Drawn to Magnets – Daily News

Magnets are attracting something new:  attention of the medical community

By SUSAN FERRARO

Daily News Staff Writer Tuesday, June 22, 1999

The force is with them — magnets, that is. Just ask Carole Barsky. “I have severe arthritis in my spine, and osteoporosis, and a couple of problems with discs,” says Barsky, 56, a former bookkeeper who lives in Manhattan. A few months ago, she tried applying “little magnets.”

Almost at once, her pain plummeted to less than half of what it had been. And there’s been an unexpected benefit: Barsky has been able to quit all other pain medication.

“The magnet shoe insoles helped the lower back and legs, but the magnet dots — wherever you put them, they work,” says Barsky, a student at New York University. Her physical therapist is impressed, too: “She’s ordered them for herself.”

Sole magnets    

Slap ‘em on sore shoulder muscles. Stick ‘em in a headband if you have a headaches. Slip a magnet over the small of your back for lower back pain. Snap on a magnet bracelet, or step along with a magnet-studded liner in your shoe.

Permanent magnets — the kind used to stick snapshots to the refrigerator — are suddenly hot stuff. And after decades of discounting them as medicine-show quackery, establishment researchers say they really do seem to ease some kinds of pain.

At New York Medical College, Dr. Michael I. Weintraub is studying how insole magnets relieve burning, tingling and numbness in the feet of diabetics, a serious condition called peripheral neuropathy.

In Texas, Massachusetts and Tennessee, academics report magnets can relieve postpolio discomfort, the achy muscles of fibromyalgia and pain from sports and accident injuries.

Curiosity and compelling but unofficial testimonials drive the research. Golf and tennis pros tout magnets. Horse trainers reportedly use them on equine athletes. A certain pro football team is said to sit on magnet bench pads.

And there are others, like Dorothy LaCombe, 53. An inventory processor for a drug company in Hamburg, N.Y., LaCombe picked up a $19.95 magnet bracelet in Florida to alleviate painful arthritis in her hand, arm and knee.

“Then I stopped it, and it took two weeks, but when the pain came back, it came back with a vengeance,” LaCombe says. “It kept me up in the night, so I put the bracelet back on and it was gone in four hours.”

Big business is not indifferent to such developments. Homedics Inc., a Michigan company that makes the magnets LaCombe and Barsky use, says the U.S. magnet market has zoomed to $150 million a year, up from almost nothing in 1996. Worldwide, magnets are a $1 billion business.

Homedics magnets, sold in drug and department stores, start at $9.99 for 20 reusable “magna-dot” stick-ons —prices rise from there for back and leg wraps. The Japanese company Nikken sells door to door, charging $18 to $90 for magnet products.

No permanent magnets have been granted Food and Drug Administration approval, and some people aren’t buying. Joan Ferrante, a New Jersey nurse, tried magnets on hip bursitis that set in after a car accident.

“I had them in my mattress, in a hip pack, in my car seat, in my shoes,” says Ferrante, 60. “It didn’t work. It was the same pain. I was very disappointed. It did not help at all.”

But the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health is following formal studies on how magnets affect migraine and muscle aches.

In New Haven, Dr. Lloyd Saberski, a Yale University pain expert now in private practice, is enrolling people in a double-blind, or scientifically foolproof, study of magnets and their impact on lower back pain.

“Deep down inside, I believe magnets work,” Saberski says. But before he will prescribe them, he says, “I need to substantiate them in a way that other M.D.’s, the scientific docs, will recognize.”

To some, the benefits of permanent magnets are old news. Ancient Chinese physicians wrote about the healing properties of certain “stones” if applied to key points of the body — the “meridians” of acupuncture.

Magnets remain a common medical treatment in Asia, but Western physicians and scientists generally scorn them as gimmickry more suited to con men than to true healers.

The body, experts say, has its own magnetism: Cells generate magnetic fields, says Dr. Leo Galland, a traditionally trained Manhattan internist who integrates Eastern, herbal and other alternative approaches.

But no one knows what might make magnets work, and that makes scientists doubtful. Among the theories: They increase circulation, affect minerals like calcium, attract iron in the blood or interact with the pineal gland in the brain.

Researchers also like to limit variables when they assess treatments, and magnets have many. Most are multipolar, with both north and south poles, but debate swirls around the possible danger of unipolar magnets.

Strengths vary, too. Magnets are measured in gauss units — a refrigerator magnet is about 10 gauss. Weintraub uses 475-gauss magnets in his foot studies. Homedics dots are 1,000 gauss. Galland uses 3,500-gauss magnets on mild sprains.

Most alarming, sweeping claims about unproven benefits rightly raise establishment hackles. Some promoters have even said magnets cure cancer. That’s wrong, says Dr. William Pawluk, a family physician in New Jersey.

Pawluk, who has done extensive reviews of European magent studies, says magnets are a powerful “supportive” therapy for everything from arthritis to bruises, swellings, headaches and the toxic effects of chemotherapy, all without side effects.

But studies on human cancer cells exposed to magnetic energy found “it didn’t make any difference,” Pawluk says. “I definitely would not recommend permanent magnet therapy at this time as something taken to cure anything.”

Less Pain Is Still a Gain

Dr.Phil Hariram,

Arthritis Guide.