Getting Wired for Relaxation
Tina York needed a brain boost. She removed her earrings, clipped electrodes to her ear lobes and set the timer on a device nicknamed “the Brainman.” After zapping herself with an electric current for 20 minutes, she emerged a stress-free woman.
“Your whole perception of things will change,” says York, a Los Angeles kinesiologist in private practice. “Everyone should experience this. It’s like a runner’s high.”
She was relaxed and alert, she says, all thanks to a little battery-operated box.
Scores of people have paid $795 for the Alpha-Stim CS, which resembles a beeper with earphones. Dr. Daniel L. Kirsch, a neurobiologist and the Alpha-Stim’s inventor, says the electrical current produced by the little gray box causes the production and release of endorphins (compounds that have a pain-relieving effect similar to morphine) in the brain.
“Psychologists call this level of consciousness an alpha state,” says Kirsh, who has spent a decade of research and study on the product. “Your body is relaxed and your mind is alert and that is the simplest definition of an alpha state.”
Manufactured by Electromedical Products Inc. in Hawthorne, the Alpha-Stim CS was FDA-approved--for pain relief--last month and can only be purchased from the company with a doctor’s prescription, says Kirsch.
Kirsch, chairman of the company, is a former clinical director of the Center of Pain and Stress-Related Disorders at the college of physicians and surgeons of Columbia University at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York and has been editor of the American Journal of Electromedicine, published since 1984.
So far, more than 200 of the 4 1/2-ounce stress busters have been sold, many to celebrities and health-care providers including dentists, psychotherapists and chiropractors, Kirsch says.
Cloris Leachman who, next month will begin a five-month nationwide tour with the play “Grandma Moses: American Primitive,” says she “won’t leave home without” her Alpha-Stim--or her hot water bottle. She used similar, larger devices recently during stressful months of filming back-to-back films, “Love Hurts” and “Texasville.”
The actress, who last week purchased an Alpha-Stim CS, says she became interested in electro-medical technology about six years ago. “I’ve never taken pills, drugs or alcohol” to unwind, Leachman says. “When I’m in that alpha state mode I’m energized and my performance level is way up there. I’m more creative, passionate, ready to solve my problems and have tremendous use of my emotions.”
Dr. Fred N. Lerner, a Beverly Hills chiropractor, recently purchased an Alpha-Stim CS for his private practice. Since 1981 he has been using older, similar technology on patients to relieve neck and back pain as well as tension in shoulders.
“Most of my patients are tremendously stressed: movie stars trying out for parts, athletes, executives on the go, secretaries trying to cram 30 hours of work into an eight-hour day. They are exhausted. They know they have to relax and take it easy, but a lot of them don’t have the time or forget to how to relax,” he says.
Lerner says after an Alpha-Stim treatment, patients claim “their memory improves, concentration is better and they sleep better.”
“I get people who come in and say, ‘I want to be zapped today,’ ” which he obliges with a $75 20-minute session.
