Microcurrent Therapy: A New Tool for Managing Crohn's, Colitis and IBS

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'm going to be talking with Rob Van Berken. Rob is a certified holistic healthcare practitioner with training in biofeedback, neurofeedback, hypnotherapy, homeopathy, aromatherapy, auriculotherapy, counseling, and what he'll be speaking on today, microcurrent therapy, in which he's also certified. He's also currently pursuing his PhD in natural medicine. After experiencing the healing properties of the Hashé Protocol, Rob joined Doctors Lori and John Hashé at Pacific Health Options, where microcurrent therapy is one of the key tools used to help clients resolve pain and heal, including from gut health issues. But before I get to Rob's interview, I had a listener question I wanted to share with you. They wrote, I suffered from panic attacks since 2015. I was then introduced to Multi-9 probiotics. I started taking it and it helped reduce my panic attacks. In April 2019, I was diagnosed with chronic gastritis. However, in December 2020, I suddenly had side effects from taking the probiotics. Within 10 minutes of consuming the probiotics, I had bad gas pain and heart palpitations. I made the decision to discontinue the probiotics, but now my gastritis and panic attacks came back. What should I do? I wrote, panic attacks and anxiety can be caused by deficits in your neurotransmitters, which can be measured on the Organic Acids Test if you're in the U.S. You can also try using amino acids to help bring up your dopamine or serotonin. Your microbiome helps create and modulate neurotransmitters, which explains why the probiotics helped. It sounds like you may have other issues as well, possibly H. pylori, which could be tested with a stool test at your doctor's, although it's often missed on tests at the doctor's. It looks like you're not in the US, so you probably don't have access to testing like the organic acids test. But if you wanted to get the H. pylori test at your doctor's and then bring the results to me, I could consult with you on working on the panic attacks and whatever comes from your H. pylori results naturally. Rather than using triple antibiotic therapy, which is the standard treatment for H. pylori with allopathic doctors and could lead to decimation of your microbiome. So I love getting listener questions. Feel free to write me at Lindsey@HighDesertHealthCoaching.com with questions. I will use your first name on the air unless you ask me not to. And if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do that so you don't miss an episode. And please share it with a friend who you know has gut health issues or in your favorite gut health Facebook group if you haven't seen it mentioned there. And also, exciting news, I have created a new freebie called Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing. And if you sign up for my newsletter by going to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and waiting for the pop-up box, or also there's a link on the homepage, you can get that freebie. So it's just a little ebooklet about that topic. Now on to the show. Hey, Rob, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Lindsey Parsons. Glad to be here.

Yeah, glad to have you. So tell me how you got into this work with microcurrent therapy.

I suppose it was a very weird situation for me. I never intended to go into healthcare or alternative health. I actually wanted to be an English teacher, so I started going to university to essentially study books and didn't really enjoy that too much. So I moved on to anthropology, didn't really like that, moved on to business. And then I ended up working in the family business, which was essentially a business role for me, like accounting and things like that. But while working in the office, I was seeing my parents treating all these patients, right? And I just thought to myself, wow, look at these people coming in. And then 30 minutes of treatment later, they're sort of standing up and whatever was bothering them was bothering them less. And so many times they were fixed. And when I was a kid, I was kind of like a patient first. I had really bad scoliosis. Nothing we could really do would fix it. And that caused a lot of anxiety for me. So I'd had a personal healing experience with microcurrent therapy because for them, bringing microcurrent therapy into their practice was first done to help me. Coming in from that perspective, when I was a kid, I took it for granted. I didn't really realize like, wow, how great is it to have that pain and then no longer have it? So I went through all these different things and it was just only then, as I say, when I'm working in the office doing the boring number crunching that anyone that runs a business has to do and thinking, why can I not treat people? You know, for me that was kind of a teaching moment there because I was like, well, if I want to treat people, I need to go get certified. I need to, you know, I need to have some sort of credential. I need to be insured. There's so much that goes into, you know, working in alternative health safely. So I went in, I did all that, and then I sort of started studying with them because they're the ones that really know about microcurrent, and just kind of trying to absorb everything that I could so that I could start to teach others about it.

Cool. So did your scoliosis resolve or become manageable?

So it resolved. Scoliosis is one of those things when we're treating them, we find it very easy to make a shift in one treatment session. And it's just all about treating that S-curve. That mine wasn't super severe. I've seen some really, really bad cases that we've helped that were way worse than mine was. But yeah, it definitely resolved. Before that, we'd been using homeopathy to try and manage the pain. I'd been seeing an osteopath to try and do some adjustments. And those were providing temporary fixes, you know, a couple days, a week of pain relief, and then it would kind of settle back in. That was when microcurrent stepped in and it just changed things. It realigned everything for me.

And was that microcurrent simultaneous with some type of hands-on physical therapy or just the microcurrent?

So at that point, I had had a session of the hands-on physiotherapy, and then we did the microcurrent right afterwards. And they continued to do the microcurrent. Both my parents are naturopaths, so they weren't really into physical manipulation so much. So we were seeing another therapist for that. But beyond that, it was a couple of sessions of treatments to really just get things to stick. And microcurrent, it's all about that memory of the body and the electrical communication of it and just trying to make things stick, you know?

Right, right. I've been doing frequency-specific microcurrent with my sciatica. And definitely attribute the combination of the physical therapy and the microcurrent to my current pretty good state of healing.

Oh, absolutely. I think what we see, even when we're using microcurrent, there's some people that just love to just stick some pads on their bodies and run the treatment passively. My preferred method is to do movement of the body, movement of the tissue while stimulating it. It makes the results so much better than if people are just sitting there charging themselves up with sticky pads on. And as you say, it's that physical movement that makes the difference there. Yeah.

So now that we've been talking about it for 10 minutes, what is microcurrent therapy and how does it compare to modalities like TENS or transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation or EMS, electrical muscle stimulation?

Sure. Microcurrent therapy, in order to kind of understand that, I tend to ask people to kind of imagine the concept that their bodies are electric. Their cells communicate through these electrical signals that they pass along each other, kind of like skipping a stone, right? Now, in order for the brain to send a signal to the body and ask it to do something like turn off inflammation or trigger healing, it needs to be able to communicate. So it uses these little microcurrent signals and sends them down the nerve pathways. So when it comes to Microcurrent therapy, what we're doing is we're using frequencies like the brain uses. We're kind of hacking into the body, like hacking a computer, right? You're going in and you're asking the body and the brain to work on the issue. We want them to do the healing. So we're kind of taking control of our body's own amazing ability to heal and triggering it. So we're always asking ourselves that question, you know, if your body was meant to heal, it's biologically designed to heal, Why are you not healing? And so this communication breakdown can be the problem there. Now that you mentioned TENS devices and EMS devices, there's definitely a big difference. TENS devices are about 1,000 times stronger than microcurrent therapy, even at our highest frequency in our equipment. You know, honestly, what we're doing with TENS devices is we're kind of paralyzing nerve pathways. So that we block pain, kind of like electric Tylenol.

It worked very well when I needed to do exactly that. I actually was sleeping in my unit for a while.

Yeah, exactly. And so you can definitely do that to block the pain. But usually TENS devices don't have long-lasting effects, and there is risk if you do it in the wrong place. You can't treat your neck properly. You shouldn't treat your chest. There's all these different warnings because of how high the voltage is. They worry about triggering muscle spasms or damaging nerves. Even EMS is more for exercise. I see it promoted more for exercise than anything else in rehab. So electrical muscle stimulation is sort of just a series of pulsed electrical signals that are going in pretty high frequency as well to exercise and move the muscles in the body. And you see them very popular for, say, you know, six-pack hacks. Let's get in there and give you a six-pack. You know, more medically, we do see them in rehab facilities as well. It can be very close to microcurrent. In fact, our professional device you can actually use for electrical muscle stimulation. It has programs in it that are stronger, designed for that purpose, but they're very focused on that one thing. So just cycle back with microcurrent. We're not doing anything unnatural. We're— well, aside from the fact that we're taking control of the body, we're asking the body to turn off inflammation. Trigger repair, normalize the system. And it's why a microcurrent treatment with our equipment tends to only be 5 to 15 minutes with the goal of then letting the body and the brain do some work.

So basically you're using the currents that the body is using itself to communicate, whereas something like a TENS unit is so many thousands of times more that it's just like hammering the body. It's not in any way communicating with the body the way the body communicates, right?

Yeah. TENS devices are not what we would consider body-friendly at all. You know, just as an example, 7 Hz is the frequency that seems to trigger regeneration of bone. So when we're dealing with broken bones, we go specifically for 7 Hz, and soft tissue is 90 Hz, and so on. So it's all these different things like what is the body responding best to? That is body-friendly. Let's use that on the area and get the problem resolved. Got it.

So I'm excited to tell you about a company called Reel Paper who's sponsoring this episode. They make toilet paper from 100% bamboo, which is much more sustainable than cutting down trees, and there's even zero plastic in their packaging. And if you're someone who uses a lot of toilet paper, this can help you feel much better about it. And if you ever ran out of TP during the early days of COVID You can appreciate that if you sign up for a subscription at whatever frequency you want, which comes with free shipping, you won't ever run out of toilet paper. What's more, every roll helps fund access to clean toilets for those in need. Use my coupon code HDH for 25% off your first subscription order at reelpaper.com. That's reelpaper.com, and you can find the link and code in the show notes. Excuse this brief interruption, but I wanted to remind you that if you've been struggling with IBD or IBS, reflux, gastritis, SIBO, dysbiosis, Candida, or another gut health issue, that's my specialty. I work with clients not just here in Tucson, Arizona, where I live, but virtually on video chat. And I offer single appointments as well as 5-session gut health programs for people with tougher issues who will likely require testing and longer-term follow-up, as well as 12-week programs for weight loss or reversing autoimmune disease. So if you think a 5-session or longer course of health coaching might help you meet your health goals, You can set up a free 30-minute breakthrough session with me to talk about what you've been going through and hear what health coaching involves. So you can find the link in the show notes. Now back to the show. Okay, now let's get to the gut. So what gut conditions have you seen microcurrent therapy work on? Quite a lot.

Recently we've seen a big surge of people that have a lot of gut issues due to adhesions from massive surgeries. So scar tissue as the result of C-sections, which then triggers issues like Crohn's, IBD, things like that. So the scar tissue is one thing I definitely want to make sure there's a focus on here. But Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, IBD, just constipation, even diarrhea. I've seen these things benefit greatly from microcurrent.

Wow. Okay. And so are there any peer-reviewed published studies of microcurrent therapy and gut conditions?

So peer-reviewed published studies, there's some that have been done on Crohn's specifically with vagus nerve stimulation. But what they're doing in that case is they're implanting a surgical implant with a battery attached to it onto your vagus nerve. And originally they started doing those studies for epilepsy and then they kind of noticed that people's gut issues were calming down. So they redid a study on that. Most of the studies we're doing both at Stanford University, Baylor University right now are focusing on blood flow enhancement and wound healing. So, we haven't launched any specifically with our own devices on gut health yet, but I myself, I'm writing my PhD here. I'm doing my study, my thesis on vagus nerve stimulation and inflammation in the gut and the body. And, I've got probably 20 case studies that I'm working through right now that are all similar situations, different inflammatory issues in the gut that are causing diarrhea. Usually manifesting themselves as IBS.

Okay. And so these are all people who have come through your practice there?

Yeah. So either through my practice or through some of those people I've trained and their practices. So we've got a good sample from across the world. We've got people from Australia, from the US, from the UK, and from Canada involved.

Got it. Okay. So how exactly does microcurrent function to change conditions in the gut and to heal those conditions?

Sure. So, I think the main thing is that inflammation causes a huge amount of problems. So, when you're dealing with chronic inflammation, which we usually are when we have chronic gut issues, you can be seeing quite bloated and swollen, quite a bit of pain and discomfort. These things, the inflammation is not meant to be there. It is an overreaction to something and it's not doing you much good. The only situation where I would say that inflammation is doing you good is in very early stages of the development of an ulcer because then early stages of inflammation are trying to help your body. If you imagine your brain sends that signal to your gut and says, "Get this place inflamed, we've got something going on here." Now, ultimately, what you would hope is that within a day or two, things would settle down and the body would start to relax and feel better and the brain would turn the signal off. It would put the fire out. But what seems to happen in chronic conditions is that the fire doesn't get put out. It's almost like the brain started a fire in a room, closed the door, and then forgot about it. And so it continues and it keeps getting worse and worse. And long-term inflammation will cause degeneration. It's sort of like, again, leaving that fire on the room. The stuff in the room is going to get burnt. It's not going to be useful very much anymore. So, we end up with this chronic inflammation. So, when you're dealing with the gut with chronic inflammation, I see more people than anything have chronic diarrhea and very easily upset stomachs. Things that they used to be able to eat, they can't eat anymore. Some people can barely keep down water. And this becomes a big issue because it interferes with your lives, right? I mean, I'm sure your listener is all can resonate in that way because as a person that used to experience anxiety that triggered upset stomach, I know how impactful that can be on your just your day to day. So what we're doing with microcurrent again is we have that potential to turn off inflammation. So the general way is, yeah, sure, we could paint the device over your stomach. We could find some sticky spots on there that are pockets of inflammation. The current actually kind of grips onto them, so it slows the movement of the device down. But systemically, I don't think that fixes the problem. Systemically, we use the vagus nerve. And when we access the vagus nerve through the left side, what we can actually do is do a 3-minute gentle stimulation on the neck to send the signals of calming to the brain and the gut. Because that's just the pathway of the vagus nerve and ask it to turn off inflammation. The quickest turnaround I've seen was just before Christmas where I had a lady that purchased a device. She had had chronic IBS, you know, that diagnosis for years. And within 4 days of doing vagus nerve 4 times a day, she had her first normal bowel movement she can remember. That was the quickest turnaround that we've had. But getting that vagus nerve stimulation to just turn off the inflammation is key to shutting off that inflammatory response, reducing pain, and regulating the bowels as well.

Mm-hmm. So I get that it could reduce inflammation and maybe even get the vagus nerve to reduce inflammation. But what I'm wondering is, what caused the inflammation in the first place? And once you take out the microcurrent, won't that same thing cause inflammation again?

It can do. And this is where we look at trying to determine what it is. Part of what we do involves the Hashé Protocol, which involves looking not just at microcurrent but stress, nutrition, fitness, and sleep, and the impact that all of these things can have. Now, obviously with the gut, nutrition plays a major role. And I see quite often that people that are dealing with these chronic conditions have kind of an overgrowth of Candida.. And that's something we have to address as well and potentially even have other digestive organ dysfunctions such as liver dysfunction. So, we absolutely have to look at the bigger picture. I mean, if someone's not sleeping, then their rhythm's not in the right place and their gut might not be working properly. So, we can't just say, yeah, microcurrent is going to fix it all. But what it will do is it will provide relief and potentially, depending on if the issue was just left on and it should have been turned off, it won't come back.

Mm-hmm. I see clients with Candida a good bit too, and I'm just curious because I'm always having these discussions with people about diet because it takes so long to knock out Candida that asking somebody to not eat any sugar or carbs or these types of things for 8 months just is a little unreasonable. So I'm just curious what kind of nutrition recommendations you do along with treatment for Candida.

First, I love being able to get like a full GI mapping test done so we can really see the levels of the Candida. If we do that, we have some data to work with and then we can have a before and after, which is perfect. I hate recommending specific diets. I find that there's no one-size-fits-all diet for people, and I'm a big fan of the process of elimination. So I usually tell people to look at the big triggers— dairy, gluten, sugar— but don't remove them all at once. Let's see what people's triggers might be. One big part of Candida, I think, is getting on a good probiotic, but also making sure that they purge the Candida. There's a product I like. We don't sell it, so I'm just going to put it out there because it's a good product. It's called BioCidin, and I've seen that in both close family members and clients. Totally eliminate the Candida. And yeah, it might take 2 months and it does take some conviction to be able to say give up sugar for that long, especially with how much sugar is just in everything.

Do you use the full protocol with the biocidin including the biotonic and the GI detox and the proflora 4R?

We've just done the GI detox in combination with it and just really slow on the biocidin. I found that people tend to be really gung-ho to just finish the bottle. But, you know, take it slow, start working through it. The GI detox we tended to recommend simply when people have flare-ups as they start to usually get improved symptoms pretty quickly, especially if they can use the microcurrent to manage the symptoms. But it doesn't mean that you can say, oh, my inflammation is gone and I feel better, I'm going to eat that chocolate bar. You know, it's, it's not going to work that way.

Okay, so you talked about the vagus nerve and the importance of calming the inflammation via it, but I'm wondering whether there aren't simpler or less expensive ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, like gargling or humming or the methods that are described in Stanley Rosenberg's book, The Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve.

Right. We've had some people compare the difference between that, and I have found that, you know, 9 times out of 10, you're going to get better results from the electrical stimulation. Because you're combining the frequency of alpha, the alpha frequencies of being calm and in a relaxed state, and you're able to put those in the nerve and have them travel up and down it. And because it's electrical, it's communication, it's hacking the body. It doesn't require you to get into that state of mind where you can do deep breathing or goggling or humming and calm yourself down properly. Because we find people get high, high stress, especially with gut issues. And again, I resonate with that. So it can be really hard when you start to feel that discomfort coming on to focus in the moment and bring yourself into it. And the electricity just kind of takes control. It's like an override for it.

Hmm. Okay. Now, you described a little bit about the physical way that the machine will kind of stick. So can you describe what it looks like? Because people might be wondering what exactly this is that they're using.

Sure. So it's a handheld device. It's battery operated with two AA batteries and it's smaller than my iPhone, fits into the palm of your hand pretty nicely. And it has a metal electrode on the back of it. So the electrode is where the electricity comes out. It's gentle tingling. It's nothing uncomfortable. You can also plug in various attachments. So if you feel you need extra reach or just a more comfortable tool to hold in your hand, then you can plug those in as well, and then the electricity comes out of those instead. So you can hold it in your hand and then you can paint it across the body and you can adjust the power. So with 250 power levels in the device and it's always set to be comfortable for the user, and that changes on a day-to-day basis based on the electrical potential of their body. So just because 50 power was where you were at that morning doesn't mean that when you're really inflamed, 250 might be that point and you just kind of paint it across the body and the frequency that you set in is translated into that electrical charge.

So are you saying that people are choosing to change their frequencies?

We follow specific protocols with people. Everyone gets their own one-on-one treatment coordinator to tell them how to go about their issues. And what order to treat them in. And we work through that as a service. And they would be— some frequencies are different, right? There's a frequency that's great for the vagus nerve. There's a frequency that's great for surface inflammation. We find any frequency above 100 Hz is very good for dealing with inflammation, but then anything below 100 Hz tends to have more regenerative capabilities. So we do switch between the modes. Depending on what it is that we're trying to achieve.

And, is it just one frequency at a time?

The chip technology in this equipment enables different bands or groups of frequencies. So, in our Avasia Life Evolution, we have one that's called 7 to 12, which we use for the vagus nerve. So, that moves between 7 and 12 hertz over a 2-minute period and then it recycles itself back around. And it does that with different kind of little pushes and all these things that are designed to make sure that the body doesn't habituate itself to the frequency. We don't want a static frequency consistently hitting the body because just like taking 2 Tylenol every 4 hours will eventually mean that the body stops responding to the Tylenol, doing the same thing with one frequency could have the same results. So we're making sure every, every frequency, every program is consistently changing to prevent habituation.

Okay. So the devices that they've been using on me, I think they use pairs of microcurrents. So I'm wondering whether you're familiar with those and how they're different from the Avatzia devices that you use.

Sure. So yeah, the pairs of microcurrent frequency-specific microcurrent usually involves hitting the body with one frequency and then following up with another. And so what they tend to do when they have those programs is they do very similar to what we have here. Like I described our 7 to 12, That's a very small range. We have a specific program called Blue Stim, which is 22 to 163, and it hits every frequency between that range. With frequency-specific, they might say do 70 and then do 2. And from what my understanding is, it does vary based on the different models of these devices. You're hitting it with one and then it switches to the next, and then it might go back to the first one and switch to the next. It's just trying to hit it from two different angles. Now, it's likely that they also have a similar thing built in so that even if it's a specific frequency, it at least changes in a decimal level so that there is no ability to habituate to it. Otherwise, you would find that over time your body would just stop responding.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I think the lowest cost one of those devices is something around $2,500. So how does that compare to the price of your devices?

So our lowest cost one is about $600. My recommended one for gut issues is about $1,500. The reason I recommend that one, the Avazia Life Evolution, is because it can do vagus nerve stimulation. So you could treat gut issues with the Avazia Life Genesis, which is the $600 model, and you'd probably get quite a bit of relief. But to work systemically on that vagus nerve, I feel it's worth it every time. To make that investment.

And people have to buy them. They can't just rent them.

So we don't currently have any rentals. Some local practitioners do offer rentals. The way we work is we have the devices. You buy the device, you get 30 days from when it arrives with you, not from when it's shipped, to try it out. And if you don't like it, you can return it if you don't find it's working for you during that 30 days. In fact, during the first 60 days, you have a one-on-one treatment coordinator that will, as I say, send you links to videos like, this is how we do this, this is how we do this. They might hop on Zoom with you. They would talk you through the different treatments that you need. If you're having any issues or you're finding something's not working, they'll adjust the plan, which we found to be crucial because every, every single patient is different and has different case histories. And if we don't work on that level, we might miss something that is critical to their healing.

And so how long and how often do you need to use the microcurrent device in order to see some initial results and then for complete healing on average for gut conditions?

The hardest one— I'll preface this straight away— the hardest gut condition I've ever worked with is ulcerative colitis, especially when it's very, very chronic. That one I've seen 3 to 4 months before I see results. But with other gut conditions, I'm usually seeing some benefit within the first 2 to 3 weeks. So, within that first 30 days, each day, the bare minimum ask is 12 minutes of treatment. That's 4 times a day of 3 minutes with vagus nerve. If people can do that alone, that'll make a good shift. If they can throw in another 15 minutes of general treatment on the abdomen, that's going to be even better. So, maximum, I like to say 30 minutes a day.

So the 12 minutes, did you say, was on the vagus nerve?

12 minutes on the vagus nerve. Yeah. We try to mimic the implants that were done, you know, the surgical implants I mentioned earlier. Those ones fire all the time. So what we do instead of doing that is we want to be hitting 4 times a day, usually around mealtime and bedtime. So we kind of do it before breakfast, lunch, and dinner and before bed for just 3 minutes on that left side.

Seems like a reasonable ask.

Yeah, it's not a big deal for many people. Some people have very busy lives and that can be kind of challenging for them to fit that in, but it's your health. It's a very good investment of time.

Well, if you run to the bathroom 12 times a day, it seems like this would be a better choice. Absolutely. Okay. So you mentioned the $600 and the $2,100. You have a higher level one too, don't you?

Yeah, we have one that's intended for doctors. It's about $4,000. I never recommend that for for home users, right? I mean, it's not designed for that. The main advantage to that one is that it has evaluative capabilities. So it has a screen on it, so you can put the device on the skin, and then within 1 second of being on the skin, it's going to give you a reading. And that reading will tell you whether that area has inflammation, is degenerated, or has regular, normal, healthy tissue based on the electrical feedback from that machine and from the body. So that can help a professional determine what's really going on. They may be able to look at your abdomen, take a bunch of readings, and then think, all of these are normal. And then maybe they go up to your liver and they test that, and whoa, the liver is really inflamed. So they can see what is causing a cascade of issues somewhere else. That's not always necessary, but it's a neat feature. But that's really where that extra price comes in. There's another extra probably 45 programs in the professional device as well, and it can be fully programmed by yourself. I just find it can be very overwhelming for someone, especially who has pain or gut issues or whatever it may be, to try and ask them to essentially learn what all the material you need to make that one work for you. Yeah.

And I think I misspoke about the price was $600 and $1,500, right?

That's right. Yes. $600 and $1,500 and then $4,200.

Yeah. And then you have to pay extra for the attachments, right?

Yeah, it varies. So the $1,500 and the $600 are the device with some attachments. That's what we call our classic kits. And then we do have a deluxe kit, which includes like every attachment under the sun. For the Genesis device, that makes it $795. That's all the attachments you would need with that device. And for the Evolution, it's $1,995. And these devices are FDA approved. They're HSA and FSA. You can spend those accounts on it. So it doesn't come out of pocket either.

Nice. So tell me a little bit more about the Hashi protocol and how it relates to the devices. And like when you get the device, do you automatically get some amount of that protocol?

We focused on it quite a bit in the last few years more than anything else because we realized that we really need to take a full holistic approach, right? Maybe if something we were doing ourselves, but just to expect that every patient is doing that is not really an accurate assessment. People find the biggest one is stress. And as I mentioned earlier, I'll just recap them here. Our 5 elements are stress, nutrition, fitness, sleep, and microcurrent. And, you know, we may have had lots of people that were doing microcurrent, but maybe they weren't managing their stress. Maybe they had no support system. And what's really happening in that situation is the stress reaction, the fight or flight mode, is blocking healing happening. We mentioned nutrition earlier, right? It's very important to find out what you can and can't eat for you. And then fitness. Fitness is a word that I find scares a lot of people. They're like, you asking me to get on a treadmill? And, you know, no, the answer is to that movement is medicine. Movement is life. If you move, if you are moving around, you're doing a lot of good for your body just for like even a 10, 15 minute walk. Or some gardening, any of that stuff. So we're really not asking people to run marathons. We just think it's important that people get some sort of physical exercise and don't just sit on the couch. And I know that can be tempting when there's pain and discomfort, right?

So yeah, no, I know that the research says that the gut microbiome improves essentially if you engage in exercise.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's very interesting, isn't it? I think there must be some good bacteria that like fitness.

Or whatever our body releases when we, when we do exercise. Yeah, I'm one of these people who actually, I love walking, but like full-on aerobic exercise, I kind of dread it, but I suck it up and I do it 3 times a week. Yeah, for like 20 minutes. It's the maximum I could stand.

Good for you. I prefer swimming. I can't stand running anymore. I used to when I was younger. Now I can't, but I need to do something.

Yeah, no, I actually have been swimming since the sciatica started. That was the only thing left to me because for the longest time I couldn't even walk. But I've been on hikes in the last couple months, so it's been so wonderful. I used to hate walking uphill, but now the fact that I can walk uphill, I'm like, I'm walking uphill because I can do it. Like, now I have a body that lets me do that. What a privilege.

I know.

Yeah.

And I see that with people all the time. One of those, you don't know what you got till it's gone, right?

Absolutely.

People will complain that they have to walk to the store, but then 10 years down the line, they might be wishing they could walk to the store.

Oh, I would say to my kids, they didn't want to do their chores, and I would say, you have an able body, and if I had a body like yours right now that I could just go and clean up this floor, I would do it in a second. I'd be so happy to clean this floor, right?

Yeah, totally feel that.

I'm not sure now that my capabilities have come back I'm that excited about cleaning the floor, but I'm at least happy that when I want to, I can do it.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, okay. So can someone see practitioners who already have the devices so that maybe they don't to invest in the device? Or is it better to just buy one given how frequently you need to use them?

Sure. So that's a really good question. There are definitely practitioners, and if someone's looking, I do encourage them to reach out. We have a bigger concentration of practitioners in California than anywhere else, but we do have them all over the place. It's just whether or not they've been properly trained before I would recommend them, because they would be using the professional device, and I wouldn't want them to, you know, have the wrong idea of what to do. If someone wanted to reach out to me and ask, I'd be happy to recommend someone in their area if there is. Now, that being said, the cost of these treatments is usually quite high. Microcurrent therapists tend to charge anywhere from $200 to $300 an hour, so the investment tends to pay for itself pretty quickly. And trying it on yourself, and then with the fact that you can just return it if it doesn't work, I tend to recommend people buy it and work with our treatment coordinator because that's all included and just see, does it make a difference for me or not? Do I want to continue with this or not? And then you don't have to put out as much money or travel or any of that stuff.

Okay. I'm not sure if I totally got the answer, whether the Hash Protocol is included then with the device and the treatment coordinator, or is that a separate thing?

Sorry. Yes. So, it is included.

Yeah.

We will work with people on that level. And in situations where we don't feel that we can, you know, work— so say stress is a huge factor, maybe there's some PTSD involved— we have training in counseling. We're open to talk to people, but sometimes it's better that we recommend them to see someone whose sole focus is that, because if that's the healing blockage, we'll kind of outsource to someone that's more specialized. We're not going to pretend to be experts in it all.

Okay. And is there a certain number of sessions that come along with the machine?

Right now it's kind of set to be unlimited. So the treatment coordinator team, what they do is they will 5 days a week, so Monday through Friday, they're kind of at people's beck and call. They'll do email, Zoom, phone calls. If anything needs escalating, then they come to me or my parents. We have a meeting once a week and we go over any kind of extreme cases or anything like that to make sure that we're all staying on the same page. But it's all included for that period of time, for that 60 days. It's just kind of an unlimited series of sessions.

Okay. And do you have specific diets that you recommend for Crohn's and ulcerative colitis?

So I tend to recommend people just stick to that elimination thing. I still find people work in the same way. For example, it always baffles people. I can't eat raw greens.

I can't.

My mouth swells up really badly. My gut swells up really badly. So a lot of these diets wouldn't work for me, right? Because I couldn't go that traditionally healthy direction. We have recommended specifically working on like the nightshade aspect of things for inflammation and trying to avoid those nightshades, which many people may consider healthy tomatoes and things like that.

Right. So basically it was try eliminating for 10 days gluten, dairy, sugar, and then perhaps nightshades if you have one of those IBD conditions.

Yeah, exactly. And just see how you feel. Like, there should be some improvement when you've knocked the thing out for 10 days. Keep an eye on those ingredient lists on things because a lot of processed foods have hidden ingredients you wouldn't imagine.

I would imagine. And then beyond the 60 days, if you still need some support, How does that work?

So beyond the 60 days, if you still need support, we have a membership option. It's $48 a month. It just reactivates the unlimited support feature of the treatment coordinators and unlimited access to videos and things like that. It's just our way of affording to pay the treatment coordinator team.

Sure. Okay. And so is this something that doctors may have heard of? If people want to go to their doctor and say, hey, I want to get this, or should they just go straight to you because the doctor's going to go, what the heck is that?

Some doctors might know. I found that in Europe, microcurrent is much more prevalent. If anyone has a naturopath, they will probably know about microcurrent. But the devices are FDA cleared, Health Canada cleared, all those things, primarily for pain and inflammation. So they're not necessarily going to think, oh, you should use this for your gut. Now, that's kind of where, you know, I recommend people really need Oh, have questions about it, they should just give me a call or book an appointment for me to give them a call and I can answer their questions for them. And if they want me to speak to their doctor, I've done that before as well.

Okay. And so I have to ask, since I've been through sciatica, how successful are the machines in treating sciatica?

It's quite successful to be able to treat sciatica. What we really do is we work again with that movement motion on that lower back where the nerve is pinched. And so, is your sciatica just down one leg?

Yeah, yeah, on the left side.

On the left side. Okay. We would be kind of looking for where that is pinched and we would kind of place the electrode on the side of the spine near that and brush out with an anti-inflammatory frequency with the goal of helping to pull and release. But then, we also got the memory component of the brain looking at it and saying, "Okay, this is a problem." and remembering that and not snapping it back into place. We definitely have a simple to-do sciatica protocol. You would need one of our Y-electrode wands to be able to actually reach your own back in that way because just handholding the device like that would be kind of uncomfortable.

Yeah. Okay, great. Well, I think that was a lot of information that would be useful to people who are dealing with gut issues that they can't seem to find a solution for. So tell me where people can find you and all that.

I recommend people go and check out our website. If people are looking for some case studies that we've done on Crohn's and things like that, they can go to the blog and they can search anything gut health. It'll come up. There's some in there. And of course, from that website, if they want to speak with me directly, they can book a complimentary consultation and I'll give them a call and we'll just have a chat.

Okay, great. I just set up an affiliate account, so if you use my link from the affiliate account and end up buying something, then that supports the podcast. So I just wanted to mention that.

Absolutely. Yeah. So if you provide them with that link, then yeah, they can do that and it will support the podcast. That's amazing.

Awesome. Okay. Well, thanks so much for all this interesting information. This is a totally new modality for my podcast and I imagine for a lot of my listeners.

Awesome. Well, I was really glad to be here and thanks for having me.

So that sounds like a cool new option for folks who are stuck and haven't been able to resolve their gut issues through gut testing, antimicrobials, probiotics, etc. So I wanted to let you know that I've begun transcribing the shows and putting that out in blog format, and I send out a newsletter with links to that about a week after the show comes out. So if you'd like to get that in your inbox, visit my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll get a pop-up box soon after you get to the website, or you can visit the newsletter page under the heading Podcast Blog Videos. And if you appreciate the free information I'm giving you, there are some painless ways to count at iHerb. So if you buy from there and press on my link under the recommended supplements page or or through the link in the show notes. I'll get a percentage. You can also connect with me by joining my Gut Healing Facebook group if you wanna ask a question about gut health or suggest a topic or a guest for the show. And you can also follow my Hygienic Health Facebook page or find me on Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest. All the links are in the show notes. So I guess that's it. Thanks for listening, and here's wishing you all a perfect stool.