Flux Health Forum

Claims that digital PEMF are not effective overtime because your body becomes accustom to the frequency

@Bob

Can anyone please educated me on this claim? I really want to get an pemf device but this is making me question if they are viable options for long term use?

This is what they stated: “Not all PEMF is created equal Go feel the machine you are interested in buying. There is a big difference between high and low power machines. 1 Tesla = 10,000 Gauss. My machine is 23.2 Tesla. Spark chamber technology is true PEMF. The digital machines are not the same. Your body will get used to digital over time and it will “stop working” Spark chamber technology is more expensive. You get what you pay for.”

“Digital is a fake version of PEMF. You need to feel a digital and a spark chamber unit to understand I will try to explain. Digital has the same repeating pattern of pulses. 1,2,1,2,1,2 the same always. No change in pattern. The body learns the pattern and can resist. Spark chamber units create a little bolt of lightning inside the chamber; The way Nikola Tesla designed PEMF. It is random like lightning. There is no pattern to the pulses. They go fast and slow but random. The body can never learn to resist if there is no pattern.”

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haha this will be a fun (and quick) response from Bob.

from previous comments about “spark tech” vs. digital, you’ll find a lot of the marketing doesn’t talk about the excessive power that isn’t necessarily beneficial. what you quoted above, they did not address the fact that a digital device could also cycle thru a variety of frequencies over various segments of time (as what the Omni 8 protocol does).

alas, this is a layman’s explanation/understanding addressing that marketing copy

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That is basically true. But @OptimalHealth is absolutely correct.

The fact is that biology responds to monotonic stimuli (signals that never change) as “not information” and the biological response tends to reduce toward zero over time. This is a widely known biological phenomenon known as habituation or neuro accommodation. The explanation given above however is more of an advertisement than science. For example, a “spark chamber” is simply very old (pre-vacuum tube) technology, from about 1890, and we’ve debunked that elsewhere.

But the kernel of truth here is that signals do need to change in order to maintain their biological effectiveness. Because of this, all ICES-PEMF pulse protocols (except the few experimental constant ones, to match some published scientific paper protocols) have pulse pattern variability built into them. I have included this important feature from the very beginning, decades ago. I have put an enormous amount of research into this, and as a result, all ICES-PEMF pulse protocols have pattern variation that emulates neuro-motor development patterns which the body is evolved to recognize as important neuro-developmental signals. I have tested the effectiveness of this, and the result is that the ICES-PEMF pulse patterns become more effective over time, not less effective. They become more effective over the course of months and years, and this results in the fact that most people benefit over time (months and years) by reducing the intensity of the pulses from ICES-PEMF devices.

Many people report this observation. My personal case is typical: I use only about half to 2/3 the intensity to get the same beneficial effect as I was getting 5 to 10 years ago with the same ICES-PEMF pulse pattern.

So, yes, there is a grain of truth to the incessant attempt of PEMF marketers to sell out-dated inefficient technology as something “new and special and unique”, but really it is all just over-priced dangerous junk from an ex-Soviet bloc village somewhere in Eastern Europe. It works, sort of, but caveat emptor.

The funny thing about this post is that “spark gap” technology is random and very noisy so that it generates a lot of high-frequency EMF, which is probably harmful. But their pulses are not smoothly variable during operation, because these primitive devices are set by a crude screw-point gap to set a spark discharge voltage. So, to a technologically informed person, this post actually disproves the usefulness of the device they are trying to sell you.
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But this kind of nonsense will never stop. They make their living by misinforming people who are suffering in pain and dysfunction by making false claims. People keep falling for it, and these marketers spend full time generating misinformation and marketing pulp.

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Hi Dr. Dennis, to further expound on this topic, could you please extrapolate whether this principle applies in the same manner when we are talking about using PEMF/ICES specifically for “Brainwave Entrainment”? (e.g. the M1 entrainment protocols/frequencies). I know that you cycle the frequencies within a particular band range (i.e. low-beta), in order to avoid habituation, but if one’s goal is to get sympathetic entrainment with a particular brainwave band, wouldn’t the brain require at least a sufficient amount of time on a static frequency? In addition to testing with your Brain Gauge, do you think you and/or Dr. Tommerdahl might ever do PEMF/ICES testing with EEG/QEEG, to study or optimize the degree to which your micro-pulse entrainment protocols are actually modulating brainwaves? Have you and Bill Pawluk ever discussed PEMF brainwave entrainment? Have you seen Dr. Jerman’s research with PEMF’s on brainwaves? Here’s a couple of his studies: (not being a brain scientist or engineer myself, I don’t understand a lot of the terms):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336582485_Enhancing_Vigilance_by_Low_Intensity_Transcranial_Pulsed_Magnetic_Stimulation_Applying_the_Entrainment_Model

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335857457_Influencing_Relaxation_by_a_Low_Intensity_Transcranial_Pulsed_Magnetic_Stimulation_Applying_the_Entrainment_Model

Thanks for all you do!

Basically I think the principle is the same. Brainwaves do not actually settle on a single monotonic frequency, and there is no reason to think they require one steady (static) frequency to achieve entrainment. The brainwave entrainment protocols I have written for the M1 and C5 ICES-PEMF systems actually slowly sweep across the range of frequencies usually associated with each type of brainwave (alpha, theta, etc.) in a manner similar to the frequency sweep that actually occurs in the living brain.

But I am not a “brainwave entrainment” scientist, and Mark Tommerdahl is actually quite skeptical of the whole notion of brainwave entrainment (he does not subscribe to the implied cause-effect relationship of brainwave entrainment and modulation), so we do not study in that area. Brain research is a positively enormous field, and ten different people could easily all spend an entire career and never overlap. I don’t really follow the research in this area. But from a scientific instrumentation perspective, I understand it well enough to design credible devices that would be expected to have entrainment effects.

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