Engineering Strategies Applied to Relieving Chronic Pain and Impaired Functioning
Keywords: allostasis, allostatic loading, homeostasis, nostos, nostostasis, nostostatic, R2N, Huntington's Disease, C5/C6 quadriplegia
Allangardiner.com is under construction, slightly repetitive, and formatted for computer screen
This site shares a few insights from an engineer's perspective. My life story centers on the mantra: "if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
My first startup, Kensington Laboratories (1972), created tools at the heart of quality improvement systems in industries that gave you hard disc drives and kept the computer revolution moving along Moore's Law. Objective measures were in nanometers and nanoseconds. I successfully exited in 1998. Later, the company exited for $320M.
My friends were right when telling me that my early "retirement" and flying charters as a commercial pilot would not be satisfying for very long.
Allan Gardiner
University of California - BS Mech. Eng. 1970
Professional Engineer, California M15780
U.S. Commercial Pilot, Type Rating CE-500
Free to look for a next chapter, I was appalled by the hopelessness of my friends and neighbors from experiencing unrelenting chronic pain and residual impairments from strokes and spinal cord injuries despite the "best" care available.
Estimates suggest that 20 million Americans endure high-impact chronic pain. Could engineering strategies from other industries solve these challenging medical problem?
In 1999, a light came on. Literally. I was exposed to photobiomodulation therapy (PBM) and its ability to relieve chronic pain. I asked the clinician, Constance Haber, how she chose the wavelength to use. She replied, it's the only one I've got. That brief conversation inspired our invention of variable-wavelength therapy. Our invention addresses fundamental limitations to fixed wavelength therapies: A. The wavelength or multiple wavelengths needed by the body are unknown. B. The needed wavelengths likely change as healing resumes or accelerates. In 2000, I formed a team that became my second startup, PhotoMed Technologies, to develop the variable-wavelength therapy. The aim was to find solutions to unrelenting treatment-resistant chronic pain. Outcomes from the therapy were beyond everyone's imaginations. Real-time recordings using thermal imaging and surface electromyography (SEMG) connected the settings and timing of the therapy with responses and outcomes. However, I was skeptical when our medical advisors were puzzled and had found no studies to cite for the observed phenomena. How might years of high-impact chronic pain and coldness from complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS or RSD) simply vanish? The varying wavelengths appeared more complex to study than for a discrete wavelengths. However, the varying wavelengths are like how visible rays of sunlight filtering through a forest in a breeze pleasantly dance on your skin. DOCUMENTING UNPREDICTED EVENTS The team applied engineering strategies as they created sophisticated recording systems to document the unpredicted events in real time. Like how nature videos show ordinary events from new perspectives, the real-time recordings show healing as it switches back on. The responses and outcomes turn out to be ordinary. It is the years of delay and low expectations that make resumed functioning feel special. It's the same for when sensations turn on again, the feeling coldness thaws, and for when one's range of motion returns back to normal. Of course, the body heals itself rather than being forced to do something that it would not have done on its own. Millions of anecdotes from myriad non-invasive therapies tell that story. PhotoMed's real-time recordings let everyone watch like with the man's hands warming after 30 years of dysregulation. Could his experience of coldness have gotten stuck and the temperatures were a result? In 2024, the answer appears to be that the homeostatic set point had changed over time such that homeostasis active maintained his abnormal experience of coldness. I have been honored to work with hundreds of volunteers having no path forward. They often shared detailed stories about their lives left behind. About the grip of pain that narrowed their focus until nothing else seemed to exist. And added details of the torment of losing jobs, friends, and family. But it was their outcomes and gratitude that inspired me to invest 25 years of my life and $20M to solve challenging life limiting problems. The trek helped to develop the variable-wavelength therapy. The insights apply to many non-invasive therapies. They are not specific to any intervention or therapy. For example, I would not have invented variable-wavelength therapy if I had not seen cold limbs warm in response to then called infrared therapy. ​Six U.S. Patents have been issued for the variable-wavelength therapy methods.
I want to thank the volunteers who helped the team develop PhotoMed's variable-wavelength therapy and methods. Most volunteers arrived with chronic pain and impairments having no path forward. I also want to thank the many people who contributed to and challenged ideas: especially Constance Haber, Catherine Willner MD, William Conard MD, and Robert E. Florin MD.
Improving the quality of life
By Allan Gardiner
The team investigated how the therapy might be used to improve lives for maladies other than treatment-resistant chronic pain. The basic therapy aims to help the body recognize errors and return to normal functioning.
Thomas is a college baseball pitcher who has used the therapy to keep in top condition by addressing his injuries right away. He has provided input on developing the therapy for sports injuries.
Thomas guides his interactive therapy by telling me where he perceives a limit to his moving fluidly.
Each session addresses the problems that might limit his next game. A year ago, he broke a key finger and thought the his game was over. The variable-wavelength therapy accelerated healing.
Sports and fresh injuries
Figure 1 Thomas is a college pitcher with an ongoing need for therapy to recover quickly and remain in top condition.
The interactive methods are easy to learn and apply. The therapy prompts the body to resume its ordinary healing tasks.
My primary focus has been on helping people who have no path forward.
I have been inspired by the hundreds of people for whom the therapy has improved their quality of life. Most received only a few sessions of therapy to get back on the road. I shared in their moments of elation and amazement as their sensations and coordinated movements came back online.
Their outcomes improved the quality of my life, too. Perhaps consider joining me in restoring lives.
Improving lives of families
​
"Beth" and Mark are among the most impactful people who show that ongoing therapy can overcome big challenges. But just getting to the clinic was a family challenge I am inviting you to help solve by lending devices to the family to use at home. More on that later.
Beth's C5/C6 quadriplegia resulted from a tragic auto accident. Beth's mom shares how her life changed as she cared for Beth as they accomplished her tasks of daily living. I learned how challenging just getting to the clinic was each week. Lending devices with individualized training frees up the travel time to use for the therapy at home.
​
During a year of the new therapy, Beth returned to physical rehabilitation to rebuild her strength enough to manage her manual wheelchair. She went on to school and to live independently.
​
Mark's loss of coordination from Huntington's disease limited his activities of daily life. Nothing that we take for granted was easy for Mark. He lived in a nursing home which made it impossible for Mark to be the father that he wanted to be.
​​​
During his first two years of the new therapy, Mark's Huntington's-disease-eroded coordination improved sufficiently for him to move out of a nursing home to live independently. Mark's speech improved enough to get custody of his kids back. He became the father that he had hoped to be.
Figure 2 Beth arrived having post-plateau C5/C6 quadriplegia from an auto accident. The therapy restarted her improvements which allowed her to get back into rehabilitation. Beth transitioned to manual chair in a year.
Mark had impaired coordination from Huntington's disease that forced him to live in a nursing home. The therapy helped him improve his speech and coordination sufficiently to live independently again and to regain custody of his kids. To become the father he had hoped to be.
Figure 3 Clips from interviews with Beth. (4:09)
Figure 4 Clips from the first anniversary meeting and an interview with Mark telling about getting custody of his kids back. (1:40)
Sadly, the therapy is not widely available. About 40,000 people have C5/C6 spinal cord injuries and about 7,000 people have coordination issues associated with Huntington's disease that might be improved. Their families are waiting, too.
My passion remains high with reports of how the therapy restores quality of lives on a daily basis.
​​
I am working with the L.C. and Lillie Cox Haven of Hope (a non-profit organization) to implement their project (PhotoMed Project.) We lend therapy devices to families having members who might benefit from the therapy. We are starting with people having challenges like Beth and Mark. https://www.allangardiner.com/lending-project
​
Please share my contact information with families in the San Francisco Bay Area who might wish to try the therapy. Of course, funding must come from gifts, donations, and grants.
Want to get involved?
Contact me.​​
You can learn more about the therapy and device at https://www.photomedtech.com/
Documenting "unimaginable" responses and outcomes
For 25 years, the responses and outcomes to the therapy have been, and remain, "unimaginable" from conventional perspectives. From a wellness perspective, the events and the return to normal functioning are delayed rather than unimaginable.
​
Aren't most practitioners of non-invasive therapies aiming to hear their patients report "I feel normal again"?
But, I felt isolated until I recognized that millions of "I feel normal again" anecdotes from hundreds of seeming unrelated non-invasive therapies have been dismissed.
​
However, the "evidence" is the strongest on the planet when the person no longer need therapy for their previously unresponsive malady.
Start by documenting the ending autonomic dysregulation
The team created sophisticated real-time recording systems to document events that appeared to have no precedent.
However, co-inventor Haber had been prompting the return to normal functioning using lasers and LEDs that took hours to prompt the event.
​
Our inventions were about efficiency rather than overcoming impossibilities.
The efficiency opened the practicality of making uninterrupted recordings of events during a session, typically during the first or second session.
Figure 5 Thermal imaging of hands warming that marks the conclusion of the person's complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS or RSD). The person's hands released an unrelenting sensation like the burning of "holding ice."
The real-time recording systems helped to make the therapy more efficient and effective by linking therapy settings (#1 - #3 in Figure 5) with the thermal imaging data.
The events typically occur during the first or second session followed by normal functioning or ordinary healing such as with wounds.
Figure 6 Real-time recording of thermal imaging of hands warming that marks the conclusion of the person's complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS or RSD). The time is accelerated.
Documenting the return of ordinary sensations, movement, and resolution of pain
The recording systems evolved as volunteers arrived with their individual collections of maladies. The recordings show how independently the responses can be connected.
An instructive example shows the return of sensations in feet after 8 years but misaligned with the man's anatomy. Watch as the man gasped at the instant the touch-maps realigned upon observing where he was being touched.
Figure 7 "George" arrived without sensations in his feet after 40 years of diabetes. His sensations resumed during his second session but were misaligned (left panel). His sensations realigned when he observed where he was being touched (right panel).
The real-time recordings let the team investigate different possible mechanisms for the resumed awareness of touch and its misalignment. The misalignment appears in many recordings of reawakened sensations of touch but is usually realigned by cross-sensory observations before I could perform testing. Thank you, George, for complying with my request to not move or look at your feet until requested by me.
Figure 8 Watch as George experiences sensations that had been unimaginable only a few minutes before. I am the voice behind the camera.
Real-time recordings of events such as experienced by George show two components. The first prompted by the therapy and the second via an ordinary cross-sensory observation.
The team and I mused over highlight recordings to tease out a common factor: we found that it is the delay that is special rather than the recovery.
The set of real-time recordings is likely the world's only collection showing that the return to normal functioning and "I feel normal again" are not distinguishable from the same event during the acute phase. That is, knowing the delay and "before" state makes the responses and outcomes feel like magic or unimaginable.
We wondered, why a delayed return to normal functioning should cause the apparent cognitive dissonance?
​
Could the dismissal of millions of anecdotes reflect that there isn't a medical term for an abrupt return to normal functioning event or outcome?
Naming a fundamental principle of biology
How can you think about or imagine events without a name?
​
Quickly. What is the inverse of a catastrophe called?
For 25 years, the team and I have observed in real-time recordings that chronic pain can appear to vanish. Unrelenting pain, like holding ice, can simply switch back to normal responsive regulation. See Figures 5 and 6. We called that a "return to normal" functioning or R2N.
The R2N events were shown to occur by restoring sensation (Figures 7 & 8), 3D vision, and the ending of phantom pain (post-surgical pain). The team focused on "I feel normal again" events that were easy to document; the person did not need more therapy for that malady.
I was skeptical for lack of confirmation in the scientific literature. Could we the first to observe a new phenomenon from the variable-wavelength therapy? Could each "case" be special or might there be an underlying connection among seemingly unrelated maladies that could return to normal functioning?
About 2014 the plot thickened upon my invention of a therapy that uses only vision and no device to prompt the body to rid itself of phantom and post-surgical pain. I call that the Visual Experience Therapy (VET). Curiously, people in our Sacramento study showed that a location of pain could be partially relieved by the variable-wavelength therapy (VWT) but needed VET to complete the relief. Single uncut real-time recordings show both events leading to the person reporting "I feel normal again."
Over time, I learned that many non-invasive therapies can prompt "I feel normal again" events that we call R2N. More broadly, R2N is a primary aim of physical therapy, rehabilitation, and pain relief in general?
But where are the "I feel normal again" stories for perhaps a million practitioners aiming for and achieving that outcome?
Millions of anecdotes dismissed for "lack of evidence"
Gradually, the team and I recognized that the problem is semantic rather than biological.
It turns out that the term "evidence" accounts for millions of anecdotes appears to having been dismissed. A little deeper dive illuminates the problem.
Two interpretations of "evidence" show a semantic problem, the models are:
​
1. That the active "agent" must be present in the body for "managing" a disorder, or the malady returns to its baseline.
​
2. That the active "agent" is not present in the body while the malady does NOT return.
Which model of "evidence" applies to a particular "case" using invasive interventions or non-invasive wellness therapies? It can't be both.
Could the anecdotes have been dismissed for applying the wrong measure of "evidence?"
Outcomes from light-based therapies fit model 2 evidence. The photons depart at the speed of light after the therapy ends and many people do not need additional therapy.
The real-time recordings connect the therapy with responses and model 1 outcomes.
For the next section:
The term "healing" refers to the Greek root for curing. The processes are expected to take time to progress from injury to fully healed. We call that the "normal-healing state." Typically unnoticed, healing can stop and restart during the "acute" phase.
​
Critically, the terms "chronic" and "new normal" imply that healing is NOT to be expected.​
Could the semantic problem be more fundamental than the "evidence?"
In August 2024, advisor Parker Lapp and I were on Zoom discussing the increasingly common abrupt "I feel normal again" events prompted by the therapy.
I explained that my skepticism had continued because the team and I had found no studies or terms for abrupt "I feel normal again" events (R2N) like those shown in the real-time recordings. Perhaps conventional research wasn't looking for (R2N) events. Worse, the term "spontaneous remission" removes the agency of the therapy and the practitioner.
A very brief history:
In 1849, Claude Bernard introduced the concept of stabilizing the internal environment as crucial for life.
​
In 1926, Walter Cannon expanded Bernard's ideas and coined homeostasis to describe the body's ability to maintain the status quo.
In the 1970s, Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer began studying the effects of chronic stress on human physiology that could not be explained by homeostasis alone.
​
In 1988, Sterling and Eyer introduced the concept of allostasis that accounts for how stress can prompt maladaptive homeostatic states that maintain pain and impaired functioning.
The concepts of allostasis shifting homeostatic set points support common notions of a "new normal" homeostatic set point and associated status quo.
​
The "new normal" accounts for the stability of the status quo that maintains pain, impaired functioning, and associated experiences such as PTSD. The stability is achieved by resisting interventions and therapies.
In 2019, the stability of the "new normal" state led to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defining some types of chronic pain as a disease itself in the ICD-11.​
In 2000, Constance Haber and I invented the variable-wavelength therapy. In retrospect, our focus was ending the "new normal" by prompting the body to resume its ordinary updating tasks that could discover and correct errors that stop healing. The real-time recordings show events when "new" reverts to "old."
My skepticism continued. How could the team be seeing something foundational that hadn't been described before?
I did not learn about allostasis shifting homeostatic set points until 2023. Team member Steven Gerhard and I investigated ramifications and developed graphics that tell complex stories. We aimed to simplify the concepts about set points and status quo. Contact me to investigate the details.
An "ahaa" changes everything
Clearly, allostasis and other terms could account for "getting worse." Previously, we had discussed the simplicity and ramifications of replacing "chronic" with "delayed healing."
We had reasoned that the Variable-Wavelength Therapy (VWT) and many non-invasive therapies "work" by prompting the end of a delay. VWT happens to be efficient enough to document using real-time recording systems.
Could advisor Parker Lapp and I find a term that completes the homeostatic journey from normal to the "new normal" and back to the original normal?
Let's try AI, we simultaneously blurted out.
He put in the word "Greek" and asked me for descriptive terms used by volunteers for their abrupt recovery. I suggested "homecoming." Up popped nostos that refers to a homecoming after an epic journey such as in Homer's Odessey. You might be familiar with the feeling of nostalgia.
​
We agreed that nostostasis might fill the semantic void of a homeostatic journey to a "new normal" back to the normal-healing state.
Figure 9 Introduction of nostostasis that names a fundamental principle of biology that accounts for the reversion to the normal-healing state from a "new normal" state. The concept of "delayed healing" anticipates healing whereas notions about "chronic" imply never healing.
​
Testing the principle can direct. For example, responsive regulation of skin temperature can be missing for years yet resume within minutes. See Figures 5 and 6.
Return to normal functioning, or healing, events shown in real-recordings from two therapy methods (one using light and the other only vision) are indistinguishable from ordinary except for the delay. The delay in one case was 75 years.
​
The real-time recordings document during-session changes such as the person changing tense while describing their pain or impairments. For example, "the pain I have" switches to "the pain I had" and the pain intensity rapidly fades.
What are some characteristics of fundamental principles?
As a fundamental principle, nostostasis provides a name for thinking about and researching ordinary phenomena that result in the abrupt release of maladies.
A nostostatic event occurs at a change-of-state from "not-healing" to the "normal-healing" state.
​
​Fundamental principles can be tested and demonstrated, like with gravity, without understanding how the principle works.
​
Nostostasis and the nostostatic event are not specific to any intervention, therapy, or malady. The cycle may need to be repeated to advance a healing process.
​
We hope that future researchers can start from an understanding that healing is a necessary ability of every cell, even at a sub-cellular level, that continuously waits for the "right" signal or energy.
Figure 10 A comparison of the effects of gravity and delayed healing at the instant when nostostasis occurs at the restart of healing.
Summarizing thoughts
I recognize that introducing nostostasis may cause a bit of cognitive dissonance.
I suggest replacing notions about chronic meaning forever with "delayed healing" to remove the blockage of expectations about possible healing.
​
​Note that nostostasis names a change in state rather than a "thing" to be quantified.
Figure 11 I talk about the introduction of "nostostasis" as a fundamental principle of biology. (3:16)
​In 2000, the team and I saw our first nostostatic events. The outcomes were deemed to be unbelievable by the conventional medical community. They still are.
​
A term coined by engineer's for foundational biological principle might ruffle a few feathers, but the bird is now out of its cage.
​
I welcome questions, comments, and suggestions.
Allan Gardiner
January 8, 2025
Disclaimer: The information and insights on this website are not to be considered as recommendations or medical advice. PhotoMed's variable-wavelength therapy and other non-invasive therapies are presented to support a broader understanding of wellness therapies. PhotoMed's Varichrome Pro is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or disorder.