Interview with Vladimir Lopatko
Dr Vladimir Lopatko MD, neurologist, SCENAR therapist and RITM OKB ZAO certified trainer (Nizhny Tagil, Russia).
Q: Why did you start to work with SCENAR? Were you unsatisfied with conventional medicine?
A: It’s not that I was unsatisfied… To be honest, I did not have much to compare with – I was unfamiliar both with the alternative medicine in general and SCENAR therapy in particular. The reason has mostly financial roots. The beginning of my career matched the impendent decline of the socialistic economy. The end of 1980s was the time of so-called “first gentle signs of capitalism”: private business, cooperatives, and so on. No wonder I had a desire to, first, run a private practice, and, second, be able to successfully treat various diseases, not only the ones related to my speciality as a neurologist.
SCENAR met both of these requirements perfectly. It was impossible to pass by.
Q: How many patients did you treat using SCENAR? What are the results?
A: I never thought of gathering statistics, so I can share only the approximate numbers.
For twenty years (since March 2003 to March 2015) your obedient servant has been collecting data on the results of the back pain treatment. My aim was to give the benchmark assessment of the timing of the analgesic endpoint onset and its intensity when using SCENAR vs conventional therapy.
There were 927 patients involved in the study, which was about 75-80% of the total number of people I treated with SCENAR during that period. My experience as a SCENAR therapist is about 25 years long (since May 1995), so I think there should be about two thousand patients all in all.
Speaking of the results… I will use the quote of the abovementioned study of the back pains treatment: “When treating dorsalgia with the SCENAR therapy method, the analgesic effect is more pronounced and comes faster than when using conventional therapy. Therefore, this method can be recommended for the treatment of dorsalgia if conventional therapy methods had an unsatisfactory effect”. This statement is also true for other disease entities.
Q: Could you please tell us about the most interesting case from your practice?
A: It is hard to pick just one. There were a lot of interesting cases. And if I would have remembered just one patient in 25 years that would be a shame both for me and SCENAR.
Though, there is one I would like to share. In 1997 I had my first advanced SCENAR training course. The speaker, Dr Yury Gorfinkel taught us how to perform the technique called “SCENAR vaccination”. Later that day, Dr Iosif Semikatov (I think, he needs no introduction) and I were treating each other to try the technique. As a result, I got rid of my chronic bronchitis that used to exacerbate twice a year, my tonsillitis and chronic pharyngitis. I hope they are gone forever. So this was definitely a memorable case, though that time I was the patient, not the doctor.
Q: Do you think SCENAR is just an add-on to the conventional medicine or rather its future?
A: I am not quite familiar with the healthcare systems of other countries, so I will talk about Russia.
Of course, that would be great to have SCENAR therapy right next to the official medicine so the patients may choose the treatment way. However, the goal of contemporary conventional medicine is to get people hooked on pharmaceutical, especially since the Big Pharma pays for this. The medicine becomes a source of income, at least for those in power, and I doubt that any of them would want to share. Considering that, SCENAR is unlikely to fit well into this household. In a best-case scenario, medical officials will just keep to ignore it.
Q: Should there be a SCENAR cabinet in every clinic?
A: Yes, of course. Moreover, now, when we have an add-on and especially the self-adhesive electrodes, we are entering the golden age for SCENAR in the clinics. If earlier a nurse would have spent 20-30 minutes to treat one patient, now it is possible to work with 3-4 patients at a time. This significantly increases the cost-effectiveness of this service.
Fifteen years ago the clinic I work in bought three SCENAR devices for personal use. We organized the SCENAR therapy cabinet and had good treatment outcomes. Unfortunately, it is a thing of the past now. The devices reached the end of the service life and were written off the books, but the clinic did not purchase the new ones since they set a course for free medical services.
However, I must note that recently many new private medical centres appeared. It is possible to widely use SCENAR there – it is a matter of good advertising of the devices, treatment techniques and effects.
Q: Do you agree that every family should have at least a personal SCENAR device?
A: Sure, but why there should be only one? We often have to leave our home for business trips, vacation, fishing, and whatnot. It is good to have SCENAR with you in case of an emergency. This is especially important for chronic patients, because the exacerbation, e.g. of stenocardia, asthma or other diseases, may happen anywhere. Ideally, I would recommend everyone to have a personal device.