Magnet therapy: The power to heal?
By Charlotte Crystal
Healers have used magnets since the Middle Ages and skeptics have questioned their effectiveness ever since.
In 1784, King Louis XVI of France established a commission to investigate Franz Anton Mezmer’s “animal magnetism” treatments, using magnets and hypnosis. And according to the July 1998 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Thomas Jefferson, who arrived in Paris shortly after the publication of the commission’s report, concluded that “[a]nimal magnetism is dead, ridiculed.”
Magnet therapy is still ridiculed, but far from dead.
Cassandra “Cassie” Morris, a master’s student in biomedical engineering, is one of several researchers at the University trying to determine whether there is a scientific basis for magnets’ supposed healing powers.
“It’s amazing how many people have wonderful anecdotes about how magnets have ‘saved their lives’ by reducing their pain,” Morris said. “But there is not much scientific evidence about what magnets actually do.”
The market for such treatments is not insubstantial — loosely estimated at $150 million to $500 million annually –- and the potential for abuse of desperate patients is high. s
Morris is investigating the effect of magnets on blood flow, a project funded by a $1.1 million grant by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and supervised by Morris’ advisor, Thomas Skalak, chair of the department of biomedical engineering.
Increased blood flow brings oxygen and other nutrients to the site of injury, so therapies that increase blood flow to an area (such as the application of a heating pad to a muscle sprain) promote healing.
Actually, researchers already have found that applying static magnets — similar to those used by elementary school children to pick up paper clips — increases the blood flow through blood vessels, but no one can say by how much. So, Morris designed a project two years ago that would enable her to measure increases in blood flow generated by magnets.
“We’re making direct measures of diameter changes in blood vessels in response to localized field exposure to static magnets,” Morris said.
Morris spent the first year calibrating her magnets – measuring the power at their cores and on their surfaces – to obtain part of the baseline data needed for the study.
Her current experiments measure the effect of 15 minutes of exposure to static magnets with a strength of 700 Gauss — the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field is about 1 Gauss — on the blood flow in the skeletal muscles of laboratory rats. Morris videotapes the diameter of the blood vessels before exposure, immediately after exposure and at 15- and 30-minute intervals after exposure.
Her results show that different-sized vessels react differently to the magnetic field, with the smallest vessels showing a more marked response than larger vessels, and possibly contributing to an overall increase in blood flow.
Morris is repeating her experiments to establish statistically significant results in the coming weeks and plans to present her findings in June at the Bioelectromagnetics Society Conference in Quebec City, Quebec.
After establishing that magnets do have an effect on blood flow with her master’s thesis this spring, Morris plans to pursue doctoral research, testing several hypotheses that might explain how it happens.
“What I want to do is to establish a scientific basis for the clinical use of magnets and determine the ideal strength and exposure combinations for the most therapeutically beneficial devices or treatments,” Morris said.
“I want to help people who have been injured and have not found relief from their pain through traditional medicine.”
Two other groups of University researchers have explored various aspects of magnets’ interaction with the human body.
A research team co-directed by Ann Taylor Gill, professor of nursing and director of the U.Va. Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies, last winter published the results of its study of the effectiveness of magnetic mattress pads in treating the deep muscle pain suffered by fibromyalgia patients. The study was funded in part by a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
The study looked at 94 patients, divided into four groups, over a six-month period. The first group was given mattress pads with embedded magnets of a uniform polarity; the second group got magnetic mattress pads of mixed polarities; the third group received sham mattress pads; and the fourth group acted as a control, with no mattress pads and no change in previous treatments.
Researchers found no statistical differences among the groups in most of the measures studied. However, for some of them – particularly, pain intensity, the number of tender points on body and functional status after six months – the two groups that received magnetic mattress pads reported more improvement than the other two groups.
Researchers hope to learn more about how to establish proper dosages and understand possible side effects, while learning which conditions benefit most from the use of magnets.
In other U.Va. research supported by the NIH, Jeremy B. Tuttle, professor of neuroscience and urology with the Health System, has been exploring the effect of static magnetic fields on gene expression in human neuroblastoma cells.
Tuttle’s research group conducted several tests on 12,600 genes and found that most were not affected by magnets. However, about 100 genes — “a surprisingly large number” — were affected, Tuttle said. Interestingly, he found that many of the affected genes have to do with cells’ mechanisms for responding to injury.
Tuttle is preparing to present his results to the Scientific Conference for Complementary, Alternative and Integrative Medicine Research in Boston in April and hopes to further develop his results.
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