Jan 14, 2008
Attractive Health Measures or Magnetic Manure
We probably all know at least one person who swears by their magnetic charm bracelet for preventing travel sickness, reducing arthritic pain or even helping them through situations that induce an attack of social anxiety disorder. These bracelets and other devices (some are in the form of headbands, others pendants, blankets, knee braces, shoe inserts, there’s even one you wear in your pants to improve your sex life) use magnets of a similar strength to those that make shopping lists stick to your refrigerator or let your kids spell out rude words without you realising…
…in other words, they’re not very strong and so probably have absolutely no physiological effect whatsoever. So, this $5billion industry founded in ancient Greek mythology is almost on a par with homeopathy for having no real scientific basis. Or is it?
Serious research, being carried out in a serious university laboratory, with serious financial backing recently hit the headlines with proclamations that a short application of a magnetic field to an inflamed joint could somehow improve blood flow and reduce swelling. Thomas Skalak, chairman of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia and his colleagues lead the field in the area of microcirculation research, the study of blood flow through the body’s tiniest blood vessels. This status presumably helped them secure $875,000 of US taxpayers’ money from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Initially, they set out to examine a claim made by the companies that sell “therapeutic” magnets: that these devices somehow increase blood flow. Skalak’s team used magnets of 70 milliTesla (mT) field strength, which is about ten times stronger than a common refrigerator magnet, but still very weak, the magnetic field of an MRI machine, for instance, is up to about 3000 milliTesla (3 T in other words). The researchers measured blood vessel diameter before and after placing the magnets up against lab rats.
They found that the magnets seemingly had a significant effect on blood vessels. Those that had been dilated became narrower and those that were previously constricted widened. Apparently, this implies that the magnetic field could induce vessel relaxation in tissues with constrained blood supply, ultimately increasing blood flow; how the magnet knows which way to stimulate the effect is not known. In a more recent study, the team treated the hind paws of anaesthetized rats with inflammatory agents to simulate tissue injury. Therapeutic magnets were then applied to the swollen paws immediately. The researchers say they say significant reduction in swelling (oedema), although there was no effect if there was any delay between injury and application.
According to Skalak, “The FDA regulates specific claims of medical efficacy, but in general static magnetic fields are viewed as safe.” So, could magnets
be
used to
improve blood flow
following muscle injurycould magnets be used to improve blood flow following muscle injury, say, as many of the headlines surrounding this press release claimed?
Well, what I’d first like to know, is did the researchers use a double-blind control? Did they, for instance, apply non-magnetic objects of equal size, shape and weight and at the same temperature to a second set of inflamed rat hind paws to examine whether those had any effect on blood vessel dilation? Did they have a set of inflamed rats that were not treated at all? How did those groups respond? The research paper on which the press release is based was published online in November 2007 in the American Journal of Physiology and Heart Circulatory Physiology.
Given that one of the major tenets of sports injury treatment is ice and compression could it be that the very act of pressing an object against the inflamed joint simply acted as a compressive heatsink, reducing local temperature of the inflamed region and at the same time temporarily reducing blood flow during the compression?
It’s just a thought, but couldn’t any metallic object of a reasonable size, 10-20 mm would be adequate for a rat paw, act as a cold compress, asks my good friend Stephan Logan. Logan supplies scientific educational equipment, including neodymium rare earth magnets, and points out that these have a field strength of several thousand milliTesla (1.3 T is typical for the standard neo magnet N42) and so has a keen interest in scientific claims made about much weaker magnets, such as those used in the experiments, knowing that a nasty pinch when flesh is trapped between two neo magnets is one of the well-known physiological effects but has nothing to do with mystical field effects
The Virginia press release, and consequently much of the media, claim that since muscle bruising and joint sprains are the most common injuries worldwide, Skalak’s discovery has “significant implications”. He rightly points out that, “If an injury doesn’t swell, it will heal faster – and the person will experience less pain and better mobility.” The extrapolation of the magnetic research to the notion that “magnets could be used in much the same way ice packs and compression are now used for everyday sprains, bumps, and bruises, but with more beneficial results, is not necessarily supported.
Magnets could be used, but where is the evidence that they reduce swelling any more than a conventional cold compress? Indeed, does injecting a rat’s foot with an inflammatory chemical simulate adequately a sprain or strain? The release says, “The ready availability and low cost of this treatment could produce huge gains in worker productivity and quality of life.” That’s a big extrapolation from a small laboratory study to the whole of sports injury medicine. Anyway, if commercialised are these therapeutic magnet ever likely to be as cheap and readily available as a bag of frozen peas? I doubt it.
Mike, I retrieved this comment from the spam filters, i suspect it was the list of drugs that got it caught out by Akismet.
Anyway, I still don’t think the effect reported in the rats and magnets study has anything to do with placebo. Placebo, as you say, could be a very powerful tool and is exploited very well by quacks and various other practitioners across the globe and has been for many years. To put it in hand-wacing terms, the underlying principle of placebo is essentially the soothing hand of a parent on the fevered brow, surely?
As to the placebo effect on animals, especially as observed in pets…many kinds of animal kept as pet can detect only too easily their owner’s mood, a trip to the vet with the promise of a healthy pet to come could so easily have a placebo effect on the owner’s downheartedness, which could rub off (literally), olfactarily, or temperamentally on a pet (in particular dogs) and seemingly. I suspect that there is no placebo that you could give a dog that will cure it of a rampant dose of worms though, no matter how good filling the prescription makes the owner feel.
db
Hi,
As every doctor, witch or otherwise, knows, the power of belief in the practitioner is 95% of the cure. A case in point is the effect of Voodoo; believe in it and the effects are real enough. Do not believe in it, and Voodo has no effect.
How do rational, thinking, evidence-based scientists, worshiping only the one true God of science, explain the placebo effect or faith healing? Is it the power of suggestion, the patient’s belief that this treatment will cure them, or perhaps some other effect or force which we do not understand but, nevertheless, by the process of elimination, have to admit must exist? Doctors have for ages given sugared pills, conducted mock operations etc. and some patients have been cured, all to the consternation of the Guardians of the Temple.
The fact that not all patients are cured, by whichever method is employed, must surely warrent further investigation, if only out of scientific curiosity.
Something which most people don’t want to admit is that we are not rational beings; we are emotional ones. Anyone who disputes this I would ask to walk on a three inch wide line painted on the floor. Then I would ask them to walk on the same line 30 feet in the air, at which 99% of people would baulk. That is not logic, it is pure emotion.
It is not the fault of caring doctors, and there are many doctors, scientists and healthcare workers who do care, who enter the business wishing to help people; it is the influence of the multi-billion moolah businesses behind the teaching establishments and doctors mug mats that must be scutinised, the status quo who will go out of business if ‘natural’ practitioners are allowed to flourish.
No wonder the MHRA (wholly funded by the pharma companies) tried so hard to get herbals classified as drugs! I wonder if anyone has ever made a comparison between the numbers killed by the chemical companies and those killed by evidence-based-over-thousands-of-years practitioners? Has anyone taken the time to read the side effects warning leaflet that accompanies every bottle of prescription drug? This is not to say that all chemicals are bad, but there is surely room for everyone to co-exist in working together to alleviate suffering, and not dismissing things they do not understand, purely because they don’t understand them.
Many doctors are forgetting their roots, and their roots are just that – roots!
Sincerely,
Mike Jozefiak Guinea Pig
PS. A Norwegian alternative practitioner was prosecuted by the Norwegian equivalent of the MHRA in 2002 for, I kid you not, “illegally curing a seriously ill person”. His case was thrown out of court. The point being? Who cares how someone is cured, as long as they adhere to the 1st Hippocratic principle ‘First, do no harm’. How many doctors, legislators and chemical companies can honestly say they have not prescribed medicines which have killed or harmed their patients? In case anyone has a short memory, do the words Vioxx, Celebrex, Accutane, Bextra, Ephidra, Meridia, Thalidomide, Ortho Evra, etc, ring any bells? Mote and beam.
Many thanks for the follow up Mike. Anyone else care to comment on what Mike has to say about the putative effects of magnetic fields on health?
db
PS I checked the spam filter and cannot see your missing post there, feel free to re-post it and I’ll watch out for it.
Hi David,
My apologies for not clarifying that the main focus of my comment about placebos was directed at the testimonials concerning various pets/animals that have benefited from magnets, not exclusively the rats. For instance, a neighbour was commenting that his old dog could no longer jump up onto the bed, due to arthritic/joint problems. Two weeks after he fitted his dog with a magnet, he reported that his dog now found no difficiulty leaping up onto the bed. That’s what I mean by “Something must be going on that we don’t understand.”
The dog certainly had no inkling that he was being treated, probably thinking he was being given a new collar. Hence my question whether you could possibly explain the mechanism that seemed to, if not cure, then sufficiently diminish the dog’s pain enough to allow him to jump up onto his (and mine) favourite platform, the bed!
I believe physiotherapists use electromagnetic devices to speed bone and tissue healing. Whether they can explain how the bodys heals faster under the influence of a magnetic field, albeit alternating, or not, doesn’t seem to prevent them using it, just as we don’t need to know anything about Lenz or Faraday to appreciate that assuming a certain direction of current flow, under the influence of a magnetic field, an electric motor always rotates in a certain direction when we switch it on.
Just as an aside, did the researchers think of thermally insulating the magnets from the rats’ skins (it wouldn’t have taken much of a gap)? That would show whether the effect is as you suppose, a thermal one. Also, did they try an alternating magnetic polarity?
I too value scientific research, provided it is done correctly and without axes to grind or the ensuing biased bull**** that often results from commercial-sponsoredship, but even scientists have to sometimes admit they do not understand what is going on, especially concerning the huge influence our brains and thought processes have upon the outcome of treatment for an illness. Can they explain how cancers mysteriously ‘disappear’?
Regards,
Mike
PS I submitted an earlier comment to the original article, but it seems to have been ‘eaten’ by the system. Should I resubmit?
Mike, I most certainly do have a likely explanation. But, more to the point who said anything about it being a placebo effect? I didn’t mention placebos in the original article, there was no need. The effect is probably very real, but nothing to do with magnetism. The material is most likely simply acting as a heat sink (being thermally conductive and colder than the rats’ skin) it would thus have the same beneficial effect as any other cold compress. Moreover, read Stephan’s comment regarding the type of magnets used. Why wouldn’t an even stronger magnet have more of an effect unless it were something to do with the thermal conductivity of the material itself as opposed to its magnetism?
Humankind has for generations sought panaceas. Why wouldn’t it? We all want to live long and healthy lives. Magnets as not much stronger than the kind I used in the little graphic at the top of this post are just another example of the kind of this wishful thinking.
db