The ReBuilder: A Device That Started With One Man's Father

David Phillips was an engineer, not a physician, when his father developed severe nerve pain in his legs following complications from heart surgery. Watching someone you love in that kind of pain, with the available options exhausted, is the origin story behind a surprising amount of medical technology.

He started with what was on the market. A conventional TENS unit helped temporarily but, by his account, ultimately made his father's nerve pain worse. That result is what sent him back to the drawing board, and the device that came out of it has been in continuous development for more than thirty years.

The problem with masking a signal

A standard TENS unit works on the gate control principle. It floods a region with electrical stimulation at a frequency that competes with pain signals for access to the spinal cord, effectively crowding them out. It is a real effect and it is useful. It is also, by design, a way of interfering with a message rather than doing anything to the tissue sending it. When the unit goes off, the message resumes.

Phillips took a different starting point. Rather than overwhelming the nerve, he set out to deliver a signal shaped more like the biphasic waveform a healthy nerve actually produces, at low frequency, with the intent of stimulating the nerve and the surrounding musculature rather than drowning it out.

The muscle pump

There is a straightforward piece of physiology here worth knowing regardless of any device. Blood returning from your legs to your heart is traveling uphill against gravity through veins with very little pressure behind it. What moves it is your calf muscles contracting and squeezing the veins, with one-way valves preventing backflow. Physiologists call the calf the peripheral heart, and it is not entirely a metaphor.

People with painful feet move less. Moving less means the calf pump runs less. Rhythmic electrical stimulation that produces gentle muscle contraction engages that pump directly, which is part of why this style of stimulation is used in the legs specifically.

What a session looks like

The signal is delivered either through adhesive electrodes or through conductive socks or gloves, which spread the current across the whole foot or hand rather than concentrating it at two points. Sessions run about thirty minutes. The sensation is a mild tingling or a soft pulsing, and the intensity is set by the patient. It should never be uncomfortable.

The device is FDA-cleared for symptomatic relief of chronic intractable pain and for post-traumatic and post-surgical pain, and for maintaining or increasing range of motion. Those are its cleared indications and that is the frame we use it in.

How we use it

Electrical stimulation is one tool among several, and we do not present it as the whole answer. It sits alongside infrared work on local circulation, manual care, and the measurement that tells us whether anything is actually changing. We would rather show a patient their numbers than ask them to take our word for it.

If you want to know what is happening in your feet and what the options are, call (725) 255-7333. Henderson, southwest Las Vegas, and North Las Vegas.