A breakthrough in psychobiology treatments
05/08/2025
This blog tells the story about a dramatic breakthrough in psychobiology that Dr. Kirsten Lykkegaard made in January of 2025. But why was this so amazing, and what's it good for? Read on to find out...
Curing incurable disorders with 1st generation psychobiology (PB1) treatments
When we think of breakthroughs in technology, we think of 1st generation products like the Apple 2e computer or the iPhone 3G. They were spectacular because they did something that had never been done before. Of course, later generations of these products work faster and better (think MacBook Air), but the initial breakthrough started the ball rolling.
Similarly, our 1st generation psychobiology treatments for emotional issues and psychological disorders can eliminate symptoms that were impossible to treat before. For example, a therapist could now successfully treat a PTSD client whose trauma used to keep coming back; eliminate the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome; silence disturbing 'mind chatter' in someone's head, and so on. These applications were truly groundbreaking and amazing. But (from our perspective) treatments were relatively slow and tedious (true, treatment time is measured in hours, but still...), and not everyone could follow the necessary steps. For over a decade, we made incremental, minor improvements to our techniques, but they were not dramatically better. It was as if we had only gotten up to an iPhone 4 or 5.
But we wanted more...
Engineers metaphorically have the words 'better, faster, cheaper' tattooed on their arms. And as the Institute was founded by an electrical engineer (Grant), this 'not much improvement' state of affairs was simply unacceptable. But we'd tried everything we could think of, and our techniques weren't getting much better. After so many years, it sure was starting to look like "This may be as good as it is possible to get".
Going sideways into psychoimmunology
Since the 1990s we (along with thousands of other researchers around the world) had been trying to figure out how to make a targeted psychoimmunology (PI) treatment. We'd had good success with one fungal pathogen, but failed with every other pathogen we tried. And we had no idea why. Then, in 2018, we made a fundamental breakthrough in understanding psychoimmunology. And over the next 6 years we refined the theory and developed treatments for various diseases. It is truly amazing to be able to target a disease and make the client both immune and have them completely symptom-free. True, this is a 1st generation technique, and not nearly as fast and simple as we wanted, but hey, after finishing the clinical trials we now use these treatments with clients and get amazing results.
How is psychobiology different from psychoimmunology?
So at this point we had two very different 1st generation approaches to treat disease. The psychobiology (PB1) approach would get rid of the symptoms for some disorders (for example, Asperger's), or with other disorders we could eliminate a symptom at a time (for example, a disturbing 'voice', a copy, or a time loop). The downside is that treatment leaves the client still infected with whatever pathogen was causing the symptoms.
By contrast, the psychoimmunology approach would get rid of both the pathogen and the symptoms it caused; but treatment was very tedious, not always fully successful, and slow (10+ hours). This approach just wasn't economically viable unless significant fees were charged. Still, these PI treatments proved that the theory was valid, and left us with avenues to explore with the hope of speeding up treatment times and ease of use.
Dr. Lykkegaard's breakthrough insight
On January 19, 2025, Dr. Lykkegaard got to her desk at exactly 8am to start preparing for a 10am meeting with our applied research team working on psychoimmunology. She wanted to have something ready to test, but wasn't quite sure what - we had not prepared anything during the week as we'd been overloaded with other responsibilities. She needed to come up with something, and she needed it fast. Sitting there by herself in front of her MacBook Air with the early morning sunlight streaming through the big glass windows, she suddenly had a profound insight. She realized how she could use psychoimmunology theory to radically improve our existing psychobiology approach.
In those short 2 hours, she not only derived the theory but then immediately applied it to ADHD ('shattered crystals'), quickly working out the needed treatment steps. Then, at our applied research meeting, she had the phase 1 clinical trials team test it out. Normally, we'd have the research team test it out first, but her breakthrough used the existing psychobiology approach - it just radically streamlined the treatment. So our usual safety concerns were not as great as they might have been. After explaining the potential risks to our team, they jumped right into testing. And boy, it worked like a charm! Treatment was so simple, robust, and fast - a dream come true.
2nd generation psychobiology (PB2) treatments are so fast
We're calling this new approach '2nd generation psychobiology', or PB2 for short. I literally can't express how big a deal this breakthrough in psychobiology treatment is. Figuring out treatments is still complex and takes skilled and knowledgable researchers; but the finished treatment is amazingly easy, fast and simple. It was like we jumped from the Apple 2e right to the M4 MacBook Air in just one go.
Let me give an example of why PB2 treatments will be so valuable to therapists. When treating PTSD, some clients successfully get rid of their symptoms in the office, but then get their problem back a few days later. This phenomenon is due to a subcellular problem we call 'time loops'; anxiety will trigger the return of all their symptoms. Once this problem is recognized, the therapist has to guide their client in getting rid of the loop(s), and then repeats their PTSD treatment. But all this is a rather tedious and a slow detour away from the real goal. By contrast, with the new PB2 approach, a therapist can now take just a few minutes to get rid of all time loops the client has, and quickly get back to treating the PTSD symptoms they are getting paid for. With PB2, time loops go from being a time consuming and very annoying problem to something simple that takes about as much time as going to the bathroom.
Another example is our Asperger's Syndrome treatment. Our current PB1 process, developed back in 2014, works well. And it is truly amazing to see the change in the clients who use the treatment. But it takes many hours of focused therapist guidance, and requires the use of prenatal regression. By contrast, the new PB2 treatment is in the 'minutes of time' ballpark, does not require regression, and also does more - it also clears up a type of ADHD-like symptom in some clients. At this point, I hope you are starting to see why PB2 treatments are such a big deal for us.
"The reward for good work is..."
You know the old saying, "the reward for good work is more work". And we can now say from experience, "the reward for truly great work is total overload!" Over the next few months, we went back and started to update all our existing psychobiology treatments with this new tech. And this also meant doing new phase 1 clinical trials (with phase 2 clinical trials later this year). Add to that, we started developing treatments for disorders we had never been able to solve before. All this on top of our current work on Parkinson's, editing our peer reviewed paper, applying to be presenters at conferences, family obligations, and in Kirsten's case an ongoing cabin restoration project with work crews standing there waiting...
Testing, testing, testing
As I write this blog, the next big step is to do the testing to verify stability, efficacy and safety on each new PB2 process. It's going to take a while! Now, as we normally do for any new treatment, we do the phase 2 clinical trials on our volunteer certified therapists. Since most of the therapists have these common disorders, they are going to be impatient to test the new treatments on themselves, and then with their clients! For those of you who don't know, our certified therapists pay yearly dues to stay certified, and one of the benefits is to be trained in any new technique - and boy this year they really hit the jackpot. (Of course, this assumes that the testing goes as well as we believe it will.)
Our virtual psychobiology clinic
For the more uncommon disorders (like ADHD, Asperger's or hearing voices), we're listing the new treatments on our Peak States virtual clinic website. The therapists there are all our applied research team volunteers, which gives us lots of feedback so we can optimize treatments, get client testimonials, and accumulate data for publication. When we've seen enough clients, we'll have these therapists teach their certified colleagues. You can see this rebuilt clinic website at www.PeakStatesClinics.com.
Putting this new breakthrough in perspective
Over the last 35 years we've had 4 fundamental breakthroughs in our work in understanding the causes of health and disease. Each of our breakthroughs built on the previous ones. The 1st was in 1995 with the development of our regression trauma therapy WHH. There were already other great therapies out there, but WHH was unique as it allowed us to easily study prenatal development, which was absolutely necessary for further progress. If we use a math analogy, it was like developing arithmetic, necessary but not too spectacular. The 2nd breakthrough in 2002 was the discovery of the primary cell. With this, we could now find the causes of diseases of unknown etiology. This was like discovering algebra. Then in 2018 we made our 3rd breakthrough in understanding how psychoimmunology really works, and developed treatments. This insight was like inventing calculus. And now in 2025 we have our 4th major breakthrough, Dr. Lykkegaard's 2nd generation of applied psychobiology.
Changing the world
It has been a rather long post, but we hope you find it helpful in grasping why Dr. Lykkegaard's insight is such a big deal. It isn't good enough to have a working technique or therapy - to have any hope of changing the practice of medicine and psychology, we had to have treatments that are so fast, so easy, and so simple that almost anyone can do them in just minutes. And now we do.
Curing incurable disorders with 1st generation psychobiology (PB1) treatments
When we think of breakthroughs in technology, we think of 1st generation products like the Apple 2e computer or the iPhone 3G. They were spectacular because they did something that had never been done before. Of course, later generations of these products work faster and better (think MacBook Air), but the initial breakthrough started the ball rolling.
Similarly, our 1st generation psychobiology treatments for emotional issues and psychological disorders can eliminate symptoms that were impossible to treat before. For example, a therapist could now successfully treat a PTSD client whose trauma used to keep coming back; eliminate the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome; silence disturbing 'mind chatter' in someone's head, and so on. These applications were truly groundbreaking and amazing. But (from our perspective) treatments were relatively slow and tedious (true, treatment time is measured in hours, but still...), and not everyone could follow the necessary steps. For over a decade, we made incremental, minor improvements to our techniques, but they were not dramatically better. It was as if we had only gotten up to an iPhone 4 or 5.
But we wanted more...
Engineers metaphorically have the words 'better, faster, cheaper' tattooed on their arms. And as the Institute was founded by an electrical engineer (Grant), this 'not much improvement' state of affairs was simply unacceptable. But we'd tried everything we could think of, and our techniques weren't getting much better. After so many years, it sure was starting to look like "This may be as good as it is possible to get".
Going sideways into psychoimmunology
Since the 1990s we (along with thousands of other researchers around the world) had been trying to figure out how to make a targeted psychoimmunology (PI) treatment. We'd had good success with one fungal pathogen, but failed with every other pathogen we tried. And we had no idea why. Then, in 2018, we made a fundamental breakthrough in understanding psychoimmunology. And over the next 6 years we refined the theory and developed treatments for various diseases. It is truly amazing to be able to target a disease and make the client both immune and have them completely symptom-free. True, this is a 1st generation technique, and not nearly as fast and simple as we wanted, but hey, after finishing the clinical trials we now use these treatments with clients and get amazing results.
How is psychobiology different from psychoimmunology?
So at this point we had two very different 1st generation approaches to treat disease. The psychobiology (PB1) approach would get rid of the symptoms for some disorders (for example, Asperger's), or with other disorders we could eliminate a symptom at a time (for example, a disturbing 'voice', a copy, or a time loop). The downside is that treatment leaves the client still infected with whatever pathogen was causing the symptoms.
By contrast, the psychoimmunology approach would get rid of both the pathogen and the symptoms it caused; but treatment was very tedious, not always fully successful, and slow (10+ hours). This approach just wasn't economically viable unless significant fees were charged. Still, these PI treatments proved that the theory was valid, and left us with avenues to explore with the hope of speeding up treatment times and ease of use.
Dr. Lykkegaard's breakthrough insight
On January 19, 2025, Dr. Lykkegaard got to her desk at exactly 8am to start preparing for a 10am meeting with our applied research team working on psychoimmunology. She wanted to have something ready to test, but wasn't quite sure what - we had not prepared anything during the week as we'd been overloaded with other responsibilities. She needed to come up with something, and she needed it fast. Sitting there by herself in front of her MacBook Air with the early morning sunlight streaming through the big glass windows, she suddenly had a profound insight. She realized how she could use psychoimmunology theory to radically improve our existing psychobiology approach.
In those short 2 hours, she not only derived the theory but then immediately applied it to ADHD ('shattered crystals'), quickly working out the needed treatment steps. Then, at our applied research meeting, she had the phase 1 clinical trials team test it out. Normally, we'd have the research team test it out first, but her breakthrough used the existing psychobiology approach - it just radically streamlined the treatment. So our usual safety concerns were not as great as they might have been. After explaining the potential risks to our team, they jumped right into testing. And boy, it worked like a charm! Treatment was so simple, robust, and fast - a dream come true.
2nd generation psychobiology (PB2) treatments are so fast
We're calling this new approach '2nd generation psychobiology', or PB2 for short. I literally can't express how big a deal this breakthrough in psychobiology treatment is. Figuring out treatments is still complex and takes skilled and knowledgable researchers; but the finished treatment is amazingly easy, fast and simple. It was like we jumped from the Apple 2e right to the M4 MacBook Air in just one go.
Let me give an example of why PB2 treatments will be so valuable to therapists. When treating PTSD, some clients successfully get rid of their symptoms in the office, but then get their problem back a few days later. This phenomenon is due to a subcellular problem we call 'time loops'; anxiety will trigger the return of all their symptoms. Once this problem is recognized, the therapist has to guide their client in getting rid of the loop(s), and then repeats their PTSD treatment. But all this is a rather tedious and a slow detour away from the real goal. By contrast, with the new PB2 approach, a therapist can now take just a few minutes to get rid of all time loops the client has, and quickly get back to treating the PTSD symptoms they are getting paid for. With PB2, time loops go from being a time consuming and very annoying problem to something simple that takes about as much time as going to the bathroom.
Another example is our Asperger's Syndrome treatment. Our current PB1 process, developed back in 2014, works well. And it is truly amazing to see the change in the clients who use the treatment. But it takes many hours of focused therapist guidance, and requires the use of prenatal regression. By contrast, the new PB2 treatment is in the 'minutes of time' ballpark, does not require regression, and also does more - it also clears up a type of ADHD-like symptom in some clients. At this point, I hope you are starting to see why PB2 treatments are such a big deal for us.
"The reward for good work is..."
You know the old saying, "the reward for good work is more work". And we can now say from experience, "the reward for truly great work is total overload!" Over the next few months, we went back and started to update all our existing psychobiology treatments with this new tech. And this also meant doing new phase 1 clinical trials (with phase 2 clinical trials later this year). Add to that, we started developing treatments for disorders we had never been able to solve before. All this on top of our current work on Parkinson's, editing our peer reviewed paper, applying to be presenters at conferences, family obligations, and in Kirsten's case an ongoing cabin restoration project with work crews standing there waiting...
Testing, testing, testing
As I write this blog, the next big step is to do the testing to verify stability, efficacy and safety on each new PB2 process. It's going to take a while! Now, as we normally do for any new treatment, we do the phase 2 clinical trials on our volunteer certified therapists. Since most of the therapists have these common disorders, they are going to be impatient to test the new treatments on themselves, and then with their clients! For those of you who don't know, our certified therapists pay yearly dues to stay certified, and one of the benefits is to be trained in any new technique - and boy this year they really hit the jackpot. (Of course, this assumes that the testing goes as well as we believe it will.)
Our virtual psychobiology clinic
For the more uncommon disorders (like ADHD, Asperger's or hearing voices), we're listing the new treatments on our Peak States virtual clinic website. The therapists there are all our applied research team volunteers, which gives us lots of feedback so we can optimize treatments, get client testimonials, and accumulate data for publication. When we've seen enough clients, we'll have these therapists teach their certified colleagues. You can see this rebuilt clinic website at www.PeakStatesClinics.com.
Putting this new breakthrough in perspective
Over the last 35 years we've had 4 fundamental breakthroughs in our work in understanding the causes of health and disease. Each of our breakthroughs built on the previous ones. The 1st was in 1995 with the development of our regression trauma therapy WHH. There were already other great therapies out there, but WHH was unique as it allowed us to easily study prenatal development, which was absolutely necessary for further progress. If we use a math analogy, it was like developing arithmetic, necessary but not too spectacular. The 2nd breakthrough in 2002 was the discovery of the primary cell. With this, we could now find the causes of diseases of unknown etiology. This was like discovering algebra. Then in 2018 we made our 3rd breakthrough in understanding how psychoimmunology really works, and developed treatments. This insight was like inventing calculus. And now in 2025 we have our 4th major breakthrough, Dr. Lykkegaard's 2nd generation of applied psychobiology.
Changing the world
It has been a rather long post, but we hope you find it helpful in grasping why Dr. Lykkegaard's insight is such a big deal. It isn't good enough to have a working technique or therapy - to have any hope of changing the practice of medicine and psychology, we had to have treatments that are so fast, so easy, and so simple that almost anyone can do them in just minutes. And now we do.
From the desk of
Dr. Grant McFetridge
Emeritus Research Director
Therapists
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