Allan Gardiner Home / About Updated 2026-10-10
Twenty-Six Years of Asking Why Recovery Stalls
How a mechanical engineer ended up documenting rapid recoveries from pain and impairment, and why the four Methods on this site exist.
"The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees." – Erwin Schrödinger
This page is about the pathways in developing the Gardiner Methods that may alert the body to failure-to-update flows of information. It is the body's recognition that the flow of information is late, corrupt, or missing that prompts updating to resume that may improve quality of life.
Figure 1. The Gardiner Methods provide different environments, singly or in combination, aimed to help the body recognize a failure mode that is common in treatment-resistant pain and impairment.
Overview
Real-time recordings and data collected over twenty-five years document events that are not predicted in books and research literature. The recordings continue to add value by helping answer new questions and for making the Methods more effective and efficient. They are the first of their kind that enabled finding a common mode of failure among seemingly unrelated types of pain and impairment. Like other first introductions of new imaging techniques, real-time recording usher in new frontiers for studying events when stalled healing abruptly resumes or concludes. These events have occurred for millennia but were dismissed as "spontaneous remission." To remove cognitive dissonance, replace "chronic" with "delayed healing."
The Short Version
I trained as a mechanical engineer, spent a career building precision inspection equipment for the semiconductor industry, and became a commercial jet pilot along the way. For the last twenty-five years I have been documenting something conventional practice does not expect: stuck conditions, pain, numbness, aphasia, unresolved grief, beginning to change within a single session, on camera, in real time. This site is the record of that work and the four Methods it produced.
Allan Gardiner
UC Berkeley, BS Mech. Eng. 1970
Professional Engineer, California M15780
U.S. Commercial Pilot, Type Rating CE-500
Where the Questions Started
My father was a research chemist who treated a failed experiment as the interesting part of the day, not the end of it. My mother taught me to notice the people around me who needed help. An uncle who used a wheelchair asked me questions I could not always answer, and did not let me pretend otherwise. Another uncle, an engineer, took me onto job sites and let me use real tools on real problems.
One question stuck longer than the rest. A blind friend in elementary school once asked me what blue looked like. I did not have an answer, and I have spent a fair amount of my life since then comfortable with questions that do not resolve quickly. A few years later, a routine school vision test caught something simpler: I needed glasses. The depth, color, and clarity I saw for the first time started my lifetime interest in vision, one that later shaped the Relaxation Mask.
From the Chip Industry to Solving Pain and Impairment
After UC Berkeley, I spent two years with an electrical testing equipment company, then co-founded Kensington Laboratories, building precision inspection systems used by IBM, Intel, and other semiconductor manufacturers to catch and examine defects on the production line. I sold the company in 1998 with an urgency to find new hard problems to solve.
In 2000, PhotoMed Technologies started the way a lot of second careers do: watching people I knew live with pain that nothing fixed. A friend, Wayne, phoned me while walking with his father in a shopping mall. It was his father's walking that caught my attention. He usually rode a wheelchair because of diabetic pain in his feet. I expressed my surprise. Wayne introduced me to what was then called infrared therapy administered by Constance Haber, owner of Alternative Medicine Pain Management. I went to see for myself. I quickly had no doubts that a few photons could improve lives after everyone else had given up. I asked Haber how she had chosen that wavelength. She told me it was the only one she had. That conversation sparked our invention of Variable-Wavelength Therapy: what might be accomplished with access to the entire visible spectrum, a few wavelengths at a time, that could be dynamically varied?
I formed a team of engineers who invented sophisticated systems to document events in real time that we thought would be rare. We applied engineering strategies and aviation-style forensic analysis of the events to make the variable-wavelength (VWT) methods more effective and efficient without needing a hypothesis. Real-time recordings and data continue to increase in value as they help answer new questions and test hypotheses.
Of course VWT doesn't work for every ailment. Long story short, I developed two Methods that do not use a device to get the body's attention, check itself out, and resume its ordinary tasks. The Gardiner Methods now employ four synergistic interactive methods aimed at alerting the body to its failure-to-update the flows of information the body does not know is failing. The clinician looks for physiological responses that occur within seconds that may confirm the body has been alerted. No response means change something. Two sessions with no response suggests that it may be time to consider a different therapy.
What Twenty-Six Years of Watching and Interacting Taught Me
Recordings and data were collected from a series of feasibility studies and clinics involving more than four hundred participants having no conventional pathways forward.
The recordings show previously unseen events in fine temporal and spatial details. Being engineers, we called the events, and the resumed healing that followed, return-to-normal functioning or R2N. The evidence was clearest when the person stopped needing therapy and no longer met their arrival diagnostic signs and symptoms.
However, the variable-wavelengths meant that we had to give up trying to find "A does B" answers for what each wavelength might help the body achieve. The question whether there might be a dose-response relationship was easy to answer. No. The response, resumed functioning, is what the body does when it detects and corrects errors that we think are in the flow of information.
The aim of each session was to maximize the likelihood that the volunteer would leave having reduced their pain or impairment. The responses and outcomes could be limited by tissue damage. I developed Methods to be tried in combinations during a 45-minute session. For example, alerting the body to its impaired thoughts-to-speech (aphasia) involves a combination of Relaxation Mask and touch Methods.
From the start, our feasibility studies and clinics invited people having pain and impairment that no one, including me, expected to respond to the evolving methods.
Four people, among many, taught me about how their lives would have been if the Methods had not been available to them.
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"Beth" and "Sam" arrived having C5/C6 quadriplegia neck injury, quickly became able to feed themselves, return to insurance-paid rehab, and transition to self-powered manual wheelchairs within about a year. (VWT)
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Mark arrived having impaired and unwanted (chroeic) movements from his Huntington's disease. He moved out of a nursing home to live independently and became able to speak for himself sufficiently to regain custody of his kids. (VWT)
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Luis came to compete at the 2025 DoD Warrior Games despite phantom pain in his missing leg and his loss of thoughts-to-speech pathways (aphasia) from a stroke 10 years prior. Interactively, Luis's phantom pain faded away and he demonstrated his thoughts-to-speech in sentences on the third day. (VxM, TxM, RM)
It was the failures of variable-wavelength methods that kept me up at night. However, it was the ideas that awakened me that led to inventing my Visual-experience Methods (VxM), and Touch-experience Methods (TxM).
I used a combination of Methods to help veterans regain thoughts-to-speech (aphasia), end PTSD, and to regain sensation in numb feet.
You may be wondering why these events and outcomes appear to be the first of their kind.
The Problem Is Linguistic Rather Than Biological
Could medical terminology lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Figure 2. Open-ended terminology lowers expectations of improvements. How much research has been prevented by low expectations of improvement?
Figure 3. The team and I considered that healing was delayed and ignored the terminology. Real-time recording documented delayed recoveries up to 75 years after the injury in a case of PTSD at a scar.
Figure 4. We developed real-time recording systems to document low-probability events that simplify detection that the Methods are working. The test was people arriving in a "low probability new normal" state and leaving in a state of resumed healing with some having concluded the healing process. We used terminology that describes the outcome as a return-to-normal functioning.
The problem is a void in terminology and not biological
I did not understand that our return-to-normal terminology does not fit the conventional medical framework of static states. Nor did I understand how open-ended medical terminology lowers expectations to nearly zero for an abrupt recovery.
In 2024, advisor Parker Lapp and I had an Ahaa that we could not find precise conventional medical terminology for the key events recorded in real time:
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The event when not-healing switches to resumed-healing.
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The event when an experience of pain and impairment concludes and transposes into an ordinary memory.
The linguistic problem came into focus.
How can one think about abrupt return-to-normal events without terminology?
Lapp and I invented terminology, nostostasis, that refers to the return-to-normal functioning to fill the linguistic void.
However, inventing a medical-sounding term does not solve the linguistic problem overnight. I prefer to use return-to-normal functioning.
The range of maladies shown to respond expanded as people arrived having "rare" disorders, such as Huntington's disease. The Methods improved Mark's quality of life for five years by helping his body move, swallow, and talk. We had no illusion that the Methods were "treating" the disorder. Rather, the Methods helped his body roll back the clock of his impaired movement and other functions. His disease ultimately overcame his body's ability to roll back the clock.
The dataset grew to include seemingly unrelated maladies that could resume healing while the camera rolled. Could we find a single common factor?
Finding a Common Failure Mode
Varying the wavelength during therapy didn't fit "A does B" thinking. We had no hypotheses, maps, guides, or mentors who had been down this path before. We would have to make our own path and document where we had been.
Our real-time recordings are the first to show the return-to-normal healing and the concluding step when the "now" of an experience switches to the "then" of an ordinary memory. The event is often marked by a deep breath, flinch, gasp, or report of surprise.
Each new "impossible" to improve malady began to feel the same at some underlying level.
We used thermal imaging to monitor for changes in skin temperature that might mark the event when the body responded to the therapy. The focus was on abnormal skin temperatures. But one case showed us that a "stuck" experience of coldness that had failed to update better describes the status quo. Defending the status quo accounts for treatment resistance and maintenance of downstream signs and symptoms.
Figure 5. Thermal imaging let us observe the event when the body responds to the therapy methods. The body is responsible for the release of the malady. Later observations ruled out temperature regulation as being too specific to be a common factor.
Over several years, the central idea changed as different common failures appeared. But additions to the list bumped off speculations until the concept of a failure-to-update information remained.
Like a dam on a river affects the flow everywhere below, an upstream failure-to-update the flow of information leads to downstream signs and symptoms.
The failure-to-update provides a model for making therapy decisions and testing whether there is a response.
Figure 6 shows some of the maladaptive status quo states that we found could revert to an earlier state. Real-time recordings let us test concepts and ideas without needing new data.
Figure 6. Some of the maladaptive states shown to abruptly resume their ordinary course of improvement during a session using combinations of the Gardiner Methods. The common failure mode appears at the event when the failure ends with an updated flow of information.
Our initial aim was to end certain types of treatment-resistant chronic pain.
Today, we see the group of people who appear most likely to improve as distinct from people having "managed" maladies.
Of course there are many reasons why the Methods do not work. The clinician and client cannot know in advance whether the Methods will work.
Figure 7. Finding a common factor involved our initial aim to relieve unrelenting treatment-resistant chronic pain. This diagram distills the groups of people who have been found to respond to the Gardiner Methods.
Therefore, a common failure mode, failure-to-update, can only be seen in retrospect.
Using real-time recordings to find a common failure mode opens frontiers for research and clinical care. The outcomes from interactive Gardiner Methods show what has been done.
I am seeking early adopters who are willing to think differently about the plateau or new normal of the person in front of them and how to improve the quality of life.
Patents and Where This Stands
PhotoMed Technologies holds issued and pending U.S. patents covering the devices and methods described on this site, including U.S. Patent No. 7,878,965. This notice is provided under 35 U.S.C. § 287(a) in place of physically marking each product.
© 2020–2026 Allan Gardiner or PhotoMed Technologies, Inc.
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If You Want To Help
I am looking for sponsors, advisors, and clinicians willing to look at evidence that does not fit the usual model, and willing to share it with their own networks if it holds up. If that is you, I would like to hear from you.
Contact Allan Gardiner to set up a time.