“Dr. Lee’s first treatment successfully relieved my pain that I had lived with for 23 years. For years, I have tried every type of treatment including surgery and medication… After the 2nd treatment I was able to eliminate all pain medications.” – John Weiss “
I underwent two low back surgeries but I was left with incapacitating back spasms. Dr. Lee gave me A-IMS treatment, and I received spectacular relief, my depression went away, and my pain went away. Dr. Lee has certainly given me my life back.” - Dr. Donald Underwood
“I have been suffering from severe back pain for years now. It was pretty much constant and I had resigned myself to having to deal with it for the rest of my life … In one treatment, Dr. Lee was able to get rid of my pain and completely changed my life. Thank you Dr. Lee! – Marlina Randazzo
How could this be? But these are only a few of the stories that I have heard from my patients. Some of my patients call me a “miracle worker.” In the following, you will hear the rest of the story. Experience Counts, I started medical school at the age of 35 when my two daughters were quite young.
Experience Counts
I started medical school at the age of 35 when my two daughters were quite young. After finishing my MD degree from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, I did a year of internship followed by a year of residency in anesthesiology. During this period, I became pregnant unexpectedly. The delivery was rather traumatic because of the intense pain I had during the labor. I refused epidural anesthesia thinking that I could handle labor pain. Little did I know - my body at age 41 was not flexible enough to have a natural birth. My post-partum recovery was also complicated with vaginal bleeding due to retained placenta. Since then, I developed pain in the left mid-scapular region. The pain spread to my neck with severe headache and weakness in both arms. I had to wear a soft cervical collar all the time to hold my head straight. The range of motion of my cervical spine was very limited. I had to be on disability for about 7 months to recover. I was treated with a physical therapy program with no noticeable improvement.
I felt I had to switch my residency because I could not handle the physically-demanding anesthesiology residency anymore. I chose physical medicine and rehabilitation and started my residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, I met an attending 2/10 physician who was doing pain management with intramuscular stimulation (IMS) procedure with a needle. Because I was a chronic pain patient by then, I wanted to try it myself. The MRI of my cervical spine showed a herniated disc at C3-C4 that was abutting against the spinal cord and two disc bulges. Surprisingly, after about 3 months of the IMS treatments, I got almost total relief from my pain. I became intrigued with this procedure and decided to devote myself to it. After finishing my residency, I stayed for one more year for fellowship training to learn about this procedure.
At that time, the IMS treatment was done manually using an acupuncture needle with a plunger. Basically, it was a dry needling procedure to elicit so-called ‘LTR’ (to be explained shortly) from the affected muscles. The needle is inserted first into a target muscle and then it is moved in a piston-like motion in small amplitudes until a ‘twitch response is obtained. The ‘twitch response’ is a sudden contraction of the muscle followed by an immediate relaxation – this is called ‘Local Twitch Response’ or LTR. It was shown in the literature that LTR is essential for breaking the spasm and fast recovery from pain.
During my fellowship year, I was doing the manual IMS procedure on patients 3-4 days a week. It was repetitive manual labor the whole day – constant pushing and pulling of a needle in a piston-like motion in tight muscle bands. The acupuncture needles are occasionally bent because of the tightness of the muscles. Patients got better but the attending physician and I got worse (in terms of pain from repetitive motion injury). My husband advised me to ask the University to make an automated needling device for doing the IMS. So, my attending physician and I invited the Chairman of the Biomedical Engineering Department to our clinic and let him observe the procedure. He said he would not have any problem making an automated device in 6 weeks. We went back to him after 6 weeks to find him empty-handed. That was the most disappointing experience I ever had in my career.
Hearing the bad news, my husband Young Lee, who was then an engineering professor, made a prototype automatic needling device within a week. He used an EMG needle which was about twice as thick as an acupuncture needle to eliminate the ‘bending’ problem. I received an IMS treatment with his automated device firsthand on my right triceps muscle. To my great surprise, I experienced less treatment pain (due to the slippery nature of the Teflon-coated needle) and the LTRs elicited were noticeably stronger than those obtainable with the manual needling. Stronger LTRs meant faster pain relief.
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