00:00:00
Björn Reindl: We see the same thing with microcurrent therapy. It helps us tremendously with various injuries, bringing the tissue back to a state where it can function properly again.

00:00:09
Björn Reindl: It’s interesting, as is so often the case in medicine: what we don’t know is initially met with scepticism, and at some point someone has to find the explanation for it – and then it works.

00:00:20
Björn Reindl: We’ve looked into this in more detail, and when you ask a patient, ‘Do you experience anything – any sort of reaction – when you move your head quickly?’, the initial response is usually, ‘Oh no, not really. But if I look in the wing mirror a bit more quickly, yes, then everything goes black.” That’s a typical patient response: not really, but then actually yes, and quite dramatically at that.

00:00:39
Patrick Walitschek: A warm welcome and hello to this new podcast episode from LuXXaMed GmbH. My name is Patrick Walitschek and, in this episode too, I’ve brought you another fascinating interview. I spoke to Björn Reindl from Neu-Isenburg, a long-standing practitioner of microcurrent therapy. Björn Reindl is a qualified physiotherapist, a DOSB-accredited sports physiotherapist, a chiropractor, an osteopath and a naturopath – so he covers a very, very wide range of therapeutic and medical approaches. Björn Reindl runs a therapy and training centre in Neu-Isenburg and, as mentioned, has been using microcurrent therapy for several years. He also employs many other therapeutic methods, ranging from shockwave therapy to chiropractic and so on, and is therefore able to draw comparisons between the various forms of therapy. We had a little chat about his experience of microcurrent therapy, but of course also about the prospects for training therapy, neuroathletics and the interplay of different forms of therapy within a therapeutic approach, if you like. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer – I hope you really enjoy this episode and the interview, and, as usual, we’ll catch up briefly again at the end of the interview.

00:02:10
Patrick Walitschek: Hello Björn! It’s great that we’ve managed to arrange a chat in the form of a podcast. I’d suggest you just introduce yourself briefly – what you do, where you’re based, and what your main areas of focus are.

00:02:24
Björn Reindl: Yes, hello, my friend. We’ve been working together for a very, very long time now, so of course you already know quite a lot about us. I studied physiotherapy in the Netherlands back then, then worked for seven years at Eintracht Frankfurt as a senior physiotherapist; in between, I also qualified as an osteopath, chiropractor, alternative practitioner, and DOSB sports physiotherapist, and so on. We now have over 40 staff at my practice. The aim has always been to build as interdisciplinary a team as possible, to cover every possible area, and that makes working together a real pleasure. We have a large training area, and we have people from all disciplines there: osteopathy, chiropractic, nutritional advice, orthotic fittings; we have an in-house radiology department with which we work very closely, and a large network of doctors and specialists in all sorts of fields. That’s how we try to cover every possible area – that was ultimately the aim.

00:03:30
Patrick Walitschek: We were just talking briefly about chiropractic a moment ago – is that one of your main areas of focus? Would you say that’s fair?

00:03:37
Björn Reindl: Well, chiropractic is, of course, a sub-discipline of parietal osteopathy. Consequently, opinions do tend to differ somewhat on this, but it is certainly a very powerful tool. We have a wide range of specialisations in this area too – we have specialised tables and equipment, of course – but we also cover other approaches, whether visceral or cranial; those are part of our practice as well. We have all sorts of treatment approaches, whether that’s shockwave therapy in various forms – such as radial and focused – we have lasers, we have the ‘super inductive system’, and of course microcurrent therapy, which we’ve been using very successfully for a very long time. We’ve now also acquired a pelvic floor chair; there are only five or six of these in Germany at the moment. It’s extremely expensive, but very effective; it generates a current via a 2.5-tesla coil, 50 per cent of which promotes muscle regeneration – and this has been proven. So we’re always trying to take an innovative approach in certain areas, even those that are challenging.

00:04:42
Björn Reindl: We see the same with microcurrent therapy. It helps us tremendously with various injuries, restoring the tissue to a state where it can function properly again, whilst also providing additional support once the biomechanical conditions have been restored. And then the biggest challenge is to regulate the metabolism there again, as is the case with many things. Microcurrent is an extremely effective tool for this, but not just there – it’s also effective in all aspects of cell regulation. ‘Cell regulation’ always sounds rather high-flown, but it’s nothing more than metabolism, and if that’s working properly, then that’s simply a good thing. It’s like a mobile phone: either it’s too full or too empty. Our body has to operate at a certain mid-point, and if it isn’t working there, then the information isn’t clear either and can’t be passed on. Accordingly, it’s naturally wonderful for bringing things back to that level. It might be a bit too much in one part of the body, perhaps a bit too little in another, but the listeners will probably already know all that from your brilliant podcasts.

00:05:45
Patrick Walitschek: Yes, we’ve certainly covered quite a bit on that already. What’s also interesting – and what lots of people always ask me when I’m interviewing users – is how individual users specifically integrate microcurrent therapy into their day-to-day practice. How does that work for you?

00:06:01
Björn Reindl: It always depends on the condition at hand. Ultimately, of course, you can use it for highly acute cases, which is very, very good. In the first day or two, you can still use (soothing?) cooling, then you switch back to heat. Normally, there are only a few options available in such cases. The laser works well here too, but you can also use shockwave therapy if you’re confident enough. There are now some excellent studies, including on muscle injuries, which show extremely rapid results. So we combine many different approaches. It also depends on the patient which decisions you make and which tool you use. You can combine them too. Then, of course, you need plenty of time, including with the patients. With microcurrent therapy, it’s always nice that, once it’s become second nature, you know relatively quickly how to apply it and can then leave the patient to it on their own. That’s obviously the great thing about it, and as a result, you can incorporate it frequently and effectively. It’s also extremely helpful in cases of chronic conditions, simply to help regulate things again and get them moving.

00:07:07
Björn Reindl: In that respect, there’s a very wide range of possible applications. Even light therapy – which, I’ll openly admit, I, too, used to look down on a bit for years, just like Kinesio tape – I used to ask myself: ‘Why is that?’ We now know that mitochondria have cell receptors that respond to light and, just as with mechanotransduction, react to this stimulus and then adjust their cellular expression accordingly – and that’s always a good thing, of course. This actually stems from research into macular degeneration. I know one of the scientists involved; they were also laughed at for a long time, and now they’ve been nominated for the Nobel Prize. It’s always interesting how, as is so often the case in medicine, what we don’t understand is initially met with scepticism, and at some point someone has to find the explanation for it – and then it works.

00:07:57
Patrick Walitschek: Yes, that’s certainly true. Many people say this, particularly in larger practice settings that are very conceptually tailored to the patient and work with a wide variety of therapeutic approaches; they really appreciate being able to say: ‘Right, I’m going to carry out shockwave therapy, for example.’ Particularly amongst our clientele – and I’d say this applies more to the orthopaedic sector, although I do see that shockwave therapy is also being used more and more frequently in physiotherapy. Many practitioners do it this way: they say, ‘I’ll start with shockwave therapy and then we’ll use microcurrent therapy, simply to boost regeneration, enhance detoxification and so on.’ I hear from many people that this is a relatively good model – just as one example of a combination approach.

00:08:44
Björn Reindl: Absolutely, combined therapy is being promoted more and more; even the *Sportärztezeitung* – where we’ve also published an article before – is always keen in its seminars and conferences to let people share their experiences in a truly practical way. We see time and again that the combination of different forms of therapy is coming increasingly into focus, and rightly so – it’s a sound approach. That’s exactly the point: we use one approach to stimulate a response and can then fine-tune and follow up with the other. They don’t conflict. It’s excellent. In physiotherapy, radial shockwave therapy is very commonly used. Of course, it’s a bit trickier to apply this to periosteal points – or rather, it can be done, but it’s not particularly comfortable for the patient. So, of course, it’s great to have the focused shockwave as an option too, but that’s where you need the alternative practitioner again. You always have to assess the situation, but the more tools I have in my toolbox, the more I can use, and the better the results will be in the end. By now, you sometimes get a gut feeling as to which therapy might work better for which person. Sometimes the ‘Why? How come? What for?’ isn’t entirely clear – that’s interesting. At some point, though, you start to get a bit of a sense of who might react how. That’s the beauty of it, and that’s how it works. Then it becomes a joy, too.

00:10:16
Patrick Walitschek: How do you integrate exercise therapy into your practice? Do you actually want to bring in every patient – once they’ve come out of the acute phase or are perhaps nearing the end of the chronic phase – to work on stabilisation and muscle building? How should I picture that?

00:10:34
Björn Reindl: Well, we live in an age where people lead extremely sedentary lives, to put it bluntly. It’s not just a matter of what we used to call ‘mobilisation’ – moving through our full ‘range of motion’. This isn’t just about mechanical components and tasks; we also know from brain research that we’re subject to the ‘use it or lose it’ principle here too. We can picture this: take someone who sits in front of a computer all day, doesn’t move about much, and then, suddenly, at home, has to move in some awkward direction or extreme position – often, the muscular system and everything around it shuts down. Quite simply because the body asks: ‘Is it safe?’ If it isn’t safe, then the body shuts down.

00:11:20
Björn Reindl: But if we move and move through the full range of motion, and the joint is also centred – meaning the muscles around it stabilise the joint as evenly as possible – then none of that happens. It’s a very simple matter. The brainstem always asks just this: ‘Is it safe?’ And if we’ve only ever travelled within Germany, using sat-nav, it’s not like with computers where the rest of the information remains intact; rather, if I suddenly travel all the way up to Norway, the rest becomes vague and it looks as if it’s in a fog, and the brain then has to relearn how to make these movements. If I haven’t done that for a long time, then we get this reaction; and accordingly, it’s always good to simply provide the brain with a stimulus and, as a result, consolidate the whole process and guide people back into movement.

00:12:08
Björn Reindl: The aim must always be to first relieve people of their pain, problems or symptoms, because the body has various options. Either it restricts performance or mobility, or it sends out pain signals. But that doesn’t always have anything to do with the (unv.). It’s the brain that decides this, and if something isn’t quite right in the perception of the entire system, then we get reactions. And now, of course, we have to try to guide this, all in all, rather complex being back towards normality, and to do that we need to identify where the most or the biggest problems lie. Whether these are people who don’t move around much or who have problems due to perception – it could be their eyes, a scar, a tattoo, or anything else – we can also use neuroathletics, which is a truly brilliant concept developed by Dr Eric Cobb from the USA – with whom I’ve since become very good friends – and which has become well-known in Germany through Lienhard and others, and is now widely practised; a truly brilliant concept that we can use to help people find peace again in this area too. What this means is that, whilst you’re doing exercise, sometimes it might be for reasons other than what we used to think in a more conservative way. These are really, really fascinating things, and you can regulate an awful lot with them.

00:13:35
Björn Reindl: The body always does something for a reason. I once had a patient who had calcification of the ligament – or, to be precise, the ligamentum alaria. We asked ourselves: ‘What’s going on here? Why is the body doing this?’ Well, in our usual approach, the response is always: ‘We’ll have to operate. There’s something there. That’s it.” We took a closer look at it, and when you ask the patient: “Do you experience anything – any reaction at all – when you move your head quickly?”, the initial response is: “Oh no, not really. But if I look in the wing mirror a bit quicker, yes, then everything goes black.” Okay, that’s a typical patient response: not really, but then actually yes, and quite severely at that. Then we had her walk along the wall, because I already had an idea of where this was heading. We then pushed it further, and she kept sort of ‘falling’ into the wall, so to speak, and we worked on that; ultimately, we worked on the vestibular system – which consists of three semicircular canals, as well as the ‘utricle’ and ‘saccule’ – and as a result, the problems improved significantly. In other words, we provided the brain with input again to regulate this weakness, to allow it to regulate itself, and then, of course, using all the other options – manual therapy and so on – we managed to get everything back on track.

00:14:49
Björn Reindl: That’s often how it is. It can be a shock following an operation; it’s often the anxious individuals who then also experience greater restricted movement. This has nothing to do with any adhesions, scar tissue or fibrosis, but is purely controlled by the brain. In other words, the body simply won’t cooperate, particularly in children. The worst thing I can do in that situation is to take a heavy-handed approach. Instead, it’s better to provide plenty of input – lots and lots of input. It helps simply to wrap something around the area, as much as possible. Even bandages ultimately simply provide a stimulus to the brain and a lot of attention, and that helps. To be honest, that isn’t real stabilisation; the only thing that works here is the feedback, and this heightened ‘awareness’ – that’s absolutely crucial. If we then combine this and incorporate other therapies as well, so that once the system is functioning properly again we can regulate the metabolism, that’s absolutely brilliant.

00:15:41
Björn Reindl: Many people aren’t aware of this. Tattoos are, after all, scars, and sometimes you notice that people have restricted movement somewhere; you then focus on the spot where the tattoo was done – perhaps where it hurt the most, even in specific areas – and realise that the restriction suddenly lifts. Then I can also provide a huge amount of input there to reassure the body that it’s learning this. But it takes time; you need to provide about 28 hours’ worth of information for it to work properly again. That could be the eyes – they’re obviously very, very important – but also, as I said, everything else around them. It’s like a car: if there’s a raindrop somewhere in front of the parking sensor, it beeps constantly. We have parking sensors everywhere, and if something isn’t quite right, it often simply results in a major limitation on ‘performance’. The nervous system as a whole is often simply overlooked. And here too, if a nerve – along with its epineurium – exhibits some sort of rigidity or problem, then I need to resolve that. I can do this manually, of course, but I can also work through the metabolism to regulate it, and here, of course, microcurrent therapy again offers an excellent option and produces very good results.

00:16:51
Patrick Walitschek: I’ve noticed that the topic of neurology and this feedback – and this communication network, too – is becoming more prominent, even on social media. Now that you’ve mentioned ‘neuroathletics’, more and more content along those lines is popping up in my feed. I find that absolutely fascinating, and I think it would also be a really interesting avenue to explore in the future with regard to microcurrent – to see how it might be used in combination with that, simply to see if it makes a difference, if it makes you faster, and what changes. That’s certainly a very, very exciting field for the future.

00:17:25
Björn Reindl: Absolutely. We’re familiar with this from osteopathy, where it all started with questions about how I treat blood vessels or nerves. If something’s wrong in the pathway, then information reaches the brain that isn’t accurate, and the reaction is a limitation or some sort of alarm signal from the body – and resolving that is the task. Most of the time it’s a bit more complex; there might be three or four things that aren’t quite right, but when combined, they’re extremely important. We recently had a footballer who, following an isokinetic test, had a kink at a certain angle, which was a bit of a problem. So we simply applied pressure to the saphenous vein and moved it slightly, in the area of the hiatus adductorius – where entrapment often occurs – and simply by shifting it, the problem suddenly disappeared; and that’s when you realise you need to work on that. It could also be a scar somewhere, an incision site – particularly with knee arthroscopies – where you then target the scar, push the tissue in a particular direction and see how it reacts. It’s absolutely incredible what that triggers. Suddenly the symptoms disappear, and then I know I can stabilise it with Kinesio tape or other methods, work on it, even target the scar again, treat it metabolically afterwards – and that’s how you combine the therapies to restore normality to that tissue.

00:19:02
Patrick Walitschek: Perfect. I’d say that’s been quite a lot of input for one episode; I think we could perhaps explore this in more depth in the future, looking at one aspect or another – perhaps focusing specifically on neurology or whatever. However you like, whenever you have time.

00:19:17
Björn Reindl: Absolutely. I’d be very, very happy to.

00:19:18
Patrick Walitschek: In any case, thank you very much for your time and for your input, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else is in store for the future.

00:19:26
Björn Reindl: Yes, thank you very much, also for the collaboration and for the fantastic, ongoing development of your devices. It really is fascinating and very, very exciting to see what’s happening there. Thank you very, very much!

00:19:41
Patrick Walitschek: And that brings us to the end of our interview with Björn Reindl from Neu-Isenburg. I really, really enjoyed the interview with Björn Reindl. It’s always great to chat with him, and I hope we’ll be able to have more conversations and interviews together here in the future. As always, if you’re listening to our podcast, please subscribe to it. Please rate us on Apple Podcasts, Deezer, Spotify – wherever you like – and stay tuned. Check us out on social media using the hashtag #LuXXaMed. We’re on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and of course on YouTube too, and I’d be delighted if you followed us there as well. On that note, I’d like to say: “Thank you very much for tuning in, thank you very much for listening, and see you in the next episode!”