Posted by Hugh on July 16, 2025, at 12:34:09
In reply to Re: A Psychedelic Journey on CBS 60 Minutes » Hugh, posted by SLS on July 13, 2025, at 20:08:47
Hi Scott,
It's good to hear from you. Psycho-Babble has been a lonely place for the past several months. Congratulations on your wedding. What wonderful news! It shows just how far you've come. I've heard that after many years of illness, whether it's mental or physical, getting well, and adjusting to the new normal, can be quite a challenge.
Try not to be so hard on yourself. Any damage you did to Psycho-Babble was slight compared to the havoc wreaked by the troll whose name won't be mentioned. For many years, you were one of the pillars who helped to sustain Psycho-Babble. You did your best to help others.
I've been doing all right. Thanks for asking. I'm much better than I used to be, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. I continue to research novel treatments, hoping that one of them, or a combination of them, will finally get me into long-term remission.
One of the novel treatments I'll be trying is described in this thread:
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20230117/msgs/1122401.html
At the PROSOMNIA Sleep Health and Wellness clinic in Miami, they use a combination of propofol and EEG to keep people in a super-dream state for one hour. It costs $500, but one treatment is all it takes to give people significant and lasting improvement. There's so much interest in this treatment, other propofol clinics might be opening around the country in the near future.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06644573
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/inside-the-emerging-world-of-anesthesia-dream-therapy/
Before I try propofol dream therapy, I'm going to try Vibrotactile Coordinated Reset Stimulation (vCR therapy). This new and extremely effective therapy will become available very soon. Most of the research on it has been done at Stanford University.
Two engineering students at Rice University used Stanford's research to develop their own vCR therapy gloves, which they plan to make available by this fall. The Rice University gloves will be sold at a price that is far lower ($250) than what the Stanford gloves will cost.
https://news.rice.edu/news/2025/rice-students-develop-low-cost-vibrotactile-glove-help-treat-parkinsons-disease
I pre-ordered the Rice vCR therapy gloves (no payment is required to pre-order) by scrolling down to the bottom of this page:
https://kinnections.foundation/buy-a-glove/
On the following website, the Rice engineering students published complete instructions on how to build your own vCR therapy gloves:
https://oedk.wildapricot.org/Treatment-Glove
Most of the vCR therapy research has been done on Parkinson's disease. This video shows a Parkinson's patient before he was treated with the gloves. Then it shows him at the end of the first day of treatment. Then it shows him after six days of treatment.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSjv6m4xLH0
The gloves could be used as a therapy for many other neurological conditions, such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, depression, anxiety, insomnia, addictions, eating disorders, epilepsy, essential tremor, dystonia, ADHD, OCD.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EX4GgLBlA
There are some things that set vCR therapy gloves apart from other vibratory therapy devices. The gloves' vibratory stimulation is only delivered to the fingertips. This is because the fingertips have a huge cortical representation -- far more than the legs or the torso. Other vibratory devices use continuous stimulation. With continuous stimulation, the brain can become habituated to the stimulation, making the therapy less effective over time. The vCR therapy gloves don't use continuous stimulation. They deliver 100-millisecond bursts of stimulation, followed by brief periods of rest.
And instead of stimulating all of the fingers simultaneously, the fingers are stimulated one at a time in a staggered manner. The vCR therapy gloves' intermittent, staggered stimulation prevents habituation to the therapy from developing. The frequency and the length of vCR therapy sessions can be greatly reduced over time.
News stories about vCR therapy gloves:
https://med.stanford.edu/tass-lab/media.html
vCR therapy gloves were developed by Peter Tass, a German physician with a background in mathematics and physics. He's a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. Tass says that the vibrating gloves "change the connectivity in brain regions that are producing abnormal activity. ... We really massively change brain activity on a long-term basis." Among other things, vCR therapy gloves cause a significant decrease in the amplitude of high beta (21-30 hertz) brain waves, which, in excess, are associated with anxiety and many neurological conditions.
In the following video, Tass compares deep-brain stimulation (DBS), an invasive treatment, to vCR therapy, which is non-invasive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xACrVSZeAag
The full text of one of Tass's studies:
poster:Hugh
thread:1122427
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20230117/msgs/1122432.html