Recovery Has a Failure Mode
A failure-to-update in the sensorimotor systems leads to a static, maladaptive experience. The Gardiner Methods prompt the systems to resume the flow of information.
A trial takes three minutes. A session holds a dozen.
Most therapy aims to improve. These Methods aim to conclude.
Finding the error is what releases it. The test and the therapy are the same act.
Sensorimotor systems are the source of dynamic experience. Moment to moment they carry information about where the body is, what it is doing, and what deserves attention. When that flow fails to update, the information downstream arrives late, arrives corrupt, or does not arrive at all, and what we feel stops resolving on its own. Burning that never fades. Feet that go offline. A hand that will not open. A movement that is not as intended. The four Gardiner Methods are aimed at the flow, not at the feeling. When the information updates, the downstream experience often recovers within the session, though not necessarily the first one.
Figure 1. One failure mode, found across conditions that do not share tissue pathology.
An example: phantom pain and stroke-induced aphasia
Stroke: 10 years of phantom pain and aphasia/apraxia released
Luis, ten years post-stroke, required his wife or family to translate his attempts to speak. He resumed propositional speech (thoughts to speech) during two sessions. He arrived at the 2025 DoD Warrior Games in Colorado Springs having phantom pain where his left leg had been amputated. We worked together to extinguish his phantom pain during his first session. We do not know whether releasing his pain helped him resume propositional speech.
The deciding is the part that makes it work. Change is expected within seconds to minutes, so the clinician is watching rather than waiting, and what they are watching for is specific: a flinch, a gasp, a deep breath, a report of surprise. Luis could not tell me where to test. A grimace when I reached the right spot told me what he could not say.
Luis (3:03): brief overview of his progress over three days.
Three ways the flow fails
Naming them matters, because each one appears as a different aspect of the failure mode. The information can be late, arriving after the moment it was needed. It can be corrupt, arriving but wrong. Or it can be missing, not arriving at all.
How a session works
An interactive trial takes about three minutes. Two minutes of therapy, then one minute to decide what to do next.
The deciding is the part that makes it work. Change is expected within seconds to minutes, so the clinician is watching rather than waiting, and what they are watching for is specific: a subtle change in skin tone, sometimes a flinch, a gasp, a deep breath, a report of surprise. Those are the signs that updating has resumed.
If nothing changed, that is information too. The next trial changes the wavelength, the location, the frequency, or the Method itself.
A standard forty-five-minute session holds a dozen or more trials. That is why a problem that has not moved in years can be addressed in a single visit. Not because any one trial is powerful, but because a dozen of them can be run while you are still in the room.
A standard forty-five-minute session holds a dozen or more trials. That is why a problem that has not moved in years can be addressed during the session. Not because any one trial is powerful, but because a dozen of them can be run while you are still in the room.
Figure 2. Every trial ends in one of three places.
A, no change. The most common single result. It takes three minutes and it narrows the search.
B, is partial. The flow resumes far enough for healing to restart, and ordinary rehabilitation carries it from there. For example, plateaued stroke, non-healing wounds, and sports injuries.
C, concluded. The flow resumes, the experience finishes, and it becomes an ordinary memory rather than something still happening. For example, phantom pain, post-surgical pain, guarding, and stuck sensations or offline state.
Aiming to conclude
Other non-invasive approaches may work along the same path and "work" the same if the fixed setting is what is needed.
What is different here is the interactive monitoring for a physiological response, adjusting the Method, or switching Methods. During a session, two types of failure-to-update can respond to different Methods.
The larger difference is the target. I do not know of another therapy that aims to conclude the experience during the first session or two. Improvement is the ordinary goal, and it is a good one. Conclusion is a different aim, and it is the one these Methods are built around.
Aiming for conclusion is a high bar, and it is the reason this work draws argument. The question I put back is a simple one. If conclusion is what the patient needs most, why would we aim for anything less?
Not every case can be concluded, and saying so is part of the claim
Conclusion is available when the only thing still holding the problem in place is the failure-to-update. For example, guarding after an injury has otherwise healed.
Where tissue is still healing or a skill still has to be rebuilt, as in a wound that has not closed or speaking or movement that has to be relearned, releasing the failure restarts the process but cannot finish it.
That is endpoint B, and in those cases, B is the right result rather than a lesser one. The aim is always the most complete endpoint the condition allows. Working out which one that is belongs in each session, not at the end of a course of care.
The four Gardiner Methods
Two of the four need no device at all. Those are VxM and TxM, the Visual-experience and Touch-experience Methods, and they are the ones to try first. The other two use a device: VWT, Variable-Wavelength Therapy delivered by the Varichrome® Pro, and RM, the Relaxation Mask.
The no-device Methods and the Varichrome® Methods work the same way. They differ in which part of the sensorimotor system is thought to be linked to the failure-to-update. Finding the error is what releases it. The test and the therapy are the same act.
I invented the two no-device Methods and co-developed the Varichrome® Methods. The Varichrome® Pro and the Varichrome® Mask are made by PhotoMed Technologies, which is where a clinic or a family buys one.
What we are looking for
Physiological changes during therapy and while you are still in the room. Subtle changes in skin tone. The limited function improves. Pain drops. A hand opens. Warmth returns. Speech begins. An old experience feels finished rather than present. Healing resumes and sometimes concludes marked by a flinch, gasp, or deep breath. The response is individual to the event and not seeing one does not mean that there was no response because some people report improved function a day or two after a session.
It is important to remember that the Methods provide an environment for the sensorimotor systems to check themselves out. Any response is a result of the systems and not of any specific wavelength, frequency, or other parameter.
Another important clue that a conclusion has been achieved is a change in spoken tense by the person. For example, the pain "I have" shifts to the pain "I had." Continuing experiences are described in the present tense while memories are described in the past tense.
Sometimes nothing changes. This does not work for everyone, and we cannot yet predict who will respond. A short trial is the fastest way to find out. Sometimes relief occurs after the session during the next few days.
If it works and then stops
A change can hold, it can fade, or it can need another trial. We do not yet know which to expect for whom, and that is one of the questions the recordings are meant to answer. A fade is not a failure. It is information about where the flow is still impaired.
Watch and Learn
The two no-device Methods are the ones a family can use. They need no equipment. What they need is to be seen, because the timing is the part that is hard to describe and easy to copy once you have watched it.
Recorded examples are being filmed for exactly that, shot so you can follow along rather than only watch. Those pages are not up yet.
Contact me if you would like to be told when they are up
For clinicians and clinic owners
A plateau is usually read as a ceiling. It is not. It is the point at which the current approach stopped producing change, which is a fact about the approach rather than about the patient.
The Methods can be used at any point, before a plateau or long after one. The failure they address is not a stage of recovery. It is a state, and a state can be present upon an injury, on the first session, or at the fiftieth. Practically, that means you do not have to wait for a plateau to look for it, and you have not missed the window if a plateau has already arrived.
Two things make this worth testing rather than reading about. A trial takes three minutes and tells you within that time whether it did anything. And two of them, TxM and VxM, need no device at all, so the cost of finding out is one session and no purchase.
Each of the Methods provides a different environment for the sensorimotor system to check itself, discover the error, and solve it.
The Methods present physiological inputs to the sensorimotor systems that do not require acceptance of "how it might work".
What is known, and what is not
Many of these outcomes have been replicated. What is scarce is not the evidence. It is practitioners. The Varichrome® Methods are not widely available because few people have been trained in them, which is the reason the recorded examples matter as much as they do.
What we do not know: who will respond, and why an experience at one location answers to one Method and not another. Sessions in the feasibility studies were recorded, so a change can be examined rather than argued about, and those recordings are how we expect to answer these questions in the future.
The recordings gain value every time they are used. Each new idea tested against them costs nothing to try and either survives the archive or does not, which means the cost of asking the next question keeps falling while the evidence behind the answer keeps growing.
Allan Gardiner is an engineer and inventor. Twenty-five years on these Methods, six United States patents, seven feasibility studies with more than four hundred participants. The work is self-funded.
Background
The Gardiner Methods address a common failure mode that my team and I found through re-investigation of real-time recordings and data collected in feasibility studies and clinics. The data was used, without a hypothesis, to make the Variable-Wavelength Therapy (VWT) more effective and efficient.
The team used aviation forensic-style methods, which do not start with a hypothesis. Instead they test hypotheses against observations and reject them until a "most likely" remains. Real-time recordings and data let us efficiently re-investigate ideas and concepts. Physiological responses such as a flinch, gasp, deep breath, or report of surprise suggest the instant when updating resumes. Confirmation that an ongoing experience had transposed into an ordinary memory also occurs when the person's speaking tense about their experience shifts from present, "I have," to past tense, "I had."
Beginning in 2000, the team and I have focused the feasibility studies on people who had not achieved long-term benefit from conventional interventions and therapies.
The Variable-Wavelength Therapy, VWT, became more effective and efficient using feedback from the data and recordings. However, some volunteers arrived having many sites of pain and impairment that responded at the same time (associated) or at different times (not associated).
We found multiple "layers" of pain and impaired sensorimotor functioning at the same location that responded to different Methods. I am grateful to the people who interactively help me to develop the no-device Methods for alerting their body to release their PTSD, phantom pain, post-surgical pain, and mapping errors.
Figure 3. Active resistance to interventions and therapies appears to result from the sensorimotor system or body defending a maladaptive failure-to-update status quo.
I am often asked why I chose to develop solutions for some of the most challenging problems facing physical medicine today. It was not a leap of faith because my co-inventor, Constance Haber (owner of Alternative Medicine Pain Management), had shown that infrared therapy could prompt an end to complex regional pain syndrome. The problem was a matter of efficiency. Fixed wavelengths took hours to prompt the body to resume its ordinary tasks. Today, we think in terms of seconds-to-minutes.
The team and I applied engineering strategies for solving complex problems when you do not know the answer.
Figure 4. (A) Conventional hypothesis-driven "A does B" studies use groups of people and statistics to show that "it works." (B) The individuals in our feasibility studies were not expected to improve. The low expectations let us model their response as being stopped at a signal waiting to resume progress or to conclude the healing process.
Disclaimer:
The Methods are not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or disorder.
Rather, the Methods aim to provide an environment for the sensorimotor systems to recognize and release failure-to-update states. A conclusion of the failure mode is clearest when the person stops needing additional therapy and no longer meets their arrival diagnostic criteria.
Release of a maladaptive status quo is entirely a matter of the body and not the Methods, which only serve to alert the body to its failure-to-update.
The four Gardiner Methods
Two of the four need no device at all. Those are the ones to try first, and a family member or a therapist can learn them by watching real-time recordings of sessions.
The no-device Methods and the Varichrome® Methods work the same way. They differ in which part of the sensorimotor system is thought to be linked to the failure-to-update.
I invented the two no-device Methods and co-developed the Varichrome® Methods. The Varichrome® Pro and the Varichrome® Mask are made by PhotoMed Technologies, which is where a clinic or a family buys one.
Contact Allan
Please do not send medical records or detailed health information. Please contact me to arrange a conversation.