Behind the Varichrome Pro: The Inventor and the Support Available to You
For clinicians exploring Varichrome Pro for clients with stroke, spinal cord injury and other persistent impairment patterns.
I'm Allan Gardiner, the engineer who invented and developed the light-based methods used in the Varichrome Pro system.
If you have heard about the outcomes this device can support and you are considering bringing it into your practice, this page is for you. It describes who I am, what I offer Varichrome Pro users, and why having direct access to the inventor may matter as you help clients achieve more before plateau or re-enter rehabilitation after being discharged for being stuck.
What your are actually purchasing
A Varichrome Pro device is the delivery system. The outcomes come from how the device is used based upon clinical reasoning, the interactive methods, and the clinician's capacity to recognized what the body is showing in real time. Experienced users consistently report that training is what separates a device sitting on a shelf from a device that changes what clients can achieve.
That is why I offer training and ongoing support alongside the device, not as an upsell, but as the path most users need to get the results they heard about.
What I offer Varichrome Pro users
Clinical training in the interactive methods
Hands-on instruction in how to use Varichrome Pro and Relaxation Mask as an interactive, outcomes-driven methods. The device presents different environments for the body to select what it needs and ignore the rest.
Training covers candidate selection, session structure, reading real-time responses, and iterating based upon what the body shows you. The interactive methods work with your existing methods in most cases rather than being a stand-alone therapy.
Case consultation
Direct access to me for difficult cases: clients who have plateaued, clients discharged as stuck, or presentations that do not fit your standard protocols. I review recordings and help you think through what the body might setting its status quo around and what to try next.
A clinical framework for recognizing candidates
Not every plateau responds to this approach. I help you recognize the patterns that do, particularly cases where the limiting factor is no longer strength, flexibility, or tissue healing alone but remains organized around a persistent protective state after its original purpose has ended.
Ongoing access as questions emerge
Clinicians trained in neuromuscular reeducation tend to generate good questions once they start working with the device and methods. I remain available as those questions come up, because my interest is in continuing to develop methods that clinicians can actually use, not in selling a device and disappearing.
Why my engineering background matters to clinicians trained in neuromuscular reeducation
Over the years working with clinicians in this field, I have found that my engineering thinking fits the way that neuromuscular reeducation practitioners already reason. Both disciplines look for the signal underneath the noise. Both assume the body is a system that can reorganize when given the right inputs. Both prefer testing hypotheses over following scripts.
When I explain why a session unfolded the way it did, or why a particular response suggests the next step, clinicians tend to recognize the logic immediately. You are not being asked to adopt a new worldview. I adjust my explanations to fit the world that you already work in.
The clinical problem that the interactive methods address
Many clients plateau even after good care. In some cases, the limiting factor may no longer be strength, flexibility, or tissue healing. The body may remain organized around a persistent protective state. For example, guarding, stuck sensations, pain signals that continue after their original purpose has ended, phantom pain, and post-surgical pain. Our methods aim to alert the body that it has not finished healing.
The concept that organizes my work: a failure-to-update the sensorimotor systems
Everyday experience shows that the nervous system is built to update. A sensation that is vivid at first is updated as the body recognizes it, such as the shower water temperature that felt hot a moment ago now feels neutral. Updating of a constant input decreases the response to prepare the system to detect the next small change.
A failure-to-update appears to underlie certain types of pain and impairment that have responded to our light-based interactive methods. The body interprets the continuing sensations a persistent pain, as a reason to keep guarding, or as evidence that the threat is still present. The academic literature touches this territory through terms like habituation, adaptation, gain control, repetition suppression, novelty detection, and predictive coding.
The practical point for your clinic: when you can recognize a failure-to-update pattern, you gain a different read on why a client may be stuck. The Varichrome Pro system provides an environment for the body to recognize and release the failure.
The outcomes you may have heard about
Real-time recordings and data document cases where clients exited long-standing plateaus in spinal cord injuries, stroke, aphasia/apraxia, and phantom pain.
Spinal cord injury - C5/C6 regraded from complete to incomplete
"Beth" - a C5-C6 spinal cord injury 2 years before, previously reliant on an electronic wheelchair, made incremental and measurable progress using our methods that released her plateau and restarted progress. Beth reentered rehab at about six months. She attained mobility by the end of a year for her to self-power a manual wheelchair.
Stoke - 10 years of phantom pain and aphasia/apraxia released
Luis - ten years post-stroke, he required his wife or family to translate his attempts to speak. He resumed propositional speech (thoughts to speech) during two sessions. He arrived at the 2025 DOD Warrior Games in Colorado Springs having phantom pain where his left leg had been amputated. We worked together to extinguish his phantom pain during his first session. We don't know if releasing his pain may have helped him resume his thoughts to speech.
Luis (3:03) - brief overview of his progress over three days.
Spinal cord injury - clenched fist released
Margaret - totally paralyzed following a motor vehicle accident and chosen not to die, made incremental and measurable progress in the release of her persistent clenched-fist posture. Margaret, a personal friend, and I worked together only intermittently starting about two years after the accident. COVID lock downs ended our sessions after 20 months of improving her hand and leg/foot functioning.
These are not promises. They are example of what became possible when a plateau turned out to be a waypoint. Some responses are incremental. Some are harder to comprehend. For example, Luis's return to propositional speech after two sessions is the kind of event that motivated me to keep recording, keep investigating, and keep refining the methods.
About me
For more than 25 years I have been looking for the simplest explanation for the fast recoveries that real-time recordings have captured. The recordings work like nature videos that show ordinary events, progress, and outcomes seen from different perspectives. They are how I test ideas, rule most of them out, and keep the ones that hold up.
One case from around 2007 of a woman having unrelenting painfully cold hands, burning like holding ice, diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS or RSD). Her response to the light-based therapy showed Robert E. Florin MD, a neurosurgeon, and me that the unrelenting sensations were the problem rather than the temperature of her hands. At that time, we did not have the basic terminology to describe what we had observed and recorded. The failure-to-upate is how I describe it now.
My goal is to continue developing methods that clinicians can use to restart difficult cases, and to help clients achieve greater progress before reaching a plateau or restart progress sufficiently for standard rehabilitation methods to work again.
Next step
If you are evaluating Varichrome Pro for your practice, I am available to talk through what using it well would look like for the clients you see. That conversation is the best way to decide whether the device and training behind it are a fit for your work. I can refer you to clinic owners who provide neuromuscular re-education services.