Sana Health Aims To Cure Pain Through Masks, Eliminating Use of Pills

In a mission to redefine treatment of pain, Hanbury created Sana. After curing his own chronic pain in 1993, Richard Hanbury, the founder, and CEO of Sana Health spent 24 years developing, testing and refining the Sana FlowState technology. Sana is the first non-invasive bio-therapeutic device that provides lasting relief for serious chronic pain patients. Over 1,300 tests helped Sana's medical engineers create the optimum feedback loop to effectively treat different levels of pain intensity. The company now creates a mask that users wear over their eyes for 15 minutes before bed, or in 15-minute intervals throughout the day as needed, inducing deep relaxation and promoting neuroplasticity. According to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), close to 100 million adults in the US suffer from chronic pain. While Opioids are the most effective treatment for most severe pain states, they do come with side effects like abuse and addiction. Besides, many patients cannot tolerate opioids. The issue with Opioids are now taking lives of almost 130 Americans each day from overdoses, as per a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sana is currently available only for people in clinical trials. It’s on a look out for classification as a medical device, and Hanbury is seeking an approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by October. Together with the other companies in the field like Bioness and Cefaly, Sana is working on neuromodulation devices that have the capability to cut down or completely remove pain, as well as over-reliance on opioids to treat it. The Sana mask measures minute changes between each heartbeat and administers precisely timed pulses of light and sound to revive the audio and visual cortex of the user’s brain. It all started In 1992 when a Jeep accident in Yemen at age 19 left Sana Health founder Hanbury in a wheelchair in intense pain, he was rarely able to sleep. The doctors told Hanbury that he had just five years to live. Prescription drugs, even morphine, were not being effective and the chronic pain from nerve damage worsened, to the point that it threatened to kill him. While watching a movie, Hanbury realized that the ups and downs in the film changed his pain levels more than morphine. That’s how the idea to use a visual stimulus to create a different state of consciousness arrived.