I first got a wrist pulser in 2007, while I was fighting my way out of a nasty West Nile Fever nightmare. I've had one ever since. I feel it was pivotal in helping me recover.

Also, back then we lived in an area with many venomous spiders, like black widows. Any bug bite, we'd zap it with the wrist pulser — one electrode right on the site, the other circling around it, working closer in stages. It made a real difference, fast. We had started trying this after reading about a guy who survived 300+ bee stings when he ran into a high voltage fence and was shocked unconscious. Then some doctors using electricity in the Amazon rainforest to treat venomous bites.

Then in 2010 we moved to Hawaii, which came with its own wildlife surprise: large, venomous centipedes. Centipedes there go for warm, sweaty guys apparently, because twice now I've been bitten while in bed sleeping beside my wife.

The first was a small blue centipede that got into bed with us. Sometimes they give you a warning bite first — that's all I felt, a little poke, so I rubbed my shoulder against the bed. Then it bit me injecting venom. Having read years prior about how electrical currents could neutralize venoms, even snakebites, we knew exactly what to do.

Centipede venom is its own special kind of miserable. It feels like acid, lightning, and a baseball bat all at once. And it didn't follow any normal nerve pattern, shooting pain up my shoulder down my arm and down my back to my leg all the way to my toes.

Local tradition in Hawaii for a centipede bite is to get a bunch of liquor and stay in bed for four days, because there's supposedly nothing else you can do. Both times, we used the wrist pulsing instead.

Here is how we did it:

• The Setup: My wife dampened the pads with salt water so the current would go in rather than sit on the skin (damp, not soaking wet!) One time we got them too wet and it didn't work at all — the electricity just ran along the skin surface in the water. We started over with less and it worked right away.

• The Technique: We turned the unit up full blast. We placed one electrode directly on the bite, and moved the other electrode in circular motions around the bite every couple of inches, stopping to hold it longer on the spots where the zapping sensation felt the most intense. I suggest starting lower, it can hurt if too strong, but you want to feel a good level of current.

• The Duration: She zapped it for a couple of minutes, and when a bit of the pain tried to creep back later, she ran it for about five minutes

The difference was absolute night and day. Within minutes, all that horrible burning, stinging, pulsing and radiating venom pain completely vanished. I went back to sleep, and woke up with two tiny bite marks on my shoulder blade. One from the warning bite, one from where it got me — and nothing else.

About ten years later, I pressure-washed the house. I'd pushed the window screens up so the water could run out, and I forgot to pull them back down. That night a seven-inch centipede came in through the gap, crawled into bed with us. It went for me again. It got me on the hip. I flew out of bed, pulling the blankets with me so it couldn't get Ava, and told her to get out. Lights on. I lifted the blanket and it was rapidly heading under the bed. I smashed it on the floor with one very hard swat.

The bite was on my right hip. The pain went up my back, down my right arm to my fingertips burning/pulsing horrible pain, and down my right leg to my toes. All on the right side. I was a pre-med biology major before I switched to nursing, and I still can't explain that one, it was the strangest pain pattern...very weird.

That one had put so much venom in me that a couple of 5 minute rounds zapping with the pulser wasn't holding, the pain kept coming back. So, Ava taped one electrode on the bite and the other where it felt hottest, and we left it running and I finally fell asleep. I woke up in the morning to a dead battery and no pain at all, this after some of the most severe pain I had ever experienced.

My best guess is that the voltage neutralizes the active sites on the venom compounds somehow. Venoms are usually proteins with an active site, like enzymes, and that site does its job electrochemically in the body. Interrupt the electricity and you interrupt the job the venom needs to do to get the effect? That's a guess. I won’t pretend I know (it is a great area for research).

We strongly self-advocate when it comes to our health, because we've both been burned by trusting the wrong people at the wrong time. What I'd tell anyone reading this isn't "trust me" — but the opposite:

I advocate the “Principle of Disbelief” (avoid accepting and believing blindly) because once you accept something, your brain shifts that idea from Right side of the brain (abstract thinking) to Left side brain (logical reasoning), it then takes on the job of proving any accepted idea “true” then keep proving it true even in the face of evidence that it is wrong. We NEVER want to blindly believe for that reason alone.

So don't believe me. Take the information and go look into it yourself and try to understand why this might work before you commit to it, or at least be willing to test things and try using reasoning to discover.

I know where I started, and I know I wouldn't have found my way out of that swamp of West Nile Fever if I had just “believed” the standard advice.

These days, even when we travel we take the Wrist Pulser with us everywhere — no exceptions. And it's paid off many times.