I have a friend who was very devastated when she found her ex was recently diagnosed with ALS. It’s been a little more than a year ago now, and as expected, the prognosis is not good. I’m wondering @Bob, whether the M1 could help with his condition? If so, any suggestions on how to apply it (ie where to attach the coils, what protocol/intensity and duration)? Thanks.
I really do not know about the effect of PEMF on ALS. People ask this question every few years (maybe every 3 or 4 years). But these are just the question: does anyone know anything?
I understand that ALS is utterly devastating, so I think it is important to give the best answer possible without giving sway to any form of personal bias (except, of course, the bias toward truth)
If you google search the terms “ALS PEMF” you get a full page (and much more) of sponsored links and websites to the worst of the PEMF charlatans. These are the bad people that dash the hopes of desperate people for their own financial gain.
The one interesting and potentially useful link is to a clinical study, posted on the NIH site for clinical trials (ClinicalTrials.gov):
The study is titled " Neuromuscular Magnetic Stimulation in ALS Patients (NMS-ALS)"
The official title of the study is “Neuromuscular Magnetic Stimulation Counteracts Muscle Decline in ALS Patients” but this sounds more like a hopeful outcome than a study.
The study recruitment was completed in 2018, so they had all the subjects they needed. Their final update was in 2018, and they did not report results according to this website.
So I suspect this is an example of publication bias, where negative results are almost never published. This is why our academic medical science has discarded more than 80% of the useful, critical information. In any search, you first start listing where the answer is not. Think about searching for your car keys. You immediately start collecting negative results: in my pocket, no… in my purse, no … and so on.
Half way down this page is a very vague description of the Device: Neuromuscular magnetic stimulation (NMMS) and the treatment protocol.
At the bottom of this page they give a list of academic publications (13 total). They evidently did see some effect in mice with the ALS scientific model.
My guess is that they took their best approach from these earlier publications, started the study, didn’t see much of an effect on humans, then probably abandoned the study part way through without reporting it.
This does not prove anything either way: Maybe their device had the wrong waveform, had the wrong settings, was placed incorrectly. They give us no information, so I don’t know.
So, what do we do from here? I don’t have enough information to give any advice.
If this were me and my child, I would probably make the desperate attempt to use PEMF. I believe PEMF will cause no harm, I could drop everything and everyone else, pour huge resources into it, work day and night, and try it. But it would all be a last, costly, desperate attempt using all of my skill and resources, to the exclusion of all else, because that is the effort that I think it would take, even in the face of zero positive human data. But this is me.
I don’t know what to advise for another person because I don’t know anything about them, their circumstances, or whether this would even work.
Yes, I’m aware of the hype, which is why I tend to view the information with a skeptical eye and have hesitated to give my friend false hopes…
I think I will relay the information you have given here and let her make her own decision. As you said, what does she have to lose? She has already bought an M1 and she could let her ex try it and see if it produces any results for him. Thank you for your integrity, @Bob, that is precisely why I would much rather seek information from you than from outside sources.
Continued…
So, as a practical matter, if your friend is interested, we could try to collect what small amount of information might be available (they discussed the device placement on the arm, for example, for the clinical trial), and then use their clinical rationale to try to determine the best placement for an ICES-PEMF system.
Plus, we could use some common sense. For example, motorneurons exit from the spinal cord and extend to each muscle, but the key part of the motor neuron (the soma, which contains the nucleus) is in the spinal cord (dorsal root ganglion I think), so it might be that we could influence the entire motorneuron for all skeletal muscles by directly stimulating only over the spinal cord. That would be a huge reduction in the complexity, cost, and size of the system. It could probably be done with just a few C5 units.
This all depends on whether or not your fiend is even interested in trying ICES-PEMF. It would be 100% experimental, totally working in the dark, with educated but otherwise uninformed guesses.
Sorry, I don’t have the answer. But there is increasing research that ALS is caused by mycotoxins/mold/fungi. Most new discoveries take decades to reach standard treatment so you might want to make sure your friend is aware of this so she can find a doctor who is. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33631494/
Thank you very much for this information. The issue right now is that her ex is in Taiwan, and I don’t know how much the doctors there would understand over there about this, barring language barriers aside since this publication is in English and even finding someone who would know.
Most of them know english.
And there are many more studies on pubmed if you search.
It’s possible they may not know about this, but often they are ahead of us in other countries so it’s hard to say.
Thank you very much again, I need to let my friend know and then she can make the decision on her ex’s behalf.