Frequency Specific Microcurrent or FSM was developed in 1995 as a way of treating muscle and nerve pain by using frequencies found on a list that came with a medical device developed in 1922 and applying them with a two-channel microcurrent device.
Medical and osteopathic physicians in the US and the UK began experimenting with electrical therapies and frequencies in the late 1800’s. By 1922 there were thousands of physicians using frequency devices to treat a great number of conditions. The research and methods were recorded in books and journals such a Electromedical Digest and physicians shared their research, results and findings at meetings of groups such as the Pathometric and Electromedical Societies.
But the FDA was founded in 1906 as a result of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and pharmaceutical medicine had grown and become politically powerful by 1920. The Flexner Report was funded in 1910 by powerful interests and declared that there should be fewer medical schools, attended primarily by white males, and medicine should use pharmaceutical therapies as the standard of care. Electromagnetic therapies, homeopathy, herbs and nutritional therapies were dismissed as fraudulent, the physicians were persecuted and some were even jailed. The devices and the frequency lists were covered up with sheets and went into the back rooms of clinics or onto the trash heap. When the generation who developed the frequencies and devices died out, the last memories of this therapy and all of the development, research and outcomes were lost.
Harry Van Gelder
They were lost until a British osteopath named Harry Van Gelder bought a practice in Vancouver, BC in 1946, walked into the back room and pulled the sheet off of a device built in 1922, found the list of frequencies and began using them and the device as a way of treating patients. He became well known all across Canada and the US because of his success in treating all kinds of very difficult illnesses. George Douglas, DC worked with Van Gelder in 1983 for three months and brought the list of frequencies home to Portland written on pieces of binder paper and put them in a desk drawer.
Reliable Results
Dr. Douglas joined Carolyn McMakin, DC in her first year in practice in 1995 and found the list when he moved his desk into the office. They began using the frequencies on chronic pain patients by applying them with an FDA approved two-channel microcurrent device. The treatments were remarkably successful and Dr. McMakin taught the first FSM course in January 1997 to see if the results were reproducible. Once it was clear that the frequencies produced reliable reproducible results, the courses continued to be taught, consistent protocols were developed and the conditions being treated expanded. After that first course, the basic FSM course evolved from two days to five days and there are now 5,000 FSM practitioners from every clinical license allowed to use electrical stimulation on patients in 23 countries.
Principles and Healing
FSM uses the principles of biophysics and the effects of biological resonance and frequencies that seem to change cell signaling and thereby change cell function and even structures, such as scar tissue, to reduce pain and improve function. The frequencies seem to improve healing from physical and emotional injuries, resolve nerve pain, phantom limb pain, muscle, joint, neck and low back pain, fibromyalgia, shingles and inflammatory conditions such as irritable bowel, asthma and chronic fatigue. FSM is not used to treat active infections or cancer or any potentially fatal condition.
The Resonance Effect describes how FSM was developed and the textbook, Frequency Specific Microcurrent in Pain Management, was published by Elsevier in 2010. There are 17 peer reviewed published papers documenting the positive effects of FSM in case reports and controlled trials.