Magnet therapy doesn’t work

Of course you knew that, but a British Medical Journal review of several studies has just confirmed it, according to the BBC. Interestingly, the team also warns of the waste of money spent on expensive and unproven therapies like magnets – money better spent on therapies that actually work. Well said! And a lot of money is wasted this way - $1 billion worldwide, according to the article. Remember that the next time altie practitioners say they haven’t the money to do proper studies.

Of course, double-blind studies into magnet therapies are difficult to do because it is usually pretty easy for the patient to be able to tell if they have the magnet of the placebo: the placebo doesn’t attract key rings and other metal items. One study was able to get around this:

The team does refer to one study on the effects of carpal tunnel syndrome - a painful wrist condition - in which the magnets and the sham treatments were boxed so they could not be identified.

In this, they said, there was no statistical difference between patients with real and sham magnets, with both reporting an improvement in their condition.

Quackwatch agrees, quoting a study from the New York College of Podiatric Medicine and one from the VA Medical Center in Prescott, Arizona – both showing no difference between the real magnets and the sham. Quackwatch concludes:

There is no scientific basis to conclude that small, static magnets can relieve pain or influence the course of any disease. In fact, many of today's products produce no significant magnetic field at or beneath the skin's surface.

Even if it did, the human body is not especially magnetic. Well, unless you’re this guy.

And keep that MRI machine away from me too!

Comments

[pvandck]

It didn't need any money at all to show that magnet therapy doesn't work. All it needed was for someone to point out that a person, and each constituent part thereof, is not ferro-magnetic (unless includes surgically implanted, or swallowed, steel bits and bobs. If blood, for example, were magnetic (on the basis that it contains a form of iron) then any part of a human body placed in an MRI scanner would explode. The best analogy I've heard was from Dr Ben Goldacre (Bad Science blog) in an inteview, when he asked why anyone visiting a car scrap yard doesn't get yanked up into the sky by the big magnet they use for picking up the scrap vehicles. But public ignorance is there to be exploited for a buck or two, as is well known by all quacks and medical scammers.

[Prometheus]

Actually, oxygenated haemoglobin is diamagnetic (is slightly repelled by a magnetic field) and deoxygenated haemoglobin is paramagnetic (slightly attracted to magnetic fields) - this is how fMRI can discriminate between oxygenated and unoxygenated (or deoxygenated) blood.

Using this information - and ignoring the knowledge that the overall magnetic attraction of blood cells is effectively nil (if it weren't, MRI's would be fatal) - then we could expect that magnets would attract unoxygenated blood and repell oxygenated blood.

This would create an effect exactly the opposite of what is claimed by the purveyors of "therapeutic" magnets. Oxygenated blood would be repelled from the treated area and deoxygenated blood would be attracted, decreasing tissue oxygenation.

Of course, the magnets used in most "magnet therapy" items are barely magnetic, being similar to refrigerator magents, which are designed to have a very shallow magnetic field (to avoid demagnetizing credit cards).

And, as mentioned before, the magnetic susceptibility of blood is far too low to create any movement of blood even in the intense (1 - 6 Tesla - about 10,000 to 60,000 times the magnetic field of the earth) magnetic fields found in clinical MRI scanners.

But how nice that someone wasted the research time and money to prove what any thinking person would have known from readily available information.

Prometheus.

[Ian B Gibson]

Why is the guy in the photo leaning backwards?

[Magnet therapy]

Check out this introduction article on Magnet therapy:
Magnet therapy
Content:
* 1 Magnetic therapy’s benefits
* 2 Criticism
* 3 Magnetic products
* 4 Scientific proof

[AW_Ottawa]

When I saw a post had come from a guy calling himself 'Magnet Therapy', I was expecting to see an angry response from a true-believer, and that the link would go to a site pushing magnet products.

I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the site in question takes a very clear-headed view.