I think that turns quickly into a very technical conversation, which of course I am happy to have
One way to think about this is by analogy to what we understand about transmission of information. I’m sure this analogy breaks down at a detailed level, but our understanding of exactly how PEMF works is incomplete, so analogies might be the best we have available, and we will not know for a while how accurate they are.
With that caveat in mind, I think PEMF mostly transfers energy, encoded at certain levels in different ways, sort of the way we might think about how information transmission works works for an FM radio.
At the most fundamental level, the information is carried by the right basic physical force. In this analogy, it is electro-magnetism for both (PEMF and FM radio)
The information is “carried” through time and space by a specific form of that energy.
- For an FM radio, that would be the carrier frequency, that is, the place where you tune the dial to get the signal from one specific radio station.
- For PEMF, that would be the pulse waveform shape. This is why I always say that PEMF waveform shape is most important. For both cases (FM radio and PEMF) the carrier energy must be tuned properly to be transmitted and received properly.
The carrier signal itself does not really have a lot of information. But it “carries” the information by being “modulated”. For an FM radio signal, this amounts to slight changes in the frequency of the carrier signal base frequency. For PEMF, this probably has something to do with the pulse pattern. This is why I always say the pulse waveform (carrier) is most important, but the pulse pattern, if expressed by waveforms of the correct shape, will also contribute information. But without that crucial initial step of encoding with the right waveform shape, the encoded information never gets properly transmitted or received.
The next step is the big one we do not understand about how PEMF has a biological effect. This is the way the recipient decodes the signal that it receives. For an FM radio signal, this is done by a “demodulator”, which transforms the FM signal from the modulated signal on a carrier wave into a signal much closer to what you could put through a speaker and understand as language. For PEMF, this would be the biophysical mechanism (whatever that is, we do not know). This is what PEMF marketers lie about a lot, claiming to have secret knowledge of this step, which in my scientific opinion is a load of BS.
Once you have the information encoded, transmitted, received, and decoded, then you are almost there. The final step is this: does the information make sense to the recipient?
Imagine an FM radio station that is transmitting in a strange foreign language. Everything about the signal itself is working fine, your hearing is working fine so you received the signal, but you simply do not understand it because you do not speak that language. For PEMF, I think the closest analogy would be that you would be sending a signal that the recipient cells/tissues need to be able to understand. This might mean that the PEMF needs to send a signal (pulse pattern) that makes sense to the cells or tissues of a certain species, or of a certain tissue, or in a certain state (developmental state, or state of injury, repair, growth). This is almost totally unknown scientific territory.