FREQUENCY SPECIFIC MICROCURRENT


Carolyn McMakin (2017).The resonance effect:                                                                            How frequency specific microcurrent is                                                changing medicine.


McMakin is a persuasive story teller, describing how she discovered a list of frequencies (electrical pulses per second measured as hertz) associated with particular health conditions based on Harry Van Gelder's frequencies who apparently found them with a medical machine (according to one science/skeptic website this machine was created by Abrams in 1922 and is a medical hoax, upon opening it, all wires and no connections)...no one knows who discovered the original frequencies or how they came up with them (this is a sticking point for me--what is the rationale behind associating certain frequencies with particular health conditions?). 

In McMakin's clinical practice she used a battery operated two channel micro frequency machine producing square waveforms with positive pulse frequencies to treat patients with various conditions using the list of frequencies from Gelder as a guide. Her stories (case studies) show amazing and almost immediate results (sometimes within one minute) for many individuals with different kinds of health issues, especially consistent results are reported for inflammation and various kinds of muscle pain. 

I was convinced and excited about her findings and looked into purchasing my own machine only to discover that the machines are only sold to health practitioners, and that the FDA only recommends them for pain relief under the TENS category and not for other health issues. Further, the research cited on McMakin's website upon closer inspection is not good science: low sample sizes, often no controls, subjective measures for pain, not peer reviewed, and so forth. So i have my doubts about the efficacy of the treating health issues with frequency specific microcurrent.


One lesson here is a good story can be misleading...one needs to exercise some common sense in reading about healing modalities for treating illness. Having good science to support one's claims helps, but not everything need be science based, not everything is measurable with our current understanding of science, e.g., how could one measure the phenomenological experience of a shamanic journey or the value of the "medicine" brought back from the journey? On the other hand, some healing modalities thought of as "woo woo" are later found to have a scientific basis, e.g., the inert substance given to individuals in the control condition for a clinical trial that shows similar effects when compared to the actual experimental drug for 30+% of the people is now known as the placebo effect...this is no longer considered a "woo woo" phenomenon, but one that is well documented in the research and one of many examples of the mind-body connection.





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