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Natural Health Magazine, August,
1998
Natural Healing—By Sarah Fremerman
New Evidence is giving credence to this curious form
of pain relief—and may be silencing long-time critics in the process.
Meet Magnet, P.I.
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In
1993, a patient of Carlos Vallbona, M.D., told him that a cushion made with
small magnets had cured his lower back pain. Vallbona was skeptical. “I
thought it was a psychological effect,” he recalls. “There was
nothing in the scientific literature that indicated magnets were helpful.”
At the time, most scientists would have agreed and some, like William Jarvis,
Ph.D., executive director of the National Council Against Health Fraud,
still do. “There’s a lot of huckstering going on,” Jarvis
says. “Marketers are making extravagant claims for which there is no
evidence.”
Physicians and scientists ridiculed magnet therapy with good reason. Until
last year, there was not a speck of scientific evidence showing that magnets
did what patients–and magnet manufacturers–claimed they did. In
fact, one informal study, conducted at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York in
1991 by physical therapist Benjamin Gelfand, tracked a group of 24 patients
suffering from bursitis, tendonitis, and lower back pain. The patients wore
magnets 12 hours a day for up to six weeks and none experienced any pain
relief that could be attributed to the magnets. Gelfand concluded that magnet
therapy merited no further investigation.
But magnet therapy wouldn’t go away. Anecdotal evidence continued to
mount, despite the inability of science to explain how magnets worked. Chronic
pain sufferers like Vallbona’s patient, went on claiming that magnets
worked for them. Consider these three stories:
•Golfer
Jim Colbert’s chronic back pain forced him to quit playing professionally.
Then a fellow player recommended magnet therapy. “When you have the
kind of back I have, you try anything,” says Colbert, who returned
to professional golf four years later. He now straps several magnets to
his back when he plays and sleeps on a magnetic mattress pad every night.
Today he is one of the top–ranked players on the circuit.
•Ryan
Vermillion, physical therapist and athletic trainer for the Miami Dolphins,
says he regularly treats football players with magnets, including quarterbacks
Craig Erickson and Dan Marino. Vermillion says that although there’s
no way to be sure magnets are helping the players’ injuries to heal
more quickly, he has noticed differences since he started treating them
with magnets three years ago.
“The players are saying they’re feeling better, but there are
also objective things,” Vermillion explains. “After applying the
magnets you will get some decrease in swelling, or changes in post–surgical
swelling or hematomas. You can actually see the swelling decrease faster.”
•Gail
Banta of Weymouth, Mass., suffered from bursitis in her hips and arthritis
in her back for 11 years. She had fibromyalgia, a painful neuro-muscular
condition whose cause is unknown. When her husband told her what he had
heard about magnets from a hunting guide in Canada, she decided to order
a magnetic mattress pad. The result astonished her.
“In one week of sleeping on the pad, my backache was gone.” Banta
says she had been taking 12 pills a day for pain since the onset of her
condition and that she had stopped needing them within two weeks of purchasing
the mattress pad. (She was so impressed that she became a distributor
for a Japanese magnet company that sells products in the United States).
Facts
in Favor
After hearing story after story like these from his patients, Vallbona,
the director of the Post–Polio Clinic at the Institute for Rehabilitation
and Research, affiliated with
Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, was interested enough to attend a 1994
conference on the effects of magnetic fields. What he learned led him to
suspect there might be something to magnet therapy after all. He and his
colleague Carleton Hazelwood, M.D., designed a double–blind study to
test the effect of magnets on 50 patients suffering from pain associated
with post–polio syndrome. What he found piqued the interest of even
the staunchest critics of magnet therapy.
In the study, Vallbona examined the effects of one specific type of magnet
known as a “concentric circles” magnet. He had some subjects hold
these permanent magnets (permanent magnets have a static magnetic field)
on points where they felt the most intense pain, and others hold inactive
magnets. All were told to keep them in place for 45 minutes. After the magnets
were removed, seventy–five percent of the patients who used active
magnets reported a significant reduction in pain. Only 19 percent of the
patients in the control group, however, experienced even a small decrease
in pain. No side effects were reported. Vallbona published these results
in the November 1997 issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Vallbona’s study did not explore how long this effect might last, but
he has continued to follow the progress of participants, and the preliminary
results look promising. “Many patients reported that the effect lasted
not only hours, but days, weeks, even months in some cases,” he says.
“So we have the impression that the relief brought about by the magnets
is lasting longer than relief by painkilling drugs.”
Vallbona is no the only researcher finding promising results. In a controlled
setting, neurobiologist Alvaro Pascual–Leone, M.D., Ph.D., and his
colleagues at Harvard Medical School treated 17 severely depressed patients
with a technique called “rapid–rate transcranial magnetic stimulation.”
The treatment involves using an electromagnet–produced by running an
electric current through a coil of wire–to stimulate the activities
of certain areas of the brain. After five daily sessions of the treatment,
11 of the 17 patients showed a marked improvement that lasted for two weeks
after the treatments and no on reported significant adverse effects. Pascual–Leone
published his findings in the July 1996 issue of the Lancet.
Several related studies on electromagnetic brain stimulation, including
one at the National Institutes of Health, are currently exploring the use
of this technique to treat a range of neurological disorders, including
epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and even learning disabilities. Ann
Gill Taylor, director of the Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative
Therapies in Charlottesville, Virginia, has just begun a year–long
study designed to investigate the effect of using static magnetic fields
to treat 100 patients suffering from fibromyalgia.
Although intrigued by research results, Gelfand and Jarvis say they are
still waiting for more scientific evidence that magnet therapy works. The
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which as not approved the use
of permanent magnets to treat pain, has approved several independent review
boards to track current research in the field.
Leading
Theories
No one knows for sure how magnetic fields interact with the human body.
But there are a few leading theories:
Blood flow
Experts agree that magnets probably help increase blood flow to a painful
area of the body, which carries more oxygen to the region, decreases inflammation,
and relieves pain. According to biophysicist Marko Markov, Ph.D., magnets
probably stimulate blood flow because blood is composed of positively and
negatively charged particles. Markov recently conducted a study–which
has not yet been published–that found a substantially increased blood
flow to an area of a horse’s leg where a magnet was applied.
Pain perception
Vallbona suggests that the magnetic field may affect pain receptors in the
painful area, eliciting a slight anesthetic effect, or that the magnetic
field might be transmitted via blood vessels to the brain, which then releases
endorphins, chemicals that act as natural pain relievers.
Theories are one thing, facts are another, which is why Vallbona has plans
for further research on magnets. In the meantime, since he completed his
study with the post–polio patients, he has been successfully treating
his own injured shoulder with two small magnets. And he now takes along
several magnets whenever he travels–just in case he needs them.
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