You put your right leg in, you put your left buttock out, you do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about - but otherwise untreatable angina patients find it anything but hocus-pocus.
A new form of therapy being tested at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin involves a lot of quivering flesh and inflatable cuffs ballooning round the buttocks, thighs and calves.
Called external counterpulsation, this strange-looking approach to alleviating crippling chest pain drives blood backwards through the circulation into the heart chambers as they rest between pumps.
Patients who have tried every other therapeutic option - invariably after previous coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty followed by massive courses of anti-anginal drugs - are asked to undergo 35 one-hour pneumatic squeezing sessions over the course of seven weeks.
The paraphernalia, which is hooked up while the patient lies prone in the clinic, is a bit reminiscent of Jane Fonda's bouts in her Barbarella "orgasmatron".
But external counterpulsation is no joke for the desperately ill, who are hoping these enigmatic but painless treatments will lead, as the main theoretical explanation would have it, to restored blood flow in the small vessels of their hearts, and a return to semi-normal functioning for a year or more afterwards.
"For a cohort of patients for whom nothing else can be done, this can provide a very definite benefit," says Dr James Horgan, the Beaumont cardiologist who is the first person to bring the treatment, which has become a rage in the United States - to the Republic and the UK.
This week, Horgan will present his findings on his initial group of 68 patients, one of the more sizeable to undergo treatment, to the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, in Stockholm.
He will report that 40 per cent of patients with crushing levels of angina - rated as class 3 and 4, with 4 meaning essentially bedridden and 3 severely debilitated - dropped two levels to a condition in which they could undertake without pain, routine daily activities and modest degrees of physical exertion.
The length of time patients could tolerate exercising on a treadmill before their angina became unbearable - a gauge cardiologists use to measure heart function - increased by an average of 90 seconds.
"You're not talking about people being resurrected, Lazarus-like, you're talking about a modest improvement, but most patients who undergo any reduction in angina find the results very satisfactory," says Horgan.
"Our quality-of-life data, which include physical and social functioning, general health and emotional status, all of these showed an improvement."
Horgan estimates that there are hundreds of new cardiac patients in the Republic every year, typically between 55 and 65 years of age, who have used up every other option for making their lives bearable.
A typical case involved a diabetic woman in her late 50s who had developed severe recurrent angina after her previous bypass surgery had failed. "She's an unusually resilient woman and, I dare say, a quite remarkable person to still be alive. After receiving ECP she became mobile again for the first time in years, able to resume a reasonably normal life and participate in day-to-day activities at home."
Liam Lee, (68), a former lecturer at University College Limerick and, now, a resident of Navan, was the first person in the Republic to be treated with external counterpulsation. Sixteen years ago, he underwent a quadruple-vessel coronary bypass that left him in temporary cardiac arrest before the surgeons struggled on with a 14-hour procedure.
Eventually, his chest pain returned and then worsened, despite steadily increasing amounts of medication. The last thing he wanted was to undergo another invasive procedure. His first date with the pneumatic cuffs, in February 1999, left him nonplussed.
"I remember an American salesman for the system claiming that people got so comfortable with it that they could sleep through their treatment sessions. This sounded outrageous, when there I was popping about and perspiring profusely; but sure enough, in three weeks I was dozing after lying down," says Lee.
He soon experienced "a fairly dramatic improvement in the reduction of my chest pain and ability to tolerate exercise, whereas before I couldn't walk up an incline of any kind without experiencing angina".
Lee has now returned to supervising student teachers around the country. "The amazing thing is that every one of my initial group is still walking around and doing fairly well, and these were people with serious chest pain before," says Horgan.
At this point, external-counterpulsation patients at Beaumont Hospital are being treated free of charge, with the costs of the extended therapy - $7,000 in the US - underwritten by Vasomedical, one of three US-based companies that have developed computer-synchronised systems to provoke reverse blood flow when the heart is resting.
External-counterpulsation sessions are usually monitored by a trained nurse rather than by a consultant cardiologist, but the attendants must nonetheless be able to administer advanced cardiac life support and to diagnose cardiac-rhythm disturbances, as the patients are often at a potentially perilous stage of coronary artery disease.