There are four treatment rooms in the Body Tuning clinic, each musical in name: Orchestra, Guitar, Piano and Violin. There are no instruments in the rooms but there are a number of impressive machines used to help patients’ ailments.
Vibration
In the open area there is a machine that looks like a treadmill; it vibrates and loosens muscles. Sometimes patients will stand on it for about 10 minutes with their lower body shaking before the appointment begins to remove tension in the extremities.
There’s also a smaller vibrating leg and ankle machine that is placed at the end of the treatment table also shaking things up, loosening ankles, feet, and lower legs.
Cold Laser Therapy
Cold laser is one of the treatments used, which is essentially a light amplifier, building on beliefs about the healing power of light going back to Hippocrates and ancient times. Throughout history many believed that light therapy could harness the power of the sun to heal. However cold laser is different from the sun as it is a compressed waveform, usually from the red spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Low-level lasers provide a form of pure light to deeply penetrate the surface of the skin without heating or damaging body tissues.
Cold Laser has been approved by the FDA as an effective painless drug free therapy successful in treating muscle spasms, nerve pain and arthritis. It has also been shown to increase the speed of wound and fractures healing.
Magnetic Therapy
Magnet therapy provides electrical stimulus to reduce tension. Chinese medicine has been using magnets in treatments for at least 2,000 years. Magnet therapy traces its history in Europe back to the 16th century. NYU’s Langone Medical Center website devotes several pages to magnet therapy, stating that various forms of treatment are proving to be therapeutic to relieve pain related to chronic conditions such as arthritis, neck pain, post-polio pain, and diabetic foot pain.
Dr Oz did a series on his television show called the ‘Healing Power of Magnets’ extolling the benefits of magnets for dealing with pain.
Diapulse
The Diapulse machine uses electromagnetic stimulation for certain chronic ailments – enabling the body to regulate and heal itself using our natural healing abilities. The machine has a relatively long history going back to the Olympic Games in 1970’s where it received attention for its role in the treatment of one of the gold-medal winners.
It was first developed for the treatment of surface wounds. At higher frequencies it provides deep tissue therapeutic healing through a pulse mechanism, hence the term diapulse. The theory is that the machine’s frequency is a catalyst stimulating the healing forces in the body, pulling them into the area that needs attention. Diapulse has been used to help resolve chronic problems such as tennis elbow and plantar fasciitis. Advocates say it is good for broken bones, muscle tears, and headaches.
Shmuel’s Diapulse machine is over 40 years old. He considers it to be a marvel and uses it throughout the day with patients. His view on why it hasn’t become more widely used, “Medicine in America is not supposed to heal people, the goal today is to treat them on an ongoing basis. Diapulse is a great machine for healing, and I think this is why it has been challenged in the US by the FDA and some in the medical community who do not want machines to cure, but only to treat.”
Electrical Stimulation
In addition to Diapulse, there are several machines in the office that provide different types of electrotherapy. Electrotherapy has been researched and accepted in the field of rehabilitation (electrical muscle stimulation). The American Physical Therapy Association acknowledges the use of electrotherapy for improving the range of joint movement, neuromuscular dysfunction, strengthening motor control, improvement of circulation of both the blood and arterial and lymphatic systems.
By Heather White