Shocking Bite Cure

CLAREMORE, Okla. — When he ws a kid on the farm, Clifford Mackey could get into all kinds of trouble. He was always poking around where he wasn’t supposed to. As a result bee stings and bug bites were common. “All the time,” he recalls, “and most of the time it was in the face.”

Maybe that’s why he seems to know all the dark places that hide the thigns that bite us. We mentioned bees and other bugs, but also snakes and poisonous spiders too. Mackey opens a dark closet in his garage and says there are sure to be Brown Recluse spiders in there somewhere. “Because they can get in that clothing and keep real warm.”

Cliff got stung so much he became allergic to wasp stings. Then about 20 years back he started to think about how his father used to treat his bug bites with a mild electric shock. He read about other people trying it too. Using himself as a human guinea pig he made something about the size of a garage door opener but with a bigger kick. “It puts out 25,000 volts of DC electric current,” he says.

He found that if he shocked himself right around the spot where something bit him the pain and swelling seemed to go away. “You don’t harm the body in any way. You just use the body to defeat this.”Mackey had to be really careful about his claims. He got into some trouble wth the FDA early on but Cliff got enough feedback to tell him he was on to something. Doctors who heard about his device started using it. A few Pentagon brass were interested too. Mackey says, “The Navy Seals us it. They order it.”

Mackey holds another couple of patents for oil field stuff but he’s proudest of this little device. “It was just something real interesting to me,” he says. He only sells a few hundred of them per year. “I sell it as a mini-stun gun,” he says. But there are people out there who swear by his ‘shocking’ methods. He has a notebook full of letters and articles from health professionals who’ve written to him.

Each letter seems to prove Mackey’s point, that one painful bite might just cancel out the other.