started to use the frequencies on patients with myofascial pain. And I'd been doing myofascial release and myofascial trigger point work for 4 or 5 years, and when you use… when you use your hands, you're used to really having to dig on muscles, it's uncomfortable, ischemic compression, all of that. When I started using the frequencies, the muscles just melted, the trigger points just dissolved into like something like pudding, leaving behind just normal non-tender, non-trigger point muscle. So, we treated a muscle pain first then nerve pain then we figured out how to treat the spinal cord, and then the conditions that the frequencies responded to were broadening and deeper and wider and more difficult and more profound. And so that's the way I got to it, but the reason I've stayed with it is, how could you not? How could you not? How could you… once you feel tissue do what is not possible to do, how do you not do that?
[00:06:00] Scott: Right.
[00:06:01] Dr. McMakin: So, you just show up at work and you start out and you see 1 patient, I had to see 3 patients an hour, I had 3 rooms. And so it's been 20… 25 years of what has turned out to be clinical research, because within 2 years, my practice was more or less exclusively the 10% of patients that nobody else could fix. So, I… trigger points, nerve pain, ligamentous laxity, disc injuries, facet joint pain. This last weekend, we taught a seminar in Denver and there was a young man there who was 42, he had cerebral palsy from birth, they had done serial casting in his feet when he was a child at the age of 3, and they got the legs to lengthen and the spasticity to be reduced. But then when he's 27, 15 years previously, he got chickenpox and the inflammation or something made the cerebral palsy come back. So, he had spastic diplegia, which means he's toe walking on spastic legs, taking very short steps and with a cane and just difficult to navigate, a little bit spasticity in his hands. Well, there's a frequency that we stumbled across, I mean, these frequencies are all on the list, there's no new numbers, there's new ways of figuring out how to use them. There is a frequency for increasing descending inhibition of spasticity in the spinal cord and to increase secretions from the cerebellum, which is what's missing in cerebral palsy. So, if something happened to your spinal cord to injure or reduce the kind of messages that come down from the brain as they don't spasm, you'd have cerebral palsy.
Okay, this young man, we worked… we ran that frequency, increased secretions in the spinal cord, increase secretions in the cerebellum, and inside of an hour, the spasticity in his legs was gone and his gait was more normal, he was still a little bit up on his toes, but his legs were more relaxed and there was no more pain. And so Sunday night before he left, we worked on him for another hour, only this time, we went… he had retained what he started with on Thursday night and we were able to progress on that. So, his hamstrings relaxed and his psoas relaxed, and there are frequencies to treat the tendinopathy that accompanies a very tight… chronically tight muscle. So, the psoas lengthened, the legs lengthened, we were able to sort of, with manual therapy, get the gastroc to lengthen and run the frequencies for scarring in the connective tissue to get the gastroc to lengthen, got his foot in 95, 1000. The end of the story is that, at the end of an hour and 20 minutes, he is walking normally with heel strike, toe off, heel strike, toe off, shifting weight normally, we'll see if it lasts.
[00:09:29] Scott: Wow that's amazing.
[00:09:30] Dr. McMakin: But to be… how could you not do that?
[00:09:34] Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So, let's start then with the basics for those people that are listening. So, what is frequency and what is resonance, or as you say in your book titled ‘The Resonance Effect’? So when you deliver a frequency to the body from this list that you mentioned, how do those frequencies resonate with something within us to support improvement of health and balance?
[00:09:54] Dr. McMakin: Oh, that's a great question. First, a frequency in electro… well, a frequency in music is a sound or a tone. Frequency in electronics is the number of pulses per second. So, 1 Hertz is one pulse per second. So, in music, the A tone is 440 Hertz, 440 pulses per second makes you hear the note A. So, that's the basic concept, there's a lot of physics involved in that that we'll skip, but resonance, the simplest example that we use on a daily basis, well, there's a couple of them. One is I have a… I have a blue shirt on here, when you're a child, you are taught that this frequency is called blue, it is not a color, it is a frequency that is reflected off the dye in my shirt, hits your eye, is interpreted by your brain, and when you were 6 months old, your mom or dad taught you that that color is… that frequency is called blue. So, we interact with frequencies all the time with our ears in our eyes. The most common at this point use of frequencies that everybody does is your car remote. There's a frequency that your car is tuned to, and it's very precise down to thousandths of a Hertz. And when you click your key fob, it opens your door lock just on your car, and then you click it again, and it opens the back doors. Even if there is an identical vehicle from the identical year, your key fob, your remote will only resonate with your car doors. You can… so that's the equivalent I think of how the frequencies affect our body.
We've… we've had data over the years and the only thing at this point that explains all the data, the only mechanism that explains all of the data that we have is that somehow, the frequencies are interacting with cell membrane receptors in such a way as to change their configuration or somehow change their interaction with the internal machinery of the cell, and it changes what the cell does. So, there is a frequency that reduces inflammation in the spinal cord. We have that data from the National Institutes of Health. These peptides which are very difficult to change in any medical or research setting called cytokines, they change by factors of 10 and 20 times in 90 minutes. This is literally impossible. And after 10 years of medical physicians and researchers and physicists literally all over the country on email conversations and in meetings trying to figure out how we did this, the consensus is that the only thing that makes sense is that the frequencies change cells signaling in such a way that the cell machinery inside changes and the cell stops putting out these inflammatory cytokines and these of inflammatory peptides because all of the cytokines stop in the normal range, they come down from 300 to 32, down by a factor of 10 times in 90 minutes and they stop in the normal range. When you change these cytokines with drugs, the problem with the medications is that they take them below the normal range and then the patient has problems with infection and cancer because you need the cytokines for protection, because we lower them so fast so dramatically, and then when the cell comes back on it, never goes back as high as it was. And each time you treat, the cell behaves more normally.
So we're used to pharmaceuticals and nutritional substances operating on those same receptors like a key in a lock. You can use your key to open your car-door and you can use ibuprofen or some nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory to change the cellular machinery and reduce inflammation, or apparently you can use a signal. So, that's resonance is when you match the frequency to the target, so the key fob to the key. When a singer sings a note that that shatters a lead crystal glass, the reason that trick works is that the frequency that holds lead atoms together, there is a frequency that binds 1 lead atom to another in a led crystal matrix. That trick only works with lead crystal that is at least I think 70% or 80% lead; I think it’s 70% . And when the singer’s note is very precise and sustained, the lead atoms start to vibrate, and pretty soon, they vibrate enough that the lead atoms stop sticking to each other and the crystal glass comes apart. So, those are the easiest examples.
[00:15:58] Scott: No, those are fantastic. Dr. Klinghardt, who's been one of my mentors over the years, has been a big proponent of physics-based tools over a biochemistry, or at least using a combination of the two. So, we've talked a little about how Frequency Specific Microcurrent, which is based in physics, is shifting the chemistry of the body. So, my question to you is, in exposure to let's say electromagnetic fields from cell phone towers and so on, do those frequencies have the potential then to negatively affect our chemistry?
[00:16:31] Dr. McMakin: There's research out there that shows that EMF and certainly like even the magnetic fields that are around wall current, 60 cycle or 60 Hertz current, there were studies in, I think it was Norway showing that those… that the frequencies that surround us can increase the stress response in specific; I think Becker found that. What's interesting to me is that when we use… there's a frequency and the FSM protocols in the advanced courses for neutralizing that EMF influence on cells. I have no idea how that works, but if the EMF that we are surrounded by is very high frequency and Becker's conclusion or Becker's suggestion was that those high frequencies somehow increase the stress response in the body and change immune system activation and to the extent that FSM frequencies have been shown to quiet the stress response. So, we have the ability to change heart rate variability in 60 seconds, we can, with the frequency to quiet the sympathetics, change heart rate variability and autonomic tone in 60 seconds. There's a study in 2013, quiet the sympathetics, run that frequency, wait 2 minutes, do the tests, and the sympathetics have come down, parasympathetics have balance and come up. So, there's always a teeter totter between sympathetic and parasympathetic balance.
So as long as we can do that, then EMF just doesn't worry me. It's there are particular patients that are sensitive to it, but I think it's because their stress response is preset either genetically or medically or because of life experience, and their… the stress centers in the brain which affect the immune system in the endocrine system and all the systems, digestive system, stress centers in the brain are more sensitive to disruption by those high frequencies and they over respond. Because you have people that don't have any effect from it at all, and you have people that have very strong symptomatic changes in response to cellphones. If you look on your phone and you check, I will guarantee you that… I'm in a relatively small town in the State of Washington, I have 1200 cell phone towers within a 1-mile circumference, so there's no place you can go perhaps short of Antarctica where you're not going to be in EMF, and not everybody suffers. So, in my world, it's more a matter of making the patient's system less reactive by quieting down the sympathetics, by quieting down the stress centers in the amygdala, the hippocampus, the midbrain, and bringing up the vagal tone so that the vagus is not so fragile and so easily turned off. So, there's no way we're going to change modern society and so we are surrounded by EMF. So, our response is simply is to navigate that and help the patient be healthier.
[00:20:06] Scott: Yeah. I'm going to have to watch… I've just recently started exploring the Oura ring, which does measure heart rate variability, and so I'm going to be interested to see how FSM shifts some of the HRV on that system.
[00:20:19] Dr. McMakin: See, and I've got my little electromagnetic thing. I have no idea if it works, but I know that I feel better in days when I wear it, so it's like, “Okay, it's… that works.
[00: 20:27] Scott: Yeah, and I know that's great, but one of the nice things with the Oura ring is it actually measures your HRV and your heart rate and whatnot, and you can actually do things then like FSM and see how your body responds to it; so that's very exciting. Tell us a little about some of the medical conditions or challenges that people have that you've seen FSM really help support. I know fibromyalgia is a primary one, what are some of the others that you commonly see, and what are some of the types of issues that frequency may be able to support in the body?
[00:20:57] Dr. McMakin: Oh, good question. The most common things that we treat that like 80% of the patients that come in to see a standard therapist, either a PT, an OT, an MD, a DC, Naturopath, Do, I mean, we have the whole gamut of medical profession. We started out with neuropathic pain as being the number 1… we actually started with muscle pain, but it turns out that muscle pain is almost literally never due to the muscle. When we treat the nerve and the nerves that innervate the muscles, the pain goes down. When we treat the discs and facet joints and reduce their inflammation, the pain goes down; the muscle pain. So, we think it's the muscle, but it's not really. So, the musculoskeletal applications are kind of one part of the course we teach, then post-operative and injury application.
So in both sports and general medicine, if you can get microcurrent onto an injury within 4 hours of the time that it happens, patient doesn't even bruise, we have frequencies that apparently stop bleeding because you break your hip and you get the frequencies on it within 4 hours and the patient doesn't bruise. You have a hip replaced, patient doesn't bruise and recovery happens in 6 weeks instead of 12 weeks. Burns, lacerations, wound healing, diabetic wounds, diabetic neuropathies. Neuropathic pain is probably the most because… most important because there's no other treatment for it. There's no thing that works for neuropathic pain or nerve traction injuries in medicine; there is no thing that works easily or well. Then in the more complicated medical conditions, there are protocols that affect asthma beneficially, liver disease, reducing liver enzymes; we have data on that. Congestive gallbladder is simple, gout as simple, goiters are simple, irritable bowel is simple. Crohn's is more difficult because very often, in Crohn's, there's an underlying parasite or pathogen involved and you have to take care of that medically.
So that brings me to drive by what we don't treat which is infection and potentially fatal conditions. We do not treat cancer, period, end of discussion; it's really clear, there's no wiggle room in the course when I teach about that. With… with Crohn's, because if you use the frequencies for infection and the patient's pain goes down significantly, you have a reason to suspect that it is indeed a pathogen or parasite. So, the patient comes in and their history is (this happened couple of months ago), their history is, “I have Crohn's, I've had it for 15 years, it flares up about every 6 weeks.” Okay, what happened… what is the only thing in the digestive system that flares up every 6 weeks more or less like clockwork? Parasites; they lay eggs, the life cycle of the parasite is about 6 weeks. And so when the Crohn's patient says, “It flares up every 6 weeks,” you have the presumption that it is parasite. The next step is to use the frequencies that we have for parasites and confirm that when you use the frequency for parasites on channel A and combine it with the frequencies for the cecum and the appendix, which is where his Crohn's was focused, his pain went away, the swelling went away, the difficulty went away. We moved up a little bit and you treated the next tight place which is the gall bladder, and that respondent, his pain went down. And what we found is, if the patient has an infection or parasite, if you run the frequencies to reduce inflammation, it'll make it worse because the immune system is using inflammation to contain the infection. So, his physician had brought him to the class and I said, “He needs to start on an anti-parasite medication today,” they are staying for the course for 4 days, and by Sunday, his pain was gone, the Crohn's was back into remission and FSM, well, did dissolve the scar tissue and his abdomen, the scarring was gone. But that's how you come by and what the frequencies can do, common-sense, medical education intuition and knowledge and medication. It's a… there has to be a stable state that the frequencies can contribute to.
Same thing with things like constipation and one other…. ovarian cysts; oh my gosh, those are so cool. You start out with an ovarian cyst; it really is fun, it's so neat. You start out with an ovarian cyst the size of… I mean, you can feel it, feels like a water balloon in somebody's abdomen, and it's the size of an orange, your palpating it, you run the frequency for inflammation in the ovary. And in real-time inside of about 20 minutes, the ovarian cyst goes down the size of a kumquat and then it's done. There are things that we do that even I don't believe. Ehlers-Danlos, that was another thing we did this last weekend. There's a frequency for torn and broken, and I can't even tell you what it does, all I can tell you is it seems to repair partial thickness tendon tears. Achilles tendinopathies, rotator cuff, partial tears, the pain goes down in about 5 minutes and then takes 30 to 60 minutes to actually repair the tendon, and it might take more than 1 treatment. But when you apply that principle… so we found out about the Achilles tendinopathies 2009; that's 10 years ago. 2 years ago, I applied the same principle to an Ehlers-Danlos patient, this last weekend, we had 2 Ehlers-Danlos patients, and it is 1 frequency combination, torn and broken on channel A and 77 Hertz connective tissue on channel B. And you hook the patient up from their neck to their feet, punch a button, let them fall asleep on the table, come back 60 minutes later, and their joint laxity is just gone.
[00:27:40] Scott: Wow. I mean, I have to… I almost have to interrupt that one because…
[00:27:43] Dr. McMakin: I know.
[00:27:44] Scott: … that is such a difficult challenging condition for people, it's one that more and more commonly is coming into my… the information that I come across, lots of people that are dealing with Lyme and Mold and that whole mix that do have hypermobility and Ehlers-Danlos, and there aren't a lot of great tools out there, so that's… that's phenomenal. So, in those people, after they do FSM, do you see then that it sounds like the hypermobility reduces?
[00:28:10] Dr. McMakin: Yes, and it stays gone; it's interesting. It will stay gone, any… depending on how many of the EDS genes they have, I think there's 4 or 5... 4 of them, depending on what their genetic expression is of that condition, it'll last anyplace usually from 2 to 3 days up to a week. And the other thing that's interesting is that the Ehlers-Danlos patients, because their connective tissue kind of everywhere is lax, that includes the neck and the gut, and that apparently creates autonomic disturbance because the places where the vagus nerve attaches are stretchy, they don't sit still. You eat a meal, you stand up, your gut moves, like gravity pulls on the connective tissue, connective tissue stretches. Well, the vagus nerve is stuck to it and so the vagus nerve gets stuck to it, the vagus nerve gets turned down, not off, but down, most of the Ehlers-Danlos patients have gastroparesis or some form of SIBO reflux because the sphincters are lax. Well, the sphincters are laxed not only because of the connective tissue in the sphincter, the cases we've done in the last 5 years, about 3 years, have suggested that the other problem is that the vagus is turned down or off. You check in Ehlers-Danlos patients, all of them have elevated heart rate. Their heart rates are between 80 and 95. You treat the connective tissue and then you quiet the stress centers in the brain, you turn back on the vagus and her range of motion and her fingers goes to normal and her heart rate of 67. We did that on 3 different patients this weekend, it's like… and these days, it's like it is now becoming standardized as care for these patients, and then you can go after what else is going on. With the vagus is turned down, one of the vagus’s… one of the roles of the vagus is to quiet the immune system, right, that's its role, it quiets immune system by affecting the spleen and the… and the macrophages. And so if the vagus is not doing its job to quiet the immune system, the immune system becomes hyper vigilant, hyper active, and it's the immune system hyperactivity that creates the inflammation, the chemical sensitivities, the…
[00:31:00] Scott: Mast cell issues.
[00:31:01] Dr. McMakin: The mast cell has issues. It's like people talk about this mast cell activation syndrome because they don't have any way to fix it.
[00:31:08] Scott: Right.
[00:31:08] Dr. McMakin: So, it’s described in great detail how complicated it is, they haven't… it's fine that they can't fix it, and it's like, “No, wait, all you have to do is turn it… turn on the vagus. Quiet down stress centers, turn on the vagus, control the immune system,” now, that's a challenge if they still have active infection, but if you can balance the immune system by quieting down the stress centers, turning on the vagus, get the heart rate back to normal, get rid of the pots, and the vagus controls the sphincters. So, that takes care of the SIBO. SIBO is like… I hesitate to say it because it sounds… it really sounds stupid, but if you can a… if you can normalize the function of the sphincters between the large and small balls… bowels, SIBO as a matter of 2 weeks, not 2 years, not 12 months, it's like 2 weeks. Get the sphincters to close, deal with the dysbiosis reflex, kind of the same thing and gastroparesis, they all go into one bucket that is now being treated by quieting the stress centers in the brain, turning back on the vagus, you don't have to do anything with the sphincters because the vagus does that; that's its job.
[00:32:26] Scott: And turning back on the vagus then also helps with the migrating motor complex issues that people have in SIBO as well, correct?
[00:32:33] Dr. McMakin: Right, yeah, because you normalize… you normalize stomach acid, the pancreatic enzyme function, and gut motility. So, gastroparesis goes away and the relative SIBO goes away. You still have to do stable state, you still have to kill the pathogens, I am all about chemical warfare when it comes to pathogens. There is a reason God invented metronidazole, there is a reason God invented Augmentin. If you've got diverticulitis, you take Metronidazole and Augmentin and let us treat you with FSM and then yes, but you do both.
[00:33:10] Scott: So, talk to us a little bit about the experience of an FSM session. How is the device applied? How does the power or intensity of the frequency that's delivered compared to let's say a TENS unit that people might be familiar with?
[00:33:23] Dr. McMakin: Well, the microcurrent devices are categorized officially as if they are TENS devices by the FDA. That is for regulatory convenience and to keep just regulatory convenience. Microcurrent devices are battery operated, and so for the FDA, that means there are TENS. The current is a 1000 times less than TENS, 1000 times; it is the same kind of current that your body puts out on his own. So, we can use adhesive electrodes, I don't prefer those because they tend to prickle on the skin when the… even when 100 microamps goes across. So, as you've seen at the meetings, we use wet towels, they are… it requires a towel warmer and you attach the leads to the wet towel. Like if I'm treating somebody's spinal cord or vagus, wrap the towel around the neck because that way you, get at the whole spinal cord and both sides of the vagus. And if you're going to treat let's say fibromyalgia from the spine trauma, the other warm wet towel goes around the feet then you cover the patient up with a soft fuzzy blanket, and then the frequencies are applied. You can't feel the current, so the current is usually between 100… 150 microamps. For somebody that works out a lot there's a lot of muscle mass, we use 200 microamps. For professional and elite athletes, we use 3 or 400, and that's mostly because it makes the treatment go faster. If on children, if we're treating directly on their bodies, we… it's 60 microamps, use less current for a smaller patient. You use less current for a more frail patient. So, a 78-year-old that just got out of the hospital for a hip replacement or pneumonia or whatever, that tends to be between 60 and 80 microamps. So, lower current, use the adhesive pads, and then the practitioner will have a list of frequencies, there are suggested protocols when they leave the course, they have this book.
But it's really interesting, the treatment has to match the individual patient. So, you could have shoulder pain because you played tennis and you have a partial thickness rotator cuff tear, and that is treated with a different protocol so that you treat the partial thickness tear and then you treat the muscle and you repair the tendon and then that makes the muscle pain go away. But if you have shoulder pain because you are picking pairs in your uncle Ralph's orchard and uncle Ralph sprays pesticides and you don't metabolize pesticides well, the way to get rid of the trigger points in your shoulder would be completely different than the tendinopathy patient. You'd have to treat to quiet the nerve and you'd have to treat to remove the toxins from the fascia, and then all the shoulder pain goes away and that's better. So, that the frequency protocols have to match what the patient has.
So what's leg pain? You can have leg pain from sciatica, which we think of as being associated with the disc, you can have leg pain from the facet joints, the posterior joints in the spine, you can have leg pain from trigger points in the muscles in your glutes, and you can have leg pain from the individual joints. The practitioner has to use the protocol that is specific for what's causing your difficulty. So, that that's the part that's variable. 40, 50% of the FSM workshop or training course is differential diagnosis. So, the same thing like with the Crohn's patient, if I had not figured out by listening to the history that his problem had to do with parasites, if I had just treated him for inflammation, he would have gotten worse.
[00:37:40] Scott: Right.
[00:37:41] Dr. McMakin: So, the frequencies have to be correct, the setup is going to be so that the current runs through the area of interest. So, if you're treating the liver, you put 1 contact on the back, 1 contact on the abdomen, the current runs to the liver, ovaries. Shoulder is neck to hand, go back to leg, the towel will go under the low back and then down on the foot. Diabetic neuropathy is it goes from the knee to the foot.
[00:38:12] Scott: So, talking more about this low level of current and its effect on the body's ability to produce ATP or cellular energy, energy currency of the body what the mitochondria of our cells are producing, is it too much of a leap to say that if ATP increases from FSM that everything in the body then is upregulated and the body can better do all of the things that it inherently knows how to do?
[00:38:40] Dr. McMakin: I love the way you put that, yes. There's studies going…. 1982 was the first one, and it showed that just plain microcurrent, just plain DC current increased ATP production by 5 times in rat skin. That study was replicated in 2001 and then done in vivo in human lymphocytes in 2002, and consistently, it increases ATP production by 5 times, 500%. So, you would think that if you give the bo… and that current is going to flow through the interstitial water that is you, because you're a conductor, you're a semiconductor, then it will allow the body to do everything it does better. And specifically when we target the tissue with the frequencies, it's as if the current gives let's say the liver 5 times the energy that it had 5 minutes ago and it allows the liver to make the changes that the frequencies tell it to make.
[00:39:47] Scott: Yeah, I mean, this is really phenomenal. So, you see a lot of times, a lot of my listeners, Lyme disease is a fairly common issue that they're dealing with. And so, you know, we're familiar with the anti-this’s and the anti-that’s, and the way that I really see FSM is that it's more about fortifying, uplifting, increasing vitality, raising our vibration so that we can execute on that inherent design. So, is that a reasonable way to kind of think of it that we're really kind of raising our vibration through the use of Frequency Specific Microcurrent?
[00:40:19] Dr. McMakin: I'd say it's a good start, I mean, it's… it's yes, that happens, but the effects of the frequencies are so really incomprehensible, Scott. It's like in addition to just making you feel better, it… we really do have solid reproducible data that shows that we turn off… off inflammation, reduce LOX and COX inflammation by 62% in 4 minutes and every animal tested, and that lasts for anypla… it historically, clinically it lasts anyplace from 2 to 4 hours. During the time that the inflammation is reduced, that's where your model comes in, and that says that while we can turn the inflammation down, your whole body can begin to function better and recover. When we turn off nerve pain, it's off, you go from a 7 to a 1 out of 10 pain in 30 minutes.
[00:41:21] Scott: Wow.
[00:41:22] Dr. McMakin: It's… and that's for 20 years. So, when that happens, all of the stress centers in your brain get to recover, your digestion starts to recover, that part's good. And then lately in the last 2 years, when you can reboot the vagus, quiet the stress centers and reboot the vagus, the clinical improvement in the patient's condition is… it's breathtaking. I have trouble getting my head around it sometimes because it's been such a… I stayed away from treating the vagus for 20 years. The first patient I treated I was working in a cardiologists office after I was on functional medicine update in ‘99 or 2000, this cardiologist flew me down to his office in Beverly Hills and I spent the day working on cardiac patients. This patient came in and ventricular tachycardia, his heart rate was 140, and they had his pulse on a microphone, which made me really nervous. I'm a chiropractor, I don't treat patients in ventricular tachycardia, so I thought, “Well, the vagus lowers heart rate,” so, I ran the frequency to increase secretions in the vagus. This guy's heart rate went from 140 to about 70 in 20 seconds. It…
[00:42:42] Scott: Wow.
[00:42:43] Dr. McMakin: … it scared the heck out of me. Now, it wouldn't hold because we… I didn't have sense enough at the time to address… to use a second machine to address the irritability in the heart that was causing the problem in the first place, so they went and converted him. But it's kept me away from the vagus for 18 years, and then 2 years ago, one of our practitioners had been using it, she reported a result, I was like, “Hmm.” And now, it has become a standard, it changes everything. So, yes, it… we do help the body do what it does normally better, but very specifically, we have the ability to specifically change things, processes in the body that are problematic.
[00:43:29] Scott: So, just for people listening, you've mentioned channel A, channel B that there's 2 frequencies; and so I think that's one of the unique things about Frequency Specific Microcurrent. So, is it reasonable to see this as kind of channel A as the what, channel B is the where? So if we're removing…
[00:43:47] Dr. McMakin: Yes.
[00:43:47] Scott: … inflammation (the what) in the small intestine (the where), that's why there's 2 frequencies; what you're wanting to address and then the thing that you're wanting to address or the target of that specific frequency.
[00:43:59] Dr. McMakin: Exactly. And then experience has shown that both of those have to be correct. So, somehow it is the combination of the 2 frequencies that has an effect. And in physics it says that you have… in any field where there are 2 frequencies crossing or mixing, you have frequency from A, the frequency from B, the sum, and the difference. Historically… and this was just… it's just a matter of experience; so you treat A frequency on channel A. So, the first place was I was treating inflammation in the tendon on a football player and… at the Oakland Raiders, and Keith Pine was treating that patient, we pleaded inflammation in the tendon, he said, “I've been doing it for an hour and it's still sore.” Well, the tendon was fine, it was the bursa; you go off the tendon and there's this big tender bursa. And it's like, “Well, the frequency for the bursa is 195 Hertz, and the tendon is 191,” that's only 4 Hertz difference. Same channel A, reduce inflammation, we changed to the bursa, 195, the bursa went all smushy in 10 minutes, then you could feel where the tendon was attached to the bone (that's the periosteum), we changed to that frequency. And after 1 hour that didn't relieve the pain when you got the correct frequency for the where, then the condition corrected.
[00:45:33] Scott: There's so much talk these days about genetics, and I really like to look at things more as epigenetics and how we can influence our gene expression. So, could we say that Frequency Specific Microcurrent is essentially an epigenetic modifier of gene expression in the body?
[00:45:51] Dr. McMakin: That is exactly… if I could put that in print and tape, that is exactly what the data suggests that we're doing, because it is the only thing, it's the only model that accounts for all of the data. So, what we do in new injuries, historically, clinically, you have to apply the protocols to stop bleeding and repair trauma within 4 to 6 hours of the time of the injury. The only thing that's different… and then if you miss that 6-hour window, then you can accelerate the healing, reduce the pain, but it's not magical. That first 4 to 6 hours, the only thing that's different are the genes. There are genes that turn on immediately at the time of an injury and they are off at 6 hours, and they are turned on by bleeding in trauma; tissue fragments. If we turn off the bleeding, reduce the inflammation, repair the trauma in that first 4 to 6 hours, the healing is accelerated by double or triple; it's why we're so effective in sports medicine. But the only thing that explains that is just what you're saying, epigenetic transformation; we affect cell signaling, that ex… that changes cellular genetic expression and that changes epigenetic function. And one of our practitioners has come up with a model that is now quite testable, and her model is that what we're actually affecting is micro RNA, it’s not the messenger RNA so much as the micro RNA which establishes the protein configuration that is created by the messenger RNA. But you're… the phrase epigenetic expression is indeed what we're changing; that's what we think.
[00:47:40] Scott: I know one of the protocols that people talk about a lot with FSM is the concussion protocol. So, we know that when people have a traumatic brain injury, that that can play a significant role in chronic illnesses. How might FSM help to mitigate these traumatic brain injuries or concussions as a contributor to a chronic illness?
[00:48:00] Dr. McMakin: We started using the concussion protocol 25 years ago. It is a treating concussion in the medulla, which are what the frequencies are for and then addressing the pituitary. We've been doing that for 25 years and it is very effective in people with traumatic brain injuries. But if you think about the relationship between the medulla the vagus and the immune system, according to this old osteopath that gave us the concussion protocol, that is the loop that actually… that is the connection that actually predisposes somebody with not only a head injury, but even certain types of day-to-day stress. So, if you think of a… I mean, if you hit your head, that's clear that you have… you have shearing and injury in the medulla, and that can inflame the tracts that regulate the autonomic nervous system and the vagus and all of that; so head injuries are obvious. What is less obvious is the feedback loop or the way that we experience what this osteopath would call concussion, the way that we experience trauma that is not from direct head injuries. If you would in your mind sort of play back the video of when you came into an intersection on a green light and a large truck came speeding in front of you running his red light and missed you by 6 inches. So, “(Gasping)!” that stress response is literally peripheral to central. The sympathetic stress response just is this wave of neurotransmitter input through the vagus, up to the medulla that up regulates the stress centers in the brain, that's what causes the copper pennies taste in your mouth, the hyperventilation, the sweaty palms, all of that fear reaction is central. How did it get there? It's the vagus. So, the concussion can come from even day-to-day stresses, and the concussion protocol, the data that we have on it is limited, lots of it, thousands, millions of anecdotes, but the data that we have from NIH and the concussion protocol shows that it raises serotonin levels. So, the last 30 minutes of our NIH data was the concussion protocol. Pain came down, cytokines came down, serotonin actually came down while we were running the frequency to quiet the pain, serotonin came down. Then when we switched the concussion protocol, we published 6 of the cases, but I have data on 13. In all 13 patients, the pain was 0, serotonin stop dropping, turn around, went back up. What does serotonin do? Makes you feel better, makes you more flexible, it's like, “Okay, good, I'm not going to die, that's a good thing.” So, that's what the concussion protocol does, and it is… once you run it, you're… it is subtle but profound. So, in traumatic brain injuries, we treat not just the concussion protocol, but the cortex, the sensory and motor cortex in stroke patients and head injury patients. There's 1 frequency combination that takes down the body pain from thalamic pain syndrome from strokes in the thalamus. Doesn't work for midbrain strokes or a cord upper medulla injuries, but the thalamus itself, in 20 years, we haven't found anybody it doesn't work on. We haven't gotten anybody to publish anything on that yet because in… it's so hard to believe that it's going to work, that every time you use it, you kind of forget that it would be publishable, but it's so that when we work on the brain, it's very specific.
[00:52:08] Scott: Our environment over the years has become increasingly toxic, which adds to the complication of many different types of chronic illnesses. Is there a role for FSM in terms of assisting the body in its detoxification capacity, and then potentially, is there a place for it in those that are toxic from exposure to water damaged buildings?
[00:52:31] Dr. McMakin: That is complicated, but doable. There are frequencies for toxicity, there are frequencies for Mold that appear to help the immune system cope with it better. So, there are frequencies for toxicity that you can run on the liver and the brain, so these are environmental toxins, organic chemicals, pesticides, VOCs, those kind of environmental toxins. Those are fairly straightforward, lots of mileage. With those with Mold, those toxins are very specific. We have 2 frequencies for Mold, Mold toxins, and the experience we have is probably in double, almost triple digits at this point. You have to correct the environmental exposure. So, I have… I have gone through that. I lived in this this house that I have now, I bought it because it was completely Mold-free, no water excursions ever, and in the… and in the 5… 4, 5 year period, I had 3 different water leaks that resulted in Stachybotrys primarily. So, my own symptoms were gastroparesis, reflux, pancreatitis, pancreatic failure, all from Stachybotrys. So, I could use frequencies to reduce my stress response, I got my gag reflex back in a matter of 2 weeks instead of a year. We still had to do the binders, chlorella clay, charcoal, cholestyramine, and I was on antifungals, the itraconazole and fluconazole, and plus nasal spray because my sinuses were colonized. So, it's an adjunct that helps the patients survive while you do the remediation and while you take care of the infection that's in the body. Mold is complicated and I'm finally, after a kitchen remodel, the house is Mold-free and it's no longer quite the struggle, but the FSM is definitely helpful.
[00:54:56] Scott: Let's talk a little bit about shingles, that is a condition that people suffer with tremendous pain or even post herpetic neuralgia and can go on for months and months. My understanding is that FSM can… can really almost make shingles a non-issue. So, I'd like to hear a little bit about shingles.
[00:55:16] Dr. McMakin: Ah, that's my favorite because the thing with shingles is it shows up just as pain in the prodrome. The shingles prodrome is any place from 2 or 3 days up to a month depending on the patient. And in that prodrome, you just have wicked pain that follows a nerve root that most people don't think of shingles, they think of, “Oh, I lifted something and I have a rib out,” or, “My gall bladder is acting up,” or, “I've got an abdominal tumor,” whatever. So, the frequencies for shingles, we had one that we started out with in 1998, and that frequency, you could run in the prodrome, it would take the pain away in about 10 minutes. You had to run it for, we used to say an hour day for 3 days in a row. Each time, the pain would come down, and then after the third day, it just never came back, the blisters never break out. If there are blisters that have already occurred and the blisters are less than 2 weeks, so if you're in the first acute-phase, week 1 of the lesions, the frequency will take out the pain, the lesions dry up, we do a 2 to 3 to 4 hour treatment, the lesions dry up in 24 to 48 hours, they're gone, and you don't ever have Postherpetic neuralgia.
Starting in probably around 2009 and ’10, that frequency which had worked for what 12 years then, all of a sudden wasn't getting it; we were getting reports that it’s not looking. So, at first, it took us 3 months to verify that the machines were good and it wasn't the device is not running an accurate frequency, it was that the virus had mutated; possibly due to the vaccines, but that's another conversation. So, one of our… one of my colleagues has a way of dowsing for frequencies, and so he came up with a modification. So, instead of 230 and 430, it was 236 and 435, and that… those 2 work together for about another 3 or 4 years, and then starting 2 years ago, we ended up with the third frequency, but still the effect is the same. If you can get the frequency on during the prodrome, takes the pain away within 20 to 30 minutes. So, the way it works these days is use each of the frequencies for 30 minutes apiece, 20 minutes apiece, so all 3 frequencies run 20 minutes apiece in an hour and then you run it for 2 hours 3 days in a row, the pain goes away, doesn't come back, prevents the lesions from breaking out, or if the lesions have broken out, it dries them up in 24 to 48 hours. Postherpetic neuralgia is a different problem. So, acute shingles is like literally easy, kidney stone pain; different frequency, but literally easy. Postherpetic neuralgia is a problem because the virus has destroyed the nerve. So, you have to repair the nerve, and because the nerve has been disconnected from the spinal cord in the brain because the little virus bites in it (if you want to look at it that way), you have to treat the whole connection, so you have to treat the spinal cord, the brain, pain centers, the spinal cord, and the nerve all at one time; it is not a slam-dunk. We get about I'd say 70% recovery, close to 80 maybe, cranial nerves, not so much.
[00:59:17] Scott: Kind of continuing on for a second on the viral conversation, Dr. Klinghardt and others in the last couple years talked about this endogenous retroviral activation and how that kind of plays a foundational role in many different types of chronic illnesses. Do we know if there's a place for FSM in terms of silencing those endogenous retroviruses?
[00:59:38] Dr. McMakin: Well, no. We have a frequency for a malignant virus that we use one that we know there has been something viral pericarditis or viral encephalitis, that kind of thing. But I would suggest that everybody's got retroviruses.
[00:59:56] Scott: Mm-hmm.
[00:59:56] Dr. McMakin: And a retrovirus, by its very definition, has inserted itself into the cells. So, I have… I don't even know how to put it, but my conception of, “Well, everything that's really a problem that we can't fix is because of retroviruses that we can’t fix, so is it really the retroviruses or is it that this… the presence of whatever has turned on the stress centers, turned off the vagus, and we are confronted with a patient whose immune system doesn't make sense, whose inflammation doesn't make sense, whose pain response and stress response doesn't make sense?” And if you can say, “Oh, there's retroviruses and we can't fix retroviruses,” then, okay, then you're kind of off the hook, right, you have an explanation for why the patient's chronically ill and you have no way to fix it. We can strengthen this and that and, yes, it's going to take a long time. My response to that is, if it was a universal problem, we wouldn't have the success we have in treating SIBO, gastroparesis, chronic fatigue, and chronic pain, right? So if that was a totally limiting factor, one of these chronically ill patients that came in would be impossible to treat because of the retroviral activity, but I've got retroviruses, everybody does. I've been vaccinated when I was, you know, 6 or 8 in 1950 something, and we already know that those vaccines had retroviruses in them. And so there's… there's just… if the retroviruses has inserted itself into the cellular DNA and if we appeared to be able to affect cellular epigenetic expression the way we seem to, then the retroviruses don't seem to get in our way.
[01:02:07] Scott: Excellent. So, one of the things that I like to do in the podcast is kind of connect people with more challenging conditions to things they can explore, and go find an FSM practitioner for example. Interstitial cystitis is another issue that is really challenging for people, and oftentimes, they do lots of different things and don't always make a lot of progress. So, is there a role for FSM with interstitial cystitis?
[01:02:31] Dr. McMakin: Good question. One of our practitioners in 2000 let’s say 4 or 5 was a nurse practitioner who worked with her husband who was a urologist, Maggie, she developed a protocol… because they saw so many interstitial cystitis patients, she developed a protocol for interstitial cystitis. So, in our world, we think of interstitial cystitis kind of like our SD of the bladder. So, we… it takes 2 machines, one of them treats the spinal cord to reduce central sensitization and sympathetic flow, the other one treats from the front to the back to treat actually the bladder and the nerves to the bladder. And when you look at the vagus, the vagus has pain fibers. So, abdominal pain, bladder pain, that's vaguely mediated. So, you treat the spinal cord, you treat the nerve to the bladder, you treat the bladder itself for inflammation, and then anytime we use the frequencies for scar tissue, you have to move the tissue through the range. So, as you reduce inflammation in the bladder, reduce the pain response the nerves, the spinal cord in the brain and the vagus, reduced that, as the bladder fills, just before you let the patient use the restroom and empty it, you run the frequencies for scarring; scarring and fibrosis and hardening the bladder while it fills, so that stretches it. Universally, every time when the patient empties the bladder, they come back and say, “I held a lot more than I used to and the pain is down, doesn't hurt as much,” so, we treat them again. Now, the challenge that I've had is that, at least in my practice because I don't see those patients regularly, and since those patients don't expect to get better, they think it's a fluke, so getting an interstitial cystitis patient to come back in twice a week for 4 to 6 weeks to actually put it into remission, I've never successfully done that. We teach the interstitial cystitis protocol in every course seminar, which is just part of the standard because it is such a difficult condition, and the treatment’s so far knock on wood, we've never found anybody it doesn't work on. I don't know that we have a course completion, I know Maggie had good success with it.
[01:05:03] Scott: There is a lot of discussion these days on the limbic system as well as kind of the alarm center that maybe is responding in a way that is (you termed earlier) hyperactive or over reactive to a stressor, like you had Mold in your house, your limbic system responds a certain way, your house is now Mold-free, but your limbic system or alarm center responds to a very small amount of Mold in the same way that it’d respond to a significant amount of Mold. And so Dr. Neal Nathan talks about a number of things in his book in terms of rebooting the limbic system, so once you've addressed that initial trigger, how do we then get the body to stop over responding? So can we use Frequency Specific Microcurrent as a rebooting strategy for the limbic system?
[01:05:50] Dr. McMakin: That has been like the most… that is… that has been the most significant discovery in the last 2 years. Because what I've been talking about with the vagus, the first step in that, there is no point in turning the vagus on until you reboot the limbic system. So, the non-FSM ways of rebooting the limbic system take months and months, and with FSM, there's one frequency that covers the whole midbrain; the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus, so it covers the whole limbic system. And there is a frequency to quiet the activity of the midbrain. So, you run that and people that are under a lot of stress just zone out, then you quiet the sympathetics, then you quiet the medulla which is the reticular activating system which coordinates with the stress centers; so you have to deal with that whole track. And the reason that the limbic system is a problem is that the limbic system, the midbrain and the stress centers turn off the vagus. So, after we quiet the midbrain, we complete the chain, turn the vagus back on, and that seems to make the limbic system treatment more lasting because there's a feedback loop between the vagus and the limbic system. So, when the stress centers go to hyper react again, the vagus sends a signal up stream that says, “I don't know what your problem is, but we're doing fine down here. Chill out, dude.” So, it makes it last longer, and it has to be repeated, I had to use it a lot, like when I had the mold exposure, you can't turn the vagus back on in that case because you still have an infection. The… and the vagus is turned down during infection and trauma because the vagus suppresses the immune system, right? Once the infection is gone, then the problem is getting the stress centers to turn off and the vagus to turn back on it. So, you have to use it wisely because it is literally quite powerful and very immediate; it's real-time, right now. And then you then you do the other strategies that are in Neil's book about how to reboot the limbic system behaviorally to support that. You just… I run, quiet the limbic system, the concussion protocol, and restore vagal function 3 times a week on myself. My life was pretty stressful and it just keeps it all on even keel.
[01:08:32] Scott: We need that these days, for sure.
[01:08:33] Dr. McMakin: Yes, I should put it in the water.
[01:08:36] Scott: So, what happens, I'm sure people are wondering with the complexity of trying to match the frequency to the specific person to their condition in the right order and so on, what if you get the frequencies wrong with FSM? Is there any downside to that or does it just not work?
[01:08:53] Dr. McMakin: Usually, if the frequency is not correct, it doesn't do anything. There are specific frequencies under specific circumstances that you do not run period ever there, and that is covered multiple times all through the core seminar. For example, in the nervous system, if you have somebody that has had sensory and motor cortex stroke and you run the frequencies to increase secretions in the sensory and motor cortex, you can get rid of spasticity from the stroke, yeah. However, there is a frequency to increase secretions in the midbrain, the limbic system. I made a guy in a… man in a coma cry when I… the first I… first time I'd ever used it. We were… he had a hypoxic brain injury, we were trying to turn back on every part of his brain, I got to the frequency to increase secretions in the midbrain or the limbic system is, and his eyes filled up with tears, his chin quivered, and tears rolled down his cheeks, and it's like, “Okay ,we don't ever use that.” So, there's warnings everywhere that you just don't use that. It's out of all of our programs, so if somebody's stumbled across that and tried it, that could be a thing. Increasing secretions let's say in the spinal cord when somebody is experiencing this level 6 or 7 pain, well, one of the secretions in the spinal cord that you're going to increase the substance P so the pain could go up. Most of those are temporary. I… the man in the coma, I could… I reversed the effect by running a frequency to quiet the limbic system back down, so that was… it's a very temporary response. But those are… every… every difficulty we've ever had running a frequency is covered in the course seminar, it's repeated and everything they get. Kidneys for example, well, there's a frequency for increasing secretions, and the kidney is an endocrine organ, and the students were warned from day 1, “You do not increase secretions in the kidney. It's too important, they affect things like blood formation, blood pressure, mineral balance, and you don't… there's 5… 4 different secretions from the kidney and you don't want to increase all 4 of them, you don't get to pick which one's going to increase, so we just don't do that.” That's… those kinds of responses are very particular, but the rest of it, if your leg pain is from facets and somebody treats the nerve, it's not going to hurt you, right? So if they just simply treat the wrong thing, it's not a problem.
[01:11:42] Scott: So, for people listening and potentially excited about what they're hearing in the podcast and wanting to explore FSM, how do they find somebody, and then is there an option where they can then work with their practitioner and continue to do the sessions at home while they're in collaboration with their practitioner?
[01:12:00] Dr. McMakin: Yes. So, we have a website, frequencyspecific.com, and the practitioners that are listed on that website have subscribed to the website; we had to make it subscription to make the list more accurate. So, we have many more practitioners than are listed, but the ones that are there are actively doing FSM. And so the practitioner works with you, you're having success, and you need independence and maintenance. So, like the Ehlers-Danlos patients, that's temporary, they have to be treated every 4 to 5 days, and there's no reason they have to come see me to do it because it's so easy. There's no techno… technique involved. So, we… there are the device company, which is separate than the seminar company, has home devices that the practitioner can program for things like Ehlers-Danlos or nerve pain or fibromyalgia from spine trauma or concussion or sleep or shingles or new injury. I programmed a unit yesterday for one of my patients who's having knee surgery today, so she will put that unit on right after her surgery and she will not bruise and her recovery time will be cut in half. So, those are important, they… there's money involved and insurance doesn't usually cover them because the devices are around $2000, $3000, $2500, and as far as the insurance company's concerned, you can get a TENS unit for 100 bucks and it's… right, and it's classified as if it's a TENS. But most patients see the economic benefit in it and just what it's going to save you in co-pays and office visits and medication, and you get your life back, so it's usually something that patients are willing to do.
[01:13:46] Scott: And these are the Custom Care, correct, that's the home unit?
[01:13:51] Dr. McMakin: Right.
[01:13:51] Scott: Yeah, I think this… this whole conversation on FSM, it's so exciting, so many things that potentially can be done with this kind of technology. And I personally have just started exploring it recently with a local practitioner after having talked with you at one of the conferences earlier this year, and I wish it was something I had explored more many, many years ago. The one opportunity I had to do it, the practitioner was several hours away and just didn't get a chance to pursue it. But I've heard so many of the people that I really respect, Dr. Neil Nathan, Dr. Dave Ou, the list goes on and on, that have really found FSM to be a phenomenal tool. And so if people listening are interested, I definitely encourage them to go to the website and look and see who's near you and reach out and try to learn more about how you potentially can incorporate that into your routine.
[01:14:41] Dr. McMakin: And we also have… there's a YouTube channel for Frequency Specific, things like complex regional pain syndrome, RSD, there are webinars for practitioners, but there are webinars for the public that go into a little more depth in… into the mechanisms and case reports and things we’re good at treating; so that's also available. Then there's ‘The Resonance Effect’, the book, that has been a great resource to get patients to understand and get a feel for what FSM does.
[01:15:11] Scott: Yeah, and it's fantastic too, the book. In preparing for this podcast and having already been exposed to FSM, I learned a lot from it. So, if people feel drawn to learn more about it, the book is ‘The Resonance Effect’, I'll put the link in the show notes as well so that you can find, there's a website, theresonanceeffect.com, and really goes into a lot more detail on the conversation that we're having today. So, the last question that I have is the same for every guest, and that is, what are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?
[01:15:42] Dr. McMakin: Oh, well, I take supplements, gluten-free diet. The things that you do in integrative or functional medicine with diet nutrition to support the stable state, you drink 1 to 2 quarts of filtered water a day, but honestly, given my personal health history and the Mold exposure and the jaw infection and the whatever, if I had not had FSM to help modulate my immune system, my digestive system, my nervous system, the endocrine system, I don't think I'd be here; cardiac system. So, that's what I do is FSM and sensible supplements, and when I need an expert like Neil Nathan or Roger Billica or Michael Gray or whoever, you seek… or David Musnick, you seek that help out, you follow their advice; Shirley Hartman. And…
[01:16:37] Scott: You’re throwing out some really good names there.
[01:16:40] Dr. McMakin: Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're just like I… they… I've been so lucky to meet these really talented, passionate, educated, intelligent people. And the fact that they see the value with FSM and it's just obvious to them, that's quite an honor and it's a testimony to what FSM is… has to offer as an adjunct in anybody's healthcare. It's almost like, I wouldn't say nothing scares you, but it takes the… some of the uncertainty and fear out of just day-to-day living. My… my dear friend had an accident last Friday that totaled his car, he got hit side impact, it tipped the car over, they pulled him out through the sunroof, had a head bump, didn't know what year it was, they called our office telling… because he's associated with us, and the office staff grabbed a custom care and a magnetic converter and they were out the door before we got off the phone with… they got off the phone with the police. They treated him in the… in an emergency room in between x-rays, he's 85 years old, he has no pain, no bruising, and they head… the head bump, the concussion, it's already better, it's done, he's back to normal. This is… what day is this? This is Tuesday? Wednesday? Whatever day this is, it's less than a week, he should be a mess, but it takes the fear out of it because you have, “I could fix that, I have a way of… I have a way around that.” So…
[01:18:22] Scott: Yeah, fantastic.
[01:18:23] Dr. McMakin: Yeah.
[01:18:24] Scott: Well, I want to thank you for being generous with your time today, for sharing all that you do with Frequency Specific Microcurrent, for your training classes, for being at all these events and really sharing. I know you spoke at our forum for Integrative Medicine just a couple months ago in Seattle and it was fantastic to have you there.
[01:18:39] Dr. McMakin: It was great.
[01:18:39] Scott: I think this is a great tool and definitely encourage people to explore it. And thank you for everything that you've done, you've made such a big difference in so many people's lives in bringing this technology to the world, and so I honor you and thank you for that.
[01:18:54] Dr. McMakin: Oh, thank you so much, it's been an honor to be able to participate and to assist in anybody's healing or improvement in their life; that is… that is an honor too. And thanks so much, you've been wonderful.
[01:19:07] Scott: Thanks, Dr. McMakin. Be well.
[01:19:08] Dr. McMakin: Have a good day.
[01:19:10] Scott: To learn more about today's guests, visit theresonanceeffect.com, that's theresonanceeffect.com; theresonanceeffect.com. Thanks for your interest in today's show. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there as Better Health Guy. To support the show, please visit betterhealthguy.com/donate. If you'd like to be added to my newsletter, visit betterhealthguy.com/newsletters, and this and other shows can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify.
[01:19:49] Outro: Thanks for listening to this Better Health Guy Blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott's personal journey to better health, please visit betterhealthguy.com.
Disclaimer
The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.
