Bernhoft Center for Advanced Medicine

Over the past fifteen or twenty years, a quiet medical revolution has been brewing in the area called “energy medicine.” Research has been going on in medical schools and research establishment in the US and around the world, especially Japan, Germany and Australia. While at first a lot of the energy medicine data seems very “woo woo” – to put in mildly – in fact, the studies have been done by sober scientists at prestigious institutions, and seem to have stood the test of time. Data is data.

In a nutshell, what scientists are doing is discovering that the chemistry of life is organized and operated by coherent energy transmissions, at the cellular level and at the molecular level. As a Catholic, I think scientists are rediscovering the soul, or at least the role of the spirit in sustaining life. Others of different religious bents interpret these discoveries to mean scientists are describing the electromagnetic energy forces which underlie all of life. Whichever of our interpretations is correct, there is a lot of science behind the “woo woo” stuff, and it is becoming clinically useful. It will become even more useful in the future.

Medical progress has been impeded for a long time by two philosophical errors: the Newtonian idea that we are just a collection of chemicals bouncing randomly about, and the Cartesian idea that body and soul are separate. Neither is tenable in the 21st century.

I first had an inkling of this back in medical school, when I was taking embryology. I noticed that the developing embryo very quickly organized into areas which would become skin and nervous tissue, areas that would become gut, and other areas which would become muscle or bone. I asked my professor why and he said “genetics” to which I replied “not so. The genes are the same in every cell.” He got mad at me for saying that, but I was right. The genes are the same in every cell, but experiments on salamanders and tree embryos suggest there is an energy field that turns some genes on and others off, which is how specialization apparently occurs in other species as well, possibly including humans.

So much for Newton and his randomly bouncing chemicals.

As to Descartes, a recent experiment reported by Dr James Oschman found that the movement of the index finger began in the energy field around the head, spread to the motor cortex, and from there to the muscles running the finger. Two implications: a) the brain supplies the accelerator and the brake, but is not the driver; b) the measurable energy field around the body – soul or whatever you want to call it – seems to be calling the shots.

This is revolutionary stuff, and opens up a lot of future possibilities for therapy, if moment-to-moment cellular “decisions” are determined by energy messages. The future of medicine may lie in unscrambling these messages, and manipulating them towards health.

Considerable work has already been done in this direction. We have two machines in our office which work in this area, the Ondamed and Frequency Specific Microcurrent.

Ondamed is based on research done by an English electrical engineering professor named Cyril Smith, who spent his career at the University of Salford, England, measuring electronic frequencies of acupuncture points in health and disease. From that, he inferred healthy frequencies for bodily organs, and frequencies associated with illness. Doctors and engineers in Germany developed the Ondamed along these lines, using it to assess health and illness of various organs and disease states, including parasites.

We are participating in an FDA study looking at Ondamed’s results and report our outcomes to their oversight committee on a regular basis.

Ondamed appears to be very sensitive as a diagnostic tool, although we are not currently using it as such, merely reporting to the FDA supervisory committee how well it agrees with conventional clinical diagnostic techniques. It is the belief of the Germans who developed it that Ondamed can also treat illness by entraining “sick” frequencies back into health, causing the disease states they produce to melt away. This is also of interest to the FDA, and part of our data collection. All patient data collection and reporting is done anonymously, subject to HIPAA regulations.

There is considerable recent research on electronic microcurrents which run back and forth on the surfaces of connective tissue, capillaries, bones, etc, which apparently are responsible for “fine tuning” of local cellular metabolism. Ondamed appears to measure an overall “gestalt” – picking out frequencies of significance to the whole body, which can be used therapeutically to benefit the whole patient, presumably by balancing subtle energies throughout the body. Ondamed has set protocols for specific conditions which sometimes treat the whole body, other times focusing on a local condition, and patient-specific frequencies determined by the patient’s response.

Thus far, our results are very encouraging. While a percentage of patients experience little benefit, a majority thus far find Ondamed treatment helpful to powerfully beneficial. Conditions treated include pain, anxiety, stress, chronic fatigue, nicotine addiction, allergy and more. Improvement is cumulative and usually requires ten to twenty treatments for full effect.

Ondamed appears to address the “big picture” primarily, but is also capable of focusing on some local issues.

The “small picture” is chiefly the domain of Frequency Specific Microcurrent (FSM), Interest in FSM grew out of Becker’s discovery 30+ years ago that broken bones heal more quickly when a microcurrent frequency is applied over the fracture line. Considerable research was done in this area earlier in the century, but the data was largely ignored after the apparent triumph of pharmaceutical medicine. Interest in the old data has been reawakened by Becker’s work, and considerable research has been done with frequencies at many institutions, including NIH.

Over 200 frequency combinations have been identified which produce specific changes (e.g., decrease inflammation, decrease scarring, increase secretions) in specific tissues. (Each type of tissue – nerve, artery, tendon, muscle body, joint cartilage, etc – has at least one frequency to which it responds.) Recent animal studies have demonstrated a powerful effect of FSM on serum levels of inflammatory cytokines (messenger chemicals). Clinical studies on humans at NIH have also shown impact on various pain states, especially fibromyalgia.

FSM is registered with FDA as a TENS unit, chiefly for treating pain, but has many other uses which are investigational. FSM is applied by focusing on a specific problem in a specific area of the body. Ondamed, on the other hand, begins with the whole body and focuses on specific areas as suggested by patient response.

Although it is too early to make any solid claims for either, both modalities, Ondamed and FSM, appear to have considerable potential for ameliorating a wide range of conditions.

1. Richard Gerber, MD. Vibrational Medicine. Bear and Company, Rochester, VT, 2001. Numerous references from peer-reviewed and other journals.
2. James Oschman, PhD. Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, 2000. Numerous references from peer-reviewed journals
3. James Oschman, PhD. Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance. Butterworth Heinemann, Edinburgh, 2003. Numerous references