We had the privilege of hearing Bob Dennis, PhD at the Society of Progressive Medical Education conference June 2018. Dr. Dennis is a professor at the University of Michigan and UNC-Chapel Hill and worked as a consultant for NASA and DARPA. He’s the foremost expert on PEMF and electromagnetic therapy. These are exerpts from his article:
PEMF Clinical reports suggest that PEMF is quite safe, and the fact that PEMF often helps under the most extreme and challenging conditions suggests to me that PEMF should be considered a treatment of first resort, not one of last resort, because it is among the most effective, fastest, safest, least costly and if necessary reversible treatment options available.
It is OK if we don’t know exactly why PEMF works. The argument that we must understand the detailed biophysics of PEMF for it to be credible is misplaced. That detailed level of knowledge would be useful for nerd scientists and product developers like me, but just as is the case for many drugs and foods, the long history and wide-spread clinical experience with the safe and effective use of PEMF should dominate the discussion of whether or not to use PEMF.
In an attempt to understand the biophysics of PEMF, I begin with my first and most fundamental observation: at NASA13 and in all subsequent studies (JCIM, page 1514) we found that only rapidly changing magnetic fields had a significant and repeatable biological effect. My hypothesis, briefly, is that the effect arises from electro-magnetism, not just magnetism per se. In fact, it is impossible to have a changing magnetic field without also having an induced electric field. This is well known from classical electro-magnetism of the 19th century.
Very briefly, I hypothesize that cells do not respond directly to magnetic fields, and that most tissues are transparent to magnetic fields, so magnetic fields can easily penetrate deeply into tissues. Then, when you change the magnetic field rapidly, it will induce an electric current in the range of nano- to pico-amperes in the deep tissues of the body by Faraday Induction. These very small electrical currents are detected by cells because they emulate the streaming currents (selective movement of unbound ions through tissues) caused by the application of mechanical stress to tissues. This was hypothesized in the 1960’s as a mechanism for the body to detect exercise and motion.
Though first proposed in the 1960’s, the cellular/molecular detectors for these very small currents have not yet been discovered (this discovery will result in a Nobel Prize for someone).It is at least plausible because unlike magnetism, it is well established that electrical signals have many different mechanisms by which they can influence cells and molecules in the body, as described by the well-accepted scientific field of research called electrophysiology. I propose only that there is one more mechanism that we have not yet discovered, whereby cells detect very low-level currents of unbound ions moving along (not across) cell and organelle membranes. This isn’t so farfetched because, as mentioned above, the presence of such receptors was first proposed in the 1960’s as a mechanism by which musculo-skeletal tissues could detect low-level daily activity and normal movement.
I focus on very low-energy, trapezoidal pulses of magnetism with very rapid rise times but relatively low pulse frequency, generally at or below 100 pulses per second. Many modern PEMF systems use this same approach whether or not they know it. I am not saying that other forms of PEMF do not work. Honestly, they may work by entirely different biophysical mechanisms and they may have different biological effects. But I could not get them to work in any of my experiments. So I remain skeptical.
PEMF frequencies fall into a few broad bands, and precise frequency is not really important. It may be more important to change frequency within the effective range over time than to use just one specific magical frequency. Beware of the company selling the device makes claims about mystical effects, supernatural powers, or they evoke pseudo-scientific jargon to try to get you to buy their product. Examples of mystical or supernatural effects are self-evident, but many intelligent (non-scientific) people are taken in by the use of pseudo-scientific jargon. Common examples include any claims of the use of zero-point energy, dark energy, anti-matter, dark matter, quantum coupling, quantum entanglement, quantum computing, action-at-a-distance, gene scanning, epigenetic scanning, energy frequencies of DNA, and creative combinations of that kind of language. PEMF machines just can’t do that.
Clinical reports and independent laboratory testing indicate that certain types of PEMF appear to quickly reduce swelling and inflammation in deep tissues. At the time of this writing, several scientific studies are ongoing to try to determine which inflammatory pathways are influenced by different forms of PEMF. But clinically the effects of PEMF are very broad, almost certainly because PEMF works to reduce chronic inflammation, which is at the root of several hundred known diseases and chronic injuries, and is thought to be at least partially responsible for almost all diseases of aging.
It seems to reduce chronic inflammation by mechanisms unlike any known drug, and by doing this one thing in one unique way it may be able to reduce or eliminate a very wide range of ostensibly unrelated medical conditions, all of which are actually caused by chronic inflammation, but they just manifest as different problems in different tissues. Another interesting thing about PEMF is that, unlike narcotics or other chemical pain killers, people do not seem to experience a reduction in effectiveness of PEMF over time. To the contrary, many people report that over time they can use lower doses of PEMF to still get the same beneficial effects. PEMF seems to have especially good benefits for chronic pain, which constitutes the single largest human health issue,
And most interestingly, new and mounting clinical evidence is beginning to show that PEMF may have significant benefits for supporting “The Big 5” : cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and stroke, combined, according to painmed.org as well as chronic pain.
The use of PEMF as an adjunct therapy seems to have great promise. I have never heard or seen a report with an adverse reaction or negative consequence of combining PEMF with other treatments, but I have heard many reports from clinicians of improved effectiveness when they combine PEMF with their other treatments.