History

In her excellent paper, Southworth reminds us that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians were aware of the therapeutic value of electrical stimulation, even though electricity would not be defined officially until 1600 when William Gilbert “discovered” it. Egyptian tombs show wall reliefs in which the Nile catfish was used medically. Aristotle and Plato wrote about the black torpedo, or electric ray fish, which Scribonius Largus prescribed for the relief of headaches and gout. The technique was to have a patient wade into the sea, place his gouty foot on the ray, which the fish didn’t like at all, while the clinician waited on shore, presumably.

As medically helpful as putting a fish on you pelvis or up beside your head could be, it lacked an esthetic that was not to be overcome until at least 1747 when “an electrifying machine” was used to successfully treat pain in the joints.(3) That was soon followed by much interest by many others, including John Wesley, the originator of Methodism or the Methodist Church, who ordered that such devices be placed in all the clinics with which the church was associated.

Much ongoing experimentation was done with electricity, with everyone trying to find a new medical use for it up through the early 20th century when everyone knew that you could knock a patient unconscious with large amounts of electricity (electroshock), but were trying to find a specific wave form or pulse rate that would do it with much less current so the side effects of more intense stimulation could be avoided. No one seemed to come up with the ideal parameters, so the idea lay dormant until the Russians again began researching it.

The Russians, following WWII, were again looking for some way of putting people to sleep with electricity and thereby calm the over-agitated brain of various patients in their sanatoria and hospitals. They were basing their work on Pavlov’s ideas of reciprocal inhibition, as opposed to the western world’s developing interest in the biochemistry of the brain, especially the burgeoning new field of neurotransmitters. In 1953 the Russians finally came up with their Somniatron which tended to make people sleepy, and sometimes actually go to sleep. It did not knock them out, however, the original intention of the Soviet researchers, but it did do positive things for their sleep following its use. It is that device that arrived in the U.S. around 1963 and with which American research began.

Research began simultaneously in the West and in the Orient, when Japan began using a version of electrosleep on the engineers who drove their new bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. They would make the super-speed run to Kyoto, then lie quietly in a darkened room for five minutes or so with this machine strapped to their head, then get up and drive their bullet train back to Tokyo, where they would be treated again prior to any return trip. It was a report of this use, in a Dallas, Texas, newspaper that intrigued an electrical engineer, Ray Gilmer, who soon patented his own electrosleep device, the Neurotone, and started a company.(13) Since his was the only device that was grandfathered when the FDA gained control of medical devices in 1976, that device has underlain all modern CES devices in the U.S., including those around the world which have come into the American market as substantially equivalent to his original device or to one or more of those that the FDA has rated substantially equivalent to it since 1976.

In the 1970s, scientists Becker and Nordenstrom discovered that a weak electrical current triggered stimulation healing, growth and regeneration in all living organisms and concluded that injury repair occured in response to signals from an electrical control system. By the ’80s, it was discovered that the growth and/or healing process of damaged tissues could be stimulated or enhanced by increasing this electrical activity.

The 1991 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to two German scientists, Neher and Sakmann, who discovered that electrical activity belonged to the essential nature of all cells and that it was not limited to muscle and nerve tissue. By 1995, Mercola and Kirsch were the first to define weak electric current treatment as Microcurrent Electrical Treatment (MET), confirming that MET stimulated the growth of cells and that it had no significant side-effects.

In 2006, Elexoma™ developed and patented a unique form of electro-medicine and with the Elexoma™ Medic, applied the first-of-its-kind “Controlled Smartcard Modulation Technique” (CSMT) micro-amperage current of low intensity to the body in an effective, simple and safe manner. From there, Elexoma™ channeled its resources into further research and development into microcurrent and its potential benefits as an additional treatment option. This easy-to-use technology enables the latest Elexoma™ Medic treatment programmes to be loaded onto the device’s SD Smartcard, and prevents cells from becoming resistant to long-term treatment while keeping it up-to-date with the latest technology.

Elexoma™ Medic works at a cellular level, moving through the affected area and restoring the chemical balance in the damaged cells while reducing inflammation and tissue damage. When this electro-biologic device is activated, the unique smartcard-controlled bioelectric current is activated and finds its way from a positive to a negative electrode, both of which are attached to the skin. The area of skin between the positive and negative electrodes becomes electro-biologically charged and this current penetrates the cells, initiating the tissue repair process to re-establish homeostasis, or equilibrium.