Bill Pawluk and I discuss this frequently. In general, I defer to Dr. Pawluk’s clinical observations when it comes to PEMF and health. He has a lot more experience than I do, and a lot more than anyone else I know.
However, he does not have a lot of technical training as a physicist or engineer. So, while he makes an observation such as “more power = better clinical effects”, the technical details of his observation are, in my opinion, not quite accurate. He does, in fact, have some incorrect opinions on the basic technical details relating to the physics of PEMF. To people like me these are important details, but they do not really undermine my confidence in his clinical skill or observations.
Let me give you an example:
Let’s say he uses more power and observes better clinical effects. Therefore he makes the reasonable conclusion that “more power = better clinical effects”
However, if I measure the same PEMF system (as I have done) and determine that the changes made when increasing power also include changes to the waveform shape (which is what I have observed), then if I design a PEMF system to eliminate the effects of higher Gauss while retaining the fundamental change that resulted in the more beneficial waveform shape (this is the exercise I did when evolving ICES gen 2.0 to 6.0), and I do the science, the engineering, remove all the extraneous energy from the signal, isolate its components, and identify the ones that have biological effects and those that do not, now I am in a position to say:
“What matters is the magnetic slew rate and the duration of that slew rate, not peak magnetic field.”
RECONCILIATION:
Dr Pawluk correctly observes an improved effect when increasing magnetic field amplitude using typical commercial-grade PEMF systems.
Bob does a lot of calculus and many experiments and determines that the peak magnetic field intensity is a secondary consequence of the more important parameters as I have described above and elsewhere in great detail, and many experiments bear this out.
Therefore, we are both correct, but Dr. Pawluk does not understand the technical details of how the magnetic field intensity relates to the more fundamental magnetic waveform parameters as described above and elsewhere. That’s fine, that is not his job. As a clinician, he is more or less constrained to use the tools he has available, which, in the case of commercial PEMF systems, are typically highly inefficient and poorly characterized by their manufacturers. In general, PEMF systems do not allow fine control of the fundamental waveform parameters. The only knobs are “Intensity” and “Frequency”, so it is easy to make the mistake that these are the key parameters, and that the PEMF system controls them precisely and in isolation from all other parameters. But this is not the case.
The same argument is fundamentally the case for our apparent disagreement on the matter of '“frequency”, which, in my opinion, is not a critical parameter, but at a clinical level it will appear to be.
These are not disagreements. They are differences in technical perspective.