When Do You Renew The Carbon Pads?

TRANSCRIPT FOR BEH PODCAST EPISODE 25

WHEN DO YOU RENEW THE CARBON PADS?

Participant:  I just wanted to thank you for recommending that I get new pads for the actual eye micro-current.  That’s something I don’t think that many people know to order new ones about every year.  It did make a difference in some of the flashing I saw.

Dr. Miller: Thank you for bringing that up, we’re re-doing the manual.  The new manual which comes with the microcurrent unit is going to state that a little more clearly.  What she is talking about is the carbon rubber black pads that have the Velcro on them—the things that you put the wet piece of cotton on them and they go over your eyes.  That material, as you pass electricity through it, so it’s a pretty miraculous material—it’s rubber, it’s flexible, and yet it is able to conduct electricity.  What a great thing. But as you pass electricity through it, basically the material begins to become a resister, rather than a conductor.  And you can’t tell that by looking at it, you won’t know it just by working with the unit.  It’s going to feel the same and it’s going to look the same.  Basically the thing you need to do is you have to change those pads about every year.  There are ways that we can look at the pads with an instrument to decide how conductive they are.  And recommend that you change them, but it is important to change them about every year.  So, what were you noticing?

Participant: I was noticing that I had quit seeing any flashing and then once I switched to the new pads I got that again. 

Dr. Miller: You know one of the things, too, that happens is that the microcurrent machine, the MicroStim machine, is pretty remarkable in that one of the things that it’s trying to do is to maintain a constant current output, no matter what the resistance is in the circuit.  If you’re trying to push the current through pads that have become highly resistive, they don’t conduct very well.  It will up the output to maintain a constant output but eventually if those pads become too old, then the machine can’t even overcome that.  And so that’s why we do recommend keeping track of that. 

And so replace the pads every year whether you think you need to or not.  But certainly if you’ve been using them for a while and you’re starting to feel like the unit just doesn’t have the oomph that it used to have or that it, like she says, your used to see the flashing all the time and now you’re not seeing it.  Or you have to turn the unit all the way up before you feel anything at all.  That’s a sign that you probably need new pads.

And I just want to use this opportunity also, it wasn’t her question, but just to say that the weakest link in the equipment, the MicroStim equipment, is the wire.  So if suddenly the machine seems to stop working, 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be because the wires gone bad.  The wires are rather fragile, they go bad, but the reason we use that wire, is that wires that are more robust are also very, very stiff.  And so it’s nice to have a flexible wire.  And that’s why we give you an extra wire with the unit, we recommend you keep one around.