Vicci TibbettsMental health and biofeedback therapist in private practice. Fifty years in holistic health. Six Australian shepherds, and one named Baxter. That's him.

Baxter was thirteen and a half. Seventy-five pounds, sweet as could be.

Not typical for an Australian shepherd. Vicci and her husband had owned six of them, and Baxter was the calm one, the easy one. They called him their Bubby.

Then, about eight months before this was written, the nights changed. He started pacing. He'd go outside and stand and stare at nothing. Three days later it was seriously worse.

One of them slept on the couch every night after that, because Baxter was rubbing his nose raw. He was knocking things over, and the things would fall on him, and he couldn't stop himself. It started as the sun went down, and it ran until two or three in the morning. They could calm him a little if they sat with him. Then it ramped back up. In and out, in and out, all night.

He bit them twice. He had never bitten anyone in his life.

Vicci looked it up. It has a name: sundowners.

The therapist who was afraid of being put out of business.

So she went searching online, hoping there was something. She found several people selling a device for the vagus nerve. As a mental health and biofeedback therapist, Vicci knows the vagus nerve and trauma very well, and she didn't think a vagus device would reach the brainwave states she knew were involved in dementia.

She kept searching. That's when she found Resona Health, and read the cognitive study and the PTSD study.

"As a therapist, initially I was a little scared. Maybe this is going to put me out of business. Thirty days? I can't achieve that with the stuff I do in therapy."

Vicci, on reading the studies

She had never heard of PEMF, even though it had been around for forty years. She kept researching. Within a few days she went to her husband and said, here's this device, and here's what I think it might do.

His answer: if I can have one night of good sleep, it's worth three hundred bucks.

She bought two. One for Baxter, and one for herself, because she wanted to know exactly what he was going to feel. He didn't even like the Dremel on his toenails. She wasn't going to hand him anything she hadn't worn first.

Then her husband wanted his own.

Remember the second VIBE, the one she bought for herself? About a week and a half in, she started lending it to her husband here and there. He is, in her words, very skeptical.

"He said, 'I want my own. I don't know why, but I want my own.' And I said, 'Okay honey, there you go.'"

Vicci

She had already ordered wholesale by then. She now uses what Resona Health calls the Power of Four, four protocols in a row, with every single one of her clients. She loosely keeps an eye on about forty people who are using the device, dogs included. A family buys one and three people share it.

The stories she hears back are all over the map. A woman who had lived with diabetes for twenty years told her that within about five weeks her A1C had gone from nine to six. A man with twenty years of back pain from a car accident said he used it twice and doesn't feel it anymore. Vicci herself tripped over something with her arms full and took a big scrape off her knee. She ran Wound Healing on it. No bruise, no scar, nothing.

She has given the device away to six people who couldn't afford it, because she wanted them to have it.

Her count so far: she has not met one person she's been involved with who hasn't had some benefit.

What she ran, and what she runs now.

Every protocol on the VIBE is a one-button preset. Here are the ones in this story, with a couple of notes Mark L Fox gave her on the call.

• GammaBaxter's morning protocol, at full intensity. Mark's note: 40 Hz gamma makes a dog more alert, so run it in the morning and never at night.
• Vagus NerveBaxter's evening protocol, and the one she ran when he woke up in the night. Now part of her Power of Four with every client.
• SleepRun after Vagus Nerve at bedtime, at about a four or five.
• AnxietyThe first of the Power of Four.
• PTSDMark's suggestion for any dog that has been through trauma, and automatic for any rescue.
• Relax and BalanceMark's pick as the closest thing on the device to a thunder blanket: a comforting, settling pressure, like Temple Grandin's squeeze machine.
• Wound HealingThe one she ran on her knee.

One more thing from Vicci, from watching forty people. The biggest difference between the people who get results and the people who don't is continuity. She went to Boston for a week and wore hers around her neck all day, every day, so she could keep running her protocols. Some things are immediate. Some take patience, like a deep cut takes time to close. Keep with it.