By Andrew Beckner
Your wife could be sick, the doctors say. Really sick. The worst kind of sick you can be.
It could be cancer. It’s a scary word. Maybe the scariest. Your heart beats faster, just as you wonder how many heartbeats she has left.
You might cry or refuse to believe it. Maybe you’re mad—maybe you curse the fates or even God.
David Phillips doesn’t say what went through his mind when doctors told him that his 28-year-old wife might have breast cancer. Maybe he didn’t stop to consider it himself. He was too busy inventing a product to help save her life—and perhaps the lives of many other women.
An Entrepreneur Takes Flight
It’s 1955, and nine-year-old Phillips is pulling a little red wagon down the streets of Berkeley, IL, a Rockwellian suburb of Chicago where German, Irish and Italian immigrants are starting to realize the American Dream could be more than an idea. The war is over, and the future seems as bright as a Midwestern sunrise over Lake Michigan.
Even as a boy, Phillips heard the drumbeat of American progress. If Phillips perpetually has a light bulb floating above his head—and you get the sense that he certainly does—then that Memorial Day weekend in 1955 is when it lit up for the first time.
Following Memorial Day, Phillips noticed cemetery workers had removed and discarded the scores of flags adorning veteran gravesites. Decades before recycling became commonplace, Phillips made a business out of it.
“I gathered about 50 flags from the trash, took them home and carefully unstapled the material from the sticks and had my mother wash and iron them,” Phillips recalls. “I then re-stapled them back on the sticks, rolled them carefully, put them in my wagon and headed off down the street to make my fortune by selling them door to door.”
An afternoon later—and $20 richer—Phillips’ career as a serial entrepreneur was born.
Twenty-three years later, when his 28-year-old wife discovered lumps in her breast, doctors feared the worst while Phillips put his gift for innovation in motion. The lumps turned out to be benign, but the scare had already prompted Phillips to research the importance of early screening for breast cancer. He did research in partnership with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and as a result, he developed the GST Breast Cancer Detection System.
ReBuilding Hope from Pain
Ask any inventor how they get their ideas, and you’ll invariably hear stories about that elusive “A-ha!” moment. Phillips clearly has honed his mind with work experience, training and education.
But there’s an intangible at play here, too. Not everyone has that bulb light up intuitively.
“I usually get the ideas in the shower,” Phillips says. “The challenge or need is already in my head, but I don’t have a clue as to how to solve it. I discovered through the years that I could go in the shower, away from all the day-to-day distractions, and before the hot water ran out I would either hear a voice or see the whole apparatus—complete with colors, wires, packaging, et cetera.”
That simple process was the genesis of ReBuilder Medical, Phillips’ Charles Town-based medical device company. Just as he’d invented the GST Breast Cancer Detection System as a response to his wife’s brush with mortality, Phillips took a family member’s pain personally.
The result was The ReBuilder®. Phillips’ grandfather was suffering from neuropathy, a painful condition caused by nerve damage. Using the same combination of intuition, an epiphany and a hot shower, Phillips devised The ReBuilder®. Rather than treating the symptoms of neuropathy with addictive drugs, the side effects of which can often be worse than the pain itself, Phillips sought to cure neuropathy itself.
“The ReBuilder® wakes up sleeping nerves by sending a healthy nerve signal throughout a nerve path and, in real time, adjusts itself to the patient’s individual electrical parameters,” Phillips says. “It improves local blood flow and also relaxes the patient so he can sleep at night without drugs.”
Phillips’ wife and father weren’t the only family members to inspire the entrepreneur to invent.
When Phillips’ granddaughter contracted Molluscum Contagiosum, he may have had a case of déjà vu. No, this wasn’t as serious as a cancer scare, but like his wife’s close call with cancer, he didn’t like what the doctors told him about Molluscum and its treatment.
Molluscum is the most common virus you’ve never heard of. Experts say some 17 percent of American children will get it at some point, and when it flares up, patients develop wart-like bumps on their body—and often their face.
“The doctors wanted to burn off the pimple-like lesions with acid, cut them off with a scalpel, freeze them off, et cetera, but all these treatments leave scars and are painful,” Phillips says. “I decided that there must be a better way.”
By this time, Phillips had already experienced a successful career as an entrepreneur and inventor. With the invention of the GST Breast Cancer Detection System under his belt, as well as a Ph.D. in hypnotherapy, his resume grew to include The Blazer, a product designed to help start a fire in wood-burning home stoves, and the AcuPen, which assists in acupuncture treatments.
Molluscum Contagiosum was the next challenge, and Phillips jumped right in.
His solution is called SilverCure, an ointment consisting of electrically charged micronized, anti-microbial silver, and it is one of the many products his company, ReBuilder Medical, has marketed. SilverCure is not a treatment, Phillips insists. It’s a cure.
If you’ve never experienced the need for the GST, The Blazer, the AcuPen or even SilverCure, you have most certainly benefited from Phillips’ most widely used invention—the infrared ear thermometer.
Back in the 1980s, Phillips was involved in clinical trials that used infrared technology to check body temperature. Patients undergoing heart bypass surgery allowed Phillips to attach traditional temperature gauges all across their body compared to a non-invasive infrared gauge.
The result? The internal ear thermometer known as FirsTemp, which in 1986 netted Phillips the Inventor of the Year Award by the San Diego Patent Attorney’s Association. Today FirsTemp is used in hospitals and doctors’ offices all around the world.
The Art of Inventing
If someone has a fear, you can bet it’s been labeled. If the thought of getting a flu shot or having blood drawn turns your face the color of parchment paper, you’ve got trypanophobia.
Phillips gets it. It’s why he’s at it again, inventing.
He hasn’t gone so far as to create a homeopathic remedy to cure patients of needle anxiety, and no one yet has figured out a way to get blood out of your arm without a needle, but his latest product is the next best thing.
The problem, Phillips says, is that veins are hard to find. Thus, nurses have to probe deeper for a suitable vein. Not so with VeinAppear.
“It is a pen-sized electrical device that makes the veins in your hand or arm suddenly plump up, become round and, thus, easy to find, and it numbs the area too,” he says.
In a brief video about the prototype on YouTube, Phillips immerses his wife’s hand in a glass of water charged by the VeinAppear prototype. Nearly instantly, the veins in her hand swell like an over-inflated balloon. The specifics of VeinAppear is a guarded trade secret, but the potential for helping those scared by needles has long-lasting implications.
West Virginia, Mountain Mama
Phillips has been all over the country: Illinois, New York, Vermont. But there’s no place like home, and for Phillips, West Virginia is home.
It just makes more sense to have ReBuilder Medical in West Virginia. He distributes ReBuilder units nationwide, and the company’s central location in the Eastern Panhandle is perfect to get his products to market, he says, adding, “The advantages to us (in West Virginia) are the type and quality of employees we have here and that the space is cheaper than in other places.”
Beyond the business climate, Phillips made the decision to relocate in 2003 because, ever the family man, he was looking for a safe place to call home. On the heels of 9/11 and the realistic threats of dirty bombs and biochemical warfare in the D.C.-Baltimore area, Charles Town seemed to offer Phillips what he was looking for—a safe haven.
The mountains don’t hurt, either. An avid motorcyclist, Phillips found in West Virginia a cyclist’s heaven. The roar of a Harley Davidson engine, the serpentine pavement of a country road—the Mountain State holds more than its fair share of down time for a man who has had precious little of it since he was nine years old.
Today, there are no fates to curse, only a solemn peace. Phillips no longer pulls that little red wagon on the streets of suburbia. He’s traded it in for a Harley on the country roads of West Virginia, his wife of 43 years wrapping her arms around his waist.
