Upsetting Day: THE STIMULATOR (Patreon)

In the ’90s there was a miracle product that took away all pain, for most people, maybe, usually, and if it didn’t you could keep trying. It was built on lies intended only for the very dumb. It was way too expensive and came in a box way too big. The only way it could be any more American would be if it was endorsed by American Gladiator Tower, Miss America Lee Meriweather, and Maximum American Evel Knievel, which it was. It was, As-Seen-on-TV, The STimulaTor.

The Stimulator was a device for “ALL NATURAL PAIN RELIEF.” It was developed and sold by a chiropractor named Dr. William S. Gandee who hosted the instructional VHS tape himself. This was a mistake since he has the energy of a body found in a lake and the vibe of a man who just read that and got a boner. He called the video “Pain Free Today” USING THE STIMULATOR With Dr. William S. Gandee, D.C..

This tape is the least necessary thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve met Gallagher’s twin brother who stole his act, Gallagher II.

Dr. Gandee, D.C. starts off with his attempt at a warm smile:

“Congratulations on the purchase of your life,” he mumbles to you, the idiot fuck who spent $80 on a barbecue lighter. Oh, I should have mentioned this already. The Stimulator is a $3 piezoelectric igniter with some plastic hooks on the side. I think these were meant to give it the feeling of a medical syringe, but they might be to help retrieve it from your asshole in case you started using The Stimulator before watching the video.

From the natural light of his living room’s floor lamp, he explains how The Stimulator works for some people, like his 96-year-old grandma who uses it for her foot cramps. And already this is suspicious. He doesn’t cite a study, or a poll– his research really seems to be those people he made up and the time he tried a grill starter on his grandma’s feet. He explains how The Stimulator works for pain, sure, or really anything. And he would know because he also tried it on his kids. I transcribed his exact words: “I have an 8-year-old son that I use The Stimulator on, myself at home, for certain problems. And a 5-year-old daughter that I’ve used The Stimulator on, also. For certain problems.“

This fucking sleepwalking foot griller gave his own children electric shocks for “certain problems” and “certain problems” respectively. He had as much time as he needed to write this script and he’s saying exactly what Gallagher II would say if someone walked in on him giving electric shocks to children, right after he said, “I’m Gallagher One, and I can explain.”

I don’t want to get too deep into the ethics of testing barbecue equipment on humans. Whether you like it or not, the Constitution gives every electric maniac the right to do whatever they want to their grandma’s feet. Besides, there’s no time. Dr. Gandee is sprinting through his notes. “Who shouldn’t use The Stimulator?” he reads. For a moment, it seems to stump him. It’s the only question he can’t answer. A grill starter that takes away all pain, eventually, probably, is for everyone, right? After some thinking he decides “you shouldn’t use it over a pacemaker because it shoots electric sparks.” He also suggests not using it over the abdomen of a pregnant woman, if you’re on oxygen, or if you’re covered in a flammable liquid. And with that, he’s done listing. Those four kinds of people can live in agony, but if you can shock yourself without exploding, do it. And if you do explode, who cares? You’re already clutching all the pain relief you’ll need.

When you think you’ve cured all suffering with lightning magic, reality is whatever you want it to be. And Dr. Gandee goes off on a wild fantasy about how you will carry The Stimulator, the top-selling world famous Stimulator, with you all the time. He paints the wonderful picture of, and I quote, “People will call you ‘Doc,’ they’ll say hey Doc come over here and use that Stimulator thing, or ‘popper thing’ on my shoulder. Come over here, Doc, and use it on me.” See, The Stimulator is more than all medical science condensed into one sparking toy– it could be your new thing! Your whole new personality, Doc!

A few satisfied and unnamed Stimulator users come in to assure you The Stimulator works. They don’t know how it works, neither does the inventor, and it doesn’t always work, but it works! “Is The Stimulator 100% effective on every… thing?” Dr. Gandee asks himself. “No,” he says to the dumb bastard. It’s almost as if he knew that at this point in the video, the viewer would be pointlessly snapping a BBQ lighter against themselves and wondering if theirs was broken. I’m not kidding when I say around 60% of this video is excuses for why it’s not healing you. I am kidding when I say Dr. Gandee has the personality of a window display in a fart store.

Gandee makes his way through the bullet points of his notes, but the video has no graphics. I guess he figured a sleepy madman on his couch asking himself why electro torture is right for him was more than enough pageantry. He asks himself WHERE you should use The Stimulator, and I found his response so strange I wrote it down: “The Stimulator has such a good marketability with the stimulator that you can use it anywhere you want to, no one’s going to look at you and why are you using it and what it is because [checks notes] the stimulator is very effective wherever you are at the time.“

This is nuts. This is a man claiming to have invented a portable, unpowered device which solves life’s oldest problem and if you ask him where people can use it, he will unhinge his brain and spray a weaponized word mist at you. I think he’s trying to assure us that if anyone sees us zapping ourselves with a grill starter they’ll think we look super cool because of its effectiveness, but I can’t be sure. If you asked him, he wouldn’t know. He’d probably say, “For $120, I’ll let you step on my magic gum.”

A man Dr. Gandee met pretending to birdwatch behind the YWCA comes on to give his take on The Stimulator. He debates that it’s better than aspirin because there’s no swallowing. He asserts, “Some of us just can’t take aspirin. Some of us just can’t take anti-inflammatory drugs because they upset my stomach!” I love him. He adds that The Stimulator can’t ruin his dinner. It’s outside the body, he insists. He can take it when he wants, he shouts. He is desperately listing the benefits of The Stimulator like a man who hasn’t been right or changed his mind in fifty years. This stupid little plastic cap gun is this guy’s heliocentric theory.

Dr. Gandee wonders if you maybe bought the stimulator to get relief for one specific thing and are concerned about how it’s not working for that. If so, don’t send it in for a refund. Hang onto it, because it could cure some future medical condition. Of all the things he has said in this video, this is the least plausible. He wants me to keep a barbecue lighter around in case I one day get an injury weak against electric attacks? That’s not how real people live. At the end of every adventure, I watch God die with 99/99 lightning resist potions in my inventory. Ridiculous.

Okay, let’s meet Craig. Craig is an agreeable man of an unknown background and origin. Dr. Gandee starts popping The Stimulator all over his face and Craig endures it like a loyal dog trying not to eat its owner’s corpse. Gandee explains, “I have found when you have another person help you use The Stimulator, sometimes it’s even more effective. Sometimes it’s even a stronger stimulation.” None of these words are surprising to Craig. Craig is a grown man and when this lonely weirdo invited him into his home, he was expecting at least this much sex stuff.

Gandee has been trying to cure Craig’s headaches and allergies, a man suffering from neither, with the grill igniter he’s added tiny handles to, so it’s not strange at all when he asks Mark to stand up and let him rub his ass. “Alright, you have fun back there, fella,” the man whose name is not Mark seems to say silently. Never has anyone been more down for whatever than Craig. This is great because The Stimulator plainly doesn’t do anything. Dr. Gandee could have literally made up whatever treatment he wanted and he chose close-up rectal magic.

Dr. Gandee hasn’t ever met anyone who let him zap them in the asshole for so long, so he is out of prepared material. He just starts making shit up about how maybe poking while you zap helps? He tickles Craig up and down his leg, and asks if he’s feeling any pain. “No,” he lies, and Dr. Gandee argues with him. “Most people say The Stimulator is like getting snapped by a rubber band. Some people don’t like the feel of The Stimulator,” he adds. It’s a weird time for me to notice this while I’m watching some quack spritz sparks into a Craig’s butthole, but it really bothers me how he uses The Stimulator’s full name whenever he refers to The Stimulator.

This wasn’t the kind of poking Craig was expecting when he put on his stranger fucking shorts, but he patiently lets Gandee finish. He sits back down, his hands forming an inadequate boner shield, and we’ve now seen how it works on faces and buttholes. It’s time to move on to finger webs? I swear he’s probing for Craig’s weak spot. So he grabs his trusting hands and starts pumping electricity into the sensitive skin between Craig’s fingers. He says aggressively insane nonsense about using your other fingers to complete the electric circuit and buffer the area of stimulation. He has the same understanding of electricity as one of Thomas Edison’s elephants.

Dr. Gandee wasn’t ready to fill 23 entire minutes with The Stimulator tips. I mean, you just fucking zap where it hurts and nothing else. The only reason he added finger poking with his other hand was to trick Craig into staying longer. So he starts repeating himself. He reminds you all sales are final, even if you were smart enough to figure out these elaborate scheme. “When you don’t get results does that mean it doesn’t work? No. Does that mean you want to send it back? No. Use it more repetitiously!” He tries again to sell you on your new life as a guy named Doc who electrocutes local shoulders upon request. He tells you stimulating pain away is like an overweight person going on a diet. “Will they be skinny tomorrow? No.” He is floundering. He is the saddest, dumbest fuck twenty minutes into a 30 second snake oil pitch, but god damn it, why can’t Craig stop loving him?

They cut to an old man who tells an unlikely story about the time he used The Stimulator on someone’s shoulder who went to a baseball game and couldn’t stop talking about The Stimulator. He missed the entire baseball game because he couldn’t shut up about The Stimulator. The next time he saw the old man he told him this exact story and asked for another zap from The Stimulator. The old man said he’d have to charge him, so he bought the old man a coffee. It earned him the fun nickname “Doc!” It’s only the fourth time this video I’ve heard this story, but it could be you every day. That’s the lifestyle of a The Stimulator owner. Thanks, Craig. I promise not to make our goodbye weird.

After he’s done with Craig, Dr. Gandee glares into the camera like all of this, this entire production, was for Craig’s wife. “He’s mine now, Rebecca. He calls me Doc.” Then we cut to NBA great Bill Walton complaining about a foul he took in 1978, and how it no longer hurts thanks to The Stimulator. “Thank God, thank GOD… for The Stimulator,” he marvels.

In a twist every smart person and The Stimulator owner saw coming, this product didn’t work. Only, like, legally. The FTC asked Dr. Gandee to prove his many, many claims and he couldn’t. He didn’t even try. Bill Walton pecking at his old injuries with a grill starter does not count as peer-reviewed research, so they forced a recall. Anyone who wanted a refund for their $80 nothing syringe and Craig-probing instructional video got one, and dogshit-brained fools like NBA great Bill Walton were saved from themselves once again.

In a twist even dumb fuck Bill Walton saw coming, no they weren’t. The Constitution says as long as they’re stupid enough, you can sell people anything. And if you don’t make any actual claims, the FTC won’t even bother you. For instance, Amazon is selling an exact The Stimulator knockoff because all it claims is “electric current releases trapped (Qi) energy, mimicking acupuncture concepts.” The FTC can’t regulate Qi! If it could, I’d have to pay an import tax every time my deadly hands summoned Sheng Long. Thanks again, Craig.

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Nick Ralston, who is also known as THE STIMULATOR but for very different reasons.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.