BAUD: Body Recovery Using Sound Therapy With L. Richard Bruursema

 

The human body has been studied for centuries, and still, no one has been able to understand it fully. As technology improves, the recovery and therapy of the body and mind are becoming more and more safe and comfortable. The CEO of Insight Neurosystems, L. Richard Bruursema, talks about the development and positive effects the BAUD (BioAcoustical Utilization Device) has on trauma patients and people with behavioral issues. He talks about the promising changes that BAUD can bring into the medical field once it’s fully understood and applied. Richard explains what the BAUD puts the patient through when in use and provides testimonials of people that it was able to assist during therapy.

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BAUD: Body Recovery Using Sound Therapy With L. Richard Bruursema

My guest is L. Richard Bruursema. He is the Founder and CEO of Insight Neurosystems, which markets and provides support for health professionals using the BAUD. The BAUD is the Bio-Acoustical Utilization Device. He trains and supports psychologists, physical therapists, chiropractors and doctors worldwide in applying the device clinically. He has spearheaded research activities and experimental applications of acoustical neuromodulation to many chronic problems such as Parkinson’s, Guillain-Barré, stroke, paralysis, chronic pain and neurological disorders of all types. Mr. Bruursema has also initiated and consulted on fMRI and other brain imaging studies of acoustical neuromodulation therapy and collected clinical data for a study presented at the 2010 Conference of the International Society for Neurofeedback & Research.

He is the author of Resetting the Fear Switch in PTSD, a novel treatment using acoustical neuromodulation to modify memory reconsolidation. The new technique shows promise as an adjunct in chronic pain management, published in Practical Pain Management. Also, an article titled Acoustic Neuromodulation for Chronic Pain Management published in the Pain Practitioner. He’s also authored the BAUD Therapist Manual.

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Richard, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Tim. Glad to be here.

How did you get involved in the BAUD?

It was accidental. I had owned and published a magazine Kansas City Parent Magazine for some years and simply and sold it. I was helping another psychologist who had developed a product for parents with ADHD children. He asked me to fly down and speak with Dr. Frank Lawlis with him as he was helping Frank with the project. Frank, of course, is an expert in the field of ADD and ADHD. He was providing some content for this fellow. We met in his house in Denton, Texas and got to talking about things. I explained a little bit about what I had discovered about marketing on the web through affiliate marketing, which was quite some time ago. It wasn’t quite as popular as it is now. Frank got excited. He said, “Let me get something.” He went out into the car and dug around in the trunk of his car and came back in with a little grey device about the size of a transistor radio. This is the current version of the BAUD, Bio-Acoustical Utilization Device.

Frank went on and on about all the things that he was seeing the BAUD do in his clinical use for it. He had developed it specifically for ADD. He said, “This thing can help people with depression, anxiety, overeating and addictions.” He went on and on. I rolled my eyes and said, “That’s a lot to swallow.” I was pretty skeptical. He showed me how to use it and he gave me one. He said, “Take it home. Use it and tell me what you think later.” I did. I packed it away, took it home and didn’t think too much about it for a few weeks.

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At one point, I was having some emotional reactivity in my marriage like hot buttons getting pushed on. Let me give this thing a try. I sat down and tuned in as he had instructed me and simply focused on the issue and generating those feelings for about ten minutes and turned it off. The feelings were gone. This is peculiar. Did he give me a post-hypnotic suggestion or whatever? Throughout the next couple of days, those hot buttons continued to be pushed and every time they did, I sat and I waited for that reaction to come and it didn’t come. I thought, “This is peculiar. What happened here?” I started thinking there may be something to it, even though my logical mind said, “How can sound affect the brain in such a profound way?”

I enlisted my family and friends over the coming months to try it out because we all have some issues that we like to get rid of, whether it’s the night the cravings or chronic pain. One after the other, I kept getting reports that this thing is working and they were as surprised as I was. After about six months that I’ve been testing this thing intensely, I have a great big basket of things to test it on. I had a dysfunctional childhood. Lots of emotional things that I’ve learned regulate over the years, but they’re still there and now one by one, I was sitting down with the BAUD and they were falling away. I was like, “This is the most amazing thing ever.” I thought, “I’m going to take this out and I’m going to share with therapists because I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

I sold the business as I mentioned, so I put together another little business and went out to conferences and started presenting it. I was met, of course, with the same skepticism that I had because there’s a cognitive gap. You look at this and you go, “I don’t see how that could possibly work,” and yet it does. That started me on the path. First of all, I’ve got a number of therapists interested, the early adopters, which comprise of maybe 15% to 20%. The rest were like, “I don’t believe in that yada-yada.”

I did take it to the ISNR Conference, which is therapists who are integrating neural therapy. They were much more persuaded by it. In particular, when Frank presented a paper there, Frank is quite well known in the community. He’s got amazing credentials. He’s been in practice with this since probably about the time I was born. In the ‘60s, he was one of the first mind-body psychologists and he’s served on the faculty of different universities, five different medical schools that specialized in pain psychology for a long time, which is how he stumbled on the BAUD.

That was my introduction to it. I was so taken with it seeing its effect and being amazed that there was anything out there that could literally seemingly erase unwanted feelings. I took it out there and a number of therapists incorporated into the practice and I began to get feedback. They’re going, “This is amazing. How does it work?” The ones that were skeptical kept saying, “How could it possibly work?” I didn’t have an answer for that. This was in about 2007 and since that time, I’ve been immersed in research and working with other therapists doing studies to try to figure out what’s going on. We have a pretty good handle on it now.

 

The BAUD is working by disrupting the reconsolidation of memory circuits in the brain. By memory, we have to expand most people’s concept of memory. We have historical memory, which is, “Yes, I remember what I did yesterday,” and there’s implicit memory in which the memory is feelings and sensations. It’s encoded in a whole different way and it’s those circuits, for example, that caused the problems with PTSD. PTSD is a problem where the traumatic experience happens. The brain memory circuits get sensitized and they stay firing at high volume.

It’s a problem if the memory doesn’t resolve. The brain plasticity has been interrupted. Plasticity means both to respond to the situation of high trauma and reset to normal. We’re seeing maladaptive plasticity in which traumatic experiences, chronic pain or constant stimulation through addiction sets up these sensitize circuits in the brain and drives the problem in large part. For the last few years, I’ve been working with therapists to try to define what’s going on and seeing some pretty amazing results.

Do you have a primary way that you get information about this that you expose to either therapists or the general public to the existence of the bot and how to use it?

We do have a website called BAUDTherapy.com, in which I’ve listed lots of results, testimonials from therapists and users link to studies as well as to media. Interestingly, Dr. Frank Lawlis was Dr. Phil’s mentor or advisor when he went from law into psychology and they bonded. Dr. Lawlis works with Dr. Phil and the bond has been presented on the Dr. Phil show several times. He’s been on The Doctors, Oprah and on some national television. The interesting thing and the unfortunate thing with the BAUD is there’s no big money behind it like from a part of a pharmaceutical company that would help drive it into mainstream acceptance. That acceptance has been coming pretty slowly, although we’ve laid a pretty credible foundation now with studies.

Another colleague of mine, Dr. George Lindenfeld, has been leading the way. He’s seen the results of this, first of all with PTSD. In fact, when I first talked to him about it years ago, he called me up. He heard about it from his daughter, who was also a therapist, so he started using it and he called me up. He said, “I hate to admit this but I’ve spent 45 years as a therapist and when I see the results of the BAUD compared to my therapy, I feel like I’ve hardly been doing anything.” He was seeing folks with severe PTSD symptomology. They’ve seen the symptoms remit within a 1, 2, or 3 sessions. This is a dramatically different result than we get from almost any other therapy.

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Although it does share some commonality with other therapies. George has led the way in credibility. He’s had several published studies in peer-reviewed journals and had another one accepted in military psychology, which is an APA journal. We’re having by peer-reviewed, of course, that means other experts in the field are looking at this and finding it all credible. Part of the way we do that is that the studies are not only based on anecdotal evidence and self-reporting but on accepted metrics like CAPS-5 studies and even brain imaging, where we can see dramatic shifts in brain function, particularly in those areas that affect PTSD.

What type of brain imaging you talking about is that qEEG neurofeedback or is that functional fMRI, what imaging?

My daughter was in a clinical psych program at Kansas University working in the Imaging Lab. She did a study with an FMRI using the BAUD. Most of the imaging was due to the expense of EEG and LORETA imaging and LORETA being low-resolution electromagnetic tomography analysis. It gives a picture of what’s happening in the deeper part of the brain because EEG measures the electrical activity on the outside.

How is this used? It’s a little device called the Bio-Acoustical Utilization Device. How would you like to introduce the audience to how it would be used by an individual?

It’s simple and that’s part of the reason that acceptance has been lagging because it’s deceptively simple. First of all, this device is like a happy accident. Dr. Lawlis was looking for a device that would aid children with ADD and ADHD as an entrainment device to stimulate the brain in a certain way. He did find that this was effective, but because he’s an experimental guy, he started seeing other results that were interesting and how it worked with emotions so forth. The way it’s used is basically to set the two-volume knobs left and right volume for each year. We have an activator knob, which sets a tone. The user for example, if they’re feeling anxiety, would sit down and if they’re not feeling it, then we will try to generate that.

 

For example, have someone with a spider phobia think of a spider or look at a picture of a spider and stimulate the feeling because only when the feeling is stimulated is that neural circuit firing. What we know about brain plasticity right now is that only when the circuit is firing can it be modified. The bottom-line slogan is, “You have to feel it to heal it.” While anxiety is being filled, they will tune the activator frequency slowly.

Let me interrupt you and clarify. They put on a set of headphones that are plugged into the BAUD?

Yes.

They are hearing through the headphones a specific signal and they start tuning that signal?

Yes. This is a completely ordinary auditory sound with two different tones one in each ear, so it is a binaural device but it’s also a bit more. They will tune the activator frequency until they feel a slight stimulation of that anxiety. We found a frequency that helps to stimulate that circuit. Interestingly, how to sound stimulate a neural circuit? It’s converted into electrical signals within the auditory canal. We know there are two routes that those signals take one is to the auditory thalamus, conscious evaluation of a sound. If you hear rustling in the bush over there you go, “What is that?” You consciously evaluate it, but the other is unconscious.

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Every sound we hear passes through the limbic system and is evaluated by the amygdala, which is the sentinel organ that is designed to perceive the threat and create a fight or flight response. We know that because we could be sitting here and someone could throw a firecracker behind us and we would duck before we knew it was happening. It’s the same with physical sensations. If we placed our hand on a hot stove, we pull it back before we realized and consciously think it was hot because that’s an instinctive self-preservation response. We know there’s a direct line from the auditory canal to the amygdala and that’s what we’re piggybacking on.

This is theoretical, but at this point, we’ve seen such a dramatic change in the amygdala, we know we have a direct effect. There are two parts. You set the volume, you create the resonant tone and the user would slowly tune the disruptor. That’s another tone that creates an actual beat. When the pulse of that beat is close to the rhythm of the firing of that circuit, what they feel is that anxiety drops dramatically. It’s completely tuned by the user.

Even though Frank Lawlis in his clinic will use an EEG and I was able to witness at one point how they would have the EEG hookup and we would see deficits in certain brain areas. As someone tuned the BAUD while they were on the EEG, we can watch the reading shift and it was pretty amazing. That’s as simple as it is. We find the right frequencies that seem to neutralize the feeling. Here we’re using the brain as a monitor, which is a much better monitor than an EEG or anything else we have. The mental part of it, by the way, is for the user to focus on the feeling. Let’s say it’s a pain. They would focus their attention completely on it in a non-reactive way and try to remain calm, so it’s like the protocols are much like mindfulness with a little technological enhancement. It’s simple to learn and simple for most users to do on their own.

If you have any statistics on this, what percentage of people that try the BAUD like it versus don’t like it? I know certain people are sensitive to sound and they reject the use of a device like that. Do you have any awareness of what the rates are for people in rejecting it?

Yes, in fact, in one of the studies, I co-authored with a doctor of physical therapy. He worked with patients who had a high degree of central sensitization. A good number of them found the BAUD sound to be aversive and didn’t want to hear it. It’s not a pleasant sound. It’s been described as angry buzzing bees by some people. There’s a point to that. What’s happening there is the BAUD both stimulates the amygdala and a disruption of the circuitry there. In the stimulation of it, many people find that’s uncomfortable. There’s a minority of people that have high sensitization that simply can’t tolerate the sound.

 

Here’s an interesting story. My wife was one of those. She had suffered for many years with fibromyalgia. The methodology of how the brain becomes sensitized is constant pain sensitizers those circuits to be always on. She put the BAUD on, “Try it. It’s supposed to be good for pain.” She turned it on, made a face, ripped the headphones off and threw across the room and said, “I’m never putting that thing on again. It was awful.” What happened was the sudden stimulation activated a lot of the pain circuits that we can compartmentalize and keep out of our consciousness. The interesting thing is when she saw what was happening with the rest of the family and everybody else getting results, she wanted to give it another try.

We worked with setting some headphones off to the side, lowering the volume, took it in small amounts and eventually, she can use it at high volume in an ordinary way. When the BAUD effect sets it first, there’s the stimulation and there’s a neutralization. I would say the number of people that can’t tolerate the sound is small, maybe 2% or 3%. As far as effectiveness, I have not for the past years or so but I did several surveys early on with the BAUD and therapists reported in both cases, the numbers were close, 76% reported patients getting good to excellent results. I quantify that at least half to most of the symptoms were relieved.

Are you getting active feedback from therapists that are using it in the field about the kinds of symptomatology that they’re targeting the most with the BAUD?

Most of our customers are psychologists and neural therapists. A minority of them are physical therapists or MDs. Most of the feedback is on psychotherapy types of issues but we’re getting feedback across the spectrum and what we’re finding is interesting. This suggests that the BAUD has implications not for therapy and emotions but for physical medicine. We’re getting reports back that it can relieve pain in a profound way, also addictive behaviors and primarily anxiety. It seems to be the best or at least the most popular target for the BAUD. We’ve also done some experimental use of the BAUD because it is safe. It’s FDA approved. The side effects of this, the only thing you’ve ever heard, would be maybe a slight headache or sometimes a little dizziness from the binaural effect.

There’s a no-lose proposition. We’ve seen it improve stroke symptoms and from balance to weakness. On the website, there’s a video of a fellow with tremors. As he tunes the body, you can see the tremor diminished almost nothing. We’ve had a lot of feedback on Parkinson’s and other tremors. It doesn’t seem to matter the cause of it. The BAUD is able to reduce them, not eliminate them and a variety of problems that were never diagnosed. There was no label for them but they had a neurological component and the BAUD has been able to help. Also, irritable bowel syndrome and a variety of other things.

I’d like to make a statement based on my years of experience with this. I believe the principle that we’re working with here is going to be, once it’s fully understood, embraced. It is going to change psychotherapy much or more than the introduction of medications and a lot of physical medicine. Also with pain treatment now, which is so problematic with the opioids. They don’t work for everyone and they are addictive as all get out. We’ve had a number of cases of people able to do to reduce or even go off of opioid medication. I can tell you about one that is interesting if you want to hear.

His name is Klaus. Klaus is a Swedish fellow who contacted me by email and told me his story. His story is that he contacted Guillain-Barre syndrome at the age of 55. Guillain-Barre is an autoimmune response that gets triggered in the body where the body attacks itself and also somehow degrades the sheath around the nervous system. He had such a severe case that he was in the hospital. He lost his breathing ability. He’s on a ventilator for five days and couldn’t move anything but his eyelids. As usual, these victims recover from it so he recovered partially. He was paralyzed from the knees down. He didn’t have any sensation below that except for ongoing excruciating level 8 or 9 pain most days.

Klaus was on a regimen of oxycodone daily. Several times a week, he self-administered morphine and several times a year, he had to go into the hospital for high dose morphine, where they had to monitor his respiration in order to try to knock down the pain. I honestly didn’t know if it could work in this case. I loaned him a BAUD and walked him through it over Skype. A week later, I was wondering about him. I hadn’t heard back from him. He contacted me and told me that he had done the BAUD three times and his pain level was down to 1 or 2. He was going off of his oxycodone and morphine. I am still surprised at some of these results because they’re so unexpected. The mind goes, “How is it possible that he couldn’t get relief any other way?” What we know about now again.

Sensitization chronic pain can create central sensitization in which the pain itself becomes the problem. His body had healed up enough to where the pain circuits in the peripheral system are even firing much anymore. It was all in the brain. It kept getting triggered in the brain. Klaus, needless to say, he was thrilled. He started sending letters out to other younger age groups so forth. That was an extreme example. That was by the way after fifteen years. He contacted me when he was 70, so he had been on this regimen for fifteen years.

That’s a delightful story and it makes me want to ask, do you know about the work of Dr. John Sarno?

Possibly.

Dr. John Sarno is a back surgeon who wanted to find out what was the most effective part of the surgeries that he did. He did a study that had him look at the scans of a whole lot of people. What he was forced to conclude at the end of that study, was that nothing he was doing in his back surgery was relieving the pain that people had. It’s because 65% of the people that were in this study, they had spinal scans with the CAT scans, the X-rays and the MRIs. They had the things that we would normally call curvature of the spine, bulging, ruptured, herniated discs, arthritis, bone spurs, pinched nerves, etc. Evidence of previous fractures in vertebrae etc. Only 35% of those people had any pain or discomfort. 65% of the people that had all that same stuff on the scans of their spines and their back had no restriction of motion and no pain. He was forced to conclude that what’s showing up on the scans is not responsible for the pain. He started trying to research what was going on?

He discovered what he called tension myoneural syndrome, which means the mental-emotional body, the physical brain decides to get tight or tense because of some threat or lodges some traumatic energy in the body and the muscle tension or the small packets of muscles contract, restrict blood flow to the tissue. What he discovered is that the smallest, even a 10% decrease in oxygen flow to the tissue is enough to generate excruciating pain. He quit doing back surgery and started doing a psychoeducational approach. As a good back surgeon, his results were about 35% complete elimination of pain and restoration of motion. The third factor there is, there’s no need for additional surgery. That’s a good rate for a back surgeon, 35%, 36%, 38% or 40%. Most of us would say that’s not a good rate, but when you consider the fact that even a large percent ends up getting complete elimination of pain and complete restoration of motion.

In 4 or 5 years, you’ve got to have another surgery to get rid of the scar tissue that’s built up or whatever. When he quit doing surgeries altogether and moved to this psycho-educational model, his success rate went above 80%. He has written books. It’s Dr. John Sarno. He’s no longer with us. People can get access to that through his books and there was a documentary that was completed before he died, so he got to see it. That documentary is available online for $5 or $6 at AllTheRageDoc.com.

My supposition is that when you’re talking about memory reconsolidation, which is something I’ve read quite a bit about Depth Oriented Brief Therapy by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley, and now that’s called Coherence Therapy. They’re doing tremendous studies with this memory reconsolidation. What they’re talking about what they’ve discovered is much like what you said. I have to let myself feel the energy flowing through those physical and emotional circuits. Once I tap into that, it opens a window during which time reconsolidation of the memory, rewriting of the neural pathways contained in that memory is possible.

It’s not enough to have a reactivation of that neural pathway as anybody who’s had traumatic flashbacks from post-traumatic stress disorder will tell you. You can have flashbacks for years and not have anything to be resolved. In the hands of a skilled therapist who knows about the process of trauma and how to help someone avoid retraumatization, tools and a variety of different techniques, it can help you step into memory reconsolidation are what makes this possible. I have found that the BAUD is one of those many tools.

In fact, many of the therapists we work with modalities like EMDR for example or EFT. It’s beginning to be described as a memory reconsolidation therapy. We have these therapies that have worked. In fact, Dr. Joseph LeDoux, who’s a professor of neuroscience at New York University, is the father of memory reconsolidation. His grad student, Karim Nader, came to him one day and said, “Let’s see if we can erase memories in a rat.” They go, “They’ve tried that you can never do it.” This was back in the late ‘90s, where we thought the brain was hardwired. Once that’s set in there, there’s nothing you could do. Karim Nader did an experiment where he was able to seemingly erase a fear memory in rats.

That was amazing, so they repeated it. Joseph LeDoux described what you’re saying. Anytime a memory is reactivated, there’s one of three things that can happen. It can stay the same, it can become stronger, the re-traumatizing that you mentioned, or it can become weaker. The question is, in cases of these pathological circuits, how do we weaken them? How do we get there? Coherence Therapy is a talk therapy based on the Memory Consolidation Model. Understanding what happens, they’ll activate it and try to switch the attention away.

Let me clarify that because I’m familiar with Coherence Therapy and there are all kinds of things flooding into me as a therapist and a clinical person. I want to say seventeen different things now so that people don’t race off and re-traumatized themselves. There are books like The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild, which is a good book to be gentle yourself and to do the awareness that your wife had when she threw the headphones across the room. Instead of trying to tough it out and keep it there and gradually come back in and desensitize. What’s happening in the Coherence Therapy model is they juxtapose one implicit emotional memory with another because most of us function at a fairly high level. A traumatic memory will get triggered and we will not function so well in one setting or another.

When you go into Coherence Therapy, which does not only talk therapy, it’s this experiential memory reconsolidation-based process. You cannot simply talk about your traumas and have them go away. As you said, you have to reactivate the feeling and help the person experience it in a safe environment and alternate back and forth or as they say in that work, juxtapose one felt truth, “I’m okay. I’ve survived. I’ve made it to 65 years of age,” with another deep implicit truth, “I’m not okay. I’m in danger. Life is threatening.” I alternate quickly back and forth between those once the deep emotional trauma has been activated, that window that you talked about is open. As I juxtapose this inner knowing within myself, I know both to be true and they’re contradictory. The longer I hold them in conscious awareness in that safe space moving back and forth, the more the brain reconsolidates and says, “These can’t both possibly be true. What’s the actual truth?” That shift happens in the rewriting in the neural plasticity, etc.

I wanted to specify a couple of things there. One, be gentle with yourself. If you’ve had serious trauma and you’re considering looking into the BAUD, I strongly recommend that you do it in with the coaching of a therapist who’s well versed in the processes of trauma and its resolution from a gentle and effective approach. The BAUD is one of the most powerful tools to be added in the arsenal along with the Emotional Freedom Technique that you mentioned and EMDR. Some people use the Bio-Energetic Synchronization Technique, which is another mind-body energy process. I wanted to put that in there as we’re talking about how this device is available for individuals.

Thanks for clarifying that, Tim. We’ve always instructed BAUD users, if your problem is clinical level and by that, I mean it does not say mild anxiety, overeating or wanting to quit smoking, what I mean is there are problems people can tackle on their own with the BAUD easily. If you have bipolar disorder, having schizophrenia or if you’ve got a serious problem, even PTSD, particularly complex PTSD, you will want an expert therapist to guide you in this process.

Part of what we’re discovering when you named all the memory-oriented modalities, another one which is a drug centered propranolol is a beta-blocker that medical science is experimenting with for PTSD. It chemically inhibits the reconsolidation of neural pathways so they administer this to veterans and have them relive and talk about their experience. In many ways, the model is the same. We’re looking to change those circuits back to normal function. One little aside, Joseph LeDoux made the interesting observation that he thinks all talk therapy is memory reconsolidation therapy. One of the ways that are obvious is when you can’t talk about these and expect change.

What’s one of the most common phrases that a therapist will ask their patient? How do you feel about that? What they’re saying is to activate the emotional circuit so that we can maybe modify that and change that. In some ways, what we’re doing now is looking at it as what has worked and trying to decide how it’s worked. The BAUD is one of a number of different things. It’s a safe and rapid, effective tool. The principle that all of these operate by the principle in the brain is going to be the basis of huge changes in mental health and even things like pain therapy.

I’ve seen a lot of it in my practice. I’ve had the blessing of being introduced to a number of these techniques. I’m grateful to the person that told me about the BAUD a couple of years ago. Unlocking the Emotional Brain is the second book by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley and Robin Ticic. As they moved from calling it, The Depth Oriented Brief Therapy to Coherence Therapy, and they published that second book. A lot of research is happening and what they’re discovering is when there’s a lasting shift made, whether it’s from talking to somebody, having a deep experience or using something like the BAUD, probably what’s happened is a memory that has been reconsolidated. Neural rewiring has taken place. What is it about the bar that I haven’t even mentioned? As we’re winding down this interview, what else would you like to say that maybe I haven’t even asked you about yet?

We’ve covered a good part of it. There are many case studies that are interesting and that again, they suggest that what we know about things like stroke and even paralysis is not complete yet. I worked with a young lady who was quadriplegic, a tetraplegic for ten years. She contacted me and she was applying to be accepted into a Neural Psychology Program, a PhD program. She read about the BAUD and was interested in trying it herself. She was in a wheelchair. She was not complete tetraplegic. She had some control over her arm muscles, but her hands were clasped and she couldn’t walk. She wanted to see if the BAUD could do anything for her and I said, “I don’t know. Possibly.”

We did have one odd report from a clinic in Switzerland, where a lady was using the BAUD on an emotional issue and she was in a wheelchair as well. She suddenly perked up and said, “I can feel something that I couldn’t feel for the last 30 years.” Somehow some sensation came to life in her lower pelvic region. I said, “Let’s give it a try. There’s no harm.” This lady, Lisa, was an athlete. She was quite disciplined and she was ready to give it her all. She was an athlete before she was injured, unfortunately, by a bullet wound to some stray bullet that someone fired at a party.

We started working on this and a lot of people don’t realize that paralysis often brings neurogenic pain. When the brain is not getting any signals from the legs, it often senses that there’s something wrong and interprets that as pain. A lot of paraplegics and tetraplegics will have lights to even severe neurogenic pain. Lisa’s was moderate but we were able to eliminate that with one session on each leg, which was pretty amazing and delightful to her. The other thing she wanted to do or much more ambitious, her greatest goal was to get the use of her hands back.

We didn’t accomplish that, but we did accomplish through applying some of the latest research and techniques they’re using electricity. We were able for Lisa to regain sensation in her hands. She could feel again for the first time in ten years, which she was delighted about. The stroke recovery and others suggest there are a lot more going on with the circuitry in the brain. We know that people can rehabilitate from stroke with physical therapy. Theoretically, they can grow new neurons to replace the injured ones but what we’re seeing here, for example, with an 83-year-old fellow, a man that I worked with personally, who had lost balance completely on one side of his body was bothersome to him. Within five minutes, we were able to get that back almost completely. You can’t grow neurons in five minutes, so something else was going on.

I started putting questions out to doctors that I worked with, “If everybody’s stroke is different in different areas of the brain, why is it the same set of symptoms?” Balance weakness, speech and swallowing. Those are areas the brain can’t be affected. They didn’t have an answer to that, so my theory is the trauma of the physical problem like the trauma of emotional trauma of PTSD, somehow shocks the brain and the circuits are somehow impaired. We’re seeing things that should take a long time to heal coming back quickly. Beyond that, with the BAUD, I’m not sure what else to say. There’s so much going on now. Research continues. It’s being applied in 23 countries around the world. Based on the last survey, an estimated one million clinical uses it, so we have a lot of data that has been given back to us anecdotally. We have now assembling studies that are being published. In the meantime, it works.

I’m glad that you were willing to talk with us about this and get some of this information out there. Would you give us a website where people can go to find out more about it or purchase a BAUD?

It’s called BAUDTherapy.com. You’ll find all sorts of information there and the ability to order through. We do recommend you work with your therapist. I have worked personally coaching therapists with the background of it, so they could monitor and work with their patients. I’m happy to do that as well.

My recommendation to people is to check out the website but also, if you’re working with a therapist, let her or him know about this. Richard, I greatly appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I look forward to catching up in 1 or 2 years to see where it’s taken us.

I’m glad to, Tim. I look forward to hearing later about some of your successes with the BAUD.

We’ll do it. We’ll schedule another time. Thanks so much for the time.

You’re most welcome. Thank you.

Take care.

Important Links:

• L. Richard Bruursema
• BAUD
• ISNR Conference
• Resetting the Fear Switch in PTSD
• BAUD Therapist Manual
• Dr. Frank Lawlis
• Dr. George Lindenfeld
• AllTheRageDoc.com
• Depth-Oriented Brief Therapy
• Dr. Joseph LeDoux
• The Body Remembers
• Unlocking the Emotional Brain

About L. Richard Bruursema

L. Richard Bruursema is founder and CEO of Insight NeuroSystems, which markets and provides support for health professionals using the BAUD. He trains and supports psychologists, physical therapist, chiropractors and doctors worldwide in applying the device clinically and has spearheaded research activities and experimental applications of acoustical neuromodulation to many chronic problems such as Parkinson’s, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, stroke, paralysis, chronic pain and neurological disorders of all types.

Mr. Bruursema has also initiated and consulted on fMRI and other brain imaging studies of acoustical neuromodulation therapy and collected clinical data for a study presented at the 2010 Conference of the International Society for Neurotherapy Research.

He is the author of Resetting the Fear Switch in PTSD: A Novel Treatment Using Acoustical Neuromodulation to Modify Memory Reconsolidation, New Technique Shows Promise as Adjunct In Chronic Pain Management (Practical Pain Management), Acoustical Neuromodulation for Chronic Pain Management (The Pain Practitioner), and the BAUD Therapist Manual.

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