There's a danger of missing out on something useful
just by assuming that it is not possible"
- Tom Zlosnik, Theoretical Physicist
Recovery Has Failure Modes
The failures are linguistic and not biological.
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"Chronic" pain becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when ending it shifts to "managing" it.
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But 20 million people in the U.S. have pain that resists being managed. This is the challenge that the team and I set out to solve.
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Our Methods invite the body to self-check for errors. The rest is automatic.
Our solution: reframe chronic with delayed healing to open possibilities that are available today in the Gardiner Methods.
Figure 1. Reframing open-ended terminology with delayed healing removes barriers to thinking about methods for inviting the body to resume its ordinary healing tasks. The last step in healing processes is the switch from the experience "I have" to an ordinary memory of experiences in the past. The Gardiner Methods invite the body to recognize its need to return-to-normal functioning or R2N.
The core ideas are:
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Like how a dam on a river affects the flow everywhere below, failure-to-update leads to downstream information being late, corrupt, or missing.
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Downstream errors can lead to signs and symptoms that become a new normal state.
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The body can accept a new normal state that maintains its status quo by resisting interventions and therapies aimed at downstream signs and symptoms.
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From a new normal, the body can "remember" to check itself out, recognize errors, and return-to-normal functioning or R2N.
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The Gardiner Methods aim to interactively remind the body to resume its ordinary tasks: to restart healing or to conclude the experience when stuck at the last step.
This website presents the first real-time recordings and data showing the event when stalled healing resumes or concludes. Like nature videos, the recordings show ordinary events from new perspectives.
Because we could find no common medical terminology for these events, the team and I invented return-to-normal functioning or R2N. We needed terms that let us think about the recorded responses and outcomes. Then, the recorded data showed us a common mode of failure that we call failure-to-update flows of information that become late, corrupt, or missing.
The Gardiner Methods interactively use variable-wavelength light, touch, and vision to invite the body to check itself out. The rest is automatic or nothing. Upon a restart, healing resumes and often responds again to conventional therapies.
An example: phantom pain and stroke-induced aphasia
What three session can achieve.
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 clinician is watching rather than waiting, and what they are watching for is specific: a subtle change in posture or skin tone, a flinch, a gasp, a deep breath, a report of surprise. Luis could not speak well enough to tell me where to test. A grimace when I reached the right spot told me what he could not say. His facial expression quickly changed to relief.
Figure 2. Luis overview of his progress over three days.
Figure 3. Luis (3:03): brief overview of his progress over three days.
The Healing Hut at the DoD Warrior Games in Colorado Springs had a noisy military environment with curtain walls, machinery noises, and conversations. I was not sure that the veterans would respond like those in quiet offices in our feasibility studies.
The environment did not seem to reduce the effectiveness or efficiency of the Methods. I would have liked to have a means to follow up the progress of veterans like Luis.
An example: C5/C6 Spinal Cord Injury - Quadriplegia
What a year of care can achieve.
Tragedy struck on "Beth's" first outing with a teenage driver. The driver was not at fault when a truck rear-ended the car was stalled. Beth's mom tells the story along with a few progress clips.
Beth did the hard work of retraining her body.
"Beth" arrived about a year and a half after the accident. She had plateaued from her primary rehabilitation with little expectation of improvement from her C5-C6 spinal cord injury. The injury had been graded "complete" until she made significant progress via PhotoMed's variable-wavelength therapy plus renewed physical therapy. Then the injury was regraded to "incomplete".
PhotoMed's Variable-wavelength Therapy (VWT) prompted a restart of Beth's progress to achieve additional muscle coordination and strength. At six months, she resumed physical training paid by her insurance.
Beth was ready to go to college. At 13months, she gave her final interview of her volunteering to test PhotoMed's therapy. The therapy was not yet portable as it is now with the Varichrome Pro.
Another young person with a C5-C6 incomplete injury form a high school football head injury followed a similar trajectory and began riding a manual wheelchair after 12 months.
Figure 4. "Beth" (2:53): From electronic to self-powered manual wheelchair.
Overcoming the "impossible"
Engineering the possible - what next?
Could 20 million adults having high-impact chronic pain in the U.S. be a self-fulfilling prophecy? The list goes on and on. "Managing" didn't work for them.
Luis and Beth show what is possible but has no medical terminology for thinking about it. Both showed responses during the first sessions.
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Luis when home able to speak his thoughts and without his phantom pain.
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Beth went home self-powering a manual wheelchair.
Luis and Beth show what is possible but has no medical terminology for thinking about it. Both showed responses during the first sessions. Luis when home able to speak his thoughts. Beth went home self-powering a manual wheelchair.
From an engineer's perspective
I am an engineer and former jet pilot. Upon co-inventing Variable-Wavelength Therapy (VWT) in 2000, I formed a team of engineers and founded PhotoMed Technologies. The team invented the first of their kind sophisticated real-time recording systems to document events when healing abruptly resumes.
We use recorded data for aviation-style forensics, without a hypothesis, to make VWT more effective and efficient. Analysis of recordings and data ruled out conventional mechanisms for being too specific.
Could we find common modes of failure?
We had, and still have, the only dataset of recordings that shows the event when stalled healing resumes despite seemingly unrelated types of pain and impairment. The abrupt responses include some of the most challenging problems experienced by people who have no conventional pathway forward.
The first common failure mode is linguistic: focusing on the blockage ahead when the road runs out of medical terminology for the event when stalled healing resumes.
The second common failure mode is a failure-to-update is like the first in that the body hasn't got "words" to remember to update flows of information. The Gardiner Methods aim to invite the body to resume its ordinary updating. The rest is automatic.
Figure 5. The Gardiner Methods invite the body that is stuck at a failure-to-update to resume its course. We call that return-to-normal functioning or R2N.
Feel free to explore the data and ideas. Please contact me to ask questions and to share your ideas.
The Gardiner Methods
Four interactive methods for after others have given up trying
It took me 26 years to distill real-time recordings and data down to solve some of medicine's most challenging types of pain and impairment: types that remain unresponsive to conventional methods based upon guidelines and repetition.
In 2007, a breakthrough occurred when data from resolution of a single case of burning coldness in hands showed us that the experience of coldness was stuck and was independent of the actual skin temperatures. Ask me about the details.
In 2018, I shifted my thinking from "treating" diseases and disorders (Figure 9) to challenging the body to self-test, identify and correct errors, and resume ordinary healing that we call return-to-normal functioning or R2N.
In 2024, my shift to wellness thinking led to an Ahaa that found a void in common medical terminology that refers to an abrupt event when stalled-healing switches back online. I suddenly understood that without words, my medically-trained friends did not have a framework to accept the abrupt R2N events shown in the real-time recordings.
In 2026, a friend suggested that medical breakthroughs are often named for the discoverer...
Two of the four Gardiner Methods need no device at all. Those are TxM for Touch-experience Methods and VxM for Visual-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 Varichrome® Relaxation Mask.
Figure 6. Four Methods aim to provide an environment for the body to check itself out for errors (Table 1.) The outcome of self-testing can lead to a restart or conclusion of healing.
Figure 7. The Gardiner Methods invite the body to self-test for errors in the flow of information. The rest is automatic.
The non-device Methods and the device Methods work the same way. They differ in which part of the sensorimotor system is thought to be linked to a failure-to-update. The body 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.
Watch and Learn
The body was waiting for an invitation via vision or touch.
The two non-device Gardiner Methods are the ones a family can use right away. They need no equipment.
The Touch-experience Methods may be intuitive to use. You can try it anytime and feel the effort when tracking some else move while you maintain your lightest touch.
While also intuitive, I think that Visual-experience Methods should be accomplished in a professional setting for dealing with secondary issues.
For clinicians and clinic owners
A plateau is usually read as a waypoint that may not respond to guideline methods and techniques.
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 about three minutes and tells you within that time whether it did anything. And two of the Methods, TxM and VxM, need no device at all, so the cost of finding out is part of 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".
You are welcome to try the two methods that do not need a device. You do not need to wait until a plateau. Your massage therapists may find TxM helpful for their own aches and pains. The variable-wavelength therapy via the Varichrome® Pro and Relaxation Mask are available from PhotoMed Technologies with training from me.
Finding a common mode of failure
A few nuts and bolts about failure-to-update and return-to-normal functioning
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 invite the body to check itself out to find and fix failure-to-update errors leading to improvement or release of downstream signs and symptoms. There are many reasons that the body can't fix the errors such as when limited by tissue damage.
Engineers like models that can help find solutions without knowing all the details. For example, your car stalls and won't restart. Before about 1980, a mechanic replaced parts to get the car going again. We call that a hardware problem.
Failure-to-update is like a software problem that can be fixed with an update that gets the flow of information and your car going again. The inability to start the engine happens in a single line of code that can't be found by checking out the already working parts. The Gardiner Methods remind the computer to update.
Figure 8. The Gardiner Methods provide four ways to get the body's attention. Two of the Methods do not need a device. The failure-to-update software model shift focus to the computer needing an update instead of the named parts of the car that appear to have stopped working, for example, the starter motor.
Real-time recordings and data from clinics and feasibility studies show return-to-normal events from seemingly unrelated signs and symptoms. A common factor is that the maladaptive states are resistant to conventional interventions and therapies.
Similar to aircraft-style forensics, real-time recordings and data were collected without a hypothesis. The information helped make The Gardiner Methods more effective and efficient.
The value of the recording continues to increase when asking new questions such as "what might be a common failure mode?"
I have asked that question for years. Additional data ruled out previous hypotheses until failure-to-update remains as a principle for making decisions.
Conventional hypothesis-driven confirmation of myriads of "A does B"mechanisms may support the failure-to-update principle, or not. The key starting point is that conventional interventions and therapies are NOT expected to prompt a restart of healing or its conclusion.
Figure 9 shows ten maladaptive states that volunteers in feasibility clinics and studies arrived with. Many departed no longer meeting their arrival diagnostic criteria signs and symptoms. I picked these because the earliest physiological responses could be observed within the first session. A restart of healing often means that additional progress can be achieved using the same or conventional methods.
Figure 9. One failure mode, found across conditions that do not share tissue pathology, appears to be associated with treatment resistance rather than with signs and symptoms. We see the resistance as an active process defending a maladaptive status quo that the body has accepted as a "new normal" and not looking to update it. The outcomes in the studies are a result from direct interactions between a hands-on therapist and client.
A failure mode, failure-to-update, provides a principle for decision making. For example, which impairment should be addressed first?
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 Gardiner 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.
Disclaimer
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 a 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 specific to the Methods, which only serve to alert the body to its failure-to-update.
Contact Allan
Please do not send medical records or detailed health information. Please contact me to arrange a conversation.