There's a danger of missing out on something useful
just by assuming that it is not possible"
- Tom Zlosnik, Theoretical Physicist
Recovery Has a Failure Mode
The failure is linguistic and not biological.
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"Chronic" pain becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when trying to end the pain shifts to "managing" it.
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Reframe chronic with delayed healing to open possibilities that are available today.
Figure 1. Reframing open-ended terminology with delayed healing removes barriers to thinking about methods for inviting the body to resume its ordinary healing tasks. The last step in healing processes is the switch from the experience "I have" to an ordinary memory of experiences in the past. The Gardiner Methods invite the body to recognize its need to return-to-normal functioning or R2N.
The core ideas are:
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Like how a dam on a river affects the flow everywhere below, failure-to-update leads to downstream information being late, corrupt, or missing.
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The body can "forget" to return-to-normal functioning, R2N, from the erroneous status quo, often referred to as a new normal.
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A new normal state maintains its status quo by resisting interventions and therapies aimed at downstream signs and symptoms.
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The Gardiner Methods aim to interactively remind the body to resume its ordinary tasks: to restart healing or conclude the experience when stuck at the last step.
This website presents the first real-time recordings and data showing the event when stalled healing resumes or concludes. Like nature videos, the recordings show ordinary events from new perspectives.
Because we could find no common medical terminology for these events, the team and I invented return-to-normal functioning or R2N. We needed terms that let us think about the recorded responses and outcomes. Then, the recorded data showed us a common mode of failure that we call failure-to-update flows of information that become late, corrupt, or missing.
The Gardiner Methods interactively use variable-wavelength light, touch, and vision to invite the body to check itself out. The rest is automatic or nothing. Upon a restart, healing resumes and often responds again to conventional therapies.
Overcoming the "impossible"
I am an engineer and former jet pilot. Upon co-inventing Variable-Wavelength Therapy (VWT) in 2000, I formed a team of engineers and founded PhotoMed Technologies. The team invented the first of their kind sophisticated real-time recording systems to document events when healing abruptly resumes.
The recorded data helped to make VWT more effective and efficient. Today, the clinician looks for physiological responses that occur within seconds-to-minutes of starting the interactive Gardiner Methods. We are still looking for wavelength-specific "how it works" cases but haven't found any yet. Complicating that search, two of the Gardiner Methods don't use a device.
A clue is that The Gardiner Methods appear to invite the self-checkout by presenting cross-sensory information. It is the body that finds and fixes failure-to-update as seen in the recordings that use only vision or touch without a device.
The recordings and data are presented for educational purposes and do not imply that the Methods are suitable for every case. Please use failure-to-update, return-to-normal functioning, and R2N to think about the events that previously may have been thought to be "impossible."
Feel free to explore the data and ideas. Please contact me to ask questions and to share your ideas.
Finding a common mode of failure
Sensorimotor systems are the source of dynamic experience. Moment to moment they carry information about where the body is, what it is doing, and what deserves attention.
When that flow fails to update, the information downstream arrives late, arrives corrupt, or does not arrive at all, and what we feel stops resolving on its own. Burning that never fades. Feet that go offline. A hand that will not open. A movement that is not as intended.
The four Gardiner Methods invite the body to check itself out to find and fix failure-to-update errors leading to improvement or release of downstream signs and symptoms. There are many reasons that the body can't fix the errors such as when limited by tissue damage.
Engineers like models that can help find solutions without knowing all the details. For example, your car stalls and won't restart. Before about 1980, a mechanic replaced parts to get the car going again. We call that a hardware problem.
Failure-to-update is like a software problem that can be fixed with an update that gets the flow of information and your car going again. The inability to start the engine happens in a single line of code that can't be found by checking out the already working parts. The Gardiner Methods remind the computer to update.
Figure 2. The Gardiner Methods provide four ways to get the body's attention. Two of the Methods do not need a device. The failure-to-update software model shift focus to the computer needing an update instead of the named parts of the car that appear to have stopped working, for example, the starter motor.
Real-time recordings and data from clinics and feasibility studies show return-to-normal events from seemingly unrelated signs and symptoms. A common factor is that the maladaptive states are resistant to conventional interventions and therapies.
Similar to aircraft-style forensics, real-time recordings and data were collected without a hypothesis. The information helped make The Gardiner Methods more effective and efficient.
The value of the recording continues to increase when asking new questions such as "what might be a common failure mode?"
I have asked that question for years. Additional data ruled out previous hypotheses until failure-to-update remains as a principle for making decisions.
Conventional hypothesis-driven confirmation of myriads of "A does B"mechanisms may support the failure-to-update principle, or not. The key starting point is that conventional interventions and therapies are NOT expected to prompt a restart of healing or its conclusion.
Figure 3 shows ten maladaptive states that volunteers in feasibility clinics and studies arrived with. Many departed no longer meeting their arrival diagnostic criteria signs and symptoms. I picked these because the earliest physiological responses could be observed within the first session. A restart of healing often means that additional progress can be achieved using the same or conventional methods.
Figure 3. One failure mode, found across conditions that do not share tissue pathology, appears to be associated with treatment resistance rather than with signs and symptoms. We see the resistance as an active process defending a maladaptive status quo that the body has accepted as a "new normal" and not looking to update it. The outcomes in the studies are a result from direct interactions between a hands-on therapist and client.
The failure mode, failure-to-update, provides a principle for decision making. For example, which impairment should be addressed first?
An example: phantom pain and stroke-induced aphasia
Stroke: 10 years of phantom pain and aphasia/apraxia released
Luis, ten years post-stroke, 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 do not know whether releasing his pain helped him resume propositional speech.
The clinician is watching rather than waiting, and what they are watching for is specific: a subtle change in posture or skin tone, a flinch, a gasp, a deep breath, a report of surprise. Luis could not speak well enough to tell me where to test. A grimace when I reached the right spot told me what he could not say. His facial expression quickly changed to relief.
Luis (3:03): brief overview of his progress over three days.
The Healing Hut at the DoD Warrior Games in Colorado Springs had a noisy military environment with curtain walls, machinery noises, and conversations. I was not sure that the veterans would respond like those in quiet offices in our feasibility studies.
The environment did not seem to reduce the effectiveness or efficiency of the Methods. I would have liked to have a means to follow up the progress of veterans like Luis.
The Gardiner Methods
Two of the four need no device at all. Those are VxM and TxM, the Visual-experience and Touch-experience Methods, and they are the ones to try first. The other two use a device: VWT, Variable-Wavelength Therapy delivered by the Varichrome® Pro, and RM, the Relaxation Mask.
Table 1. Four Methods aim to provide an environment for the body to check itself out for errors (Table 1.) The outcome of self-testing can lead to a restart or conclusion of healing.
Figure 4. The Gardiner Methods invite the body to self-test for errors in the flow of information. The rest is automatic.
The no-device Methods and the Varichrome® Methods work the same way. They differ in which part of the sensorimotor system is thought to be linked to the failure-to-update. The body finding the error is what releases it. The test and the therapy are the same act.
I invented the two no-device Methods and co-developed the Varichrome® Methods. The Varichrome® Pro and the Varichrome® Mask are made by PhotoMed Technologies, which is where a clinic or a family buys one.
Watch and Learn
The two no-device Methods are the ones a family can use. They need no equipment. What they need is to be seen, because the timing is the part that is hard to describe and easy to copy once you have watched it.
Recorded examples are being filmed for exactly that, shot so you can follow along rather than only watch. Those pages are still drafts.
For clinicians and clinic owners
A plateau is usually read as a waypoint that may not respond to guideline methods and techniques.
The Methods can be used at any point, before a plateau or long after one. The failure they address is not a stage of recovery. It is a state, and a state can be present upon an injury, on the first session, or at the fiftieth. Practically, that means you do not have to wait for a plateau to look for it, and you have not missed the window if a plateau has already arrived.
Two things make this worth testing rather than reading about. A trial takes about three minutes and tells you within that time whether it did anything. And two of the Methods, TxM and VxM, need no device at all, so the cost of finding out is part of one session and no purchase.
Each of the Methods provides a different environment for the sensorimotor system to check itself, discover the error, and solve it.
The Methods present physiological inputs to the sensorimotor systems that do not require acceptance of "how it might work".
You are welcome to try the two methods that do not need a device. You do not need to wait until a plateau. Your massage therapists may find TxM helpful for their own aches and pains. The variable-wavelength therapy via the Varichrome® Pro and Relaxation Mask are available from PhotoMed Technologies with training from me.
What is known, and what is not
Many of these outcomes have been replicated. What is scarce is not the evidence. It is practitioners. The Gardiner Methods are not widely available because few people have been trained in them, which is the reason the recorded examples matter as much as they do.
What we do not know: who will respond, and why an experience at one location answers to one Method and not another. Sessions in the feasibility studies were recorded, so a change can be examined rather than argued about, and those recordings are how we expect to answer these questions in the future.
The recordings gain value every time they are used. Each new idea tested against them costs nothing to try and either survives the archive or does not, which means the cost of asking the next question keeps falling while the evidence behind the answer keeps growing.
Allan Gardiner is an engineer and inventor. Twenty-five years on these Methods, six United States patents, seven feasibility studies with more than four hundred participants. The work is self-funded.
Disclaimer
Disclaimer:
The Methods are not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or disorder.
Rather, the Methods aim to provide an environment for the sensorimotor systems to recognize and release failure-to-update states. A conclusion of the failure mode is clearest when the person stops needing additional therapy and no longer meets their arrival diagnostic criteria.
Release of a maladaptive status quo is entirely a matter of the body and not specific to the Methods, which only serve to alert the body to its failure-to-update.
Contact Allan
Please do not send medical records or detailed health information. Please contact me to arrange a conversation.