The new Billings Cereset center offers help for balancing the brain.
A few years ago, Ginny Pierce was involved with a group that met once a week to talk about spiritual and emotional issues. As part of their practice, they sometimes paired off with another person, and at one point Ginny was paired with a woman who told her about some friends of hers who were doing work with brain functions.
They were working with young women who were victims of sex trafficking, and their practice involved a computerized brain program that at the time was called Brain State Technologies.
Ginny had been a therapist for many years, and she was intrigued. She made arrangements to meet with this couple, and this was how she was introduced to what is now known as Cereset, a name meant to signify the basic premise of this process, which involves resetting the brain.
Cerebral Resetting
Ginny talked to one of their clients, one of the women who had been a victim of sex trafficking, and her story furthered Ginny’s interest in the process.
This young women found it difficult to even express a coherent thought, even though it had been years since she’d been rescued from traffickers. She had been so traumatized that her brain had a difficult time putting together a complete thought.
The basic function of Cereset is fascinating, and it was developed by a man named Lee Gerdes, who was himself the victim of a traumatic incident. After Gerdes, an engineer by trade, was mugged by a mob in 1992 and beaten with a baseball bat, he spent eight years trying to find a solution to the neurological damage that had been done to him. After he got no relief from drugs or multiple other treatments, and hearing time and again that the problem was all in his head. He decided to search for a way to address the problem himself.
Gerdes theorized there was an imbalance between the two sides of his brain, and he needed to figure out a way to bridge that gap. He created a program that reads the patient’s brain waves through sensors attached to the scalp, transforms them into musical tones, then feeds them back to the patient through ear buds.
The brain essentially listens and talks to itself through music. According to Gerdes, the brain eventually resets itself, adjusting this balance.
Pierce, who runs the practice with her daughter, Kim Hunter, allowed me a test run with the technology. She started by doing a test that measures emotional fitness and stress fitness. Then she hooked up the electrodes to my scalp, turned on the program, and I began to hear an incredibly soothing series of tones.
I was asleep within minutes, and I could easily see how this program could be beneficial to anyone struggling with sleep issues. But the program has been tried for much more than problems with sleeping. I couldn’t make any kind of determination from such a short test about how it would be helpful, but it wasn’t hard to imagine how the soothing nature of this treatment would have a positive effect.
“The company ran into some problems a few years ago when some of the testimonials claimed that they’d been cured from various ailments,” Pierce explained. “Because the program hasn’t been approved by the FDA, the FDA said they couldn’t claim to be a cure for anything.”
That’s when the name change occurred, and since then, Cereset has been working with the FDA to develop an explanation for what they do that doesn’t violate any rules.
But many clients swear by the product. Aside from sleep issues, the technology has been known to help people with all of the basic symptoms of PTSD—irritability, lack of concentration, and difficulty in following through on tasks.
Among the testimonials are several from professional athletes who suffered from concussions, including former NFL quarterback Bubby Brister, who went from having a hard time functioning as a responsible adult to living a full, satisfying life.
According to Pierce, the most attractive quality of this treatment to many patients is that it’s not intrusive.
“It isn’t designed to change your brain or have any kind of impact on it. Because the change comes from the brain itself, it’s incredibly safe.”
The treatment is also efficient, taking place over the course of four straight days, after which each client is fit with a headband they take home, to apply the treatment whenever they like. Pierce uses the headband three or four times a week, and she has been off anti-depressants (“I was on them for years before I tried it!”) and claims she sleeps better than she has in a long time.
As a therapist, she has also been able to recommend the treatment for many of her patients.
Pierce bought into the franchise nearly a year ago, and her clinic is in a non-descript little strip mall in Billings Heights. Which just goes to show that appearances don’t mean much when it comes to finding solutions.
Pam Ask was one of her first clients, and she said, “I’m a huge believer in this product. I was only getting about three or four hours sleep at a time before I tried this, and since I did the Cereset treatment, I get at least seven hours of sleep every night.”
Ask is such a huge fan of the product that she eventually convinced her husband Wayne to try it. “Wayne has been on anti-depressants for 20 years,” she explained. “I convinced him to stop taking his meds and try the treatment just to see what happened, and he hasn’t felt the need to take anything since he tried it.”
Cereset now has 24 centers around the nation, and Gerdes claims they have treated over 100,000 clients. If you want to learn about the product, visit cereset.com, or call the Billings center at 406-208-4084. MSN
