Dick After the 2012 Boston Marathon
When I met Dick in 2007, he was a long-time runner who had been forced to give up running entirely since 2000 due to the severe pain and lack of function in both feet. In his 30 years of running before this life-altering situation side-lined him, he had completed 30 marathons. Totaling up all his miles, he liked to tell you that he had run around the world.
Dick had been to numerous doctors and neurological specialist who had tried drugs and surgery with no improvement. In fact, he sometimes ended up worse. The final diagnosis was incurable nerve degeneration due to unknown causes, likely to worsen as he got older.
At his first appointment with me, Dick stood on a gently vibrating plate for 1 minute. When he got off he was already in less pain, though he wasn’t sure he believed it! By his third visit, he was jogging back to his car giving me a grin and a thumbs up.
WBV is an intense neurological stimulation of your entire nervous system – and just as your muscles grow and tone with use, so too does your nervous system. When you are on a vibration plate, every neuron in your feet and legs will fire off messages to the brain and muscles at the same rate the machine is vibrating, 20-50 times per second. That is 2-3 thousand signals shooting through your nervous system per minute from millions of neurons.
WBV also powerfully, and often nearly instantly, reduces pain and inflammation – this is one of the reasons why it is popular and effective as physical therapy. Several research studies have documented significant reductions in pain with WBV use. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine, of twenty-three elderly subjects with knee osteoarthritis, found an increase in function and a decrease in self-reported pain, concluding that “whole-body vibration may represent a feasible and effective way of improving the functionality and self-perception of disease status in older adults with knee OA [Osteoarthritis].”
Another study, of fifty postmenopausal women with osteoporosis concluded that “whole-body vibration exercise using a Galileo machine [a low-intensity WBV machine] appears to be useful in reducing chronic back pain,” (Aging Clinical and Experimental Research). A third study, looking at sixty patients with chronic lower back pain during a six-month period concluded that “interestingly, well-controlled vibration may be the cure rather than the cause of lower back pain.”
Thousands of people in pain with many different joint issues have seen their pain greatly reduced, or even gone, with just a few minutes of vibration. Acupuncture is well-known for pain reduction and WBV is theorized to stimulate our electromagnetic chi system, or energy meridians, which is how acupuncture works.
A Complicating Factor: Dick had been eating tuna fish every day for 30 years. Tuna is high in mercury, a toxin that particularly effects the nervous system and the immune system. WBV has a powerful detoxing effect, but you need to go slowly as too much detoxing too quickly can cause an increase in symptoms.
Dick also began a program of special supplements to absorb mercury in his body, and to help his liver handle toxins. Dick bought a vibration machine and gradually increased the amount of vibration. Within a year, he was biking and running to his heart’s content. He has been vibrating ever since, and in April 2012 he completed another Boston Marathon!
