What Is EECP Therapy? Inside the Conversation With Michele Lee, RN

Most people have never heard of EECP — and as Michele Lee, RN tells Mark Anthony in this conversation, neither had she, until a client asked her about it six or seven months earlier. That's despite EECP having been developed at Harvard University, used clinically since the 1970s, and cleared by the FDA in 1995. Lee, who has spent 35 years as a nurse, calls it "the most underutilized therapy in medicine," and spent this episode explaining why a non-invasive treatment with decades of use behind it remains something almost nobody has heard of.

Lee is a vascular access nurse specialist by training, having placed PICC lines across hospitals for over three decades. In August 2021, after selling a staffing business that had managed roughly 30 nurses across 88 hospital contracts through the COVID years, she opened a wellness, regenerative, and longevity clinic in Brentwood, Tennessee, just off I-65 south of Nashville. Her path to EECP started with an existing client already receiving IV plaque-dissolving infusions, who asked her where he could find an EECP unit in Tennessee — there wasn't one. That question sent Lee researching the therapy, reading cardiologist Dr. Deborah Braverman's book "Heal Your Heart Non-Invasively," and ultimately ordering an EECP bed for her own practice.

What EECP Actually Is, and How a Session Works

The mechanics, as Lee described them, are more mechanical than they sound. A patient lies on a large bed and has pneumatic cuffs — similar to blood pressure cuffs — secured around the calves, thighs, and hips, while a cardiac monitor tracks systole and diastole, the heart's contraction and relaxation. Timed to that rhythm, the cuffs inflate during the heart's relaxation phase and propel hyperoxygenated blood through the torso, up through the lungs, and to the brain. That's the "counterpulsation" in the name.

Lee said the effect is measurable: EECP increases nitric oxide by roughly 60%, reduces the stiffness that develops in blood vessels with age, and lowers blood pressure. Its primary clinical use is cardiovascular disease — patients with narrowed or "stenosed" arteries who experience shortness of breath, fatigue, or chest pain. Rather than bypassing a blocked artery the way a stent or graft does, Lee said EECP encourages the body to grow its own new collateral vessels around the blockage, a process she called arteriogenic. "Think of it as your arteries are expressways," she said. "If they get stenosed or small, we're creating highways and byways so that the blood can flow regardless of a stenosed artery."

Despite that track record, EECP has stayed on the margins of American medicine. Lee attributes this partly to timing — open-heart surgery and stents became popular around the same era and, unlike EECP, are reimbursed by insurance — and partly to how the U.S. healthcare system is structured. Medicare, she explained, covers EECP only for patients with Class 4 angina who have already undergone bypass surgery and stenting and failed to find relief. Outside that narrow circumstance, patients generally pay for it themselves.

A Patient Story: From Six Feet to Five Miles a Day

Lee shared one patient account in detail: a man she referred to as Yan, an aerospace engineer originally from Prague who had a massive heart attack in Washington State in 2020. He refused hospitalization at the height of COVID rather than be separated from his wife, and became, in Lee's words, "a cardiac invalid" who couldn't walk six feet without chest pain.

Lee said Yan repeated the 35-session course again in 2023 and can now walk five miles a day without chest pain. He never underwent angioplasty or open-heart surgery. Following his second round of EECP, he also began an IV infusion therapy she referred to as "Plaque X," used to help dissolve arterial plaque, in place of statin medication. Now 76, Lee said he plans to repeat EECP roughly every two years for the rest of his life. She also referenced a separate account from a self-published author — whose book title she couldn't recall in the moment — who has logged more than 600 hours on his own home EECP unit after refusing a recommended triple bypass; his mother had developed dementia shortly after undergoing the same surgery.

Beyond Cardiovascular Disease: Circulation-Linked Conditions

Because EECP's core effect is increasing blood flow throughout the body, Lee described a range of side benefits beyond the heart itself — improved perfusion to the lungs, kidneys, and pancreas, along with the retina and brain. She said patients whose vision problems stem from low retinal blood flow, or whose cognitive decline is tied to low flow in the cerebellum, may see improvement as circulation improves. She also described using EECP for pelvic floor reconditioning: restored blood flow to the pelvic area that, she said, can ease erectile dysfunction and reduce nighttime urinary urgency in men.

Lee also discussed EECP for diabetes-related peripheral neuropathy, noting that diabetics tend to have particularly compromised microvascular circulation. She said patients with more advanced neuropathy may need closer to 50 sessions rather than the standard 35 to regrow the small vessels needed to restore sensation, and that she currently has two diabetic patients — one in his late 40s, one in his early 50s — enrolled for that reason. Asked to compare it to shockwave therapy, which she also offers for neuropathy, Lee said EECP "will surpass — will eclipse — every therapy that I have for neuropathy," adding that unlike shockwave, patients don't find it painful.

Why So Few People Have Heard of It — and Why Lee Is Bringing It to Nashville

Lee traced the gap partly to geography: by her count, Texas has around 14 EECP centers and Florida around 15, driven by large elderly populations, but she found none serving Tennessee or the broader South before deciding to open one herself. She also pointed to the incentive structure of U.S. healthcare more broadly — a system, in her view, built to reward procedures like stents and bypass surgery rather than a therapy patients largely pay for themselves. "It's system-driven," she said. "The reality is, if you get a stent, you're going to get another one in a few years... and then they can't do anything for you." She contrasted this with countries like China and India, which she said use EECP more widely because their systems reward patient outcomes rather than procedure volume.

Lee was candid about what drives her, too, describing what she calls "the cost of caring" — the physical toll, including a higher risk of right-sided heart failure over time, that she says nurses and physicians carry from the weight of the work itself. It's part of why she's planning to use the machine on herself once it arrives, and part of a broader vision for her clinic: three dedicated EECP beds, alongside the IV therapy, stem cell, and other regenerative services she already offers.

Her first EECP bed was set to arrive the week of June 15, with a trainer spending a week on-site afterward. If you or someone you know has been living with heart disease, diabetes-related neuropathy, or circulation-linked fatigue and hasn't heard of this option, this conversation is a plain-language starting point — from a nurse who, by her own account, is still catching up on it herself.