Flux Health Forum

PEMF vs EMF any potential dangers? Research suggest a possible link between ALS and Low Magnetic Field

PEMF Basics
#1

@Bob
I have been doing a lot of research on PEMF and it seems like one of the most beneficial therapies I have found after Photobiomodulation. There were little to no side effects reported?? Is that correct? Are there any long term studies on the use of PEMF?

I also done a lot of reading on Dirty Electricity and Dr. Milham has taught me a lot about the potential harmful effects of dirty electricity. Which led me to put dirty electricity filters all over my house. This is anecdotal but the effects were pretty much instantaneously. My sinus congestion was gone within a few minutes and I slept though the night, without once waking up. I can still few the difference to this day if I unplug them or leave the house. It’s been over 6 months.

Dr. Milham has reservations on PEMF because he still thinks it MAY be harmful. He said the same thing about the TENS units. But he hasn’t done enough research to make that conclusion.

I also found research potentially linking ALS to EMF and low magnetic fields.

"Several previous studies have found that electrical workers are at increased risk of ALS,” says Neil Pearce, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “We don’t know why the risk is higher, but the two most likely explanations involve either electrical shocks, or ongoing exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields.”

An analysis of data from more than 58,000 men and 6,500 women suggests it is the latter. Roel Vermeulen, at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his team found that people whose jobs exposed them to high levels of very low frequency magnetic fields were twice as likely to develop ALS as people who have never had this kind of occupational exposure.

The team have stressed that this study is observational – it has not proven that the fields themselves cause ALS, just that this factor is linked to a person’s likelihood of developing the disease.

However, it provides the best evidence yet that magnetic fields could be to blame for the disease. “This study has much better information on exposure to magnetic fields than previous studies,” says Pearce. “It shows that the increased risk of ALS in electrical workers is most likely due to magnetic field exposure, rather than to electrical shocks.”"

The article did state: “The effect of extremely low frequency magnetic fields on ALS development is not clear”

The study is not conclusive. But knowing what I know about dirty electricity and feeling the difference myself… I am a bit concerned on PEMF? Can anyone please elaborate on the difference between magnetic field generated by PEMF machines vs electric line installers or any other appliances that use a lot of electricity?

Are there beneficial magnetic fields vs magnetic fields that harm us?

#2

The questions you are asking are quite reasonable, unfortunately they are essentially unanswerable. The fact is that we simply don’t have enough long-term studies to know about the safety or efficacy of PEMF Many things are this way.

There are a number of reasons for this, mostly we don’t even have a clear definition of what PEMF is and what PEMF is not. And if you don’t know what something is and if you haven’t defined it clearly, then how can you study it. I’ve written a scientific paper about this:

https://www.josam.org/josam/article/view/67

A brief summary of this paper is that there are about 1 quadrillion different ways to apply PEMF, which makes it more complex than all of known chemistry throughout the entire universe by a factor of about 200 million times more complex.

However, there have been about 2000 scientific papers published related to PEMF over the last 60 years or so, and none of them have ever shown any negative serious effects. Most of them show either no effect or a benefit. There are no clinical reports that I’m aware of from anywhere on earth for at least six decades that indicate that PEMF is implicated in any kind of long term problem.

However, this does not mean that PEMF is safe. The FDA has allowed PEMF devices to come to market, so presumably their assessment is that they are both safe and effective for the specific medical claims that the manufacturer has submitted for approval. On the other hand, it’s very clear that many things that have been approved by the FDA are neither safe nor effective. Example: oxycodone. The FDA is pretty transparent about this and publishes many pages of devices and drugs that they had previously approved and that they have since pulled from the market.

I have done the best that I can do to make PEMF to be clean and free of high frequency noise. I demonstrated this in a YouTube video:

But the most important thing to keep in mind is that anything that you do to yourself, any food, any drug, any device has a risk associated with it. Every single medical treatment you will ever get is an experiment to see whether it works on you or not. That’s why physicians monitor their patients when they prescribe new drugs for them, no one is 100% sure how anyone individual is going to respond to anything, period.

So my advice is, as you will see in dozens of places across this Forum: PEMF is entirely experimental. Thousands of people report that they get a great benefit from it and they have no harm that they’re aware of, however this is not proof. If you’re going to use PEMF (or anything else) you have to be comfortable with and accept the uncertainty and risks.

The challenge with making informed decisions about PEMF is that we really do not have well-conducted, large, long-term clinical studies. So you need to be comfortable with this uncertainty, or you should consider not using PEMF.

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