Episode Fifty-Five – Andrew Fawcett: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode Fifty-Five – Andrew Fawcett: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Kim Pittis:
So today we have Andrew Fawcett. Andrew’s joining us live from.

Andrew Fawcett:
Columbus Ohio.

Kim Pittis:
All right. So you are a P.T., correct? You’re more than a PT. You guys are. You almost embody everything that a PT and a trainer and an exercise scientist and all those things should encompass.

Andrew Fawcett:
We love to say that we blend the line between fitness and rehab. Now, just for reference, I don’t wanna talk about me too much, but.

Kim Pittis:
That’s why you’re here.

Andrew Fawcett:
Okay. We say that we blend the line between fitness and rehab. That’s where our clinic starts and end. So any person, no matter their fitness level or age, they have a history of orthopedic problems or a current orthopedic problem. Or they have fitness goals, whether it’s to handle grandkids better or to hike a mountain. We exercise people in our clinic for fitness at the same time as we take care of or protect their orthopedic needs. So we blend physical therapy and orthopedics and exercise physiology all in one place.

Kim Pittis:
It sounds really common sense, especially the way that you say it. It’s just so matter of fact. But I don’t think that happens very often. And the more that I practice I’ve been doing this over 20 years now. There are people that get lost in that shuffle either they’re going to PT for something that’s post-surgical or they’re in chronic pain or they’re seeing a trainer to get fit or healthy. But there’s that whole piece in the middle that people need to be, I think, handled more carefully. There’s so many times that we see people who re-injure themselves in the gym because they’re starting too fast or whatever. How many people are in the clinic right now are in the facility.

Andrew Fawcett:
As far as staff members?here’s about ten and they range in different backgrounds from our part-time, we call them exercise specialists, but they’re basically a trainer. We have some part-time graduate students from the Ohio State Physical Therapy Program, as well as some exercise physiology students from the local colleges. So we really like to rely on that academic background. And then our clinical team is made up of physical therapists and licensed athletic trainers who all have similar certifications and experience with FSM and some manual therapy techniques. But we really try and build almost a paradigm shift as what you mentioned a little bit. There’s a chasm between; do ten reps with this really easy Thurman and PT and okay, let’s do CrossFit. And there’s sometimes not a lot in between for people, especially when the medical community, we always tell people pain is the end of dysfunction. So just because you’re not in pain doesn’t mean there’s not deficits, major deficits to be had. We love dental analogies. People tend to understand them. So we explain to them you can have literally a hole in your tooth. Bacteria is eating away at this very hard substance and you have no pain. It’s only when you have pain that you go to the dentist, then you would need a root canal. So we try and catch people when they’re in the cavities stage. We look at their whole body with an orthopedic evaluation. It’s usually about 90 minutes and we pick out deficits that haven’t caused an injury yet, but are really putting them down the path that if we don’t respect it or even sometimes rehab it before it’s injured is just an injury waiting to happen.

Kim Pittis:
I love that. That’s great. You’re right. People do understand dental analogy. You start scaring them with words like root canal. They’re like, okay, fine, I’ll listen to you. But I was going to ask you for your favorite quote, but I’m going to steal what you just said. What did you how do you say it? Pain is the end of dysfunction.

Andrew Fawcett:
Yes. It’s once the thing’s already been injured, that pain occurs. We can catch it all the way back here. But we need in dentistry, you go in and do an x-ray. So we need that x-ray vision which is based on whatever the listener’s background is. And if they don’t have a background in orthopedics, there’s potentially people that have pair with or there’s training to be had and massage therapy or licensed athletic training, which which in Ohio is a medical licensed profession or physical therapy.

Kim Pittis:
Sure. When I was going through my list and we knew Carol wasn’t going to be here for the month and I was figuring out who I wanted to talk to. And we have so many listeners ranging from patients to practitioners, and we’ve been doing FCM for a while within that first practitioner rainbow that we have. We have surgeons and medical doctors and acupuncturists and veterinarians. And so I try to throw this month as many different things to feed everybody’s interest because Carol can just talk about everything. So Carol, she’s like, I don’t know anybody like her that could cover all these different things. So we had functional medicine on, we had David Burke, we had Ben Katholi, and then I’m like, I have to feed the PTs in the audience right away. I thought about you guys. I was trying to think when I met you and Jerry, and it must have been at an advanced.

Andrew Fawcett:
And it was actually at your very first Sports FSM.

Kim Pittis:
Was it at the very first? So I was going to advance. But then you guys always have that group is so special because the very, very first FSM sports course, you were there and I was so nervous doing this course because Carol was there kind of auditing the course and to see how it was going. It’s like Luke and Yoda trying to duel it out. It was really nerve-wracking. And then Jerry was there being the heckler in the audience. It was great. And he challenged me to make the course better. And I always think about him when I’m changing the course. Jerry is no longer with us, and now we have a Jerry Greenspan scholarship. Every year I give a free sports course to a deserving Pete that is keen and green just like Jerry was. So we have that and you guys to thank for all of that stuff. So I had to put that little blurb out there. So talk to me about your FSM trajectory. How did you get involved with the FSM kind of stuff?

Andrew Fawcett:
At our clinic and like you mentioned, the founder of our clinic, we’ve been open about 25 years, potentially 30, depending on if you count when he started in his garage or not. But one thing that the founder was an innovator, a visionary, almost too much. We tripped over his innovation at times. And I’m not that person. I’m more of an integrator. I kind of traction things to the ground, make them work better versus always finding something new. And that’s why it used to tease me. He pulled me out to Scottsdale in August or Phenix in August to do your course, and there it was 110 degrees. But he wanted to be at the first one. He was always looking for the first thing. So we adopted laser class 4 laser therapy in 2000 and probably 12. I was still in physical therapy school at the time. He actually asked me I was working for him as a part-time trainer, like our part-time trainers do now. In PT school at the time and told me Laser doesn’t work. But he went to the vet office and took his dog and that laser at his dog. And when he went home, the dog could walk up the stairs better.

Andrew Fawcett:
And Jerry was an engineer as well as a clinician, a physical therapist. So to him, there’s no placebo effect in animals. If it helped the dog, then it works on people. But when we brought that modality in their settings on it to treat discs and nerves and in our experience, I hope I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes, but it really made people worse. I think the blood flow, the heat there, this or nurse didn’t like it. So at the time he had been getting maybe once a year or twice a year, really beautiful thick cardstock flier from Carolyn actually and about FSM and he said after several iterations of this flier, again his business mindset was moving forward and he said this must be expensive to send. If they keep sending it, people must be going to this course and it must actually do something. So really the search was to find something that could help disc herniation and nerves. And that started our trajectory right there was, Wow, this can do something for us that our manual therapy technique wasn’t as good at our first stint into sort of the cutting edge modality world couldn’t help us with, and we just took a springboard from there.

Kim Pittis:
That’s so cool. I love the mindset of Jerry, all these cardstock fliers. I could just see him thinking about it like that. So when you went to your first course, you were already a believer or you were open-minded enough to attend?

Andrew Fawcett:
Not at all, actually. Hear I am in this doctorate program at a university that tells me we’re the best of the best, which is not true. It’s a good university, but they send you out in the world thinking you’re God’s gift for therapy and don’t even know anything yet. And I had told him, they told me Laser doesn’t work and he bought it anyways and started using it on people I wasn’t treating yet, but. A year and a half later when I graduated and came out as a therapist and I had seen the patients come into our clinic and walk out with and apathy and those kind of things, and they really did work. So I knew, okay, maybe you see some things that I don’t. But when he told me about FSM, I thought, You can’t feel it, really. I’m like frequencies. So the only reason I went was because I trusted him greatly. But another funny story. We drove to Chicago for our first Core and I think there was about eight people in the course that time Carolyn was teaching. We showed up late that first night because we drove from Columbus. It was like 6 hours and we brought four of the people. So we showed up and there was only four other people in this course.

Andrew Fawcett:
And just down the hall in this hotel center was a pain management conference with 250 docs. And again, I thought to myself, truly, I’m like, There’s eight of us. My company brought four down the hall. There’s 250 people. This can’t work. But as we sat there through the weekend, you could feel the tissue soften and that I couldn’t remedy at all. You could feel the tissue soften bringing it back to the clinic. We started using it on acute injuries and on those nerve disorders. We’ll just say the full spectrum. And that was pretty clear pretty quick that this does something because the patient doesn’t feel anything. We charge, depending on how many they buy about 50 to $60 a session on top of our manual therapy. So some of the sessions can be quite expensive. They’re not interested in paying for things that don’t make them better right away in our clinic. And that was there even before we knew what we were doing. So I was not actually thinking that it was going to work. I respected the person that brought me there greatly, but I also saw it work quickly and that really changed my mind.

Kim Pittis:
I think that’s a really common introduction to FSM, especially from the physical medicine folks, because depending on what school and background you came from, we were brainwashed in college into thinking your hands are the only thing that are going to help, or only these machines that have the peer-reviewed triple blinded study. And as we know, manual therapy of any sort is very hard to get a blinded study on. It’s really hard to do that. So I love now that I’ve been teaching to get the skeptics and we’re getting less and less skeptics coming to the course, I think you have to have some sort of open mind to take time off of work, travel, pay for a course and attend. But you’re right. You can’t deny when you feel the tissue soften. And for me, that was exactly the same thing. I didn’t believe in these devices. I thought people were getting swindled. You can’t you can’t feel it. What the heck? It’s supposed to help you recover. Sure. But when you are a manual therapist and you feel something soften, that shouldn’t soften so quickly without destroying the tissue, you really can’t go back from that. And I love Jerry’s whole placebo effect in animals. Since I’ve started practicing, I’m working on a lot more horses than I ever thought. And you can’t deny when their head starts to drop, when they’re pawing at the ground because they want to roll over and go to sleep. You’re right. There’s no placebo effect there. So you talked about how you started using FSM in most of those acute conditions and with nerve injuries. Tell me, do you write your own programs or using the Mode bank? How many machines do you typically use on a patient? What are you doing these days?

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah, we’re a really busy clinic and not because we ask our staff to do that. It’s just people find us for the collection that we offer. FSM, our manual techniques, our blending the line between fitness and rehab, all of it. We’re very unique in the area, so they find us and drive We’re very busy. Because of that we typically always multitask when we’re treating as I’m sure many do. We probably have three Precision Cares and we probably have 12 CustomCare’s We have five practitioners right now. We had six, but we just went down to five. So we’re usually using between one PrecisionCare and 1 to 2 CustomCare’s at a time with people generally. We don’t oftentimes stop and wait to feel the tissue change just because we’re doing so much. We write most of our programs, but saying that they’ve been written for some time on our CustomCare’s we get ourselves up to 50 or 60 programs and then we’re like, Wow, why are all these on here? So then we’ll pare them down and we’ll go back down to 25 and then people build and we love the PrecisionCare We started out with CustomCare’s way back when and we were actually hooking them up upside down after our first Core course we missed some details there, but we still saw people getting better.

Andrew Fawcett:
And I think we see people, more people getting better now that we have them hooked up. Like I said, we love writing our programs. We love the soft tissue programs as well. I think more often with tendinitis and tendon offices and those kind of things, we’re using some of our other modalities, not that we haven’t seen success with the FSM, but some of the other ones are a little faster that we have. We’ll pull those in, but when somebody’s starting out in pain, there’s such a fine line between what we can do that causes them to. Walk out of our clinic and feel overworked and more pain. So oftentimes we are starting with an FSM treatment plan no matter what, because even the soft tissue stuff, because we find that it allows our manual techniques and we’re not often getting them in exercise right away, but anything we do to them, it gives us more leeway. Almost calming down the tissue calms down the nerve centers and even the soft tissue protocols. That’s when we use them a lot of times.

Kim Pittis:
Couple of things I want to circle back on. Oftentimes, I’m getting questions. I’ll get a practitioner that sends me this really long history that I like. I can’t even read through it because it’s super long and it’s great that it’s super thorough. And then the bottom part is like, where should I start? And my response is always whether it’s an acute patient or a chronic patient, if that person is coming to you in pain, you start with what’s going to get them out of pain? Absolutely. Like maybe you have to treat some autoimmune stuff and maybe you’re going to have to treat some scarring somewhere and maybe you’re going to have to correct a weakness because something is weak. And you know, but what is going to get that patient out of pain on day one the very first time they see you is, in my opinion, always should be your primary focus, because maybe you’ve increased their range of motion, but their pain level hasn’t changed, they might not come back to you for treatment because all they know is I went there, I spent an hour and a half, I spent $200 and it hurts just the same.

Andrew Fawcett:
I can’t believe sometimes. The manual technique we use a neural technique, so we’re not really manipulating tissue much. We’re working on the muscle spindle. We see large range of motion changes fairly quickly. It takes a lot to get them to hold, but I have a person they’ll be able to turn their head around like an owl. After the session. I’m like, Do you feel that? And they’re like, No, my neck still hurts, but do you feel that? So you’re right. Absolutely. If they’re not out of pain soon, it doesn’t matter what I do to them. They’re not coming back.

Kim Pittis:
I think a small maybe percentage of the elite professional athletes will like the extra range of motion and the strength. They’ll appreciate that a bit more. But I think for the average everyday person, you’re right. Like you could do so many things to that person, increase their strength and range of motion. But if the pain didn’t fluctuate. And FSM, I’ll never forget my first Core. Carol said nerve pain is one of the easiest things that we treat. And I was like everybody just here that like nerve pain is so hard to treat. What do you mean? This is the easiest thing I’m going to do. Only so I think sometimes we take it for granted that maybe you don’t know where to start with the patient. Or maybe you are trying to go through your assessment and figure out biomechanics and what you’re supposed to do with that person. And as you’re figuring that out, you can run so many protocols to help them with their pain, whether it’s 43/96, taking the inflammation of the activity out of the nerve. Central nervous system, central sensitization. We’re doing so much work with the cord right now. And every year it’s changing. So I always appreciate seeing you guys every year because there’s nothing worse for me when I hear if somebody says, Oh, I’ve been using FSM for 15 years and they’ve never gone to an Advanced or a Core in between that 15 years. And I swear every time I talk to Carol, something changes the way that we’re thinking about things. Are there any frequencies that are your favorites that will that have been your favorites for the years that you’ve been practicing with it? Let’s talk about our B channels. What are your favorite tissue frequencies that you typically gravitate towards as PT?

Andrew Fawcett:
Like I said, I think a lot of times we’re treating the acute phases of injury where we love Microcurrent some of our other modalities bring a lot of blood and even some tissue trauma with some shock wave and those kind of things. So a lot of our tissue frequency, especially a lot of times we’re doing typically 40, which is decreased inflammation and 124 which is torn and broken and we’re cycling through those on the PrecisionCare and letting them run for long periods of time before we do the treatment. And then based on the fact that a lot of times we’re treating again FSM acutely, it’s going to be nerve for sure. Trying to get pain down, which I think it’d be shortsighted to not comment that it’s a huge business opportunity when you get pain down so quickly, because any time we do it and it’s not every single time, but it happens and it happens sometimes frequently if you’re in the right week or month to practitioner. But we always educate our client after that moment that as soon as you have an injury, call us because if we can get you in the first 8 hours, if you get that’s tremendous with Microcurrent in the first 4 to 8 hours. So we always take that opportunity once we’ve had a success, especially early and sometimes at that first treatment to educate them that we’re your guy or gal, give us a call any time you get hurt to a tennis match, anytime your kid sprains an ankle.

Andrew Fawcett:
And so they come in very quickly for those. But to answer your question a little further channels, a lot of times based on 124 and 40 that we’re using. Ligaments, we’re doing a lot of stuff of ligaments a lot of times, especially down in the SI joint. So many people have these very nondescript but very real and significant, they call them low back pain or they call them hip pain, but I think there’s secondary nervous tissue irritation from the cauda equina and the movements. A lot of times we’re running 40/124 for extended periods and cross that with torn or broken on the ligament. So 100. Definitely 396 the nerve if we’re up in the shoulder for a first treatment or two as we do our manual therapy up there, we’re definitely treating the bursa, definitely treating the tendon. I know those are pretty basic frequency numbers, but that’s one of the advantages that we’ve found with having the PrecisionCare always, since we have three of them and then having CustomCare maybe running like a soft tissue acute or even a new injury is that we can leave the PrecisionCare on 30, 40, 45 minutes on those tissues. And it just seems to give us so much more room to work on the patient and one help them feel better that moment, but also not send them home with that secondary. Oh, you killed me last time type of report.

Kim Pittis:
Again, so many talking points there when I fell in love with FSM and the moment that I did, I was working with a ton of professional athletes and especially practicing up in Canada. We’re seeing a ton of hockey players, Professional hockey players play three times a week so they don’t have time to feel like they’ve been hit by a mack truck the day after. You have to go in and get out, treat something super deep and be really clean about it so that they feel like $1,000,000 in next day. Like I said, not so beat up. So just circling back to the acute state, what you said, and I do the same thing I’ve learned to block out almost an hour every day for an emergency case, because I want that athlete in that freshest possible state. A lot of my athletes have CustomCare’s. Part of my business model now is you can pay me a retainer and I will pick up my phone at three in the morning if you were on the East Coast and you want to know, what should I run? I just blocked a shot. Because I want to answer them and I want them to put their CustomCare on their tissue, their traumatized tissue as fast as possible, because I know the results are going to be there the next day. And even if you’re practicing, if you’re a PT practicing and you’re saying that to your patient, even if they just come in, you don’t have to do a ton of hands on stuff. But if they can just come to your clinic and you can hook them up to a custom care right away, it’s way less work for you down the road because they’re going to recover faster, they’re out of pain, they’re happier, and that should always be the main focus, right? Get them out of pain as fast as possible, recovering so they can get back to whatever they’re doing.

Kim Pittis:
I want to talk about what you just mentioned about the SI. I think Carol said it best. A lot of the SI dysfunction that we see, you almost have to treat it like a sprained ankle in someone’s back. And that’s I see that when we talk about the torn and broken and the ligature, we talk about the shearing forces on the joint surface. To your point, we’re running some of these frequencies that you mentioned, those B channel frequencies, They’re basic, quote unquote. So people who are listening on the podcast, but they’re basic for a reason because these types of tissues don’t ever wax or wane. You’re almost always going there. And I think to your point, the Bursa was one that I used to always bypass as a manual therapist. I don’t treat a bursa. It’s that it’s there, but I’m not manipulating it. But it is definitely there and shock absorbing and getting inflamed and getting in the way and hindering things.

Kim Pittis:
Before I go too much further, I want to talk about some of your favorite A channel frequencies. Ones that are your go to, I’m going to say 40, obviously. 124. You mentioned those two. What are some of the other ones that you like to use in a PT clinical setting?

Andrew Fawcett:
Since our our manual therapy technique is working on nervous system muscle spindles, It’s called muscle activation techniques, but we find that it returns a lot of range of motion through nervous system control. So we’re never really manually manipulating tissue for change. We’re doing very little. And then sometimes we’re getting a very large amount of range of motion to return. So it’s pretty obvious to us after we treat an area of the body and we don’t get range of motion return that is not solely a muscle spindle or motor neuron type of tightness. So then I often go to 13 and the scarring of it will get through 77, connective tissue. Start working through whatever else we think of scar down. Sometimes the nerve, honestly, the joint capsule. Because if we don’t see range of motion return, it might mean I have a lot more work to do. But it also tells me that it’s not just a dynamic motor control issue, which generally our manual therapy technique will clean up very quickly. If it is a lot of times it is. But so we love the movement frequencies. I don’t remember the Restore Movement frequencies off the top of my head, but we have those on the CustomCare based off your sports courses, we built those into our CustomCare. So if we do find that, okay, we do manual therapy and we don’t return motion, that tells me it’s a structural issue. And then we work through scarring and some of those frequencies to return range of motion. But then we always finish with because the nervous system is so important in our treatment process, we always finish with the restore movement type of protocol so that we’re resetting some of that new range of motion that their nervous system just has no idea how to use.

Kim Pittis:
I think treating someone’s long term compensatory or compensatory for American versus Canadian. When somebody compensates, especially for a long time, and especially an athlete whose nervous system just works more efficiently than the rest of us. I think it’s such an integral part of, like I said, closing the case or closing the door on somebody and even doing it throughout treatment. If you have somebody who has, let’s just say frozen shoulder and maybe they only have 45 degrees of abduction and you treat them with whatever modality you have, whether it’s laser, your hands, TENS device, acupuncture, whatever. And they, an hour later, all of a sudden have 180 degrees of flexion. There is no possible way their nervous system is going to buy into the fact that this is okay The worst thing that would happen to me as a patient or as a practitioner is when you get those patients who you’ve increased range of motion by 75% and you think this is the greatest day on earth, they’re out of pain, you think you walk on water and then you see them three days later and they’re right. Back to square one. Maybe their pain stays down, but their biomechanics revert right back to normal.

Kim Pittis:
And to me, that was what sparked the sport’s course in that second day that we do that kind of wipe and load or coordinate movement patterns all over again because. Like you said, you have to teach them how to walk again, how to throw again, how to safely put that cup on the cupboard because they weren’t able to do it before without having a ladder help.

Kim Pittis:
When we talk about the sports course I used to or I still do, I contain it into three little compartments. That’s just the way my brain works. So we have our rehabilitation, we have our recovery, and then we have our performance enhancement. We talked a ton of about rehabilitation and and that sort of thing. Let’s talk a little bit about recovery. And we talk about this in the core as well, trying to maintain the patient’s stable state or steady state, that homeostatic environment that’s going to promote healing. What are some of your take homes that you tell your patient? Because as wonderful as you are, they’re only with you one hour a day, Right. Talk to me about some patient education that you like to give your patients for. Helping them recover.

Andrew Fawcett:
In terms of FSM or just in terms of anything?

Kim Pittis:
Yeah, anything. Yeah, anything in general.

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah. So again, we go back to the dentistry model. We actually tell people where your musculoskeletal dentist so you see your dentist, even when your teeth don’t hurt, you go and get a cleaning and a checkup because people understand that. And also when you have tooth pain, you know exactly who to call. So we’re always talking to them about dentists. And if they’re accountants, I talk to them about financial issues. But most people understand dentistry. So we tell them you would never go to the dentist and get a cavity filled and then just go back home, eat sweets and stop brushing and flossing your teeth. The more you brush and floss your teeth in between the dentistry visits, the better off you’re going to be when you go back. So even when people are out of pain and they’re healthy, we generally see them about once a month for some type of reassessment, manual therapy adjustment to their exercise program. And hopefully they’re working out in our facility at that point, to which then we can communicate. They lost a little bit of internal rotation in the shoulder. Maybe let’s not do this exercise or let’s add that one to their fitness program. But that brushing and flossing model, it does really help people get there because so many people, we treat a lot of people between about 40 and 75. It’s our bread and butter that that group of people. It’s very common to hear something like I walk with my wife on the weekend, so I don’t need to do any leg strengthening.

Andrew Fawcett:
So we’re educating them constantly on the difference between what’s aerobic exercise and what’s weight bearing strength training and what’s the advantage is. Most people, I think they lose between 50% of their muscle mass, between 30 and 80 years old. Obviously, it gets accelerated at distal decades We educate them that you can cut that in half to 25% if you’re training regularly. We also were an engineering based company. We try to educate them over a long period of time because it’s a lot to swallow. But the increased forces that can be encountered sometimes with bodyweight exercises and some of those doesn’t make them worse. It just makes them higher. So reeducating them based on their orthopedic needs and potentially why a cable system might be better for their orthopedic needs. And most of the time they understand that they don’t have a cable system at their home and it’s easier to come see us and work with one of our staff members to appreciate those orthopedics in their session as they’re brushing and flossing. But that’s not okay for everybody, and we always encourage them with that brushing and flossing model, which most people really do take to heart to at least maybe start in our facility and then join the gym on their own and then let us train you to work out in that gym and then phase them out. Typically, they realize that they’re just not going to do that and they phase back in. But either way, really try and push that in between. People get that.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. I think your premise has always been collectively as a group to just get people moving better. We always want to get people moving. Do you educate people on diet and sleep and stress and all of those factors come into play, whether you’re training for the Olympics or you’re just trying to heal your torn rotator cuff.

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah, we absolutely do. We did a lot more. As you mentioned, the founder of our company had passed away in 2020 and he actually had a masters nutrition from Ohio State. So he was the source of a lot of nutritional counseling. And then one of his grad school classmates, Rob Wildman, was head of GNC and Bally Melaleuca, and now he’s head of dramatized Nutrition. So together we had in-house nutrition counseling through Jerry. And then Rob Wildman ran our supplement division to help people. We sold all our supplements that cost even because most people don’t trust them. So it was just a way to bolster our model. But without those, we’ve not found our identity because we don’t have an in-house person. We’re working on that. But we do talk to people about, we call it a set point, so we do explain it in those terms where their muscular system might have a set point at which any time their function drops below that line might cause an injury or might cause pain. And so we want to drive their set point up so that they’re always able to function up here above it.

Andrew Fawcett:
And we tell them sleep sometimes if you’re not sleeping well, it’s going to drop that set point and it’s going to make you more likely to have an injury. If you’re not eating well, it’s going to drop that set point. People get that. Okay, I know I feel better and function better when I’m sleeping well, when I’m hydrated, when I’m working out is going to bump that line higher to doing the right exercises for your system is going to bump that line higher, doing the wrong exercises. Obviously, if you did a bunch of shoulder press with a rotator cuff injury, it’s going to make you worse. So all of that that set point idea really seems to hit home for them. We just aren’t able to at this time other than just encouraging good habits to dive in as deep as we want to on the nutrition end. But we did prepare with the nutritionist in town recently, a medical dietitian, nutritionist, because we felt like we at least needed somebody to be able to refer them to. So people seem to not always love a nutrition referral, but we still push it.

Kim Pittis:
I think it’s important. I’m the same way I am. Really early in my career, I wanted to do everything. I wanted to consult about nutrition and I wanted to do stretching and I wanted to do yoga and I wanted to do platies and all of that. And I’m really good at manual therapy and I’m okay with exercise therapy. So I think it’s important as practitioners that we realize we don’t have to have all those bases covered, but have somebody that you can refer to. Because, I think, in my opinion, someone’s nutrition, someone’s sleep and someone’s stress, those are the three things that I have zero control over when they. Walk out the door, but they are so impactful on a person’s recovery. Now, if you have a professional athlete, they’re checking those boxes pretty easily. But for an average everyday person, it can be very challenging. On our Advanced compendium on the; Kevin, you can correct me if I’m wrong here. David Musnick had a really great sleep talk where he gave a lot of take home advice for good sleep hygiene, getting the room colder, going off your devices.

Kim Pittis:
I think there’s a lot of tips that I think we can give our patients without having to be prescribed, being able to prescribe them drugs. It sounds like you have a lot of retention with your clients and your patients, which is great because there’s nothing worse than treating somebody two or three times and then they’re canceling their appointment because I feel fine. No, come back.

Andrew Fawcett:
When your dentist got you out of tooth pain, did you tell them, Okay, I’ll be back when my tooth hurts again? No. So really do understand. We love it. And they smile. And I guess to your point, I forget our clinic. One of the core values in our company is to be humbly confident. And that’s borne out of the idea that we always say, and Jerry, the founder, always just say the most important thing to know is what you don’t know. So we say that a lot. And I guess sometimes I forget that we don’t try and do everything. We’re super confident in what we do. Humble confidence. We chose that because it’s not weakness or meakness. We have paired we have a sports psychologist who we refer to. Again, that’s not people’s favorite referral. I love that world, but because a lot of times when people are injured and they can’t play tennis or they can’t play a high school football, I just had a kid coming down from Cleveland, which is 2 hours away with an injury, and when you take that away from them or it’s taken away from them, their identity is gone a lot of times. So we have a clinical psychologist we refer to. We have we realize we can’t do nutrition in house anymore. So rather than just try, we just set up a relationship with somebody right away. And I think that’s super missing in the world. Our world is this collaboration of great minds because there’s enough business out there.

Andrew Fawcett:
If you do things well and you do things that are different, there’s plenty of business and you’ll get better results for your people. But that’s something we really do. And actually at one of the advanced courses, gosh, we’ve been to so many, I would bet it was in 2018 or maybe 2017, there was a sleep apnea lecture that was held in the side building there in Chandler, but there was a company called Watch Pat, and it was a home sleep apnea test that’s super correlated for results and efficacy. And so we actually brought that in too and we don’t interpret it, but we can set a client up on it, especially a new client who’s been in chronic pain or just wants to get fitter and give them a sleep apnea test and it’s unbelievable results. We send it to a board certified sleep physician and they interpret it, but people’s resting, sleeping heart rate going up to 150, 260 beats a minute and. Its because they’re suffocating. So how in the world could they actually make neural changes to get out of chronic pain when they’re in that much distress sleeping? So to your point, yeah, we’ve really branched out and I sometimes I even forget how many avenues and relationships we have set up We’re so proud of what we do and we think we do it better than, I’ll put anyone in quotes, but there’s so much we know we can’t do and we just rely on other people to do it for us.

Kim Pittis:
I remember Jerry saying, You don’t know what you don’t know until you don’t know it. But I think about that all the time. And to back to your point, being humbly confident, I think we get lost actually as FSM practitioners because we’re given these massive laminates with all these frequencies. And just because we have a frequency for something doesn’t mean, A we get to use it or B, need to know where/what that tissue type is doing. Did I lose Andrew and he looks frozen to me. I’m going to take this moment, though, to pause. If anybody in our group that’s here live has any questions for Andrew on a PT level go ahead and write that in the Q&A or the chat and I’ll get to it. I’m going to keep talking, though, in the meantime until Andrew comes back. I have a super interesting story to share, but I’m going to go back now that you’re with us again. We had a Dr. Jennifer Sosnowski on with us last week.

Kim Pittis:
She was my guest. She’s a functional medicine doctor in Scottsdale, and she was talking about the sleep apnea company that you were talking about, because that’s one of the things that she feels is the most important when she’s trying to help her really chronically sick. And she’s doing a ton with mold and Lyme and brain dysfunction is we have to get these people sleeping. I know for myself, one of the reasons a lot of athletes reach out to me and has nothing to do with injury or sports performance. I’ll get a call saying, Hey, one of my buddies has those little weird machines that helps them sleep at night. Can I get one too? And I’m like, At first I used to get really irritated. I’m like, I’m so much more than like a computer programmer that’s going to put you to sleep. But I’m like, No, this is a great start because if you’re already seeing the value in sleeping, then we can incorporate FSM into injury and sports performance and all that other stuff much easier.

Kim Pittis:
So my story before I forget to say it, is I have been fascinated with for 475 on the B channel, which is nerve sheath. When I went to my very first advance, I was like, Nerve sheath, We have to use this on everything because I used nerve like yourself doing muscle activation techniques or in the college that I was based on, we call those intrinsic techniques. So we had our extrinsic techniques were our manual therapy and our intrinsic techniques were stretch incorporating the GTOs, stretch reflex joint kinesthetic receptors to help intrinsically reset the muscle.

Andrew Fawcett:
I love that. Yeah.

Kim Pittis:
So when I heard of a frequency for nerve sheath, I’m like, This is going to be my guy. I’m going to use it just like I do with nerve. I tried 40 with it, I tried 13 with it. Anything I could think of with 475. Nothing. And then we had Dave Burke, Dr. David Burke on a couple of times. He mentioned how he uses 18 a ton. And 18 is bleeding or hemorrhaging At first used to just use it in the presence of a bruise or an acute super acute condition. And then I’ll be completely honest, I really didn’t think about 18 very much because, I don’t know, I was just so torn and broken scar tissue, inflammatory minded that I forgot about it. And he mentioned something a couple of weeks ago and I’m going to butcher how he said it, but it was along the lines of, if a tissue once bled, 18 could still be indicated. And I was like, Oh, okay. So many things. Micro bleed, macro bleed, you name it. So I tried using 18 on a patient this week with 77, connective tissue, with the periosteum, with the nerve. It was unbelievable how I used that first and removed the memory of the bleed. I don’t know, however you want to phrase it, removed that component. I went back and I use 13 and it was like. Butter. It was unbelievable. So then I tried it on the nerve sheath and I got a little more smush, we got a little bit more smoother contraction. But the big kicker for me was using it with 81/49. So increasing the secretions and the vitality to the nerve sheath. And when I think about that, I get really excited. So I’ve been integrating that. That’s been my newfound love. I’m going to get to a question really quick before we go any further. Minette is asking you, _____, a neuro condition, any frequencies you use to assist or help in strengthening?

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah, we we have all our CustomCare’s because we have so many programs and we even have these sports fanny packs programed for the movement protocols in the gym. And like I said, I, we really copied, rebuilt them out of Kim’s sports course and so much so that I don’t even remember all the frequencies in there. I just run them. But it’s really common in our gym to see people exercising with those devices on. We don’t do a whole lot of very low level and potentially maybe we should do very low level movements with them. So we’re just so busy and trying to accomplish so much oftentimes that we’re running through a lot of our cable programs with people in free motion cables for strengthening. So they’re standing doing things like a maybe like a mid row because that cable is not pouring, pulling in a horizontal fashion instead of bending over with a dumbbell. We have the movement protocols running either from their neck to their low back or back to the feet. And so that cable in that mid row is trying to pull their whole body forward, including tipping them over their toes and pulling their feet off the ground. So we’re training the kinesthetic pathways of the half that has the injury just statically. So that’s our low level forces are still high but low level while we do maybe more active movement up the chain or down the chain. Because we’re probably not going to really heavily exercise the injured tissue or just freshly recovered tissue. But so that’s what we’re doing. But we really just built those all up from Kim’s course. I wish I could say that I knew what they all were, but my memory’s not that good.

Kim Pittis:
Hey, that’s okay. And that’s why you have a CustomCare. Because it can do that for you. So I’m going to touch on that a little bit. So for strengthening and as because Minette has come to my sports course. There’s so many components to what are we strengthening do are we just trying to increase the secretions or increase those motor unit units that have turned off? Is it more of a brain injury? Is it a central nervous system idea that we have that, that old injury shouldn’t get impulses because it’s injured or it’s torn and it shouldn’t work? So strengthening is more than just hypertrophy. Sometimes it’s coordinating the movement. Sometimes it’s just getting more motor units to feed that area all the time. So I think it’s a little complex in cases like what frequencies to use just for that. I think it really depends on why was that muscle weak in the first place? So I think we sometimes have to go way back to something really as simple as the Core. If a nerve is scarred. There is no way your nervous system is going to allow you to move that arm and traction and split that nerve. That in turn will create a weakness to the area. So that’s a bit of a long winded reply. Sorry about that Second question. What is your opinion on a bone spur on how a bone spur is generated over time? I have heard from a tight muscle creating pull on the tendon which stresses the bone and from mayo from osteoarthritis damaging the cartilage. Oh, I have a few things to say, but I’ll let you go first with that one.

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah. So again, our company is founded by a biomechanical engineer, so a PhD in biomechanical engineering. So we’re heavily trained. I’m not an engineer. Just studied under him for ten years weekly, about an hour to 2 hours of equations a week. What we find when we do those equations and nobody needs to know the equations, I guess, but the human body is created a huge mechanical disadvantage force wise for mechanical advantage, range of motion wise. So all of our muscles attach very close to the deoxys rotations and the joints centimeters to an inch or so away. Would it be like opening every single door with a door handle right next to the hinge? If you could imagine, you’d have to pull very hard and push very hard. Instead, we put door handles away from the hinge, so it’s nice and easy, but our muscles attach close to the hinge. So a lot of times, a lot of times the bone spur, although osteoarthritis might be a different example, it’s going to be created through potentially use or altered muscle action because those muscles are pulling with hundreds of thousands of pounds of force for even very simple movement. So if someone has a bone spur, I’m usually asking myself, one, why is it there? And I’m never going to know the exact answer, but it’s just I’m asking myself, okay, what deficits can I change up and down this chain to stop this altered pull, this mechanical dysfunction first, and then I’m going to treat the symptom second, which is the real reason they’re there anyways, is in their mind they treat that first, but really looking at mechanical disadvantage, mechanical compensation right away and bone spurs.

Kim Pittis:
So we talked about bone spurs a few podcasts ago. I want to say when Carol was here and going back to the engineering levers, right, it’s Wolff’s law. It’s that tension that’s pulling on that muscular tendon is Junction pulling further into the periosteum. It’s pulling and the body is going to repair it and throws down a bunch of osteo fights instead of loosening the muscle. And that would have just made way more sense. But it doesn’t. So I’m not sure about osteoarthritis damaging the cartilage. That definitely does happen. But a lot of times, even if that is the case, you still have to. Treat the soft tissue in order to help that heal and help the compensation help lengthen it. It’s going to shorten to protect it In a couple of weeks. I have a side podcast that I do for sports game changers. It is now up on wherever you’re listening to your podcast, I have John Paul Catanzaro as my guest who was the founder of METH instead of using RICE. So in acute injury, a lot of us, especially those of us who have been doing this more than 20 years, we were brainwashed into thinking we had to use rest, ice compression, elevation in an acute setting. And all this really cool new research, a lot of it coming out of Canada, is showing how heat is really important. So we want to do METH, Movement, Elevation, Traction and Heat and that can be very helpful in those arthritic changes.

Kim Pittis:
Bone spur changes where we want to feed the area, we want to blast it, but we want to promote circulation. And I think a lot of times we’re thinking about inflammation is such a bad thing. We need acute inflammation. We need that army to come in and say, I’m going to come and clean up all those bits and pieces and then I promise I’ll leave. And then we can use modalities like FSM using that METH acronym movement, Elevation, Traction and Heat to help vacate when the inflammation does get out of control. So going back to the bone spur, whether or not it’s the type muscle causing the bone spur or the bone spur happened and then cause the type muscle, I’m not sure that it really matters to your point. Like we’re going to treat both. We’re going to get the person out of pain. In that case, if it’s really a chicken or an egg type of deal.

Another question here. Oh, can there be an emotional component to a bone spur? Ooh, Leif always asks the perplexing questions. So we talked about the emotional frequencies the other day to where I didn’t use them for years because that just seemed a little too woo-woo for me. What about you? Do you use emotional frequencies?

Andrew Fawcett:
I use them every year from about March to June.

Kim Pittis:
And then right after the Advanced.

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah, Yeah. And then I forget about them again until the next year. And I have nothing bad to say about them. I have seen some stuff on the table where I’m like, Wow, this person actually did fall asleep. And sometimes I’m like, I’m not sure it’s the frequency, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be. I think I just moved too fast sometimes, and I think there’s a lot of potential for would be great. I just I need to get into them more.

Kim Pittis:
I agree. Leif If you want to add what you might be thinking about, there was an emotional component to a bone spur, I’d love to hear it. I know a lot of people when they have a bone spur. I had patients both with them in their heels like a plantar fasciitis setting and in their elbow. It was a fear component that I really needed to utilize. Because even though I was treating the bone spur, even though I was treating the tight muscle and the pliability increased and the flexibility increased and the strength increased, in order to bridge that gap going from pain and restricted range of motion to healthy pain free movement. they were afraid Right away when I was treating the muscle and I was like, okay, so now we’re going to check the range in your elbow. And right away before they even got into full extension so that I can’t, it’s going to hurt. So when I hear that, I don’t really think of the emotional component, but we’re using 40 and 89, which is my afraid to move it protocol. And that’s been the new change with the sports course is that is the prequel to the wipe and load because I think a lot of people are afraid to move it or are afraid to take something into that end range because it did hurt and they’re not convinced that it’s not going to hurt anymore. So again, going back to that, how do you increase someone’s strength? I think 40/89 could be a really interesting prequel to any kind of strength building so that when a patient doesn’t have fear of movement, when they can go into a movement with like total confidence and neutrality, I think that can be very helpful, especially in the case of balance training.

Kim Pittis:
And that’s been my I loved it in college and I’ve really been sparked by doing a lot more balance training again, trying to get the gto’s joint kinesthetic receptors, everything on board after we treat them with the soft tissue. So Leif wrote in here, I know a fellow whose tailbone spur dissolved after he sorted out issues with his semi estranged father. Whoa. See, that is. I totally believe it. There’s actually a very cool book I am going to mention on the next podcast that talks about an emotional component with a body part through. Oh, I don’t know how it’s morphed together, but somebody at the advanced recommended it. And sometimes you can look psosas and the emotion that goes with psosas It’s been very helpful for me when I am like about to throw my CustomCare out the window because nothing’s working. And I’m thinking maybe there’s an emotional component, but what is it? So I go back to that. No, Louise, I don’t mean 970 on A and 40/89 and B. 40 on channel A and 89 on channel B is the afraid to move it. Quieting the activity in the midbrain that has the memory of.

Kim Pittis:
Another question that came in. I just recently tried 970 so the emotional component with 191 so ligament and tendon with the client almost by accident and we both got super dorfed. Yeah, for sure. Again, going back to the Core, we talk about throwing the emotional component into the effective tissue. Can’t hurt, might help. So if you don’t know what the emotional component is, maybe just 970, which is a super kind of general emotional component on Channel A and whatever tissue that is. So yes, that book does sound so fascinating. I will bring it. I’m going to set an alarm, so I will mention it next week when we are on. Anything else that I need to talk about really quickly. You make me laugh throwing out your FSM machines. No, but it’s super true because if anybody knows me, I’m highly competitive and I get competitive with myself. And I think that’s the hardest thing. And that was going to be my next question for you. Do you have any advice for the young PTs out there that are, I guess, nervous about taking on something like FSM? We it’s not clear cut. I say this all the time in the Sports Course, this isn’t like a Kinesio taping weekend where you come in on a Saturday morning and you leave on a Sunday night and you’re going to be able to tape and treat absolutely everything. FSM isn’t like that. What’s some advice you can give for the PT minded folks out there?

Andrew Fawcett:
Yeah, I think especially because we’re a profession that likes to stay in this nice little box which FSM doesn’t really have walls. But I had a PT, probably the last six months call me. I think he was in Arizona actually, and said, does this work? He really want to know, does this work? I don’t know what I said exactly, but I want to know, does it work for what? And I think especially after you go to a course, you come out and you want to find like the trauma from the clips after a gallbladder surgery 30 years ago and those happened. think my advice would be, pick something that you want to treat better in your current practice For us it was disc and nerve We liked we could get results, but not as good as the other things we could do. So we set out okay. Can we create a solution to this issue in our clinic that provides a better result than we’re getting now? And just stay in that on that track.

Andrew Fawcett:
And when you learn to clean that up and you take another course and another course, then venture from there and don’t try and save the world with your FSM device in one frequency at a time because it’s too much, too overwhelming and you’re going to get no results sometimes. You’re going to get bad results. That’s probably not from the FSM, it’s from the other ten things you did to them. And if you’re all over the place and trying to go too big, you’re going to destroy your confidence. And that’s one thing. Whether you’re a surgeon or you’re or you’re an auto mechanic, if you don’t have a confidence in what you’re doing, it’s really hard to wake up in the morning and want to want to explore. So pick one thing at a time. And when you figure out how to treat that, then branch out and start treating something else and do the same.

Kim Pittis:
That’s great advice. I pick quotes for every episode and without prompting, like this is not scripted. Folks like we are totally live and organic here. I want to just read you what I prepared for today because it really blends in. It’s from Karl Rogers, who’s a psychotherapist, and I love his work. I have a little love affair with psychology. So it’s long I’m going to read it, though, because I think it’s going to resonate, no pun intended, with everybody. He says. In my early professional years, I was asking the question, how can I treat or cure or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his or her own personal growth? And I love that because I think as a new professional gal, we’re so like, I have to fix this, I have to do this and this range of motion and this pain. And then as you’ve been practicing for a while, you are less focused on, I have to do this to this person. And it is that relationship like you’re saying, you guys have so much retention at your practice because it’s that relationship.

Kim Pittis:
People know this is movement is for life and we all need help to get that moving in the right direction. Couple of last announcements before we go for it today. The new sports course 2023 schedule is up and posted. We are taking registrations, so I will be at 2023 Advanced in February in Phoenix. There’ll be a two day Sports Course and then the new sports advanced course that follows. You have to take the Sports Course, before you take the Sports Advance Course, people. And then we’re going to be in Kona in August 2023 and Sydney, Australia in October. We’re going big for 2023. So save up your pennies. Come join me in all these places. It’s going to be tons of fun. Registration is going to be only on the FSM Sports web page, which is fsmsports365.com. Andrew, thank you so much for coming. This was so much fun. We’re going to have you on again because there’s going to be a ton of questions popping up. If people want to find you or a little bit more about what you do. Your website is

Andrew Fawcett:
columbusfitness.com

Kim Pittis:
columbusfitness.com. Perfect. Andrew Fawcett, thank you so much.

Andrew Fawcett:
It’s always great to see you Kim, thank you.

Kim Pittis:
Bye, everybody. See you next week.

Kevin:
The Frequency Specific Microcurrent podcast has been produced by Frequency Specific Seminars for entertainment, educational and information purposes only. The information opinion provided in the podcast are not medical advice. Do not create any type of doctor patient relationship and, unless expressly stated, do not reflect the opinions of its affiliates, subsidiaries or sponsors, or the hosts or any of the podcast guests or affiliated professional organizations. No person should act or refrain from acting on the basis of the content provided in any podcast without first seeking appropriate medical advice and counseling. No information provided in any podcast should be used as a substitute for personalized medical advice and counseling. Phs expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on or any contents of this podcast.

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