How VAT works.

Vibroacoustic therapy uses low frequencies and therapeutic music, composed to complement the frequencies, delivered through special speakers called transducers. The transducers can be embedded within some sort of furniture such as portable mats, mattresses, and massage tables, custom tables, beds and recliners.

As a person’s body has contact with the embedded speakers, the music is sent from the source into the transducers and then is felt by the body as vibration and heard by the ears as sound. The vibro-tactile input stimulates nerve bundles along the spine, up into the brain stem and then through the limbic system.

The sound/music is usually delivered to your body through the combination of transducer speakers and headphones or ambient speakers, and is experienced as soothing three-dimensional physiological vibration and psychological event.

Is VAT safe?

Sound/Music therapy and Brain Entrainment is not new. Brainwave entrainment is proven to be a safe, simple and pleasant way to relieve a variety of symptoms. It is now used in hospitals and clinics around the world.

More than 40,000 hours of therapy have been provided to patients in the United States and Europe. There is not a single report of risk or mishap. No significant adverse effects have also been found.

Contraindications:

Individuals with pacemakers, active or borderline psychosis, open wounds, external or internal bleeding (except menstrual) or bleeding disorders, recent thrombosis or DVT, suspected embolism, being pregnant, or had recent surgery, should not use VAT.

History of VAT.

The earliest known use of a vibro-tactile method for healing comes from the Aboriginal people of Australia, who have used the didgeridoo, a wind instrument made from hollowed limbs from eucalyptus trees, for at least 40,000 years. While many indigenous shamans around the world continue to use vibro-tactile methods for healing and balancing disease in the body, we lost sight of the powerful benefits of vibro-tactile healing. It has taken great thinkers and scientists millennia to return to this lost knowledge.

The use of sound made its way into “modern” medicine in 1928 when German scientist Erwin Schliephake discovered that short sound waves accelerated healing in cancer patients. In 1938 another German scientist named Raimar Pohlman went on to demonstrate the therapeutic properties of ultrasound.

Olav Skille and Tony Wigram have been driving forces behind our current understanding of Vibroacoustic therapy as a research-based healing technique. Skille began his work and research in 1968 by developing equipment and music software to deliver vibro-tactile input to young people with Rett Syndrome in Scandinavia. He discovered Vibroacoustic therapy to be beneficial for such conditions as asthma, autism, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, insomnia, pain and Parkinson’s disease. He described the three main areas of effect from Vibroacoustic therapy as being:

• Spasmolytic and muscle-relaxing effect
• Increase in blood flow to the extremities
• Marked but varying effects to the vegetative state

In England, Wigram began his own research in the 1990s, using some of Skille’s techniques to help adults with cognitive disabilities and behavioral challenges. He used the techniques with individuals with self-abusive behaviors and anxiety. The passion and dedicated research from both of these men has been invaluable to our understanding of sound and vibration as a healing modality.

In 1999, the National Institute of Health published research into the use of Vibroacoustic therapy for addressing pain and symptoms that often accompany pain such as anxiety and depression. Although the results of the study were published in 1999, the study itself has been ongoing and continues to show similar positive results. There are presently a number of forward thinking hospitals in the United States that use Vibroacoustic therapy as an adjunct to conventional treatments such as surgery and chemotherapy.