Tried & Loved · STENDO
The treatment I was almost too sore to try
You can take the girl out of the clinic, but you will never take the clinic out of the girl.
I was not looking for a treatment when I found this. I was looking for a device.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was still turning over a question I had not said out loud. Whether there was still a way for me to be of use in this industry. Not the way I used to, because my hands and my body cannot do that any more, but some version of it. So I went down the rabbit holes I have always gone down, looking for cosmetic devices a practitioner could use without their own body paying the price.
That is how I found STENDO, and what stopped me first was the face mask. A facial treatment that could be given without a therapist's hands doing the work. For a therapist whose hands are the problem, that was the whole thing.
French made, and at the time only one of them in the country, on the Gold Coast, where the distributor is.
I was already flying over for a wellness convention. So I booked an earlier flight and went to try it, quietly wondering whether this might be the device, the thing that I could bring to clients.
What I went home and read about
I booked for the face and the body suit was the surprise. That is what sent me reading afterwards, properly this time, and what I found was more interesting than anything I had gone looking for.
Your circulatory system has a heart. Your lymphatic system has nothing of the kind. Lymph moves because you move. Muscle contracting around the vessels, breath, and the slow rhythmic squeeze of the vessel walls themselves.
I had been bedridden. Exercise was not available to me. I had slowed down so far that I felt elderly, and I mean that plainly rather than as a turn of phrase. A system that runs on movement, at a point when movement was the one thing my body would not give me, put words to something I had felt for a long time without being able to name it.
Why it isn't the boots
You have probably seen compression boots, or the sleeves and socks that inflate around your legs. Those are a real thing and plenty of people get something out of them. They run on a set cycle. Squeeze, hold, release, repeat, on a timer that runs the same way for everybody who puts them on.
STENDO is a full suit, working from the ankles to the abdomen, and it does not run on a timer. It reads your pulse and places a stimulation between each heartbeat, adjusting as your heart rate changes. STENDO put the difference at around eighteen hundred stimulations in a half hour session, against about ninety from a set of boots over the same half hour.
The face mask is a separate device working on the same principle. Rather than someone moving over one area at a time, the mask sits across the whole face and takes its rhythm from your pulse in the same way. STENDO put that at more than two thousand stimulations across a half hour.
That is a description of how the machines run rather than a promise about what they will do for you. But it is why I wanted to try this particular one, instead of something I could have hired closer to home.
The treatment itself
I cannot have a massage. With Fibromyalgia, ordinary touch does not arrive as comfort. Even the gentlest hands hurt, and my nervous system stays loud for a good while afterwards. So lying down for something I knew would squeeze me was not an obvious decision.
It was gentle. The pulsing was slow and rhythmic and there was nothing aggressive in it anywhere. It felt like being massaged without a single person touching me, and no part of it hurt. I fell asleep, which almost never happens to me.
I had the facial as well. I asked for no products at all, not even a cleanser, and she placed the mask straight onto my skin.
What I noticed
I slept beautifully that night.
Flying is hard on me. Cramping, pain, dizziness, and usually several days on the other side before my body settles again. This time I did not feel as though I had travelled at all. My feet and ankles did not swell, which they often do. There was less puffiness through my face, and my skin looked as though it had had a facial without a product going near it. I could do more in those first few days than I usually can. Even my digestion, which travel reliably disrupts, stayed steady.
The best way I can describe STENDO is that you don't feel like you've had a massage. You feel like your whole body has exhaled.
It's incredibly gentle. Afterwards I felt lighter, calmer and less congested, and that lightness stayed with me for the rest of the trip.
That was five days, and then I flew home, and flying undoes me. So I cannot tell you how long it would hold across an ordinary week, because I have never had an ordinary week with it. If there were a machine within reach of me, that is the first thing I would want to find out.
Where I have to be careful
That was one treatment, in one week, in a body that had just come off a flight. I have no way to separate what the machine did from rest, from a good bed, from being somewhere warm with nothing asked of me. I am telling you what I noticed. I am not telling you what it does.
And this is my story rather than a path for anyone else. Everything I try sits alongside my doctors, never instead of them.
The day itself
I filmed a little of this on the day, before I had any idea I would end up writing about it. You will hear me say detox, which is the word everybody uses and which I have since learned is not the right one.
The answer I actually got
I flew home and waited for the obvious conclusion to arrive, which was that I had found my way back into a treatment room. It did not come. A bricks and mortar clinic is not what is in front of me, however much I loved lying in that suit, and I have made my peace with that.
So I was not the one meant to bring this machine to my town. That is alright. If someone reads this and finds something that helps them, that is reason enough to have written it down.
What did come out of it was smaller and more useful than a machine. I went looking for a way to keep working with people without a treatment room, and I found one. It just was not a device.
Treatments like this one still have their place, and I will always say so. What I write about now tends to be the quieter end of it, the part that happens at home with what somebody already owns. The two sit alongside each other. One was never meant to stand in for the other.
Looking for a Therapist →
If it is a good therapist you are after, tell me what you are looking for and I will point you toward somebody I trust.
STENDO is still new to Australia and there is not one in every town yet. Ingrid at STENDO Australia keeps track of where the machines are.
Let me introduce you
If you would like me to pass your details to Ingrid, fill this in and I will send them across with a note from me. It costs you nothing and there is nothing attached to it.
You are just as welcome to go direct. I only offer because a warm introduction tends to get a better start than a cold one.