Programming VascuTherm2 Timers: change the timing of cold on/off; turn compression on/off with the timer.

I recently underwent arthroscopic shoulder surgery to fix a torn rotator cuff. During recovery, I rented a VascuTherm2 which attached to a wrap on my shoulder and applied alternating icing (really 43° water and alcohol mixture running through the wrap) combined with compression (squeezing and unsqueezing my shoulder).

This device helped tremendously with pain management and (I believe) accelerated healing. I slept most nights for two weeks with the shoulder wrap on, alternating 30 minutes of ice on and 30 minutes off.

One frustration with this device is that the user controls are very basic. If you want to turn off the compression or turn off the cold for a bit, or control any other feature of the device, the automatic cold on/off functionality is gone. If you want to resume the timer, you must power off the device and power it back on. The timers reset, and compression comes back on.

I could not find any information on all of the Internet on how to program the VascuTherm, how to control the timing. As the bandages came off my shoulder, I started wearing less and less and wanted to change the timer to try 15 minutes of cold on, 15 minutes off, but was unable to find any guide on this.

Finally, the technician had pity on me and told me how to program it. I give this information to you, the populace, in case you need to program it.

1. Turn off the VascuTherm2 with the switch in the back.
2. While the device is turned off, hold down the Compression and Cold buttons
3. Still holding them down, turn on the switch in back of the machine.
4. Release the buttons shortly after the device turns on (I think it was the screen that showed the hours).

At this point, the “heat” button is your “+” key, the “cold” button is your “-“ key, and the “compression” button is your “next” key. The “TIMER ON” screen is how long the cold will be applied (which you can change in increments of 15 minutes), the “TIMER OFF” screen is how long the cold will be turned off. There were other screens that I don’t remember what they did. Two more notes that I remember from our repeated failed and finally successful programming attempts:

• If you want your changes to stick, you have to keep going through all the screens until the device turns on. If you change the timer, and then turn the machine off and back on again, your changes will not stick.

• If immediately after programming you don’t have any compression, press the compression button for 1 second to turn compression on (which would normally kill the timer), then power the machine off and back on again. When we did that the one time it re-enabled compression along with the timer.

Hopefully these notes will help someone, somewhere, trying to exert their dominance over a simple machine.