MAGNOTHERAPY

MAGNOTHERAPY

Magnet therapy [Magnetic Therapy / Magnotherapy] is an alternative medicine practice involving the use of static magnetic fields.

Practitioners claim that subjecting certain parts of the body to magnetostatic fields produced by permanent magnets has beneficial health effects.

Magnet therapy is considered pseudoscientific due to both physical and biological implausibility, as well as a lack of any established effect on health or healing.

Although hemoglobin, the blood protein that carries oxygen, is weakly diamagnetic and is repulsed by magnetic fields, the magnets used in magnetic therapy are many orders of magnitude too weak to have any measurable effect on blood flow.

DESCRIPTION

Magnet therapy is the application of the magnetic field of electromagnetic devices or permanent static magnets to the body for purported health benefits.

These benefits may be specific, as in the case of wound healing, or more general, as for increased energy and vitality. In the latter case, malaise is sometimes described as "Magnetic Field Deficiency Syndrome".

Some practitioners assign different effects based on the orientation of the magnet; under the laws of physics, magnetic poles are symmetric.

Products:

§  Magnetic bracelets and jewelry

§  Magnetic straps for wrists, ankles, knees, and back

§  Shoe insoles

§  Mattresses

§  Magnetic blankets

§  Magnetic creams

§  Magnetic supplements

§  Water that has been "magnetized"

SAFETY AND EFFICACY

These devices are generally considered safe in themselves, though there can be significant financial and opportunity costs to magnet therapy, especially when treatment or diagnosis are avoided or delayed.

Perhaps the most common suggested mechanism is that magnets might improve blood flow in underlying tissues.

The field surrounding magnet therapy devices is far too weak and falls off with distance far too quickly to appreciably affect hemoglobin, other blood components, muscle tissue, bones, blood vessels, or organs.

A 1991 study on humans of static field strengths up to 1 T found no effect on local blood flow.  

Tissue oxygenation is similarly unaffected. Some practitioners claim that the magnets can restore the body's theorized "electromagnetic energy balance", but no such balance is medically recognized.

Even in the magnetic fields used in magnetic resonance imaging, which are many times stronger, none of the claimed effects are observed.

Several studies have been conducted in recent years to investigate what, if any, role static magnetic fields may play in health and healing.

Unbiased studies of magnetic therapy are problematic, since magnetisation can be easily detected, for instance, by the attraction forces on ferrous (iron-containing) objects; because of this, effective blinding of studies (where neither patients nor assessors know who is receiving treatment versus placebo) is difficult.

Incomplete or insufficient blinding tends to exaggerate treatment effects, particularly where any such effects are small. Health claims such as longevity and cancer treatment are implausible and unsupported by any research.

More mundane health claims, most commonly pain relief, also lack any credible proposed mechanism, and clinical research is not promising.

Effects of magnet therapy on pain relief beyond non-specific placebo response have not been adequately demonstrated.

A 2008 systematic review of magnet therapy for all indications found no evidence of an effect for pain relief, with the possible exception of osteoarthritis.

Recent experiments at MIT have demonstrated the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation on moral thinking.