Join Me at the Healing Hut – 2025 Wounded Warrior Games
This July, I’ll be volunteering at the Healing Hut during the Wounded Warrior Games in Colorado — supporting veterans and caregivers with a therapy designed to relieve pain and restore function. https://dodwarriorgames.com/
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The Healing Hut was a success. My highlights were relieving PTSD & phantom pain, and restoring basic talking by two people having aphasia and apraxia. It is not too late to sign up for my newsletter.
Engineering Strategies Applied to Relieving Chronic Pain and Impaired Functioning
Keywords: allostasis, allostatic loading, homeostasis, nostos, nostostasis, nostostatic, R2N, Huntington's Disease, C5/C6 quadriplegia
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. – Erwin Schrödinger
Allangardiner.com is under construction, slightly repetitive, and formatted for computer screens
This site shares a few insights from an engineer's perspective. My life story centers on the mantra: "if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
My first startup, Kensington Laboratories (1972), created tools at the heart of quality improvement systems in industries that gave you hard disc drives and kept the computer revolution moving along Moore's Law. Objective measures were in nanometers and nanoseconds. I successfully exited in 1998. Later, my ex-partners exited for $320M.
My friends were right when telling me that my early "retirement" and flying charters as a commercial pilot would not be satisfying for very long.
Free to look for a next chapter, I was appalled by the hopelessness of my friends and neighbors from experiencing unrelenting chronic pain and residual impairments from strokes and spinal cord injuries despite the "best" care available.
Estimates suggest that 20 million Americans endure high-impact chronic pain. Could engineering strategies from other industries solve this challenging medical problem?
Allan Gardiner
University of California - BS Mech. Eng. 1970
Professional Engineer, California M15780
U.S. Commercial Pilot, Type Rating CE-500
In 1999, a light came on. Literally. I was exposed to photobiomodulation therapy (PBM) and its ability to relieve chronic pain. I asked the clinician, Constance Haber, how she chose the wavelength to use. She replied, It's the only one I've got. That brief conversation inspired our invention of variable-wavelength therapy. Our invention addresses fundamental limitations to fixed wavelength therapies: A. The wavelength or multiple wavelengths needed by the body are unknown. B. The needed wavelengths likely change as healing resumes or accelerates. In 2000, I formed a team that became my second startup, PhotoMed Technologies, to develop the variable-wavelength therapy. The aim was to find solutions to unrelenting treatment-resistant chronic pain. Outcomes from the therapy were beyond everyone's imaginations. Real-time recordings using thermal imaging and surface electromyography (SEMG) connected the settings and timing of the therapy with responses and outcomes. However, I was skeptical when our medical advisors were puzzled and had found no studies to cite for the observed phenomena. How might years of high-impact chronic pain and coldness from complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS or RSD) simply vanish? The varying wavelengths appeared more complex to study than for a discrete wavelength. However, the varying wavelengths are like how visible rays of sunlight filtering through a forest in a breeze pleasantly dance on your skin. DOCUMENTING UNPREDICTED EVENTS The team applied engineering strategies as they created sophisticated recording systems to document the unpredicted events in real time. Like how nature videos show ordinary events from new perspectives, the real-time recordings show healing as it switches back on. The responses and outcomes turn out to be ordinary. It is the years of delay and low expectations that make resumed functioning feel special. It's the same for when sensations turn on again, the sensations coldness thaws, and for when one's range of motion returns back to normal. Of course, the body heals itself rather than being forced to do something that it would not have done on its own. Millions of anecdotes from myriad non-invasive therapies tell that story. PhotoMed's real-time recordings let everyone watch like with the man's hands warming after 30 years of dysregulation. Could his experience of coldness have gotten stuck and the temperatures were a result? In 2024, the answer appears to be that the homeostatic set point had changed over time such that homeostasis active maintained his abnormal experience of coldness. I have been honored to work with hundreds of volunteers having no path forward. They often shared detailed stories about their lives left behind. About the grip of pain that narrowed their focus until nothing else seemed to exist. And added details of the torment of losing jobs, friends, and family. But it was their outcomes and gratitude that inspired me to invest 25 years of my life and $18M to solve challenging life limiting problems. The trek helped to develop the variable-wavelength therapy. The insights apply to many non-invasive therapies. They are not specific to any intervention or therapy. For example, I would not have invented variable-wavelength therapy if I had not seen cold limbs warm in response to then called infrared therapy. ​Six U.S. Patents have been issued for the variable-wavelength therapy methods.
I want to thank the volunteers who helped the team develop PhotoMed's variable-wavelength therapy and methods. Most volunteers arrived with chronic pain and impairments having no path forward. I also want to thank the many people who contributed to and challenged ideas: especially Constance Haber, Catherine Willner MD, William Conard MD, and Robert E. Florin MD.
Improving the quality of life
By Allan Gardiner
The team investigated how the therapy might be used to improve lives for maladies other than treatment-resistant chronic pain. The basic therapy aims to help the body recognize errors and return to normal functioning.
Thomas is a college baseball pitcher who has used the therapy to keep in top condition by addressing his injuries right away. He has provided input on developing the therapy for sports injuries.
Thomas guides his interactive therapy by telling me where he perceives a limit to his moving fluidly.
Each session addresses problems that might limit his next game. A year ago, he broke a key finger and thought his game was over. The variable-wavelength therapy accelerated healing.
Sports and fresh injuries
Figure 1 Thomas is a college pitcher with an ongoing need for therapy to recover quickly and remain in top condition. He received a $33,000 scholarship to play baseball at a Division 3 college.
The interactive methods are easy to learn and apply. The therapy prompts the body to resume its ordinary healing tasks.
My primary focus has been on helping people who have no path forward.
I have been inspired by the hundreds of people for whom the variable-wavelength therapy has improved their quality of life. Most received only a few sessions of therapy to get back on the road. I shared in their moments of elation and amazement as their sensations and coordinated movements came back online.
Their outcomes improved the quality of my life, too. Perhaps consider joining me in restoring lives.
Improving the lives of families
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"Beth" and Mark are among the most impactful people who show that ongoing therapy can overcome big challenges. But just getting to the clinic was a family challenge. I am inviting you to help solve by lending devices to the family to use at home. More on that later.
Beth's C5/C6 quadriplegia resulted from a tragic auto accident. Beth's mom shares how her life changed as she cared for Beth as they accomplished her tasks of daily living. I learned how challenging just getting to the clinic was each week. Lending devices with individualized training frees up the travel time to use for the therapy at home.
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During the year of the new therapy, Beth returned to physical rehabilitation to rebuild her strength enough to manage her manual wheelchair. She went on to school and to live independently.
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Mark's loss of coordination from Huntington's disease limited his activities of daily life. Nothing that we took for granted was easy for Mark. He lived in a nursing home which made it impossible for Mark to be the father that he wanted to be.
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During his first two years of the new therapy, Mark's Huntington's-disease-eroded coordination improved sufficiently for him to move out of a nursing home to live independently. Mark's speech improved enough to get custody of his kids back. He became the father that he had hoped to be.
Figure 2 Beth arrived having post-plateau C5/C6 quadriplegia from an auto accident. The therapy restarted her improvements which allowed her to get back into rehabilitation. Beth transitioned to manual chair in a year.
Mark had impaired coordination from Huntington's disease that forced him to live in a nursing home. The therapy helped him improve his speech and coordination sufficiently to live independently again and to regain custody of his kids. To become the father he had hoped to be.
Figure 3 Clips from interviews with Beth. (4:09)
Figure 4 Clips from the first anniversary meeting and an interview with Mark telling talking about getting custody of his kids back. (1:40)
Figure 5. Mark walks for the record. He talks about his ability to testify to get back custody of kids. Custody was given up when he entered a nursing home. His gait is affected by an injury to his foot. (6:51)
Beth and Mark exemplify possibilities dismissed by conventional thinking that "plateauing" is the endpoint of a rehabilitation and that nothing can be done for people having Huntington's disease.
You might be wondering how a few photons might prompt the body to release seemingly unrelated maladies. My team and I pondered that question each time it appeared that we had made a "discovery."
The discoveries came so quickly that we called the sophisticated real-time recording system the "Rapid Discovery System."
Over time, clinicians began to expect return-to-normal responses and outcomes. Data from real-time recordings shrank the time to detect responses to seconds to minutes. The discovery phase shifted the replication phase.
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We renamed the real-time recording system the "Instant Verification System."
What's Next?
Sadly, about 40,000 people have C5/C6 spinal cord injuries and about 7,000 people have coordination issues associated with Huntington's disease that might be improved. Their families are waiting, too, for access to the therapy that improved the lives of Beth and Mark.
​Please share my contact information with families in the San Francisco Bay Area who might wish to try the therapy. Of course, funding must come from gifts, donations, and grants to build and lend devices to families and organizations that focus on healing rather than the monetary business of medicine.
Want to get involved? I am seeking individuals who might wish to become part of the adventure restoring lives after everyone else gave up.
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You can learn more about the therapy and device at https://www.photomedtech.com/
The following sections provide an overview of the team's technical progress and thinking.
Filling the Conceptual Gap in Healing Science
For years, despite hundreds of compelling first-case demonstrations, my slide titled “How It Works” remained nearly blank.
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That changed in 2024, when we confronted a critical absence in medical language:
There is no established terminology for an abrupt return to normal functioning.
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Together with linguistic advisor Parker Lapp, we invented the term nostostasis — a missing concept in clinical vocabulary. Nostostasis names a fundamental principle of biology: a change-of-state from a maladaptive, non-healing state back to an adaptive, healing state. In other words, it names the moment when healing resumes.
Figure 6. Nostostasis names a fundamental principle in biology: the change-of-state from not-healing to resumed-healing after an upset.
To validate this framework, we systematically reviewed hundreds of real-time recordings and datasets that connect the therapy settings with responses and outcomes that occur during a session. Usually responses occur within seconds to minutes. The data appears to rule out all conventional mechanisms we could identify — including those based on inflammation, circulation, and placebo attribution.
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We revisited our earlier hypotheses and found that most lacked sufficient explanatory power.
But one explanation remained. And it fits.
Figure 7. Real-time recordings and data point to the maladies that responded within seconds to minutes of starting therapy appear to be the result of a failure to update sensorimotor maps. For example, a single failure to update sensations might lead to numbness, pain, or guarding that limits range of motion.
The failure may be modeled like how a dam on a river affects the flow of water everywhere below the dam. The therapy "only" has to awaken the body that it needs to restart updating its maps like removing the dam. The rest is ordinary and automatic. The aim is to no longer need additional therapy.
The Leading Explanation: Sensorimotor Updating Resumes
The most consistent explanation — supported by clinical observation, video evidence, and patient-reported outcomes — is that Variable-Wavelength Therapy (VWT) and other non-invasive therapies trigger a resumption of sensorimotor updating.
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In this model, the therapy draws the body’s attention to areas of dysfunction — not by force, but by signal variation that the nervous system cannot ignore. The impaired region is re-evaluated within the brain and body’s internal mapping systems. When this attention aligns with renewed intention or latent capacity, the system shifts from a stuck, maladaptive state to active resolution — a change-of-state consistent with nostostasis.
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This isn't about treating symptoms; it’s about releasing the body’s built-in capacity to heal when recognition occurs.
The abruptness of responses — often within seconds to minutes — reflects not a miracle, but the completion of a delayed process that had stalled at the threshold of resolution
A case that shows both nostostasis as an "unsticking" of sensorimotor maps
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Kerry arrived at our feasibility study having complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS or RSD) with both hands cold and burning like the sensations of holding ice. Figure 8 @ Time = 0.
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Real-time thermal image recordings provided our first evidence of "stuck" sensations that are not correctly associated with skin temperatures. Her burning sensations stopped in BOTH hands by about 20 minutes. Only one hand warmed because thermoregulation in her left hand had been abolished years before in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve her bilateral pain.
Attending neurosurgeon, Robert E. Florin, MD, recognized that it was the unrelenting burning sensations that were the problem rather than the temperature of her hands. The problem appeared to be that the sensations of temperature failed to fade as they normally would.
Dr. Florin and I reexamined other cases to confirm a disconnect between actual temperatures and the sensations.
Figure 8. Nostostasis likely resulted from Tx2. The clinician continued therapy (Tx 3 to Tx 5) because she did not observe the expected warming of both hands. The person reported the "coldness leaving" both hands followed by "warming" and later the comfort of no pain and no sensations of temperature.
Kerry provided some "before" details that illustrate how the responses to Variable-Wavelength Therapy and nostostasis compare with invasive interventions. She had been placed in an experimental ketamine-induced coma for nine days. Figure 9.
She achieved a few months of partial relief. Her chart notes showed that her right hand warmed on the third day in the coma.
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Kerry came to our feasibility study because her pain and burning sensations had returned.
Figure 9. Kerry in an experimental coma that provided relief for a few months that had worn off before coming to our feasibility study. Kerry sold her house to pay for the intervention.
Figure 10. Kerry in an interview two years after having Variable-Wavelength Therapy that ended her pain within about a half hour.
I personally funded PhotoMed Technologies feasibility studies to restore lives. The studies welcomed people whom we thought "no way could a few photons help this person." We did not have a hypothesis to be confirmed, literature describing the possibilities, or researchers who might provide insights about how the therapy might work.
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Kerry and about 400 others arrived with hope but zero expectations that their maladies could vanish. Some only had to wait seconds to minutes for relief. Others were not surprised when they left as they had arrived. Figure 7 shows some of the maladies that responded during the first or second session.
As of June 2025, nostostasis and the mechanism-of-action being an ordinary restart of sensorimotor map updating provide the "best fit" for my 25 years of observations and real-time recordings. My quest has reached an elusive milestone.
I give thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who had no path forward but were willing to let my team and me try perhaps the most natural of therapies. Light varying like sunlight filtering through colored leaves in a forest.
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Now others can enter new frontiers that have not previously been imagined partly because of the limitations imposed by never-ending notions about "chronic."
Changing how we might think about "chronic"
Figure 11. Data from our feasibility studies and clinics led to recognizing that there is no medical terminology for a change-of-state at the essence of being alive: to resume healing. Replacing "chronic" with "delayed healing" acknowledges possibilities that anticipate returning to a normal life.
Figure 12. For years, the team marveled that real-time recordings from PhotoMed's feasibility studies show that the person changes tense during the session to describe their improved state. We didn't understand how profoundly the change-of-state might "work" at the linguistic and cognitive levels. The ease of prompting nostostasis opens possibilities for brain researchers who can now study the change-of-state.
Closing thoughts
Imagine the possibilities when patients seek therapies that end the delay in healing.
Nostostasis and restarting sensorimotor mapping open the gates to new frontiers.
I am seeking individuals, companies, and researchers who might wish to learn more about possibilities and opportunities...