@Bob have you seen these studies?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25910613/
altho not so sure about this study:
just says inconclusive about long term use…
Yes, I try to keep up with the PEMF literature. Without going into too much detail, most of the scientific literature misses the key point about PEMF (the importance of waveform shape, not frequency), and they rarely, if ever, even consider waveform in enough detail to tell the difference. There are other methodological deficiencies in these papers as well, and taken together, this generally explains why people keep publishing papers and especially meta-analyses about PEMF effectiveness that report inconclusive results.
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hmmm… just looked at how my post was presented and not sure if you saw the first link where the results about adverse effects on liver and spleen…
Conclusion: These results demonstrate that long-term exposure to PEMF can lead to oxidative damage of the liver and spleen.
source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25910613/
if you’re not so certain about such results, i think I’ll have to experiment to see how my results turn out.
it just seemed a bit concerning to find that
Did you get a chance to read the entire, whole, full-length article? It’s behind a paywall, so you would need to buy it or have institutional access. The information from just the abstract is generally (i.e. never) enough to really interpret a scientific paper. Basically: it is all about the methodological details as I mention above. But these are almost never given in an abstract.
Keep in mind: the findings of this paper are in direct agreement with one of my primary assertions about PEMF. I’ll describe this agreement a bit later. So I have an incentive to use these findings to promote my technology and slam competing technologies. But I am not doing that. It’s important to just look at the science, and consider its relevance and reliability.
For any medical research paper, when you look at the methodological details, you find that very often (I estimate about 85% of the time) the paper is not really studying the thing that the authors think it is. I’m familiar with previous work from these authors, and in my opinion, they are very likely not to have measured the PEMF parameters they think they did. This leads me to the suspicion that the other (non-PEMF) details of their experiments are likely to be riddled with errors as well.
Finally, lots of people in academia are (and have been for about 50 years) frothing at the mouth to show some, any negative effect of electro-magnetic fields. Reports like this get published all the time. But that is because of the statistical vagary that 5% of any type of study will draw wrong conclusions simply because of the statistical weakness of typical medical research (p<0.05 significance level)
Taken together, this all means one thing that should be applied to any medical research:
Pay a bit of attention, but don’t put much stock into any findings until they have been independently replicated, several times.
Due to publication bias (no one wants to publish negative results) you never get to hear about the tests that show no effect. So, almost all the time, findings like this just fade away because no one else can duplicate the findings. And they almost never publish the negative results. So the paper with the bad results stands in the literature without challenge, but also without replication. Then the “bad” results leak into the collective consciousness of people and they persist as an inaccurate piece of “common knowledge”. This is the massive weakness of medical research.
Let’s turn this around and look at it from the other side:
On the other hand, this finding does support one of my main contentions about PEMF, namely: too much is too much.
They report the intensity that they studied as 20 mT, which is 200 Gauss.
Hmmm, interesting. Very interesting. You will note that 200 Gauss is the absolute upper limit that I set for ICES-PEMF devices (try not to confuse this with the slew rate, dB/dt, in units of Gauss/second). I set that limit on the basis of data: I find repeatedly that intensity above this level does not have beneficial biological effects.
I would also like to make sure that everyone knows this: when I troubleshoot the use of ICES-PEMF devices with individuals and clinicians who are not getting good results, most of the time they are trying to blast the target area with maximum intensity. I always try to convince them to turn it down a bit. Most people resist strenuously, insisting that “more power is better”.
But it is not.
Nope, it definitely is not.
After a lot of effort, most of the time I am able to convince people to try less intensity, just for a few days. Pretty much by this time they have given up after weeks or months of seeing no benefits, so I suppose they figure “why not give it a try?”
Fast forward about two or three days, and I often get a message like this:
“OMG, this stuff really does work!! I mean, its really helpful … I wish I had tried this (less power) earlier.”
I’m not kidding. When I can get people to turn it down a bit, the benefits sharply improve about 95% of the time.
Really, seriously, more intensity is not better. It is not faster, or anything of the sort.
This much I have proven, repeatedly.
To get the best results, the thing to do with PEMF is to use an adequate amount of intensity, every day for several hours, then allow the tissue time to recover in the much improved inflammatory environment made possible by ICES-PEMF.
Too little tends to not be as helpful. But too much can cause the beneficial effects to disappear. It is reasonable to suspect that when too much PEMF is applied, the benefits begin to disappear as the potentially harmful effects (not yet proven) may begin to accumulate.
If true, these findings would be a very strong argument against the use of high-intensity PEMF devices.
SUMMARY: I am always cautions about any reports unless they are independently repeated. It is possible (but IMO unlikely) that they do get a negative effect on organ function, but it is more likely an adjustment in enzyme function in response to an improved inflammatory environment (less inflammatory stress) due to the use of PEMF. Meaning: a reduction of anti-oxidative activity might indicate a reduction in that function, but it also may simply indicate a reduction in the physiologic need for that activity, so it gets down regulated.
Anyway, these results may be true, or may not, and in any event they harmonize with my advice that too much is too much.
@OptimalHealth, If you self-experiment as you suggest you may, please be careful when applying maximum intensity for extended periods of time. Even without this paper, I would generally advise against doing that.
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