ARPwave, LLC

Early Years
As a high school student in Sioux Falls, South Dakota Denis had a propensity for science. My mother and father wanted me to be an orthopedic surgeon. But I never could wrap my arms around physical medicine.
I love the idea of orthopedic surgery, but I just could not wrap my head around physical medicine. I decided to investigate how other countries and other disciplines addressed soft tissue injury, orthopedic problems, and disease in general. I began to really get enamored with a Russian by the name of Dr. Yakov Kots.

Dr. Yakov Kots was the very first neurophysiologist in the world and he was the prime motivating force for the Russian Federation of Athletes. If you know history in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the Russians were very dominant in all athletic activities. He began to gather and look at as much of Dr. Kots’s research as I could get my hands on. He became deeply engrossed with a simple statement, “The greater the stimulus, the greater the change”. The processes were quite aggressive, to say the least, and would never work in the United States, however, one thing that was constant in all of it is they had amazing results… At this time, Denis decided that he did not want to become an orthopedic surgeon.

I wanted to research just simple things. Why do we have atrophy? Why does it take so long to recover from an injury? Why do we have so many injuries?

As mentioned previously, I was an athlete, so I was very interested in answering those three questions, but they could not be answered in the degree that I was following, which was exercise physiology. To this day, we have atrophy all over the world and modern medicine treats it all almost the exactly the same way.

The Journey to Eradicating Atrophy

A thought occurred to me; “Maybe atrophy is not just physiological”. If we haven’t overcome a simple thing like atrophy with the best doctors, the best therapists, the best strength coaches, and the best trainers throughout the world, maybe we’re looking at and working in the wrong places.

So what else is there? Well, when I turned that coin over, I began looking at the neurology of the problem and compared that to the physiology coursework that I was learning in school; to this day, the course work does not address the neurological component of injury, as an exercise physiologist I was not educated in the neurology of physiology.

Most of the medical students at that time were not educated in the neurology components and what they do, only the physiology and pharmacology and what they do, this leaves a gigantic gap in therapy. So, I decided that I wanted to answer those three simple questions.

It’s About the “WHY”

I’m a “Why guy”… and what that means is, I want to know why you have the problem, not where you have the problem; most professionals are trained in where you have the problem (Tear, Break, Pain, etc.). To determine the “Why”, I need to find a tool that would assist me with this process I was developing. My initial thoughts and foundation of Neuro-Therapy are 1) You have to have movement, 2) You have to have stimulus, 3) You have to break the pattern that you’re stuck in and if these steps don’t occur, your recovery will be just like everything else. So, I began the quest and I looked at all of the different technology here in the United States, from the biggest companies to the smallest and found nothing. I began looking all over Europe, I found nothing. I looked all over Asia, I found nothing. I looked all over the east, I found nothing. I looked all over Russia, and I found something; again, I’m going back to Dr. Kots and his dominance; Dr Kots had created, and I would say, rather than created, he tasked/commissioned a lady by the name of Andrianov to create for him a device that would give him tremendous stimulus and in his mind give him results; the device was called Stimul One.

Finding the Right Technology to Match My Protocols

Stimul One was an extraordinarily effective device, but also an extraordinarily uncomfortable device, so that device would not satisfy my needs; it caused too many breakdowns in neuro-communication. I was looking at something that I could put a patient into active range of motion, break a neurological compensation pattern, and retrain a new pattern; to do that, it had to trick the nervous system. Well, we began looking, and finally, on a message board, I heard from a company out of Denver, Colorado, and they said, “I think I have what you might be looking for” and I said, oh, okay then jumped on an airplane to meet the owner of the company. The trip concluded with me buying a couple of the units and starting research with a number of doctors on an IRB. “Based upon what you’ve told me and if this does what I think it will do, I’ll come back and start a private label.”

The Happy Ending

The device worked for our therapy process and as of today, we have developed over 425 protocols, partnered with 300 plus medical professionals, and treated hundreds of thousands of patients with a very high success rate…. We have achieved this by not just treating “Where” the problem is, but “Why” there is a problem.