The largest dataset on microcurrent biofeedback has been quoted three different ways for forty years.
I published the original version of it. Here’s the honest reckoning.

By Benedick Howard, Longevity Architect

More than twenty years ago, before I sat for my Master training with Professor Alexander Revenko, one of the training manuals landed in my hands with something buried in the back: the results of a Russian clinical program that ran on 18,255 patients across every major disease group.

Nobody in the English-speaking world was talking about it. So I did the tedious thing. I formatted that data, row by row, column by column, and put it on the web on my old eBodyFusion site. It was a wall of numbers, and it dared you to disbelieve it.
How could this possibly be true?

That question, and answers has followed me for more than two decades. So let me answer the one you came here with, in the first breath, the way I’d want it answered over two decades ago, but none knew what I’m about to share with you, and more in my book “High Attitude Hiking the Hawaiian Mauna: From Corporate Burnout to Cosmic Clarity — A Rebel’s Guide to Thriving in Perilous Times.

Does SCENAR therapy work? The physics underneath it is real and measurable — microcurrent biofeedback does something a TENS unit cannot, and the modern controlled trials are genuinely interesting. But the famous cure-rate percentage from the 1980s? I won’t stand behind it as a number, and I’m the man who wants you to wake up, that’s why I published it. The honest version of this story is more useful than any emotional triggered marketing version ever was. Let me show you why.

Key Takeaways

• The 18,255-patient figure is real, but it was an open-label 1980s program, not a modern controlled trial — and the headline percentage gets quoted three incompatible ways across the web.
• I published the original English-language version of that dataset over twenty years ago. The instability in the number is the story, not the number itself.
• Modern controlled evidence is mixed and honest: one rigorous 2021 trial found no significant edge over sham; a 2022 hospital study found SCENAR more than doubled the analgesic effect when added to standard care.
• What is solid is the mechanism: an adaptive signal that reads your tissue and responds, working on the body’s electrical layer — voltage — rather than masking a symptom.
• This is the evidence anchor for Sunday Briefing #27-30 Voltage Month. If you were/are fortunate to be on the list and actually read what the emails told you what voltage does is what the clinical record actually shows.

The Problem: A Number That Won’t Hold Still

Here’s what happens when a statistic outlives the people who measured it, and one of my clients said during one of my coaching teleconferences:

“I am making progress, my voice is stronger, stress levels dropped. I am really relaxing, this is a game changer.”

Claudia Erland – Retired Senior Leader of Navy Intelligence, USA

Go looking for that 18,255-patient result today and you’ll find it reported as an 82.5% average across disease groups on one distributor site, 88.25% on another, and 88.5% somewhere else — for the same study. You’ll find per-system tables claiming 84% here, 89% there, 93% for something else. Same source. Numbers that don’t agree.

I know exactly how that happened, because I watched it happen. A figure gets copied from a copy of a copy. Each retelling rounds, or drops a decimal, or confuses 18,255 with 88.25%, or lifts one disease group’s number and calls it the average. Forty years of that, and you get a statistic that means everything and therefore nothing.

And the skeptics noticed before most practitioners busy getting similar results did. One of the more widely-read takedowns of this technology online uses my old eBodyFusion page as its central exhibit — pointing at the sheer number of “100% cured” entries in that table and saying, reasonably, come on. I put that ammunition on the internet myself, with good intentions, twenty-four years ago.

So I’m not going to insult you by leading with a percentage. I’m going to do the thing the sick-care system never does with its own weak evidence: show you the seams.

The Evidence: What the Real Record Says

Strip away the recycled marketing number and look at what’s actually been measured. It cuts both ways, and that’s what makes it trustworthy.

The honest null result. In 2021, a team at Hôpital Foch in France ran exactly the kind of study the critics keep asking for: sixty patients with low back and neck pain, randomly split, half getting a live SCENAR session and half getting the device switched off. Pain dropped in both groups, and the difference between them didn’t reach statistical significance. Published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. I’m telling you about the trial that didn’t flatter the device, because a man who only quotes his wins isn’t worth listening to.

The controlled positive. A year later, researchers at Rostov State Medical University took a different design — SCENAR added on top of standard drug therapy for acute lower back pain, versus drug therapy alone. The SCENAR group’s pain relief was significantly greater, and by the third week the advantage had more than doubled. Not a miracle. A measurable, repeatable edge.

The white space nobody’s filled. Here’s what struck me pulling this together: there are now registered SCENAR trials on the public clinical-trials registry — the French spinal-pain study, a Spanish study on incontinence — and almost nobody in the practitioner world writes about them. The distributors keep recycling a forty-year-old percentage while real, citable, modern data sits there unread.

Three data points. One that says not proven, one that says helps, one that says the field isn’t even reading its own evidence. That’s a more honest picture than any table of cure rates, and it’s the picture I trust.

The Reframe: Stop Asking “Does It Cure.” Ask “What Layer Does It Work On.”

Biology is physics first.

The reason the old cure-rate framing collapses is that it was asking the wrong question. “What percentage of disease X does this cure” is a drug question. SCENAR and DENAS aren’t drugs. They don’t target a disease. They target a layer underneath disease — the electrical one.

Every function in your body is voltage-dependent. Just like the processor in a computer. The voltage drops and the computer first malfunctions and then stops working, the blue screen of death. Now here’s the math: you run on an estimated 40-74 trillion cells, and there are 30 – 50 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) mitochondria. Each hold a voltage across their membranes in the tens of millions of volts per meter — the same order of magnitude as the plasma inside a lightning bolt. That’s not a metaphor I reach for to sound impressive. It’s the measurement. For every star in the Milky Way, you’re carrying roughly 25,000 of these tiny lightning generators, and when they run low, that is what you feel as the flat, chronic “low energy” no green smoothie touches.

An adaptive microcurrent device doesn’t ask what’s wrong with you. It asks where the charge has collapsed — and then it does something about it. Which brings us to the one claim I’ll defend without a caveat.

The Solution: The Difference Between a Signal and a Conversation

A TENS unit pushes the same mechanically shaped electrical signal into you no matter what your tissue is doing. It’s a one-way broadcast. It masks pain and then it’s done.

A SCENAR or DENAS device in dose mode listens. It sends an organic signal that resembles the same shaped “pulsed DC” electrical signal coming down your nerve fibers. Just like charging the flat battery in your cell phone it reads how your skin’s electrical resistance responds, adjusts the next signal to match, and repeats — until the tissue registers as charged and the device, when in a dose mode, beeps and tells you enough. It’s having a conversation with your nervous system instead of shouting at it. That adaptive loop is the whole ballgame, and it’s the one thing about this technology that isn’t in dispute: the engineering does what it says it does.

I spent five years working exclusively with a professional RITM 1NT SCENAR that Professor Revenko sold me before I ever picked up its cheaper Russian DENAS cousin. Two years of testing later, I’ll tell you plainly what took me far too long to accept: for most people, at home, the honest work isn’t in the device’s price tag. It’s in the hours. You don’t out-hustle a depleted electrical system and you don’t fix it in a twenty-minute appointment. You measure it, you charge it, and you keep charging it until the numbers change.

That full method — brushing, priming, dosing, and how to read your own body’s feedback — lives in my companion guide, Mastering the DENAS Microcurrent Biofeedback. This post is the why it’s worth learning. That one is the how.

Practical Steps: How to Judge This Technology for Yourself

You don’t have to take my word for any of this. Here’s how to evaluate it like an engineer instead of a believer.

1. Separate the mechanism from the marketing. The adaptive biofeedback signal is well-described and real. The forty-year-old cure-rate percentage is not something to hang a decision on. Judge the first; ignore the second.
2. Read the null result, not just the wins. Pull up the 2021 Hôpital Foch trial. A technology that only ever shows you its successes is selling; one that can point you to its own inconclusive data is worth a second look.
3. Ask what layer it targets. If someone tells you a microcurrent device “cures” a named disease, walk away. If they explain it restores cellular voltage and lets your body do the rest, they understand the tool.
4. Start with orientation, not equipment. Before you buy anything, run the free exercise from this month’s briefings: list three things this week that drained your charge and gave nothing back, and three that put charge in — sunlight, quiet, a hard task done slowly. Do one donor act today. You measure a voltage problem before you treat it.
5. If you go deeper, own the tool and the hours. Chronic depletion took years to build. A professional appointment can’t deliver the tens of hours of application that actually move it. Home ownership plus a real protocol is the only path that works — which is exactly why I built the training I did, and refined it for over a decade.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Close

Twenty-four years ago I formatted a wall of Russian numbers and threw it onto the internet, half-convinced it was too good to be true. I was right to doubt it — not because the technology is fake, but because a percentage copied a thousand times stops being evidence and starts being folklore.

Here’s what survived my doubt. The mechanism is real. The physics is measurable. Your body is running lightning through 30 – 50 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) mitochondria right now, and when that charge collapses, no amount of discipline, supplements or antioxidants puts it back. Only voltage does.

That’s the whole of it. Not a cure rate. A charge.

This is Voltage Month, and next Sunday I’ll show you how to actually measure the thing everything in your body depends on. The number I chased for two decades was never the point. The current was.

Go forth, question everything. Do no harm, so love can blossom🌹 Many mahalos from Hawaii. Warrior out.

Keep Learning

• Mastering the DENAS Microcurrent Biofeedback — The full field method: brushing, priming, dosing, and how to read your own body’s electrical feedback.
• The 30 Million Volt Discovery: Recharging the Executive Battery — Where the lightning-bolt voltage figure comes from, and why it matters for anyone running on empty.
• The Bioelectric Assessment — How I measure cellular charge in a one-on-one session, the physics-first way.
• Fasting for Longevity — The other half of the voltage equation: clearing the drain so the charge can hold.
• Investigating the Therapeutic Efficacy of Microcurrent Therapy: A Narrative Review. — Applications in chronic pain, wound healing, musculoskeletal injuries, deconditioning, and neuropsychological conditions, MIC offers a pain-free alternative to traditional electrotherapies.
• SCENAR Therapy Clinical Efficacy: Analyzing 20 Years of Russian Medical Data — Break down the Russian data across multiple physiological systems.
  

About the Author

Benedick Howard is a Longevity Architect and founder of the Ageless Warrior Alliance, working off-grid on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. A former GE development engineer, he trained as a Master SCENAR practitioner under Professor Alexander Revenko and spent over two decades in independent field research on bioelectric microcurrent, strategic fasting, and cellular voltage. He was among the first to publish the English-language SCENAR clinical dataset online and now coaches executives and founders through his physics-first Triple-V framework: Voltage, Vibration, Verticality.