It all started with Louis Plante, a 26-year-old CF patient who woke up one morning wondering why he had had to leave a concert hall a few months earlier due to excessive coughing. He believed that his coughing may have been related to the fact that he was sitting close to a large speaker.
In 2015, Louis was internationally recognized in Portugal for his innovation.
A skilled electronics technician, Louis began the process of developing a device that could generate low-frequency vibrations (similar to the frequencies generated by the speaker) to be used in airway clearance therapy. Louis' results using the newly developed device were so astonishing that even his physician was surprised. Until the day he started using this new sound machine, Louis had never responded very well to clapping, although it was done by his mother, an experienced nurse at the University of Sherbrooke Medical Center.
At the age of 11, Louis lost his sister to CF and, like many young CF patients, denied his illness for many years. His FEV1 was at 42% when he first tried his low-frequency generator.
On a regular basis, Louis used to expectorate 25g of mucus at the end of a CPT session. It was now a constant 65g and more with his new device. It would even reach 96g on occasions. That was in 2001.
In 2006, Louis has a lung transplanted... but he kept his clearance device close by... just in case... and twice Louis says it prevented him from loosing one of his new transplanted lungs.
In 2008, Louis' physician scheduled a new operation, this time to remove his new left lung after a scan showed a severe infection on his upper lobe. Two weeks later, Louis returned for the operation and they performed a new scan to update their previous diagnosis... the infection had disappeared!
Louis told them he had used his frequency device so much during those 2 weeks it must have dried up the infected area... because no pills or antibiotics were used... just low frequency…
In 2009, same scenario... same lobe... This time, the physician recommended that Louis repeat what he had done the first time…