Does anyone here know the mechanism that photo bio modulation uses vs. PEMF? What are the biological differences?
I just asked that in conjunction with the videos Bob is going to make. I don’t know what the difference is between them in how ATP is generated.
I’ve used red light for a few years. I have some opinions that may be interesting to you even so.
I find red light works especially well on tired muscles right under the surface of the skin. Especially neck and shoulders. The red light industry know that when demonstrating red light before an audience, they need to pick someone out of the crowd with exactly that issue. Get the right person and they will feel the relief during the treatment. I did, during my very first treatment.
I don’t use my M1 on anything that responds well to red light. I currently use a bigger cheapo pad/belt. It works really well. I’ve seen similar ones for right under 100$ on Amazon.
I use my M1 on inflammation instead. I had inflammation not too far under the skin surface a while ago. It took months to clear up using red light and avoiding the movements that caused the injury that got inflamed. I expect it would have taken less time with PEMF.
Thanks. I use the Vielight product which is meant to target the brain. I found that in conjunction with pemf there was a significant change on a couple of things that neither pemf alone nor Vielight alone produced. Unfortunately the Vielight headset developed a short and need to be sent out for repair. I should have it back soon and we will see if the combined effect returns. We have seen that after 3 or 4 days of not doing the combined therapy things began to revert but again until we get it back and try the therapy for a longer period of time (Ie. One month) can’t say for sure if it was a flash in the pan or something more long term
I do not know for sure about the biophysical mechanism of photobiomodulation, but I can assert with high confidence that no one knows the biophysical mechanism of action of PEMF. Many people (basically PEMF marketers) will tell you anything you need to hear to get you to make a purchase, but this is all marketing fraud.
People will speculate all kinds of things like “energizing mitochondria”, but this is not a fundamental mechanism, it would be an observed effect, which, by the way, no one has convincingly demonstrated yet.
I have theoretically testable scientific hypotheses on the mechanism of action of PEMF at the molecular level, but that would be a major scientific project, requiring many years or decades and many millions of dollars. When successful, it will result in at least one, but probably two Nobel prizes for the discoveries it will involve.
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Have you tried to pursue this? No one wants to fund it? You have created a great product that I can say from experience works better than the curatron and the really big machines with the massive loops.
Keep up the good work and thanks for being helpful to so many of us.
PEMF is very political, unfundable, and filled with fraud. Making real progress is almost impossible, but I keep working at it.
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Curious - how many millions of dollars would you need to do those studies? Is there an underlying reason why in 2022 PEMF is very political? I ask because it seems like energy based medicine (ultrasound, sound, PEMF) are gaining a lot of traction in the wellness community that is rapidly growing. I understand the community is not the same as the grant funding bodies, so maybe that is one of the reasons…
As it happens, I paid a “Regulatory Consultancy” company to study and report on the regulatory landscape and requirements for PEMF. There are a number of such companies because this is a scientifically and legally complex endeavor. The report was short but detailed and quantitative, and it helped me formulate the strategy I have been using since the study was done in 2012.
Here are the rough numbers for the cost for a study that would be of significant enough statistical strength and properly structured and carried out so that there would be a good chance that it would be possible to make conclusive statements based on the results:
Study question: PEMF reduces back pain - YES or NO
Variations on the PEMF to be used: only one, not various waveforms, pulse patterns, dosage, conditions of use, etc. It had to be only one experimental group and one control group: PEMF + versus placebo (PEMF -).
So there would be no opportunity to optimize or correct any conditions once the study had been started. One shot at it: win or lose.
Based on the data I supplied, and their understanding of FDA requirements, they calculated that the study would need a minimum of 360 participants to be divided into two groups (PEMF + and PEMF -).
Based on the test conditions that would be required, verifications, clinical pre- and post-assessments and regular check-ins, projected duration of PEMF use, and monitoring services, they calculated the final cost for the study per test subject to be between $35,000 and $55,000 for each subject. This yields a pretty solid cost range for the simplest type of PEMF study:
$35,000 x 360 = $12,600,000.00
$55,000 x 360 = $19,800,000.00
That sets the range of cost for a single, simple study: Does PEMF reduce back pain, YES or NO? Only one question, only one shot at it. Every time that you ask a different question, change the conditions of PEMF use, or look at a different clinical condition, basically its a new study that would cost somewhere in that range unless additional costs were incurred because of the need for something like imaging, or specialist consultation, such as radiologists, surgeons, etc.
That may seem shocking until you realize that Bill Pawluk was on the scientific advisory board for a PEMF company at around that time (2010 I think) that got significant investment for exactly such a study. Their study was somewhat more comprehensive than the one I describe above, and the final cost to the company, according to Bill, was $110 million. If I understood correctly, they did the study exactly as planned, spent the $110 million, and the results were not strong; only partly conclusive. I do not think it was enough for the FDA approval they were seeking for their product, and I think the company subsequently failed, was bought up at pennies on the dollar by a different group, rebranded, etc. I might have the details wrong, but I am pretty sure it did not end well.
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Answering question #2 (underlying reason why PEMF is very political in 2022).
I can only speculate, as I generally refrain from diving into the fray of PEMF marketing and hype, but it seems to me that this all started when the field of Energy Medicine was nearly killed (or strongly marginalized) by the Flexner report of 1910:
Electrotherapy and energy medicine in general had been well-established, but was firmly pushed out of mainstream medicine 122 years ago as a result of this report.
Colleges offering formal study in this area were closed, and it has remained robustly stigmatized since then.
Even when I was in graduate school, electro-medicine was strictly taboo in any respectable university. Even jokingly mentioning it came at a price, and I had been fully indoctrinated into that mindset.
This is exactly how I entered into my initial work at NASA-JSC: I was convinced that anything related to the therapeutic use of electricity or magnetism was absurd, and I would damn well prove it to those scientists at NASA. Or so I thought…
As you know, I followed the data, I was initially wrong, and I made some contributions to the field of PEMF mainly by strictly following the scientific method.
But, when something becomes taboo, there is always a fringe element of humanity that is drawn to it. And PEMF just happened to be so poorly designed that it was typically about the size of a suitcase, and it looked expensive, so the profit margins were huge. This attracted Charlatans and profiteers, the money was just too good.
Simultaneously, PEMF had been seriously studied in the old Soviet Eastern Bloc, and several companies had been set up in places like Romania to make Soviet-style ultra-crude PEMF systems, often using pre-vacuum tube technology (such as “spark gap” technology).
That’s the weird thing about PEMF: even crude and ultra-inefficient products appear to be relatively safe and somewhat effective, because evidently PEMF is broadly effective biologically.
This gave PEMF the flavor of forbidden taboo plus exotic secret science, which we still have to this very day. The successful marketing of PEMF with the commensurate huge margins is typically a function of a new spin on these strangely attractive factors: a new “secret frequency”, or some new spin on an old urban myth about PEMF. When some creative marketer hits upon a new formula, you see a new company emerge, their sales skyrocket for a few years, then they usually stabilize or die out. In fact, one such company that asked for my technical help when they started with their new marketing spin just told me last week that they were about to end their business, after hauling a few tens of millions of $$.
Because PEMF has this type of marketing culture, it gains and loses popularity in periodic pulses, sort of like short skirts. There is a fixed amount of money in the overall market for electro-medicine, so there is a push-and-pull in the overall market, where one technology gains popularity for a few years, then gives way to another, and so forth. For example, a number of years ago Bill Pawluk’s business partner informed me, matter-of-factly, that “light is the new thing, and PEMF is essentially dead in Europe.”
The problem with that premature obituary is that PEMF really works, so it will always make a comeback, sooner or later. And then, of course, we invariably have someone who, from time to time, makes outrageous claims about one form of energy medicine or another, they build a cult-like following, and then the bubble bursts, or worse, regulators step in.
So, I think a lot of the politicization and push-and-pull of various types of energy medicine is basically a function of these cyclic forces in the current culture of people who are interested in electro/energy medicine.
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when and if you know there is a new pemf company looking to setup, and they go to you for consulting help, do you consult with them or do you refuse their request? it’s too bad they have companies and people like that trying to hype the pemf field with their products. it only just makes it worse for the legit guys like you and makes it more difficult for new people to trust and try the tech.
Generally I give them advice, for free, to try to gently guide them toward building a legitimate PEMF business. Not every new company contacts me; some are just clear rip-off pirates, and several have set up shop off shore specifically to avoid me (and others) and to avoid the US legal system.
I am trying to raise the bar, both for technological effectiveness as well as business integrity. I do this by a combination of trying to be helpful while also fiercely competing with them with a reasonably-priced, high value PEMF product. I think this has contributed to the modest improvements in the PEMF market over the past 10 or 12 years.
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as the forum picks up traction, your momentum for good in the industry will only build up stronger/faster. thanks, as always, for everything you do!
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What are your thoughts on LifeWave X39 “stem cell activation patches” (https://startx39.com/)? They claim to use GHK-Copper petides to activate anti-inflammatory and tissue remodeling responses. Works by activating natural stem cell using thermal heat signature based on frequency spectrum and not internal assimilation process. Although traditional photobiomodulation laser devices make more sense and I don’t see peer reviewed studies, where the research is funded by the company. They of course claim there are patents and is used by military.
Thoughts on Radiant Life Technologies CoMra therapy photobiomodulation? Claim no known negative side effects.
RE: Stem Cell Activation Patches - Honestly, I don’t know anything about the product itself, but I can speak to the claim.
The claim that it is “used by the military” is a big red flag. Speaking as someone who has done funded research for the DoD for decades and who owns a company that developed a legitimate product used by many branches of the military (Cortical Metrics- Brain Gauge, military studies below **), the military will not officially use anything for health or medical applications that is not first approved by the FDA. The US military is the strictest organization in the word with regards to this policy. It resulted from the unfortunate history of experiments being done on servicemen in the not-too-distant past. They have since over-compensated and they are violently averse to using anything on anyone in military service unless it is approved by the FDA.
Now, please, do not send me a flood of conspiracy BS about ongoing secret military testing on human subjects. Do your homework before believing any of this nonsense. If you buy into this, please stop using this forum and go elsewhere.
The fact is, this is tightly controlled and you would not believe the amount of red tape required to get anything like this into the military.
Every case that I know of where the use of anything like this in the military is claimed (and I have chased down a few) it always turns out that it is just someone who knows a guy, who knows someone else who knows someone who retired from the military and he knows a guy who said some of the special forces guys he knows use this stuff and they love it.
Or, it’s just a guy in the reserves who takes a supplement or whatever on his /her own.
But if a company claims that they have any kind of formal arrangement for the use of their unapproved product in the military, that’s a clear sign they are lying to you.
** Military studies using Brain Gauge:
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RE: Photobiomodulation products, I am not the right person to comment on this technology, but maybe someone else on the forum knows something about these products.
They market the patches via a network marketing model, so it is questionable. The military claim does not list which military, but it appears might be an international military they had under an affiliated company (German army?) or a “veterans organization”?
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-1000591962
https://www.39eternalhealth.com/lifewave-honored-by-veteran-s-organization
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