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PD: Is There Magic in Magnets?
As most of you know, I have spent a number of years being a reference librarian, I can remember what I read, I just can't remember WHERE , sometimes. I have PD to thank for that. This ,to me,should end the thread on Magnets. Medical Magnets do NOT come off refer. doors. Also, this UM is the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. Not Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio,home of another reference librarian!!! :-)
just me, Marjorie 67/55/58
Feb. 25, 1999,
IS THERE MAGIC IN MAGNETS?
by Marilyn Adams Special to the Herald
For Thousands of Years, Magnets Have Been Touted As Having Healing Powers. Now, Scientists Are Seeking Proof.
Her Rollerblade stunt hadn't gone as planned. The moment she fell backward, crashing onto the pavement, Donna Weidema KNEW: Her wrist had snapped. It throbbed with pain. And the cast the first doctor put on it did nothing to ease that. By the time Weidema saw a specialist days later, she was popping painkillers like candy. How about trying something different? Dr. Richard Rogachefsky, a University of Miami orthopedist, asked the Miami Beach woman. He gave her a new cast and slipped a magnet the size of a silver dollar inside it onto her wrist. Maybe this will help you recover faster, he told her. Almost immediately, she felt a change.
"I came back to the office, and the pain was gone," says Weidema, 52, who is a nurse at UM's Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It was so dramatic, it made me a believer. I went from chomping down six to eight Tylenol with codeine a day to just one." Even more amazing was what apparently was happening to the injured bone. When she returned for a checkup three weeks after the spill, an X-ray showed the fracture had healed--about half the normal time, Rogachefsky says. Maybe it was just luck. A fluke. But some doctors report seeing so many unusual recoveries with the help of medical magnets--broken bones and wounds healing more quickly, stubborn nerve pain eased, surgery averted--that magnetic therapy is beginning to emerge from the murky realm of alternative medicine into the mainstream.
At UM, a formal study is now under way to compare, through X-rays and nerve tests, the progress of wrist-injury patients who are fitted with magnets with those who use fakes. "It's another tool, like surgery and physical therapy and massage," says Rogachefsky, an assistant professor of medicine who is studying magnets' effects on wrist fractures and carpal-tunnel syndrome, in which a nerve in the wrist becomes compressed, sometimes disabling the hand. "I've probably used magnets on 1,000 patients. I think the mechanism, from the literature I've seen and the research we're doing, is the magnet stimulates blood flow to the area." And that would promote quicker healing, though just how the blood flow might be stimulated isn't well understood.
In fact, medical magnets are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which forbids magnet manufacturers from making specific claims about any healing effects. They can be bought in golf shops and drugstores and on the Internet. Yet, many doctors have no faith that they work except, perhaps, because of the placebo effect: Something works because the patient THINKS it does.
Little medical research has been done in this country on magnets, which makes the UM study significant. Fascination with magnets is hardly new. Magnets have been long touted as having healing powers: The ancient Greeks and Chinese are said to have applied the magnetic rock lodestone to the body to treat various ailments. Today, many professional football players and golfers, Dan Marino among them, swear by magnets--affixed to ailing knees or elbows or backs or ankles--for relief of pain from injuries and inflammation.
"Magnets do not heal or cure anything; they help the body heal itself," says Bill Roper, chief executive officer of Magnetherapy, a Riviera Beach company that has different lines of magnets for humans, horses and, soon, cats and dogs. Magnetherapy is supplying Tectonic-brand magnets for Rogachefsky's study, as well as for a Tufts Medical School study on patients with fibromyalgia, a painful, incurable muscle and joint condition that can be disabling. By funding studies at respected universities, Magnetherapy hopes to build a case with the FDA that its products should be approved as medical devices, which would boost acceptance by the medical community--and sales. "There has to be something there when so many people get relief," says Roper, a former Borden Foods president. He says he launched the company five years ago after finding that magnets worn on his neck and back eased pain he had suffered with for years.
STUDIES INTO PAIN
Magnets' effect on pain has been the focus of two small, recent studies in the United States. Scientists believe a magnetic field may short-circuit pain signals that nerves are sending before they reach the brain, though, so far, there's no direct evidence of that. In January, the American Journal of Pain Management published findings of Dr. Michael Weintraub, a neurologist at the New York Medical College in Valhalla. Weintraub tested magnetic insoles on 19 patients with chronic foot pain, most of them diabetics. Each was given a magnetized pad for one foot and a plain pad for the other, and were not told which was which. After a month, the pads were switched. At the end of the four-month study, 13 of the 19 patients reported much less pain in the foot that, it turns out, had the magnetic insole.
In an earlier, 50-patient study at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which was published in November 1997 in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Dr. Carlos Vallbona found that using magnets relieved muscular and joint pain in 76 percent of patients who had had polio years before and were suffering from "post-polio syndrome." This was the first successful pain test involving magnets to be published in a U.S. scientific journal.
The UM study will be much different. It's designed to measure magnets' effect on actual healing, not just on pain relief. And rather than depend on patients' subjective feedback, it will rely on black-and-white tests: X-rays of bone fractures and nerve-conduction readings on patients with carpal-tunnel syndrome. The nerve tests measure how fast an electric current travels a nerve. The worse the nerve injury, the slower the speed; the better the recovery, the faster it flies. Rogachefsky says some of his carpal-tunnel syndrome patients who taped magnets to their wrists showed such improvement they avoided surgery.
LAST RESORTS
"Desperation" to relieve patients' debilitating nerve pain drove Dr. Anne Ouellette, UM's chief of hand surgery, to start working with magnets about a year ago. Since then, she's used them on patients with everything from routine but painful tennis elbow to traumatic crush injuries to the hands and arms, which can produce searing nerve pain, even after surgery. "Magnets are sort of like acupuncture: Some patients get tremendous relief, and some get no relief," says Ouellette, who wears magnetic insoles to relieve arthritis pain in her feet. "Basically, nobody really knows what magnets do, but I've been really impressed with what they're able to achieve." She has also used magnets, sandwiched inside dressings, on patients with gaping hand wounds that wouldn't heal. The presence of the magnet seemed to help the flesh knit back together, though, again, there's no medical proof of that.
Ouellette had seen the power of magnetic fields before. For years before trying metal magnets, she saw stunning results from another type of magnetic field, one generated by pulsed electromagnetic energy. For patients threatened with the loss of fingers--such as diabetics and kidney-failure patients whose fingers start to die from poor circulation--Ouellette has prescribed treatments from a machine called Diapulse, put out by a New York-based company called Diapulse Corp. of America. The machine uses electricity to generate a magnetic field. Diapulse, which has been FDA-approved for certain uses involving soft-tissue injuries, emits pulses up to 600 times a second of power as strong as 975 watts. This technology has been studied for 40 years on nerve injuries, spinal-cord lesions, burn wounds, head and hand injuries and pain. The studies--published in scientific journals--found that it reduced inflammation, increased blood flow and relieved pain in many patients. "I have amputated very few fingers since I started using Diapulse," Ouellette says.
AMPUTATION AVERTED
Amputation was all any doctor had recommended for Jerald Porter of Okeechobee, an Army veteran who'd spent 18 years getting kidney dialysis treatments until receiving a kidney transplant in 1991. After so many years of kidney disease sparked by an infection in boot camp, the circulation in his extremities was failing: First, his foot turned blue, and, three years ago, doctors amputated his leg below the knee. Then, a finger began turning color and losing life until it looked grotesque and, for lack of circulation, wasn't usable. "I was sure I was going to lose that finger," recalls Porter, 52. "It was really scary, especially when they wanted to take my arm." He went to doctor after doctor, 17 in all. Each recommended amputation. Until he got to Ouellette, who prescribed Diapulse treatments to bring circulation back to the hand. About a year ago, Porter began spending four hours a day, in his home, resting his hand on the metal drum of the machine, which he leases for $100 a day. After the first month, the pink color began to return to the finger. Now, he's starting to regain limited use of the hand. Encouraged, he also began wearing a magnetic insole under his foot. And he now sleeps on a magnet-equipped mattress pad: "I used to wake up sore and stiff all over. Not anymore." Porter looks forward to a time when he can shake hands with a friend and it won't "drive me up a wall. "I'm hoping to get some use of my hands back," he says, "and go back to living again."
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