Flux Health Forum

Thoughts on PEMF Manufacturers

PEMF Basics
#86

when i first discovered pemf, i was referred to this site to get familiar without spending a ton of money just to experiment:
https://www.aurorasky.net//html/pemf_bob_beck.html

i don’t know if he still sells, you can contact him. the Bob Beck pemf device is basic and effective in helping my wife with her lower back pain that she had been dealing with for 2 years on and off that she had needed to go to physical therapy for. sleeping on the coil one night for rid of the nagging pain and from there i began my pemf search, research and experimenting.

if you’ve never worked with pemf, you might find some immediate benefit with this simple under 150$ device and coils…

good luck on your journey of exploration!

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#87

Again, thank you for sharing this. It’s just a bit scary for me to use something like this, I’m also way too foggy brained to undertake something like this despite it probably being fairly simple to put together and operate for the non foggers. I think I’ve found a way to legally avoid paying extortionate custom charges so I’ll hopefully be getting the M1 sometime hopefully in the not too distant future…

#88

i was fortunate you have a friend build one and after trying it out gave me theirs… as clear headed as i am, i have no patience nor knack for working with my hands and following instructions.

he used to sell completed products but dunno if that’s still the case.

anyway, glad you are getting an m1.

I’ve recently decided to experiment with application of m1 to my brain. will see how that goes! :crossed_fingers:t4::upside_down_face:

#89

@OptimalHealth, what are the parameters of your experiment? I have used the m1 all over my brain. It definitely will stop headaches, but I don’t notice much of anything else, but perhaps we have less to tweak as after multiple years, we have also moved to a low inflammatory life for the most part after solving for gut health, diet, sunshine, clear air, clean water and clean food.

#90

location placement of stacked coils and single… and power…

maybe it was a fluke, but my watch monitors sleep patterns (Garmin)… over the last 2 mos my 5-5.5h sleeps have resulted in “poor quality of sleep” showing shorter lengths of deep, light, and rem sleep patterns with frequent and longer wake up periods.

my sleep schedule is erratic and maybe this is a fluke… will have to test some more 5-5.5 hours of sleep. when i slept a 5h cycle, my watch reported back a fair quality sleep despite then many periods of 5h without pemf on forehead. looking at the results my period for light, deep and rem were notably longer.

i need to see if this was a fluke and have not had an opportunity to try again on forehead.

I’ve never tried coils on forehead during sleep either. only reason i tried this time was that i wanted to focus on possibly improving functions of that part of the brain. https://youtu.be/1CCNldjSEXs

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#91

following up on sleep experiment here

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#92

I have about 6 years of experience using the Bemer, which is a very low-gauss device that has a “whole body” pad and a couple of smaller applicators.

My experience has been that, from the usual general list of PEMF marketing claims, it does one thing very well, one thing probably well, and other things are a fail.

First, here’s all the results that that are advertized about PEMF in general, that I DIDN’T get:
no observable increase in recovery time from exercise.
no observable increase in general energy levels.
no observable increase in healing injured of muscles and tendons.
no observable results in healing skin conditions.
no observable decrease in inflammation of any kind.

Here’s the one thing that its obviously stellar at doing, imo:

I guess you could describe it as adjunct therapy. Whatever you put into your body that’s supposed to have a palpable effect, it obviously and greatly increases how palpable it will be.

A couple of examples:

I got the device immediately after spending a few weeks at a Gerson therapy center, while recovering from cancer, chemo and radiation.

A part of my holistic protocol was regular injections of Coley’s vaccine. This is a cancer-fighting modality that’s supposed to ramp up your body’s immune system by basically making you feel really sick. If the vaccine doesn’t make you feel sick, the dose is too low. it turns out that even with very large doses, I wasn’t getting any reaction, so basically, i was maxing out on it, and it wasn’t working. Then one day, I injected the regular dose, and immediately after, got on the Bemer. The vaccine had a profound effect that time - and every subsequent time that I paired the two. It seems that the Bemer potentiated the Coley’s vaccine.

Since then, I’ve been always on the lookout for ways to test this with other substances. Another example is weed. Rick Simpson Oil is another healing modality that I tried during that time, and I noticed that when I take a dose that would otherwise get me mildly high, but I pair it with a Bemer applied to the head, I get significantly more high. Again, a potentiating effect.

Another way in which it may have had a potentiating effect, is in making great nutrition more effective and bio-available. Gerson Therapy involves consuming massive amounts of fresh vegetable juices, and a whole lot of supplementation. I have no direct evidence that the juices and supplementation were potentiated by the Bemer, but I’m still here, feeling quite healthy and cancer free, so maybe there’s something to that.

And the one thing that it PROBABLY does well: I think it might be boosting my immune system. I have no direct evidence for this, but I tend not to pick up colds/flus/viruses from other people, even with my history of chemo-therapy, which tends to have a long-lasting negative effect on the immune system. I wonder if using the Bemer for 6 years has had something to do with that. I have a pretty good diet/lifestyle otherwise, so it’s hard to say what is the driver.

I believe that the above benefits come by way of blood de-clumping and/or increased vasomotion. I’m guessing it has a positive effect on blood circulation in some way. Just kind of an intuitive guess.

Just starting with the M1 this week. Looking forward to seeing what kind of effects I get with this device, in areas where the Bemer fell short.

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My personal brain entrainment results
Bemer Question
#93

This is excellent information, exactly what we need, thanks.

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#94

As a further thought, one thing that I have realized as I have worked with PEMF over the past few decades is that it seems to be used by a lot of people, especially clinicians, as an adjunct to other clinical strategies. I have come to believe that PEMF may be one of the most effective interventions available, and works to enhance the effectiveness of almost everything else.

I have had more than a hundred clinicians remark to me, almost off-handedly, that when they add PEMF to another approach they are trying, that “it all just seems to work a lot better.”

They usually leave it at that. But this observation is very wide spread. A few years ago I did a survey of clinicians, and you can read about their uses for PEMF here:
https://www.josam.org/josam/article/view/69

The comments related to using PEMF as an adjunct can be found on questions #6, #7, #8, and #11 in the paper.

Generally, most clinicians (about 2/3 of them) observed improved outcomes when PEMF was combined with almost any other strategy.

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#95

This article seems relevant as well.

#96

That’s an interesting survey. I found the answers for “side effects” very educational.

And yes, the proprietor of the Gerson Therapy center that I attended said the same: it just made everything else about the therapy work more effectively. He put every patient on the Bemer, and encouraged everyone to buy one for home use. Of course, he was a part of the Bemer MLM, so he had a huge bias.

#97

yes, I hear that MLM is pretty much like a cult. Need to be a bit cautious.

Diving into the technical speculation: It’s my scientific opinion that PEMF likely acts at several different cellular/molecular levels by different mechanisms. BEMR is very different from most other PEMF devices, and utterly different from ICES-PEMF. Thus, they may elicit one of the important effects of PEMF, but not all of them. I think that is generally true for the various different forms of PEMF that seem to work, but somewhat differently for different applications.

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#98

Here’s a study which adds weight to your experience of PEMF increasing the therapeutic benefit of the vaccine - Enhanced effect of combining bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMMSCs) and pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF) to promote recovery after spinal cord injury in mice - Huang - 2022 - MedComm - Wiley Online Library

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#99

Interesting! I see the parallel!

#100

Pawluk has a device on his website FlexPulse, how does it compare to ICES products? Pawluk is listed on Almagia’s website (endorsement?) and how their tech compare to ICES products? Anyone have experience with either of these companies?

#101

FP was developed by Pawluk’s business partner when they decided not to promote our ICES-PEMF because their profit margin would not be enough. So, they basically tried to knock off our technology, build it cheap in Eastern Europe, put it in a shiny plastic case, and sell it for more than three times our MSRP. I know they had pretty bad technical problems with the FP product because many of their customers ended up contacting us for technical support because they were not responding. They had a very serious quality problem, but I’m just not interested in managing the warranty problems for a competing company that essentially pirated my technology because I price capped it to protect the consumer from price gouging… Anyway, do whatever you want with that information.

Almagia: My opinions - Their tech is based on very out-dated soviet magnetic technology from the 1960’s, and the company itself is one of those that is known to focus on the hustle and hype of PEMF. They have recently done a corporate make-over and the CEO has been trying to connect with me on LinkedIn for some reason, but I have no interest because I believe they bring nothing of value to the table. This is the kind of company that will get PEMF listed as “massage device” with the FDA to take advantage of a regulatory loophole rather than just being honest about what they have.

Either of these product lines probably work (most commercial PEMF does, more or less), so if that is what you want, there is certainly plenty of it out there. Caveat Emptor.

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Almag (Russian)
#102

What is best for inflammation and cartilage repair? Radio-wave frequency (rife pemf) or something else?

#103

We should definitely know the answer to this (and many similar) questions by now… but we don’t.

Why?:

Marketers have filled the information space with fraudulent claims about this topic.

Mainstream scientists have pretty much ignored it.

Clinicians claim that whatever device they happen to have in their clinic works pretty well (?), and they will be happy to treat you for about $100 for a 20-minute session.

My opinion:

Radio frequency energy might have some benefits, but any solid evidence for this is sketchy and inconsistent. The biological effects of radio frequencies remains very controversial.

Rife… maybe, I have my doubts, but some clinicians swear by it.

PEMF in general (all forms) seems to be helpful, but once again, evidence is sketchy and inconsistent. There is a huge body of published scientific work on the subject of PEMF, but I have evaluated it in detail and I conclude that approximately 97% of all published scientific papers on PEMF are irreproducible, meaning that they do not include enough methodological detail for anyone to actually repeat and verify the experiment, meaning that these papers are essentially useless.

This is my biased opinion based on solid, repeatable experiments done at a third-party certified testing laboratory (CRL):

ICES®-PEMF reduces inflammation by at least 62% in the rat carageenan challenge model, which is the gold standard for identifying new anti-inflammatory drugs and devices. These results are further supported by subsequent dose-response testing of ICES®-PEMF in a certified testing laboratory. The conclusion of the Director of Inflammation Studies at CRL was:

“Your device (ICES®-PEMF) has a much greater effect on the reduction of inflammation than any other electro-magnetic device we have tested, which is pretty much all of the commercially available ones”.

Note: this was their conclusion when the studies were conducted (2013), but better PEMF systems have entered the market since then. Also, I do not think they comprehensively tested all PEMF devices on the market. So, I would caution that their conclusions apply only to those PEMF systems that had actually been submitted for testing before 2013.

These test results meet the highest scientific standards (independent, certified, GLP testing to accepted industrial and scientific standards) and are all verifiable, so why don’t I post them all over the Internet? Because the moment I do so, PEMF marketers will take a screen shot of them, then post them on their website as “proof” that their PEMF product works, even though this testing had nothing to do with their specific PEMF device. Therefore, I make these independent ICES-PEMF test results available in full only to legitimate scientists, not the general public. These studies have been published in part as a doctoral dissertation, and I will eventually publish these results in a scientific paper, but that takes time and there are more details to finish before it is ready. But the results are very solid:

ICES-PEMF significantly reduces inflammation.

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#104

Hi Bob, have you tested a randomized pattern that would be similar to a tRNS (transcranial random noise stimulation)? Is there a possibility it would be a feature on future devices?

#105

Yes I have. But it did not seem to confer a benefit more than a deterministic series of pulse patterns, so I do not include that feature in current ICES-PEMF devices. Reason: The internal microcontroller has limited memory. I already use the largest memory capacity variant of the microcontroller, and the current firmware pretty much uses up all of the available memory, so any feature that is added means that I have to remove another feature. It’s an endless trade-off.

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