A podcast was just posted by CJ (in Dubai), on our discussion of PEMF, which some of you may find interesting:
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GAH! haha…i ended up listening to the hyperbaric chamber podcast from the link above instead of the one with Bob Dennis! 
here’s the direct link so if you’re not paying attention like me and you end up listening to the latest podcast that would not feature the pemf one with Bob:
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@Bob that was an interesting observation and explanation for how pemf works by signaling messages to the cells than the hypothesis of “charging them like batteries” like most marketers claim. so is the message to heal in the range of frequencies used? also, shouldn’t one pattern chosen for healing signal the same kind of healing in a different part of the body, say a joint, for a similar kind of problem? lastly, what have you observed or heard that the high powered pemf machines can benefit the body that your low energy pemf can’t do or can’t do well?
p.s.
one thing I have noticed other than healing seems faster on fresh injuries than old injuries… everytime I’ve used pemf for my 10yo for joint pain, bruises, inflammation, etc, he seems to heal or resolve the symptoms literally within 15 to 30 mins of use! I’m surprised everytime even tho it’s been the 10th+time using it on him. and i always ask him if he’s making it up just to make me happy haha… and everytime, he demonstrates and i confirm that the injury (pain) has resolved by doing the action that would evoke the pain.
has this been anyone else’s observations with younger kids or anyone else in particular?
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excellent questions. The nuance in this discussion is to figure out exactly how the message (information) of PEMF is encoded in such a way that it is interpreted by cells that results in beneficial cellular behavior.
This gets really technical (I am a remorseless uber-nerd) but I think it can be explained in fairly simple terms this way:
Message encoding is by frequency, but not the simple frequency that PEMF marketers talk about, the one that is expressed as “Hertz”, which basically translates to pulses per second. The real frequency of importance for messaging is the frequency content of the pulses themselves. Ultra-nerds will recognize this as wavelet transformations of individual pulses, which give frequency and phase information on individual pulses. It may be sufficient to do a windowed Fourier transformation on the individual pulses, but then some additional phase information would probably be necessary as well.
Now that it sounds very confusing, let’s step back and re-think it a bit, because conceptually it is easier than that sounds. This is because the physiology of living organisms do energy and information encoding transformations all the time. One simple example is hearing: our inner ear transforms sound pressure into vibrational waves along the basilar membrane, which causes depolarization of the hair cells connected to the membrane. This is a mechanical transformation of sound energy from pressure waves to membrane vibrations, then an electrophysiological transformation into individual action potentials. The magic is that different hair cells, at different positions along the basilar membrane, detect different pitches of sound (frequencies) because of their location along the basilar membrane: thus sound frequency in the air is transfrmed by physiology and anatomy into spatially-distributed action potentials in the inner ear. This means that we hear different frequencies of sound because the different frequencies activate different locations in the inner ear. This is a transformation of sound information from frequency to spatial encoding. Other features in the special senses and the general nervous system work this way as well. Information is transformed by living structures from one form of encoding to another.
By analogy, it is my hypothesis that PEMF encodes information to cells in a similar way. Very briefly, cells and tissues respond to adaptive mechanical stresses by changing their expression of genes and their metabolism, and these are very basic and primitive mechanisms that guide growth, development, and recovery from injury.
Hypothesis: these adaptive mechanical stresses are encoded by paramembranous aqueous ion flux. This has not been proven, but it can be shown by calculation to be a real effect at the ionic level, and the basic mechanisms (such as voltage gates) are known to exist, and there are plenty of structures in the cell membrane that could mediate this (such as G-proteins). But we have not been able to actually measure this yet.
This is one of the holy grails of physiology: to find and prove this mechanism. I think this is at least part of the explanation.
But if this mechanism is happening, then it basically means that mechanotransduction in cells is mediated in part by ions flowing past (not just through) cell membranes. That means that the physiology of complex living organisms transforms information about mechanical energy (such as the load on tissues) into ion flux along cell membranes.
Now here is the magic: There is more than one way to induce ion flow in solution. One way is squeezing it mechanically, but another way is to apply an electrical field.
The trick is to apply the electrical field in such a way that it looks like the ions are being driven in the paramembranous space by mechanical forces (what the body is trying to detect), but it is actually being driven by electrical fields, and these can be induced by magnetic pulses of the correct shape.
Therefore, the information encoded in PEMF is related to the waveform pulse shape, not the “frequency” of the pulses themselves.
That’s the point I have been trying to get across. But it is nuanced, not simple. And of course, I might be wrong about all of this. Something entirely different might be happening.
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this is exactly the same thing I have experienced with myself and my kids when they get injured. Thousands of people have told me the same thing as well.
I think what is happening here is simply that one form of swelling/inflammation that causes a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering is that we as primates respond to every bump and bruise as if it were a threat of death by septic infection. Our world has changed, but we as organisms have not. We do not need to respond to every bruise with an all-out immune response. For some unknown reason, PEMF seems to quickly stop this ancient response to injury, but we do not have a drug that does quite the same thing as PEMF.
Nonetheless, yes, indeed, I see it and hear it all the time.
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it is only bc of what i learned/understood of how you have observed in pemf and the body that i have more deliberately adjusted the power on my device for treatment! it’s not so much that i didn’t believe you when you said sometimes less is more…i think understanding pemf as a messenger or as a means of sending information to the cells made sense and really sunk in for me to try.
that said, you had suggested in other posts that high intensity pemf systems do seem to show benefit in addition to your low powered, efficient devices.
are there benefits to be had that differ from your lower powered devices? i have heard some claim that a short session of higher powered devices seem to need fewer treatments. could it be the messages are different in high vs low powered devices?
thanks
This is a very interesting topic: should you use high-intensity clinical PEMF, low-intensity (properly designed and efficient) personal PEMF, or both?
As it turns out, I am writing a paper on this right now. I surveyed 421 people at a recent scientific meeting (before the pandemic) and this was one of the questions I asked. The response was this:
The way to interpret this is that most people (~83% of individuals and clinicians) have not tried using both clinical and portable PEMF, but of those who have tried combinations of both (~16%), more than 2/3 find that using BOTH results in better outcomes than using either one alone.
This was a survey done in a pretty hard-core group of alternative medicine adherents (ACIM 2019), and they probably pay closer attention than the average person to the effects of various alternative modalities. So it is interesting to me that 2/3 of them see a synergistic beneficial effect when they combine both clinical and portable PEMF.
This may be because the two different approaches are really just doing the same thing biologically, albeit more completely. Or it may be that they elicit different biological mechanisms. Or it may be that the larger systems kick-start the process (whatever it is), then the personal, portable systems used daily effectively reinforce the initial effects of the larger systems. I don’t think this is clear at this point. I just want people to know the options concerning what might work best for them individually.
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thank you, this was helpful(the anecdotal data) 
helped me off the fence…
I see the same effect with my children, and a few people have observed the same thing:
Almost immediate relief from acute injuries.
This has happened every time I have used it for my kids (10-20 minutes to resolution) except one time that my 11-year-old son had a bad biking incident, and he did not get immediate relief. But after a few hours he had pretty much forgotten the incident and the pain.
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CJ just posted the full transcript of the podcast/interview here:
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I just had a very good interview with Damon Ernst on PEMF basics and to a certain extent the use of ozone. This is part of a series, and they are being posted this week, and will be available here:
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