Tour the Turn of the Century Electrotherapy Museum (Video)

Since he was a teenager, Jeff Behary's been interested in the work of Nikola Tesla, and has been collecting antique electric devices of a particular kind: ones that send electricity through the human body to effect medical benefits, many of which do so with the aid of Tesla coils. Tesla's not the only inventor involved, of course, but his influence overlapped and widely influenced the golden age of electrotherapy. Behary's day job as a machinist means he has the skills to rehabilitate and restore these aging beasts, too, along with a growing family of related devices. He's assembled them now, in West Palm Beach, Florida, into the Turn of the Century Electrotherapy Museum. This is a museum of my favorite kind: home-based and intimate, but with serious depth. Though it's open only by appointment, arranging a visit there is worth it, whether you're otherwise part of the Tesla community or not. Behary knows his collection inside and out, with the kind of deep knowledge it takes to fabricate replacement parts and revamp the internal wiring. The devices themselves are accessible, with original and restored pieces up close and personal — you need to be mindful about which ones are humming and crackling at any given moment. (There's also an archive with books, papers, and other effects relating to Tesla and other electric pioneers, not to mention glowing tubes that predate the modern vacuum tube, and the oldest known surviving Tesla coils, recovered from beneath their maker's Boston mansion. Electrotherapy is the organizing principle, but not the extent of this assembly.) And while Behary isn't fooled by all the therapeutic claims made by some machines' makers about running current through your limbs or around your body, he also doesn't discount them all, either, and points out that some of them really do affect the body as claimed. Yes, he's tried most of the machines himself, though he admits he's never dared taking the juice of his personal Tesla-powered electric chair. View the first video for a tour of part of this astounding collection; the second video is an interview with Jeff Behary.

Comments

where there's smoke, there's fire

[nido]

I'm a little cautious to be posting this, because strict materialism is strong with users here, and vitalism-haters always pop up to spout their beliefs. I was once a materialist too, but then the medical establishment left me out in the cold.

Materialism was seemingly supported by science. But in the past few decades non-dogmatic scientists have made great progress in giving names to phenomenon which existed before anyone knew how to describe them, or had tools to measure them. A few examples:

Action potential: In physiology, an action potential is a short-lasting event in which the electrical membrane potential of a cell rapidly rises and falls, A nerve conduction study (NCS) is a test commonly used to evaluate the function, especially the ability of electrical conduction, of the motor and sensory nerves of the human body. The Goldman–Hodgkin–Katz flux equation (or GHK flux equation) describes the ionic flux carried by an ionic species across a cell membrane as a function of the transmembrane potential and the concentrations of the ion inside and outside of the cell. Since both the voltage and the concentration gradients influence the movement of ions, this process is a simplified version of electrodiffusion. Electrodiffusion is most accurately defined by the Nernst-Planck equation and the GHK flux equation is a solution to the Nernst-Planck equation with the assumptions listed below.

My journey back to health started with nearly losing it completely. I knocked myself out and nearly drowned at the lake when I was 17 years old. While the emergency medicine was great - I didn't need a hole drilled to relieve pressure from intra-cranial bleeding, but it was nice of the doctors at the hospital to watch my condition long enough to make sure. I have Retrograde amnesia starting an hour or two before I sustained the injury, and Anterograde amnesia for the next two weeks (first 10 days were at the hospital). My memory started to recover at about the 2-week mark, and had mostly recovered by 6 months.

The neurologist who'd followed my case at the hospital sent me for neuro-psychological evaluation, and said I'd probably get better without interventions. Indeed, the double vision had mostly resolved after 4 or 5 months. But my everyday experience wasn't like before. I got headaches from running, wearing birkenstocks, and certain foods, so I stopped running and wearing birkenstocks, and paid close attention to what I eat.

When I started at college, things went rapidly downhill. It was an entirely miserable 3.5 year experience, and after I graduated with my CS degree I spent the next several years trying to figure myself out.

At one point I found a really neat email list. The owner of said list said that "if you have a health condition, the best place to start is with what Edgar Cayce said about it." He also said that the best current source of information about the body's subtle energies is Donna Eden, author of Energy Medicine (actually written by husband David Feinstein, based on interviews with Donna). Edgar Cayce was known as "the sleeping prophet" because he had no conscious memory of the health readings he gave. They followed up on the recipients of the readings, and people who implemented the suggestions usually got the benefits they were told to expect.

My reason for sharing all this now, in this slashdot story about an Electrotherapy Museum, is that Edgar Cayce sometimes recommended electro-therapeutic devices. These included the violet ray (which is mentioned at the electrotherapymuseum's website), a wea