Reduce Your Pain With Micro Currents

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah, thanks for having me, Roger. I’m happy to be here.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

He will tell me microcurrent people have microcurrent some people are familiar with that. Most people probably aren’t. What is microcurrent?

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah, so a lot of people, a lot of people think of Microcurrent and they maybe they compare it to like tens units, some sort of electrical medicine. They think of it as something that’s very unnatural. But the truth is that Microcurrent is in everyone’s bodies. From the moment we are born, our body runs electrically. Our nervous system communicates by sending signals from our brain to different parts of our body. And these signals can be, you know, muscle contraction, general function, even, you know, your heart should beat things like that. But it can also be to turn on or off pain signals. So when people talk about microcurrent therapy, what we’re actually talking about is accessing someone’s natural body system and essentially taking control of that innate power to heal the body. And I’m constantly telling clients that, you know, you are designed biologically to heal. So when you are not healing, something somewhere has gone horribly wrong because you’ve done it your whole lives. So there’s this concept of cellular voltage, whether the cells can reach a particular voltage level to be able to actually take action and move within the body. Or do they not reach and do they not reach it enough times that they fail and they die? And then you end up with disease being created by the death of cells. So ultimately, at the foundation of who we are is this electrical system. And when we don’t nurture that, we are falling out of whack and we’re really setting ourselves up to create disease within the body.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So really, we are an electrical system. I mean, we’re much more than that. But I mean, our bodies really run on this innate inborn electrical system that we have inside of us, which is how our body is communicating with the different cells and different systems in the body. Now, people would associate that with the nervous system. I mean, that’s part of it. I mean, that’s a big part of it, but it’s more than just the nervous system. But when you start talking about this electrical system, I get this this mental picture of people with a tinge unit and thinking, Oh yeah, well, I’ve used a, you know, I’ve used one of those things and didn’t give me much relief. But Microcurrent is really different in so many levels than it’s engineered.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

It is. Yeah. And I mean that according to the FDA, they are they said that one in the same there’s no difference between microcurrent and tense which creates a lot of problems for telling people about what they do. But the difference in, say, our Microcurrent device and your standard tens unit is that our the signals we put out, even at our highest program, would be about a thousand times weaker in electricity than the lowest program in a tens unit. So what a tense unit is really trying to achieve is to provide pain management. And the way it does this is it tries to put so much electricity into your nervous system that it numbs it kind of like overloads it or even maybe described that as paralyzing it so that it doesn’t feel the pain signals anymore. 

The problem with this is that over time, first off, the way that tens units are designed often is to get them in this under this really cheap category where they’re really affordable and they’re a mass market item. And so that means a lot not a lot of time has gone into the engineering of them. So the waveforms that they create the tens in the tens units usually don’t even reach what is natural in the body. So the body’s looking at it and thinking, okay, well that’s weird. That’s not me. So in and of itself, the body can start to resist that. The other downside is, is that if you put electricity into different areas of your body with its hands, you could actually do damage to your nervous system, that they actually have a lot of recommendations that kind of stay on the limbs, stay away from the organs with hands. Microcurrent is not the same because Microcurrent allows us to put these gentle body friendly frequencies into that, into you that you already have in there and make your body think, oh my, my brain is asking me to do this. And so then the body takes action. It’s kind of like we have this tool that we can actually hack the body with and hack that innate healing system. And the brain just thinks, Oh, well, that’s made. And so it does what it needs to do. It sends the anti-inflammatory signals, it triggers regeneration, it calms someone, puts them into a parasympathetic state because it’s really what your body could do if it was functioning optimally. And tens of units just it’s very important to me to make that distinction. A lot of people will just say, oh, it’s the same thing. But I’ve seen people go and use like a tens unit on their vagus nerve and they have caused that has taken 6 to 7 months to get them back to normal because there’s just so much more electricity and it is not really safe for the body at all.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. So the ten unit, ten unit is certainly can be effective and it can be helpful, but it’s very crude form of this technology, whereas the MICROCURRENT is is certainly much more sophisticated and because of that can yield, I think, dramatic results oftentimes especially with chronic pain and especially in calming down the vagus nerve. And I explain the tingling. It is as you were talking about, there’s no receptive responses where it’s overwhelming. You know, it’s kind of like when you hit your funny bone, which is never funny, but you hit your funny bone and they tell you, rub it out. You’re overwhelming those receptor sites that then cause you not to feel the pain. You’re kind of it’s a distraction with the microcurrent. It’s really kind of contributing to the the communication system and maybe riding it or making it go in a direction that’s going to yield a positive result, whatever that whatever. You dial that in because there’s different settings on this, there’s different wavelengths that you set there. So depending on what you’re trying to do, you can dictate that conversation.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

That’s right. Yeah. The body speaks to itself in frequencies. So we know that like, you know, for example, seven hertz repairs, bone, 13.6 repairs, muscle. So when we register what the body signals are, what it sends, when it’s operating on that healing level, or what does it use to turn down pain? And we register those frequencies and we put them into this program and then we put them into the scan, essentially just through this, like gentle tingle. You feel the nervous system just thinks, okay, well, it’s telling me to heal bone. So Brain wants me to do this, let’s get started. And so the accelerated healing process is huge and the ability to kind of just shut down pain and snap is there because it’s the same way your brain could if it needed to. It could stop you feeling that pain in the moment. And that’s what you see with Firefly, right? You enter that final flight mode and suddenly that broken leg doesn’t matter right now, because what matters is you got to get out of here before you get hurt. So if we can get the brain to we can control the brain and the mind, we have control over the body and we know how powerful that can be.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So several interviews have kind of focus on this idea that with fibromyalgia, that the brain gets overwhelmed, the the pain signals become habitual, that you can’t get out of you get in this groove and you just can’t get out of that. And with this technology that you’re sharing, it’s a way to change that, to break that loop, that feedback, so that now the body can realize, okay, I’m not under, you know, I can change this conversation that I’m having, which is telling me I’m have all this pain. I can change that communication to realize that I don’t have as much pain as maybe I’m thinking I do.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

That’s not the best explanation I know. But I want to be cautious because I don’t want to get too nerdy because with some of this. Because it really doesn’t it can be some people are thinking, you know, is this even is this even mainstream medicine? And so I guess we need to point out that this is been around for decades. It’s different mainstream medicine.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah, it’s been around for a long time. I mean, microcurrent in this iteration was being used in the early nineties and so we were, we were seeing like for me it was used on me as a kid. So it’s been part of my life forever. As long as I can remember. And so it’s just this innate thing that to me it’s just a thing that exists and everyone should have it right. And it has certainly evolved and microcurrent and other forms is well over 100 years old. We have like old machines that you’re like a crank to create electricity. Even so like back in ancient Egypt, they used electric eels medically to reduce and eliminate inflammation. 

So electricity in the form of medicine has been around for a very, very long time. And it’s building up to this thing where people do take notice of that. We see we use our equipment in the Veterans Affairs hospitals in the U.S., right. So it’s accepted there. We are doing clinical trials on wound healing. So it really is that there’s a lot of foundational benefits to it and it is getting noticed more. The issue I see is that it’s never going to replace mainstream medicine because when you’re creating technology that gives the ability to heal and you are saying that once you own it, you own it and all, it’s going to cost you is a couple of batteries. Every few months you’re going against the grain of what pharmaceutical companies want and the pharmaceutical microcurrent devices that are out there and there are a few are extremely expensive and there’s a few that are $35,000 or so. I’ll do one thing, one feature, they stimulate your tongue to treat your brain. That’s one of them. Another is a vagus nerve stimulator. 

It’s not super expensive to begin with, but what you end up doing is you pay for a prescription each month to keep using every dose costs you money. So what I’m kind of going out with this is that it’s not, unfortunately as effective as it’s showing to be. It’s not been found in such a way so far where it’s monetizable by the people that are really in charge of everything. But all we can do is just keep pushing the message out there and letting people know that there’s this thing that can heal you. It can take control of your body, and it can allow you to get better. And you would be the healer again. You would no longer be reliant on doctors, so to speak.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Now, you know, so 30 years ago, when I went through my training as part of my medical degree, we studied Microcurrent. And I remember in my practice we had this giant. We had this giant. I mean, now because I’m going to show yours in just a minute. I mean, you know, this was a big box. That was the Microcurrent. You know, we hook patients up to that and we got good results. But that technology is so advanced now in the last 30 years. So now you see, I mean, routinely you see people sports athletes on the sideline with a little bitty micro stem curve, you know, on their thigh or on their shoulder or whatever, waiting to get back in the game. 

I mean, the technology has dramatically changed over the last 30 years. In fact, you know, hold up. You got up. You’ve got a little device there a bit. Yeah. You can see how small this is. I mean, this is something you carry around in your pocket you can wear. Is that this big breadbox or whatever that I’m used to now, let me ask you something. So we’re talking about fibromyalgia, obviously, and how this can help block pain. But what other conditions is microcurrent good for?

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I get asked this question a lot and it’s become easier to say, well, what? Isn’t it good for them? What it is? Because there’s really when you’re dealing with your body’s electrical system as the form of dysfunction, because it’s not turning off pain, it’s not allowing you to heal, then this can really help with almost anything. Things we kind of avoid treating directly would be like cancer. The reason being for that is that a cancerous tumor, if you have an active tumor, May wants to eat the blood cells that are around it to grow. And with microcurrent we see we’re actually increasing circulation by nearly 500% with my basic treatment. So we in theory feeling that we don’t want to do that. So we would avoid treating that there. We don’t treat women in the first or second trimester of pregnancy. There’s a lot of acupuncture points that can cause problems if you stimulate them in that way. So we just avoid that. And people with pacemakers, we don’t treat there directly. But really any condition that someone has, there is something that you can do electrically to reduce that pain, get that regeneration started. So many people. What about this condition? What about this one? And you know, Roger, they all end in excess, which is inflammation, right. So we’re looking at this machine that can turn off inflammation. It doesn’t really matter what the condition is, what your diagnosis says, you can take action on that body.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So how does microcurrent how does it affect the vagal nerve? So this was this is on we’ve had this conversation before. There have been several people that have been here on the summit. We’ve talked a lot about the vagal nerve and its importance. What it does, especially in fibromyalgia, where we know the sympathetic nervous system is on overdrive and the person the nervous system is really kind of dormant. What is why is the vagus nerve so special?

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah. So the vagus nerve vagus means. And maybe it’s already been explained. Vagus means wandering. So it’s called the wandering nerve because it actually touches almost every internal organ in your body. And so we know that the gut sends more signals to the brain than the brain does to the gut. And the vagus nerve is part of that reason. So you’ve got this communication pathway that essentially triggers whether or not your final flight will activate. Are you going to panic? And then you don’t need to digest anymore, right? So we’re going to put the brakes on that. We’re going to panic, we’re going to run and all of that stuff. Even healing is not essential if we’re trying to survive. So with the vague is not what science has found because the goddess was discovered this they were playing around with drugs on a mouse and they accidentally severed the vagus nerve and they realized that with the vagus nerve not there, the rat wasn’t feeling pain. So they started to experiment with that without suffering. 

Ex Obviously that’s not what we want to do, but what they discovered is that this brief electrical stimulation actually shuts down the production of inflammation in the body. So not only can it calm you down and put you in a parasympathetic state if you use the right frequencies so you can exit, fight or flight mode and you can actually relax. But it’s blocking that inflammatory production in the spleen. So if someone has full body pain, which fibromyalgia often can be like in lots of different places, then it can get tedious to say, take your microcurrent machine and treat each point that hurts. But with the vagus nerve we don’t have to. We treat one area in the neck and we are affecting the whole body on an inflammatory level. We’re reducing that inflammation. People will find that there that shift. It can make a difference with almost any condition and with my dissertation, most many of the people had other issues as well as their pain, whether it was, you know, chronic diarrhea, IBS, things like that that we saw start to resolve themselves as well because all of all of this functionality in the body of that lack of healing is often due to this fight or flight stay. 

And as you mentioned, people in pain, fibromyalgia or beyond, if they’re in chronic pain of any kind, they’re spending so much time frightened of that pain. And even if they wake up feeling good, they’re worried in the back of their mind, where am I going to start to feel bad again? So they’re consistently living in that fight or flight mode, and you cannot heal in fight or flight because that is not what it’s designed for.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

So we can pull them out of that mode. We can actually trigger that healing to happen, we can reduce that inflammation, and we can just all around fix people’s problems.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So with fibromyalgia, they’re often in this wired and tired state where they’re just feel just totally stressed out, a lot of anxiety just because of the illness and they get in this this groove. They can’t they can’t get out of it by stimulating the vagus nerve. You can tone that down and tone down this the sense of I don’t want to say panic, but, you know, feeling just anxious and stressed out. And several people can talk about different exercises that can be done to this with the Microcurrent. It is something that you do routinely is it’s a daily thing that you do to keep that pattern. Yeah. In the right form that is supposed to be.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah. I mean there’s a lot of, there are a lot of exercises out there. And unfortunately what I found is that a lot of them require someone to be able to calm down, to get to that state like, you know, meditations gargling, you know, deep breathing, even like that can be a challenge for people when they’re in pain and when they’re freaking out. But when you do something like microcurrent vagus nerve, what you’re doing is you’re doing brief stimulation of the nerve and you’re actually forcing the change. If you’re not relaxed, it doesn’t really matter because you’re signaling the body to make that change. So really what you do is you take your little like attachment, you put it on your neck and you stimulate it for 3 minutes and then you take it off. We do typically recommend 3 minutes up to four times per day so that you’re kind of the goal being you don’t have to do this forever. You’re training your vagus nerve. You want to change the tone of that so that it’s more relaxed and then you will not you’ll find that the go to response will no longer be panic, fight or flight. You’ll start to train that out of the nerve. And we’ve got to realize that it wasn’t like someone woke up one day and felt this way. Right. They they’ve gradually gotten to that point. So we got to gradually bring them back. And if we can change the way the vagus nerve responds when someone experiences a trauma or stress, we will prevent reoccurrence and flare ups. That’s happening as well. So it’s something that is recommended to do daily. But once you’ve trained the nerve, you won’t have to do it every day.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So this process is really resetting the nervous system and that everybody’s different. So you really can’t probably can’t tell what would be specifically for fibro or that person. But what’s average? What’s average, yeah. We talk in three months, we talk in a month, we talk. I mean, what would be typical?

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

So I find if people are wanting to wean themselves off of vagus nerve stimulation, they want to be doing it consistently for a month to six weeks, and then they can start to knock it down and see how they’re doing. Some people, as you said, everyone is different. It’s totally it depends on how stressed they are, what their perception is of their situation. All of these things can have an impact. But when we go in and we do that, we are really looking at with not looking at a three month thing here we are looking at it being shorter than that.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. Now somebody some of the questions I’ve gotten for my patients have to do with the technology itself, how, you know, that it may be intimidating and and listen, I’m not a tech person think they have a 14 year old that can fix, you know, the computer and the TV and work the remote and all that. But what I share with our patients is when I recommending your unit is just the ease with which to use them. And they’re very simple to use, right? Yeah, complicated.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

We’ve designed them to be used by home users. We used to we used to kind of focus on practitioners and then you own all the complex stuff and a lot of the time practitioners want it so complex that patients can’t, you know, really use it. But what we’ve noticed over the last like bunch of years is that people just want to get better and that they could they could go to a practitioner and they could spend 200 bucks a session and they could have paid for that device. And like a week or so, you know, like that about a in a couple of weeks. So like they could they could get control of their own health and that’s where we want to go. Yeah. So we simplified the devices to the point where we have a one button device. You’re essentially pressing the button and you’re seeing where the line highlights and you say, okay, that’s the note I need to use. Follow the video, follow the manual. That’s the treatment I’m doing. And we’ve even gotten to the point now where we have a team of four treatment coordinators, so everyone gets assigned their own coordinated, fully trained with the equipment so they have one on one support in using it. And that goes right down to being able to get on a zoom call like you and I are on right now and actually see, you know, the person use it on themselves and I’ll know you’re doing it a bit wrong. Let me help you with that. So the issues of like usability really don’t exist anymore because it’s just been simplified. 

And then we’ve, we’ve done everything we can from diagrams, manuals, videos to the one on one support, which really means as well, what if something isn’t working for someone, which isn’t uncommon because again, everyone’s different. You have a person who can say, okay, well, this is the next thing we try. So you’re not relying on a general protocol written down and saying, Oh, this didn’t work for me. You’re relying on a person that can see you as an individual and adjust the plan accordingly.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So you’re pain free for life dot com. Is that right. Payments for people I own there there’s quite a bit of information, much more detail we share today. And if I remember right, there’s a report that people can get for free and really go into a lot of detail. Explain this. And this technology is, as Dr. Robb mentioned, it’s been around for decades. I remember Robert Becker, the Body Electric, when we started talking about the body’s electrical system. There was a book I read probably 40 years ago and then Gerber Vibrational Medicine that was probably I read that book probably, you know, 25 years ago. 

We’re finally getting to the point now that this has bled over into conventional daily medicine, whether we’re trying to rehab a broken bone, build bone that has been impacted by osteopenia, osteoporosis, or we’re trying to block pain and it’s now becoming a very common therapy that people are now starting to see and ask questions about. And fortunately, it’s something that you can cure now. You know, you can read in your hand or your pocket, whereas before these big giant units, I really think the technology, the science, it’s it’s really has made strides over the year. We just got to get the message out to people so they can understand there’s another option for them out there to help with their chronic pain other than, you know, pain medications and some of the things that, you know, there’s just certainly a time and a place for those. But long term, that’s really not the answer.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah, exactly. And I think that that’s the goal that we put the message out there and we can make people realize that they have an option that is there that, again, as you said, this isn’t it’s not like voodoo here. It’s real, it’s science, it’s convention. It’s in the conventional medical world that is not 100% sure what to do with it. And it has been around for a long time. And things have certainly changed. We don’t even need like you used to need water. You’d have to buy wet towels to make the electricity, candles or a bunch of ultrasound gel. Now, you don’t even need that, right?

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

So things have changed. Things are definitely where they should be now. We just need to really make sure people know that this is an option. That’s what this is all about.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. So I want to encourage the viewers here to check out Dr. Robb’s website, Pain Free for Life. There’s a lot of free resources on there. A number of articles, your podcasts you just started. I’m excited about that for you. Looking forward to being on there. But I want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing this. I think incredible, invaluable information gives people another option who, you know, they’re looking to reduce their pain. And so this has been great. Thank you so much.

Dr. Rob Vanbergen

Yeah. Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.