Why Your Pain Never Really Left

You know the pain I mean.

Maybe it's your knee. Maybe it's a hip, a shoulder, or a back that hasn't let you sleep properly in years.

You saw a doctor. You had it looked at. You were told it's wear and tear, or that this is just what happens as you get older.

So you live with it. You've tried a pill or two. Maybe you've already had surgery. And it's still there.

Here's why: the actual cause was probably never checked. It has to do, of all things, with a scar. Quite possibly your belly button. Bear with me.

Nobody on the pill-and-knife side of medicine will tell you this, because they were never taught it.

The three answers you've probably already heard

A pill, first. It dulls what you feel, but it isn't built to fix what's underneath.

If the pill doesn't hold, the next answer is the knife. Surgery has its place, and if it will save your life, have it. But if it's your back, be careful. Rob's seen patients go in for one operation and come out, years later, on their fortieth. It starts with one, and you become an ATM for the rest of your days.

And if the knife doesn't work either, you get the third answer: "There's nothing more we can do."

That sentence doesn't mean nothing can be done. It means the person saying it has run out of ideas, and it's one of the worst things a doctor can say to you.

Further down this page, you'll meet a man who was told exactly that, and told he'd end up paralysed. He was walking again within a week.

The man with the fourth answer

The Rob I keep mentioning is Dr. Rob Van Bergen. He holds a doctorate and a PhD in natural medicine, wrote his dissertation on the vagus nerve, and grew up around microcurrent: his parents helped bring it to North America, and he was treated with it himself instead of being handed a painkiller. He runs Pain Free For Life, a team of full-time treatment coordinators who work with people in exactly the kind of pain you're dealing with.

In a webinar with my readers, Rob and I spent an hour and forty minutes on the device I've been calling for years "a hospital in your hand." You can watch it further down this page. First, here are the two things he told me that I most want you to hear.

What is actually in the way

Your body is designed to heal. It has done so all your life. You broke a bone and it knitted. You cut yourself and it closed. So the sensible question, the one almost nobody in a white coat thinks to ask, is this: what is STOPPING your body from doing what it has always done?

Rob's answer is one word. Inflammation.

He puts it bluntly. The research now shows that over 80 percent of chronic pain and disease comes back to inflammation. I have been saying much the same for decades. Here is the part that matters for your knee.

Inflammation has a time and a place. A sprain swells and goes hot, and that is the healing process getting started. Then it is supposed to switch off. When it does not switch off, it sits there, and while it sits there your tissue CANNOT regenerate. Rob's words: it is literally impossible to rebuild tissue in the presence of inflammation. I have written the same sentence in my own newsletters. Just remember that.

So what do we do about it? We take something for it. Which brings me to the mask.

A painkiller does not touch inflammation. It switches off your awareness of it. Rob's picture for this is the best I have heard. You walk into your bedroom and the bed is on fire. You close the door. Now you cannot see the fire. Has it gone out? Of course not. It is still burning, still doing damage, and one day it takes the house. That is what a pill does for chronic pain. It shuts the door. The inflammation carries on underneath, breaking down the structure of the joint, and the body has to shout louder and louder to get your attention. That is the day "sore" becomes "chronic".

For what it is worth, Rob counted 197 listed side effects for paracetamol, and one of them is the development of a pain disorder in one person in ten. You will not find that on the bottle.

Rule number one, which nobody has told you

This is the part that made me sit up.

Rob's first rule of microcurrent, before you treat anything else, is: clear your scars.

Not just the surgical ones. Every dental extraction. Every ear piercing. Every tattoo. The sprained ankle from years ago, the whiplash from a fender-bender, the wrist you broke falling off a bicycle at nine. Your belly button, which is the first scar you ever got. Anything the body has repaired, inside or out, it has repaired with scar tissue.

Here is why that matters. Every one of the trillions of cells in your body talks to its neighbours electrically, at a level we call microcurrent. Scar tissue is dry tissue. It does not conduct. So the signals have to find another way round, and the wiring under that sore spot has been working badly for years without anybody knowing.

The good news is almost comical. It takes about three minutes to treat a scar with the right frequencies, and you only have to do it once. The collagen fibres realign, water gets back into the tissue, and the tissue conducts again. You will not necessarily watch the scar vanish. Medically, you do not need it to. You need it cleared.

Nobody has ever checked yours. I would put money on it.

The recording

A webinar with Dr. Rob Van Bergen. It starts where he explains what's actually stopping your body from healing.

The spot that hurts is often not the problem

The second thing.

Rob's more advanced device, the Pinnacle, can read tissue. You touch it to the skin and two seconds later you have a number. Under 25 is degeneration. Between 25 and 35 is normal. Over 35 is inflamed.

Take a chronic ankle. It hurts where it is red, so the obvious thing is to treat where it is red. Rob reads it. Thirty-nine. Inflamed, as expected. Then he checks just above it. Fifty-two. And below, for good measure. Twenty-seven, normal.

Fifty-two is higher than thirty-nine. The pain is being REFERRED from above. Treat the red spot and you get a day's relief and then it comes back, which, if you have chronic pain, is a story you already know by heart. Treat the fifty-two and the problem is taken out at its source.

Twenty seconds of touching the device around your arm and you know exactly where the trouble lives.

So what is this thing?

I should say what microcurrent is, because people hear "electricity" and think of a TENS unit.

A TENS unit is a nerve paralyser. It sends roughly a thousand times more current than these devices, in order to numb the nerve so it stops reporting the pain. That is the mask again, with a battery.

Microcurrent is the opposite idea. It uses the same tiny electrical signals your body already runs on, the signals that get your hand off a hot stove before you have had time to think about it. It has a conversation with the body in the body's own language, and asks it to switch the inflammation off and start repairing. Rob's word for it is regeneration.

The simplest use is the one I have written about for years. Three minutes on the side of the neck, a few times a day, over the vagus nerve. The vagus is the great wandering nerve that connects your brain to every major organ, and stimulating it is the body's own off-switch for inflammation. Scientific American put that on its cover in 2015. Orthodox medicine's version involves opening your neck and implanting an electrode, at twenty or thirty thousand dollars a time when the battery dies. This version involves a tingle.

One more thing Rob gets asked constantly. "I'm 95, surely it won't work on me?" Your electrical system does not wear out the way people imagine. There is no too late.

Rob's team works with two versions of the device: the Evolution, built for home use, and the Pinnacle, the more advanced one with the tissue reading you just read about. Which one fits your situation is worth asking them directly.

For the record: these devices are cleared by the FDA for the relief of chronic, intractable pain, cleared by Health Canada, and carry the CE mark in Europe. Cleared is the word the FDA uses for devices. Approval is the word it reserves for drugs. It is the same device wherever you live, it runs on two AA batteries, and only the paperwork changes at the border.

For the women reading this, and for the men

My readers are mostly women, with a stubborn minority of men, so let me say it plainly. Nearly every question that came up in the webinar applied to both.

Knees and hips. Backs. Neuropathy, the burning or dead feeling in the feet. Sleep, and the three o'clock wake-up. Rob's rule of thumb: if the name ends in "itis", that is simply the Latin for inflammation, and inflammation is where he starts. Old dental work, and it turns out those extraction sites and root canals are scars too. None of it cares whether you are a man or a woman.

Ladies, there is one more. Forty years ago I coined a phrase for something I saw in practice again and again. The hot pelvis. Inflammation, often with infection, that sets up in the pelvis after years of monthly misery or a hard birth and never quite leaves. It can linger for decades. Rob has protocols for it. I would not raise it if he did not.

Gentlemen, the prostate came up too, and Rob's team have protocols there as well. Ask them.

Three people, in their own words

I promised you proof, and I would rather you heard it from the people themselves. These are the three hardest cases Rob knows of, worked on by people who know the device inside out. Nobody is promising you their result. They are here to show you what the technology can do.

What I will not promise you

I refuse to overpromise, so let me be exact. These devices are cleared for the symptomatic relief of chronic, intractable pain. They are not a cure for anything, and I will not pretend otherwise. The three people above are the hardest cases Rob knows of, and they are here to show you the ceiling, not the average. If you have a pacemaker or another electronic implant, read the first question below before you do anything. And if you ring Rob's team and they tell you it is not for you, believe them. They turn people away.

What I will say is this. If a doctor has looked you in the eye and told you there is nothing more to be done, that was the limit of their training, and it need not be the limit of yours.

You've tried the pill. Maybe you've tried the knife. Here's the fourth answer.

To your good health,
Dr. Keith