From ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9108275: “We have recently published a pilot clinical trial (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02958930) showing that 2 months of daily in-home Transcranial Electromagnetic Treatment (TEMT) was completely safe and resulted in reversal of AD cognitive impairment…Transcranial Electromagnetic Treatment (TEMT) is a new bioengineering-based neuromodulatory approach that we have been clinically developing against AD that involves brain treatment with electromagnetic (radiofrequency) waves – not to be equated with magnetic-based neuromodulatory approaches such as Transcranial Electromagnetic Stimulation (tMS) or Pulsed Electromagnetic Stimulation (PEMF).” Okay, so the authors state that TEMT is not to be equated with PEMF… but how applicable would you say that the results of this trial are to ICES-PEMF?
The links you pasted in either do not work:
or they point to something completely unrelated to your question:
Sooooooo… using my crystal ball to descry enough details from what is available to try to give a coherent, relevant answer:
Very briefly: What they are using is radio frequency, therefore sine wave, more or less continuous, might be based on the work of Arthur Pilla, which was pretty good stuff IMO, but technically unrelated to PEMF (as the authors apparently note) and is even further away from (dissimilar to) ICES-PEMF.
Calibration of the scope of the discussion:
Bear in mind, all of electromagnetism, not even including ionizing radiation, is approximately 200,000,000 (200 million) times more diverse and complex than all of known chemistry throughout the universe:
https://www.josam.org/josam/article/view/67
Therefore, in my opinion, the way to think about electro-magnetic effects on biology is to understand that electro-magnetism comes in a huge number of very different forms, so it is probably incorrect to think that one form is necessarily similar to another in terms of its biological effects. That would be like thinking:
Pure Water is good for you
Water is a chemical that contains oxygen
Plutonium oxide is also a chemical, and it also contains oxygen…
So, is plutonium oxide also good for you? It bears some similarity to water.
This example, intentionally absurd, is meant to show that superficial similarities can lead you far astray when it comes to biological effects. What they are discussing in the paper that I think you are referencing is really very different from PEMF, and extremely different from ICES-PEMF, but that does not mean that one has a biological effect and the other does not, nor that one is good and the other is bad. They are just entirely different and need to be studied and considered separately.
Okay, thanks, Bob. Sorry the links didn’t work. What I was intending my query to ask was whether the positive results of the study could be presumed to be translatable to ICES-PEMF. Namaste
Though many systems seem to be beneficial, it is an unfortunate truth of electro-medicine including PEMF that results are not generalizable. But PEMF marketers will make any connection necessary to part you from your savings.
This generalization would be analogous to saying that “chemicals” are healthful, so everyone should eat “chemicals”
I am not kidding or exaggerating. I am actually understating the truth.
Hi Bob, all, I’m just curious, here’s a loaded response/question, so maybe I’m asking this somewhat rhetorically: how come in the world of pharma/bio-chemical, they can get very precise with “MOA’s” and “Pathways”, in terms of tracing them, recording and duplicating them, especially when blessings are needed from the 3-letter agencies. But by comparison, in the world of “bio-electro”, we’re not able to get that precise, nor have the ability to record, postulate or duplicate results between populations and subjects in nearly the same ways? Thanks.
@anthonyg36 check out these 2 past posts from @Bob
“PEMF signals cells to shift into a non-inflammatory, non-degenerative state. I hypothesize this is mediated through activation of trans-membrane receptors that sense either (1) aqueous ion flux, or (2) conformational distortion of bound charges, for example, bending or twisting a trans-membrane protein (just as an example). These effects arise from induced E fields acting on charges within the oligomolecular paramenbranous space, and may involve signals as small as single ions (similar to voltage gated channels). Currently we have no instruments to measure this low-level ion flux/displacement induced by an E field parallel to membranes, so no one has observed this effect directly (yet). Solve that one and you get a Nobel Prize. If you want two Nobel Prizes, like Marie Curie, then identify the target (my guess: G-proteins), molecular mechanism, and elicudate the second messenger cascade.”
Re: Patch Clamp "This new electrophysiological tool won the inventors the Nobel Prize in 1991. But it only measures voltage and ion flow across a membrane, not along a membrane surface. In fact, it is precisely because it is so effective at isolating and measuring across membrane voltage and ion flow that it completely shuts out the signals I hypothesize act along the membrane surface when PEMF is applied.
And by the way, this is not something where anyone just blithely “gives it a try”.
It takes months of intensive training just to get to the point where you stand a slim chance of being lucky enough to get one signal, maybe. Many people try to learn the technique, spend months on it, and can never really do it.
After a huge amount of very careful, skillful work, this one technique lead to a much deeper understanding of the importance of membrane ion channels in cellular physiology, which lead to further Nobel prize - level work.
This is why I believe that the discovery of the real mechanism that underlies PEMF will basically require at least 2 Nobel prizes, maybe more.
At least one Nobel Prize would be awarded for the scientific instrument itself, because it ill open up an entirely new field of cell science.
And at least one additional Nobel prize would be awarded for using this new instrument to elucidate the new and presently not detectable mechanism(s) by which PEMF actually works at the cellular level.
As far as using patch clamping to measure cellular voltage changes when using PEMF, that would be at best a secondary measure of the effect of PEMF, not a direct measure of the mechanism.
The amount of real, hard, precise scientific work that will be needed to invent this new tool and sort out this new aspect of biology will be many lifetimes of serious, dedicated work. I am pretty sure we are not going to arm-chair science this one. This is why the subject (mechanisms of PEMF) remains so wide open to wild speculation. We are a very long way from understanding it in my opinion. Most people do not even understand what they need to understand to begin to develop an understanding of what we do not yet know. So charlatans run wild.
Yeah, what I said…
Thanks to @TajD for pulling all of that together into a coherent response and thereby saving me a few hours of re-writing.