Calmare therapy for neuropathic and chronic pain

...the "Calmare" is nothing but a quack medical device...it functions as a TENS device and is approved as such...the people trying to sell the thing, however, have come up a physiologically impossible line of nonsense about how it "scrambles" signals along "artificial" neurons as well as other claims that are simply science fiction...if you're interested, I provide greater details in my responses to an article posted here:

seekingalpha.com/article/228645-competitive-technologies-more-frequent-sales-to-come?source=qp_article

 ...I also mention some of the shenanigans the company has tried to pull in conning people tto believe this thing has some merit...whatever effects it produces are purely placebo...it is NOT covered by insurance...and some of the clinics offering it are charging up to 250 bucks per treatment -- a treatment lasts only 30-60 minutes and a minimum of ten are usually recommended...at least one clinic -- one, I believe, associated with Sharp Health -- demands cash payment up front -- no credit cards accepted...if you have the cash and still want to try it, I suggest you request a money-back if not satisified guarantee... 

very interesting rrtzmd.. this device or treatment is not something i would normally be interested in.  I was pleased when my son's foot bones healed after ultrasound therapy but have no idea if the ultrasound or time contributed to the healing.  (i was kind of surprised at your #1 post.. but i suppose you have our best interest mind maybe).

hay Athena.. no need to apologize the scolder.

I am a physical medicine doctor managing neuropathic pain for the last 25 years with off label neurological drugs, mood altering narcotics and therapies such as TENS. I have used the calmare device on ten patients in the last few weeks. I have no financial interest in this company and my only interest was to see if this device could be helpful to my patients. Our present tools are weak at best. Thus far, there has been a 70% response rate which is by far better than most of the drugs. This is not a TENS unit. Lack of insurance coverage certainly does not indicate whether a modality will be helpful. By now, most patients are well aware that the insurance company goal is only NOT to spend money. So if we are dpending on them for future innovation, we are being foolish. This treatment may not be for everyone. Your physician should discuss your problem and treatment approaches with you. I beleive the cost is reasonable considering the manpower to apply the procedure and the development cost of the device. Furthermore, when most of my patients have already reached their prescription "donut hole" in March, their share of the prescription medication cost exceeds this intervention. JACK D'ANGELO,M.D.

It is curious that this anonymous poster appears to be spending alot of time trying to dissuade any chronic pain sufferers from trying this Calmare technology.

An inherent value of these type discussion boards is to share information on potential new treatments. This poster, rtzmd, apparently is everywhere on the Internet accusing the company who markets the medical device wih fraudulent activity and lying to the public. These charges are very serious and should be addressed through more legitimate channels such as the FTC, FDA and/or the SEC.

Unfortunately for this anonymous poster, he/she would have to go public with his/her identity to stop the broader use of the Calmare pain relief technology by going through the proper channels.  The other problem is that his/her accusations are NEVER substantiated in all the postings on the internet that he/she has spent time putting up everywhere.

 He/she has been asked numerous times if he has spoken with any clinician/physician who is using the Calmare. NO was the answer. Have you spoken to any patients who used the Calmare? Again, NO. He does not need to talk to patients. He/she just knows that the technology is "snake oil". The FDA has not determined this and the device is approved for sale in the US.

The sad thing is that there are those desperate chronic pain sufferers that may be convinced that no further questions on the Calmare is neccessary because, after all, some anonymous and proliific poster insists that it is a scam. My advice is contact the clinics that are using Calmare. Ask if they can give you the name of a patientt that is willing to take a call. Ask questions. Determine for yourself if the technology should be tried given your personal medical condition . But, PLEASE, do not give some alias the permission to rule your own due diliigence--and by not pursuing your interest in Calmare does give him that power.

 I have spoken to a number of  patients that have used the Calmare. Their personal experiences were all different. One patient did 10 treatments and had gone from a 8 to a 0 and was still a 0 after 75 days. She had chronic pain for 32 years and had back surgeries, epidurals, pain meds etc. She was never pain free in all those years, although she benefited from temporary relief--like going down on the pain scale from 8 to 5, only to go up again. She was ecstatic on the phone.

Another patient had been pain free after Calmare for 45 days (at the time of my conversation witth him).  He had severely damaged discs in his back and was at a VAS pain scale of 7 when he started treatments.

I spoke with the patient that had been struck by lighning and was on Good Morning America and The Early Show a couple of weeks ago. He has to go for treatments more frequently because the pain comes back sooner and slowly increases--but to say that the technology has NO effect on chronic pain is a flat out lie.

I spoke to a patient with RSD--a sixteen year old gir--who has been helped. Never gets dow t pain free--but definitely a reduction in pain. And she has absolutely no alternative thereapy to her pain other than Calmare.

Can these patients all be lying?  Could be. Can the two physicians that are using the Calmare that I spoke to--can they be lying because they use the technology?  Sure. But both physicians decided to purchase the Calmare units because they saw the pain relief in their patients. Could they still be lying? Maybe. But not likely.

The Mayo Clinic is conducting clinicial studies on Calmare (check it out on the Mayo Clinic website). This poster that is spending all his time slamming the technology has posted that he/she did not think the Mayo Clinic's studies were properly constructed! I am not kidding. The Mayo Clinic, according to this poster, believes that Mayo needs help in constructing a clinical study.

 If this poster had any real interest in whether the technology works or does not work, he/she should be encouraging patients to try the technology and post back here on their experience. But he/she is trying (in my opinion, trying deperately) to discourage people to find out for themselves. If 30 patients tried Calmare and posted on various forums that the technology did not work at all, Calmare would fade away. But that has not happened. Why is that?

There has to be a real reason for this poster to be posting on multiple boards--some pain treatment boards, some stock discussion boards. Why? Because he is concerned that people are wasting their money? Really?

If you, as a chronic pain sufferer, are interested in the Calmare--do your research beyond just llistening to this poster. Don't take my word for it and do no take his//her word for it. 

The real victims are those patients reading this that have chronic pain that delay their own discovery of the Calmare. If it is proven to work in more clinical studies and becomes insurance-approved, how angry would you be at this poster who had affected your decision to not explore Calmare in mroe detail? 

How angry would you be at yourself for being manipulated?

..."Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance."?...I can't argue with that...fortunately, in my case, I was well trained in anatomy, physiology, and the neurosciences and, consequently, feel quite comfortable "condemning" the "Calmare" to be a bonafide, grade A certified, QUACK medical device...ask ANYONE who tells you otherwise to pick up a neurophysiology book and find exactly which receptors the device is stimulating...I'm willing to bet he can't...because there are NO receptors that can respond to "scrambled" signals" applied through surface electrodes...consequently, it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to "target c-fiber pathways"...unless of course, Dr. Marineo discovered a new nociceptor sensitive to "zapping"...because the thermal, mechanical, and chemical nociceptors that DO EXIST will NOT respond...

...the sensory system for noxious stimuli is fairly simple --  a SPECIFIC temperature, chemical, or mechanical nociceptor is stimulated and it triggers an action potential in the peripheral nerve that it synapses with...that action potential travels to the superficial dorsal horn in the spinal cord where it transfers via synapse to a central nervous system neuron that sends the signal to specific neurons inside the thalamus of the brain...NOTHING gets through via c-fibers unless it stimulates a nociceptor first...there are NO nociceptors for transdermal voltage changes!...

...the most the Calmare can do is what every other TENS device does -- produce a voltage beneath the electrode sufficient to cause the underlying muscle to depolarize and contract, causing the patient to feel a little "twitch" and sometimes some heat if the voltage is high enough...believers in TENS try and argue that the "twitch" activates mechanical receptors and that the signals produced result in inhibition of c-fibers by a feedback mechanism suggested in the "gate theory" of pain...

...neurostimulation CAN control pain by inducing paresthesia but REQUIRES implantation of the electrodes directly into the spinal canal adjacent to the spinal cord...note that Medtronic does a good business with implanted stimulators but sold its TENS division around 20 years ago for all of 6 million dollars...which I think tells you what they think of TENS units...

...an older but nonetheless worthy article about implanted stimulators:

 www. myelitis.org/newsletters/newsletter5-1-08.htm

..."seeking attention by standing on soapboxes w/o substantial proof to dissuade others from seeking alternative therapies"???...well, I'm glad you appreciate my efforts to prevent you from being swindled...proof?...what proof do you want?...I could recommend you read Kandel and Scwartz's neuroscience textbook...would that be considered proof?...or how about this?...CTT showed the machine at ASCO last year -- or maybe the year before -- I can't recall...now a LOT of docs pass through ASCO every year, and one might presume that they don't like seeing their patients suffer; so you'd think they would have lined up to buy such a miraculous device...yet when you look around at clinics offering the device, who do you find?...an ob-gyn out in Utah, a primary doc in Rhode Island, a PT doc on Staten Island (apparently) and a few chiropractors...hmmmm...what's missing there?...maybe all those onc docs want to discourage their patients from seeking "alternative therapies"...

  ...personally, I'm all for alternate therapies...if standing neck deep in fresh cow manure made someone's day brighter, I would encourage them sincerely and wholeheartedly...I really don't care whether anyone uses the Calmare...I care only about the outrageous claims about it doing anything more than a TENS device...indeed, the day the ridiculous claims stop is the last day anyone will hear from me about it...