This month we are featuring Part 1 of our interview with Jeffrey A. Marksberry, MD. Dr. Marksberry who is the Science and
Education Director of Electromedical Products International, Inc (EPI). EPI is the company that developed the
Alpha-Stim technology and manufactures the units. As leading research analyst for studies on
the Alpha-Stim, Dr. Marksberry has vast knowledge of the philosophy and
technology behind electromedicine, microcurrent, and what makes certain
waveforms good for your body and brain.
The Philosophy behind Alpha-Stim:
Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Marksberry, Part. 1
First, I’d like to
hear about how you first became interested in electromedicine.
I think the first exposure I had to it was that I had a
friend who got an Alpha-Stim from his chiropractor. Then I saw a job posting [by EPI], and was
really tired of traveling as often as I was, and I got an interview for the
job. I liked what they said. I wouldn’t say I was skeptical, but just like
anyone, like “Wow” if it’s as good as it sounds, then it would change medicine. I got the job and took the device home, and
then New Years my daughter had a sleep-over at our house and ran into the bed
and broke her nose when they were playing.
I hadn’t used the probes yet, so I just pulled it out, and her nose
wasn’t displaced so it wasn’t like she had to go to the hospital and have it
moved or anything like that. It was just
really swollen and really painful. So I got the probes out, treated her nose
for about a minute, and then another minute went by and she was like, “It doesn’t
hurt anymore.” I mean she was crying and all this, and then she was, “It
doesn’t hurt anymore.” That lasted I think the rest of the day, and then the
next morning she woke up, the swelling was much better. She had a little bit of pain, so I treated
her again and that was all the pain that she had. And then around that same time I put up
Christmas plants and dropped a big planter on my foot and broke some toes and
my foot, and I used it on myself and it just took away the pain. I couldn’t believe it. You know, quicker than any medicine I’ve had
for pain, so I was pretty convinced then about the pain. Then I was a believer, but it took awhile for
me to treat some people before I’d really see changes with depression or
anxiety or PTSD.
Can you tell us what
the philosophy behind micro-current technology is?
It’s probably two things. One is that the body has the power
to heal itself. And I think we deliver a
lot of raw materials with the waveform. We know that frequencies, electrical
frequencies, can help with things – with anxiety, with pain, with a number of
things. And a lot of conditions are
considered to be an electrical problem, in tremors or anything neurologic. There is a chemical component, but it is
probably electrically based. But with
our waveform we are really delivering a lot of raw materials to the brain and
letting it do what it needs to do to normalize itself. No matter what we see, it’s heading toward
normal. So if a patient is depressed, it
elevates their mood, but if they are anxious and manic, it will lower their
mood. No matter what they are doing you
are normalizing the patient.
Right, and I guess we
usually describe the effect of the Alpha-Stim as increasing Alpha waves,
because the majority of people try it because they still have some Delta or
Theta brain waves from sleep or from depression and insomnia.
That’s exactly right.
I think that of everything we do it is really normalizing. Everyone has cultural differences of what
they think “normal” is, but for a human being, physically and physiologically,
depression is not a normal state, and mania is not the normal state. So we are always driving a person to sleeping
better, to having normal sleep patterns, to not having pain perception all the
time, normalizing that. So whatever
their condition is, it seems to help normalize.
This ties into my
next question. Dr. Kirsch is quoted as
saying, “Physics controls chemistry.”
What do you think he means by that?
Well, chemistry is involved in a lot of things, protons and
neutrons and electrons. A compound may
have chloride ions and sodium ions, but how they react and how they act on each
other is based on the physics of the components. While everyone has chemicals in their bodies,
how they react and how they react with each other is based on the physics of
that person, electrically or physically, it is based on the laws of physics.
As the leading
research analyst for the Alpha-Stim you must be confronted with the issue of
how it is defined in the medical world.
And I am very curious about the history of electromedicine and why a lot
of people think of it as “alternative” medicine even today.
I think if you go back, probably pre-penicillin, it wasn’t
considered alternative, it was considered mainstream. But as drugs really took off with
antibiotics, with discovering DNA, with advances in microscopy, and designing
medicine, then those became huge, and electromedicine was really left
behind. Then you get large companies
that really job that market. I’m sure
you’ve read Politics and Healing. You
can see how the efforts that are non-pharmacological often get squashed if you
are not ready to sell the rights to AMA or Johnson and Johnson. If you don’t work for them, they will bury
you. So a lot of companies have gone out
because they weren’t large enough to compete with the Pfizers and Mercs of the
world.
When doctors are trained now, you have a class on
pharmacology. You don’t have a class on,
I guess it would be called, “therapeutic options.” That’s not the class, its pharmacology. You go in, and over a semester you learn 700
drugs, and how they work, and how they act on each other, and what if you are
taking two, and what you can’t take when your pregnant, but you don’t learn the
benefits of someone that’s meditating or acupuncture or behavioral therapy,
things like that. And you don’t learn
about electromedicine either.
If you look up the
definition of alternative medicine, it just says, “That which is not
conventional medicine,” or sometimes, “ that which has not been scientifically
proven to be effective and safe.”
I would say it’s probably more subjective, it’s probably
more practitioner to practitioner, and they have in their own mind what they
consider is alternative or not. If
you’re only doing one thing, whatever it is, anything else is
unconventional. There are some older
doctors that still write the same 10 or 15 prescriptions that they did 30 years
ago and have no intention on changing anything.
So even an antidepressant would be unconventional for them.
So tell me how
electromedicine, and specifically the Alpha-Stim, falls within the realm of
conventional medicine.
I think it should because, just like anything in medicine,
as a practitioner you should be following the Hippocratic Oath – you won’t do
any harm, so you are focusing on safety, and you are only doing things that
help the patient – and that really boils down to every decision you make
there’s a risk and a reward ratio. You
know, “Is this surgery going to help the patient, if so, how much? What are the risks and side-effects before
you decide on doing that?” With
Alpha-Stim, with really no safety issue, the worst that can happen is that it
doesn’t work for that patient. And you
always start non-invasive first. A
patient is over-weight, well you don’t go to a gastric by-pass. You start with
diet and exercise, getting a nutritionist involved, you go through the steps.
That builds up to eventually maybe they get a gastric bypass, if nothing has
worked and they have honestly tried, and had the psychological review that they
are supposed to, and all those steps.
But you always try the non-invasive thing first – or you’re supposed to. And if you have a patient that’s interested
in that, then you do a risk-reward ratio – and with a zero on the risk then any
reward is good. So the Alpha-Stim almost
always passes that test.
