Episode #134: PEMF with Dr. William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Welcome to Better Health Guy Blogcasts Empowering your better health and now here's Scott, your Better Health Guy. The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or or his information to facilitate self treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health related decisions with your own personal medical authority.

Hello everyone and welcome to episode number 134 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. William Pollack and the topic of the show is PEMF. Dr. William Pollack is a holistic doctor near Baltimore, Maryland. He's held academic positions at Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland. He's trained in acupuncture, nutrition, herbals, energy medicine, homeopathy, hypnosis, bodywork and multiple other therapies. He is considered the foremost authority on the use of pulsed electromagnetic field or.

PEMF therapy in North America.

His areas of interest include holistic pain management, regenerative health, stem cell stimulation, anti aging, sleep and anxiety.

His main emphasis is using PEMFs as.

A new solution for stubborn, chronic and frustrating health problems. He strives to try to resolve the cause of the problem and not simply.

To put a band aid on it.

Most conventional treatments for pain rely on numbing and dumbing that simply makes the perception of pain better but doesn't heal the cause. After 25 years of seeing the risks and side effects of traditional health solutions and approaches the and after studying various healing modalities, he discovered that PEMFs provide the most benefit and allow safe, non toxic, self directed, self controlled at home pain management. He has authored a comprehensive book on healing with magnetic fields called Power Tools for Health.

And now my interview with Dr. William Pollock. Dr. William Pollock is well known for his use of pulsed electromagnetic field therapies or pemf. This is the incorporation of physics into a health improvement strategy. And as a personal fan of light and sound, vibration and frequency, I'm really excited to talk with Dr. Pollock today. Thank you so much for being here.

It's my pleasure. I look forward to chatting with you and sharing ideas.

Many of our listeners are dealing with.

Complex chronic conditions such as Lyme disease, mold illness, mast cell activation, hypermobility, Ehlers, Danlos, Dysautonomias, things of that nature, various.

Neurological conditions and so I want to.

Kind of frame the conversation around how tools in the PEMF realm might help some of the issues that people are dealing with that are at the root of many of these conditions. So first, let's talk a little bit.

About what was your personal journey that.

Led you to doing the work you're doing today, and why did PEMFs emerge as such a focus of your work?

Well, I was originally a family physician in a pretty traditional setting. I was a medical director for a group of 15 doctors. I built the large, actually 30 doctors. I built the largest group of family physicians on the whole east coast of the US for years. There may be some bigger now at some of the universities, but for the most part, it was a big group. And we shared patients. We would do hospital rounds. We take care of people in the hospital, admitting them, discharging them, as well as working in the office setting. In a short period of time, we had two or three patients that almost died from ibuprofen. They died. They almost died from GI bleeding, acute GI bleeding. They were in shock. They were really at death's door. And after that happened again. Not just once or twice, but several times. I knew the consequences. Every time we prescribe ibuprofen to patients, we know that there are risks, and those risks are well known. GI bleeding and kidney disease are the two biggest. So after the second or third, I said, okay, this is. This is crazy medicine. This is the definition truly of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting you're not going to have any bad results. A different take on insanity. I decided to look at other options that were not available within the community, the medical community within which I was working. Being a medical director, I was looking at a lot of stuff because it's not just my own history, my own cases, but the cases that I shared with the rest of the group. So I decided to study acupuncture, going completely outside the medical box. At that time. When I started to look at acupuncture, there were maybe 300 doctors in the US who had studied acupuncture. At that time, acupuncture was not that common either. There were thousands of acupuncturists, but not as many as there are today. So that was like around 19, I'd say 87, 88 that I began that journey. When I finished studying acupuncture, then I started trying to give people do acupuncture on people. It's a little bit different for me as a physician doing acupuncture, because people expect different things from me as a physician than if I was an acupuncturist. They go to an acupuncturist because they know what they're going for. When you go to a physician, they're going to a physician. And when I say, let's do acupuncture, they say, what? Because they don't know any other physicians who do that. So that's a big question mark. You know, all kinds of flashy lights go off. Why would this doctor be doing that? So I discovered that since I couldn't do needles that easily, I decided to study the use of magnets on acupuncture points because I knew that you could stimulate acupuncture points in a lot of ways with lasers and friction and heat and so on. So I learned about magnets. I started working with magnets on acupuncture points and discovered along the way that magnets were doing something different that acupuncture needles weren't doing. They were actually healing tissue underneath the magnet. So they were doing it. If you put a magnet here, that's called the hegu point or Hoku point, you put a magnet here that will stimulate the acupuncture system. Put a needle there, same thing. But if you have a lesion right at that spot, or if you have arthritis in that joint right there, the magnet would help the arthritis, and it would still do the things that the needle would do. Maybe not quite as potently, but it could still do that. So then I started working much more extensively with magnets, and the rest, as they say, is history. So I started working extensively, started studying and researching why magnets would have any effects on the body. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, this is tissue, right? You pull that up, it's tissue. It's not electrical. Doctors wouldn't normally think of this as being an electrical. We know that nerves conduct charge. In other words, nerves are electrical. But veins aren't electrical, blood vessels aren't electrical, skin is not electrical. Of course, that's a lie, because acupuncturists know that that's not the case. We know now for a lot of work, including the Body Electric, with Dr. Robert Becker, that the body is an electromagnetic apparatus. Well, at the time, again, it was just the beginning of the exploration. Over time, I started working with pulse magnetic fields as well as the static magnets. And now I've moved over essentially mostly to pulse magnetic fields for the important reason that they go deep into the body. Magnets on the skin do not go deep into the body. They work on acupuncture points, which mostly are pretty superficial, and acupuncture meridians, which are mostly pretty superficial. But if you want to Heal a lung or a kidney or in the brain, if you want to stimulate it. You can stimulate it with acupuncture principles. You could stimulate it with electrical stimulation. You could stimulate it with light and sound and other ways of stimulating the nervous system, but they don't heal the tissue directly. What I discovered over those years was that magnets actually begin to heal, heal the tissue directly. And at one point I met a medical director, a doctor, actually, from the Czech Republic, was an MD, PhD, who did his PhD in electromagnetic therapy. And he had translated for his thesis and his work in government as well. He had translated a lot of that Eastern European literature, which was in the Russian Alphabet, written in Russia, so it was not accessible to us. And that was a frustration to me as I was learning. It was a big frustration because I didn't have access to science. Finally, I got a copy of the manuscript. We collaborated together and produced a book called Magnetic Therapy in Eastern Europe, a review of 30 years of research. Now I had science on how PEMFs work, clinical conditions on which they've been shown to benefit.

One of the most common questions that I get from people that I'd love for you to explain is people are so aware these days of the potential negative effects of EMFs from cell towers and cell phones and smart meters and so on. So if EMFs are bad for us, how are PEMFs good for us? There is so much focus these days on avoiding EMFs, and so I'm wondering if you can clarify that issue.

Yes, let's get the elephant out of the room. And that's a very important distinction. They are both electromagnetic, but as we know, the electromagnetic spectrum includes light, it includes color. So there's a whole lot more going on. The electromagnetic spectrum, color is a very high frequency. The EMFs, I call them environmental magnetic fields, just for ease of separation of the two. They are electromagnetic, but they're really environmental. In other words, they're synthetic. They're created for specific purposes that have nothing to do with health or to help the body. Now there are electromagnetic devices that are used by doctors, radio frequency, to do what we call ablation, or to burn tissue on purpose, to burn tissue. That's a different aspect of that spectrum. So that's designed to burn. That's designed to kill and destroy tissue. The environmental magnetic fields, for the most part, that are the most harmful to us are the high frequency, which includes microwaves. So cell phones are microwaves, WI fi is microwaves. And why do we have microwave ovens? Because they heat tissue, they heat Stuff. So why do they heat? They heat because the wavelengths are so short, as they're projected into something, a substance of some kind, let's say meat or soup, they heat it. Because the microwaves are so short, they're absorbed in that substance. And as a result of the absorption and the continuous stimulation of that substance, it basically heats it, it produces heat and therefore destroys things. Electromagnetic therapies are very, very low frequency. We call them ELF, PEMFs, extremely low frequency. So microwaves are extremely high frequency, and we call magnetic field therapy extremely low frequency. So when you're under about 100 megahertz, then the wavelengths are about 3 meters long. So around 100 megahertz, the wavelengths are about three meters long. When you get down, when you get way up into the microwave level, you're talking about millimeters or even smaller wavelengths, extremely tiny. So the environmental fields are heating fields, they're tissue destroying fields. They are genetically disruptive fields. Again, they tend to harm the body. Now, short exposures often are not a big deal. Very short exposures. But when you're wearing a telephone to your head for hours at a time, you're cooking your ear and you're cooking your brain on that side, not as potently as you would by putting your head in a microwave oven, because you'd have to take your head off.

That's a really helpful explanation. I think that will be something people can understand. But let's take it one step further. So many people these days have electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome, or what's called ehs. So if someone is sensitive to emfs, can they use PEMF therapy? And is it possible that PEMF therapy could even help those people that are sensitive become less sensitive over time to what you called environmental electromagnetic fields?

There are truths, there are exaggerations of truths, and then there are falsehoods. So EHS is really hard to pin down. Somebody says that they have ehs, I have no choice but to believe them. But how do you prove it? There's no, there's no diet, there's no test for it. You have to take their word for it. And there was a study done on people who said they had EHS where they sham, did a sham treatment. So they gave them the real treatment with a real electromagnetic field, and they had a stimulator that did not have the magnetic field turned on. They couldn't tell the difference. So a substantial percentage of the people could not tell the difference between real and sham. So that said, if I have a magnetic field and I expose it to myself. Then my skin turns red. Clearly, there's a physiologic response. Now, if I'm blinded to it and I don't know that it's happening and my skin turns red. Say I'm standing behind a sheet of paper or a wall and you have an effect, then you can feel it. I had a story of a guy who used to come home from work, would sit on the couch reading the paper or watching tv. His head was up against the wall, right? On the other side of the wall was a microwave that his wife was cooking with. And he would get a headache every single time he did that. Lo and behold, they discovered the microwave had a leak. He was, in fact, having radiation reaction, in a sense. Radiation. Not like, you know, nuclear radiation material, but he was having a radiation reaction to that microwave. Very potent magnetic field. I think it's real, but I think we have to be careful and try to say what is somebody's worst fears happening as opposed to somebody actually having a physiologic reaction to it, Other than a fear reaction or an anxiety response.

In those people where we say they do have true ehs, would you say that they are still a candidate for PEMF therapy or maybe is that a contraindication?

No. So unfortunately, I've had to work with people who have had that diagnosis and thought that they had those reactions. And so you have to get them to tell you or describe to you the circumstances under which they have their reactions. So there's several, several approaches that you could take. First of all, I would. I would have them exposed to only one frequency at a very low intensity and with a very short treatment time. And then what you do is you gradually bring up the time, the treatment time, and the intensity. I call that going low and slow and see where they start to experience symptoms. Now, magnetic field therapy, why does that actually happen to people ehs? I don't know if you have an explanation. I think I might.

You know, I know with the, you know, that there are the calcium channels and calcium influx into the cells. I also know Dr. Theo Theohoridis will say that even exposure to a cell phone will activate the mast cells by tenfold. So I think, you know, those are two potential ways that I would consider it. Maybe that's different from your thoughts.

No, I would agree. Mast cells can be activated by EMFs or PMFs or your television or certainly having a clock radio by your bedside. So for sure. So I think most of the time, I think that that's happening in an Environment of hyperexcitability. So it's happening in an environment where there's a lot of inflammation in the tissue, where the nerves are irritated and they're inflamed and they're hyperexcitable. So any shift or change in that physiology will fire off neurons. Have you heard of the word allodynia?

Yes.

All right. So in a sense, this is like allodynia. It may not be experienced as pain, but it's experienced as. Certainly as a sensory overreaction. Overreaction to something that you and I might not react to, but somebody else does. Right. I had a patient who actually had that kind of hypersensitivity when it was a storm. She's in Baltimore area, and she could experience storms hitting the west coast when she start to feel off. When she'd get headaches, she'd feel sick, she'd feel dizzy, nauseous. She would look at the weather and see if a storm was hitting the West Coast. And sure enough, until it passed all the way through, she was a mess because her brain was basically hot.

Yeah.

Threshold for reactions had dropped so low that almost anything was going to activate or trigger her.

That makes a lot of sense to me. And the listeners of this podcast are probably that population of people, because with mold illness, mold exposure, chronic Lyme disease, those types of things, they're already a much higher level of inflammation that then is making people more sensitive. And then also the limbic system component of that as well, where the limbic system's been triggered and then reacts to threats that are maybe not actual threats, or they're very small threats, and the limbic system overreacts to them.

Overreacts. But that's also chronic. It's not usually a single event. Usually it's not a single event. Usually it's not a single factor. It's rare that it's one single factor. Most of the time, you got an overlay of a lot of different things going on. Hyperactive immune system, hyper irritated nerves, a lot of inflammation in the tissues. And you're often going to have everything that you just said, but you're also going to. One of the most common factors I find is EBV Epstein Barr virus. 85% of the population has it. Epstein Barr virus does not leave your body. It latches into the white blood cells of the body, the lymphocytes of the body, and it replicates in the lymphocytes and passes on from lymphocyte generation to lymphocyte generation. So it's Always there, traveling around the body to wherever you have inflammation. And that's the job of lymphocytes, is to go to the fire, to go to quench that fire. And very often the lymphocytes and the macrophages, which are also scavengers in the body, will lyse. In other words, they die. And when they die, they break apart. And what do they do when they break apart, wherever the fire happens to be? They dump their loads. So they dump the heavy metals, they dump the pesticides, insecticides, the other viral particles, bacteria, fungi, parasites, parts of parasites, parasites, all of those get dumped into that area of inflammation. So the more inflammation you have, the more that dumping happens in that area as well. And some tissues are clearly much more sensitive to all this than others. And then physiology and genetics and all these variable factors determine what happens in a given individual. And so it's very hard to deal with these things by only a single approach. You really have to use a multi pronged approach to help people with these kinds of issues.

Yeah, absolutely agree. I have the honor to write an article with Dr. Gary Gordon on this topic of PEMF almost 10 years ago. I know you have collaborated with him as well. Funny enough, in that article we actually mentioned you 10 years ago. Let's start by talking about healthy magnetic fields. The Earth itself has a magnetic field. Some people refer to that as the Schumann resonance, or 7.83 Hz or cycles per second. How important is the Earth's magnetic field in terms of our health? And is it true that it is either declining or shifting such that it may not offer that same health supporting frequency that we had years or decades ago?

All right, so let's clarify some of these points that you're making. I think they're valid, but they're slightly not correct. Okay, number one, the Earth's magnetic field by itself is static. It's not in motion. All right? It's just there. It's like the same thing happens with a magnet, a fridge magnet. Once it's made, it's there, it doesn't shift, doesn't change. So the Earth's magnetic field lines are circumvent. The planets basically go around the entire planet. North pole, south pole. That's static. Now, what you said is correct too, the Schumann resonances, but that's, in a sense, that's not a magnetic field, not like the Earth's magnetic field. So the Schumann resonances are actually created by lightning storms around the planet and they resonate in the, in the ionospheric cavity. So there's a cavity, an atmospheric cavity, and they resonate within that cavity and they collect together. They dance, they sing, they. They work together basically to create the Schumann resonances. Now, there's a. There are about seven resonances. There's not one, there's seven. Now, if you will, in terms of the aggregate resonances, the averaged resonance is thought to be about 7.83 Hz. But our brains are tuned to the ionosphere. If you look at human brainwave patterns, they are exactly like the ionospheric frequencies. So a lightning strike in Sri Lanka is perceived in North America like my. Like my patient, is perceived in North America within seconds. But how many lightning strikes are there around the planet at any given time? Hundreds of thousands, if not millions. So they're all talking, they're all spreading frequencies into the atmosphere. So they're not really magnetic per se, but they are electromagnetic. So they're ionospheric. And they interact with the ions in the atmosphere and molecules in the atmosphere. And so on the next point that you made is that the Earth's magnetic field. Yes. There has been a change, a drop in the Earth's magnetic field over millennia. Hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years. That drop is not significant. It's not like it's gone from 100 to 5, but it may have dropped from maybe. Right now it's about 0.5 gauss approximately averaged. And around the planet, there's a variation in that field as well. It's not uniform on the surface of the planet altogether. And in my book Power Tools for Health, I talk about other kinds of magnetic fields that we're exposed to as well. The magnetic fields are the rocks that we walk on and the Earth's surface itself. And if we're barefoot or we're Earthing, then we're experiencing interaction with the soil, and that creates charges in the body as well. So those are electromagnetic interactions too. The question about the loss of the field over time means that, yes, that we probably are a little less supported by the natural magnetism of the planet than we were 100,000 years ago or a million years ago. Now, does that make us more vulnerable? That's a good question. And I think, generally speaking, I would say that we can say that that's true, because if we. I'll tell you about experiment. There's an experiment done in Germany called the Andex A N D E C H S Experiment. And in this experiment, they took volunteers and put them into caverns. If they weren't caverns, they were actually Close quarters. They were bunkers. They were actually called bunkers. So they put them in bunkers. They completely isolated them from the environment. No pressure changes, no sound, no light, no atmospheric changes. And they removed, they created what's called a Faraday cage. They removed the magnetic field around them. So now they were environmentally isolated. And what they found is that their circadian rhythm is dysregulated. Now, they didn't go from 100 to 0 again, they shifted by 10 or 15% because they're still in the Earth. Even though they were isolated from the Earth's magnetic field, they were still in the Earth and they still had their own natural processes in their bodies that were producing charge and energy and activity and so on. So they nevertheless, they dysregulated. Then they started reintroducing electrical fields or magnetic fields back into the bunkers. They did all kinds of frequencies. And what they found is that 10 hertz, 10 cycles per second restored their circadian rhythms. It is said that that experiment was funded by and supported by the US Government because they were looking at what happens to people who are, who go to space and don't have those fields of the Earth doing the light, the sound, the pressure, all that temperature changes. They don't have that in space. So they want to see what happened to people who are isolated. That's the theory, at least. That's the conjecture. So at least we did find out that that kind of isolation dysregulates. And so we can say then, if you take away the magnetism of the Earth, that people will in fact, dysregulate. Now, if you follow them for decades way into their lifespans, if you do that with it with a chick that becomes a chicken, that becomes an old rooster or whatever, then you might see different levels of dysregulation happen. Because if you're starting very young, then that dysregulatory pattern then begins to what we call remodel tissues. The tissues begin to physically change themselves based on the level of stimulation that you have. And we see that in medicine on a regular basis, if you subject something to a regular pattern, that's going to shift and change physically to the pattern that you're subjecting it to. So if you do the opposite, you remove the pattern, then what happens is the body's going to find its own natural level of homeostasis to be whatever it's going to be without that stimulation. So the long answer to your question, that basically, yes, if you remove or drop the magnetic field of the Earth, the theory because we don't have really good proof of this. The theory is that it will cause a shift and change in our physiology and anatomy.

I've heard some people refer to this as magnetic deficiency syndrome. We know that we need, you know, healthy air and healthy water and healthy food and things like that. Is it possible that we need exposure to healthy magnetic fields or pulsed electromagnetic fields to optimize our health?

Well, do you know what the most common magnetic deficiency syndrome is? Not moving. Why? If you don't use it, you lose it. All right? When I do this with my arm, clench my fist and flex my arm, there's a charge of current that flows through the fascial planes, between the fascial planes, in the fluids of the fascia planes at the rate of 3 meters a second. What is that doing? It's stimulating the tissue. It's creating its own electromagnetic field. Right. So, yes, if you don't use your body, we're designed to be in motion. We're not designed to lay all day long. Okay. That's why you see older people when they start laying in bed all day long, they degrade very rapidly. Right? So, yes, we need electromagnetic fields and motion on the surface of the planet along the ley lines of the planet. The ley lines, which are the surface magnetic fields and then the electromagnetic fields of the planet. As you're crossing a magnetic field line is when you feel the most stimulation. If you're going up and down, north and south in a magnetic field line, you're not stimulating your body very much. If you go east to west, you're creating the most stimulation because there's a lot of variation in those field lines as you move across, especially if you go tangentially, because they're stronger north than they are at the equator. So if you're moving tangentially, you're creating the most, the most change. That's how dowsers do their jobs. They're detecting the field changes, magnetic field changes around them and underneath their feet when they're doing their dowsing work. I've doused healers, I've doused individuals, and the healers have these huge dowsing fields they're producing, projecting a huge electromagnetic field compared to somebody who's tightened up and, you know, and close down. So let's go back to your question. Do we need magnetic field therapy? And you could even start the premise with the fact that the Earth's magnetic field is decaying.

Right?

To whatever extent it is, even if it's minimal, it's still going to be a Magnitude of change in the body. But we have another process that's going on too, and that's called aging. And that goes back to entropy. So entropy is the energy that you need to maintain a structure. And we are a dynamic structure. Our bodies are physical structures that need motion, that need stimulation, need nutrition, need all sorts of things to keep them that way. But no matter what we do, we are going to age. I don't know. One person who has been flat from age 40 to age 90 has not aged a bit. Maybe I haven't met enough people, but as a physician, I can tell you I've met huge numbers of people. So the answer to your question is we all need magnetic field therapy. We need that support. And it doesn't matter what the condition is. Just generally speaking, in order to keep up with entropy, we need magnetic field stimulation. Because we're not getting it naturally. So we need to bring it in. We need to give ourselves the additional boost of that possible stimulus that we can't create naturally. So we can defend ourselves against the environmental magnetic fields, the EMFs, which are causing stress on us. So if that's causing stress, how do you protect yourself from the stress? You amplify the good in the body. Amplify the total amount of charge that the body can basically take that hit, right? If I take a big hit to my arm, it's going to fly away. But if I just do this tapping, and that's what aging is, this tapping. Every now and then, we take a big hit and we need a lot more help. But most of the time, if we're just getting this tapping on a constant basis by the environmental fields, by aging, by stress today, lack of nutrition today. I didn't eat a good meal today. I ate one bad meal today, and the rest of them were good. But what did that one bad meal do today? What happened about that fight I had on the phone with my spouse or my kid, Or I missed a promotion at work, Or I lost a bunch of money on the stock market. All of that demands a reaction by the body, which then the body needs to be able to meet that level of demand or stress to maintain itself at a sufficient level of functionality and energy. All diseases are basically energy deficiency. All diseases, There are demand on the body and a demand beyond homeostasis. Homeostasis being that you're very level, your body's constantly adjusting itself around that midline, if you will. You may be going up and down, but you're basically going to. If you project it over time, it's A very neutral sort of oscillation around that line. Not a huge, not big peaks and valleys.

So let's come back then and talk.

More about symptoms and conditions where you might think that the application of PEMF might be helpful for someone. I know there's conditions where it's approved and conventional medicine thinks of it, and then there's a whole nother breadth of conditions where it may actually be helpful, even though that's not the common go to on the conventional medicine side.

Before I address that question, let's go back to the point you just made. Conventional medicine, what's the history of conventional medicine? It's repairing a wound from a spear that ended up in your arm. It's helping you to fight off an infection. So what were the most common causes of people dying 100 years ago? 150 years ago, infection and trauma and also probably environmental. So either too much heat or too much cold and the body could not keep up with the demand on it to maintain its homeostasis. So the conventional medicine is designed basically to take us away from the farthest excursions from health. Right. So that we can sort of nudge ourselves back. It's not designed for health maintenance.

Agree.

Right. We all, we can agree on that. So what do you have to do for health maintenance? This is where the question that you asked becomes really important. In my book. It's not about the disease, it's about the effects of disease or the effects of whatever your body's going through that need to be restored back into balance. So magnetic field therapy is used like medicine would be used for things like pain, circulation problems, swelling, infection, trauma, fractures. So those are the sort of the worst cases. But when you apply magnetic fields alongside whatever you have to do conventionally, that will happen faster to get you back into homeostasis, to get you back into recovery. In my book, I outline 25 different. I provide references of at least 25 different mechanisms of action of magnetic field circulation. I just mentioned is one of them. Anti inflammatory is a big one. Pain reduction, just simple pain reduction without doing anything else. It can basically stop your pain generally accelerating healing, reducing pain in my mind is the very first step of dealing with the pain problem. The next step is to improve function. And the last step, if you will. Well, actually the last step is preventing it from happening again. But the last step would be to actually heal the tissue so that this pain doesn't come back. In my mind, you're using magnetic field therapy along that whole spectrum, if you think of it just for painkilling effects, which is sometimes all you can do. If you're bone on bone in a joint, there's not much you're going to be able to do because in order to stop the pain in that joint, you have to restore the joint. And most of the therapies that anybody has make you feel better with your pain. But when you do imaging studies of those, people say I'm cured. Well, they're not cured. You do an imaging study, that joint is still a mess. Cells have to be treated for long periods of time. Understanding the cycles of regeneration of the different tissues of the body, understanding the depth of the pathology, the depth of the breakdown or the problem, or how far you are away from homeostasis, then you have to apply the magnetic field in the right dose for the right amount of time and repeat it over and over again until that tissue has basically restored itself.

And is there an aspect of PEMF therapy that part of why it's working is because it's helping to support the mitochondria in the production of ATP, the energy currency of the body, that it also potentially can help with oxygen and nutrient delivery. Is that something that PEMF is supporting as well?

At the very least? Again, there's over 25 different mechanisms. So one of the ones I discovered recently is inflammation. I would say that inflammation is actually probably one of the most important factors relative to aging. Now all of us have inflammation on a regular basis and we need acute inflammation to heal ourselves. But we don't need chronic inflammation. We want to turn off the chronic inflammation. So production of ATP, that's certainly one of the mechanisms, but it's not just about production of ATP. It's about inducing charge in the tissue, increasing the electrical potentials in the tissues. For the elect, for processes to work, even maintaining body energy. PEMFs increase ATP. But how much ATP does your body produce on a daily basis? We produce our body weight in ATP every day, but it recycles every 10 or 20 seconds or even faster. So it's constantly recycling. We cycle. Each ATP molecule in the body recycles about 200 to 300 times a day. So saying that magnetic fields stimulate ATP is important because you're going to give it something, a head start. But if it's breaking down that often, then how often should you be doing magnetic field therapy? Pretty frequently, Continuously. Yeah, right. Which is not what happens. One of the FDA approved devices for magnetic fields is for bone healing fractures, fractures that don't heal themselves, called non unions. The original device that was approved for that by the fda. They were treating over a fracture site. Let's say the fracture is here. They were treating over that site 12 hours a day. All right, so there are people who say, well, all you need is eight minutes. Well, you need eight minutes for what? What's going to happen in eight minutes? Are you going to take eight minutes to move that rock up a hill? Maybe, if you're Superman. The reality is, the reality is, is that you need to know what you're treating. You need to understand the magnetic field you're using. You need to know, understand the physiologic processes that are being supported as you use that magnetic field. So all those things that you mentioned, stimulating RNA and DNA, which means that you're increasing wound healing, stimulating stem cells, PEMFs increase stem cell production. But you can't grow a garden in a swamp. So all these people are getting stem cell therapy, but they're doing nothing to clear the swamp.

Right. Totally agree with that.

Spending 4,000, 7,000, $12,000 when you're putting, trying to grow a garden in a swamp. So if you do magnetic field therapy, it not only helps you to clear the swamp, it helps to stimulate the nutrients that are needed to provide the sustenance to those stem cells, helps them to turn into the tissue that you want them to turn into. And when they do, you continue to support them for the life of that cell.

Another common question that I get when we're talking about PEMF and frequency is how PEMF devices are different from rife instruments which many people listening chronic Lyme disease, chronic infections, and so on. It's something that they potentially explore. It's something that I've explored in my own journey. Didn't particularly find at the top of my list in terms of things that were helpful, but can you separate those for us? PEMF as compared to a rife instrument.

So that goes down to basics. Frequency, waveform and magnetic field intensity. Most of the science today has proven, has established pretty well that the most important action of magnetic field therapy is to increase charge in the tissue. When you apply a magnetic field to the body, it's interacting with the ions in the body to create actual electrical charge of the tissue. The electrical charge then provides the energy to stimulate the ATP to improve the circulation to open blood vessels. The to do all the work that magnetic fields do. So one thing that it does, increasing charge, has this cascade of events through all the other things that it does. So charge is the most important, frequency is somewhat important, but it's the Charge, that's important now. How often do you have to bring that charge into the body? That will vary significantly from the tissue, from the damage. What has to happen now? In my book, I have over 500 references and the book is Power Tools for health. There's over 500 references documenting the effects of PEMFs, both in terms of actions and in terms of specific diseases that have been studied. So I don't do rife. I have a rife machine. I spent $4,000 for a good rife machine or more. I have the books, I read about it. I'm intrigued. All energy medicine intrigues me. Where it fails for me is I don't see the references, I don't see the science. So a lot of the rife, even rife himself used how many frequencies?

I don't know the exact number, but for his work, I believe it was a fairly small number as compared to what people explore today.

Right. So. But the exploration that you're seeing today is whispered down the lane. I had this experience, individual case reports, I had this experience with this frequency. But if they tried another person with the same problem, did they get the same result? So that is the good news and the bad news about science. But the good news about science is that replicate it, do it over and over and over again, and then basically you find all the different parameters of how well it works for a given problem. So right now, most of the frequencies, for me, the problem that I find is that most of the frequencies tend to be unproven. They're a case report. So what happens then is that it's not reliable. The second aspect of it is it's a principle of engineering, it's also principle of physics. If charge is the most important thing, how rapidly does that magnetic field rise to its peak? So you get the amount of time that it takes to do that and how high it gets. So you need the peak and you need the time. If you increase the frequency of the magnetic field, let's say you need to go from here to here to get the maximum magnetic field. And let's say that takes a second. Well, let's say it takes three seconds or five seconds, then you could divide that line into fifths. Let's say five seconds. So five, five seconds. We can do the math on this in terms of frequencies. But if you, you decide to go faster and you modulate it enough that it basically it doesn't go all the way up. It doesn't take five seconds. Let's say it jumps off the line at four seconds, is it going to reach the peak? Because it needs to go from here to here. It's going to take five seconds so it doesn't reach the peak. If you increase that frequency even more all the way down to here, then you're going to have an extremely low magnetic field. When you needed this much to do the job, now you're only getting this much. So the power behind the right frequencies becomes a very important determinant. If you say, if somebody says that their magnetic device produces, let's say, 100 gauss and. But they don't tell you what frequency that was measured at. So I'm going to say most likely they measured it at the lowest frequency, which is going to give them the highest intensity. So let's say that frequency was 3 hertz or 5 hertz. So now they say for rife purposes, let's use a 250Hz or 900Hz or 750Hz. Well, again, you've got off the line a lot faster. So the magnetic field intensity drops significantly. So you're not getting the same amount of power to do the job in the tissue. And if charge is the most important factor, and again, you don't have enough charge. So that's another problem that I have.

With rife largely is the term charge that you're using, is that similar to Jerry Tennant's term cellular voltage? Are we talking about this? Okay, we are talking about the same thing. So let's dig a little more then into gauss, which you just mentioned. I want to understand a little more how important is the gauss of a device is more always better. A lot of the things we do in the Lyme and mold arena, sometimes people do too much, sometimes something a little more subtle. I often say sometimes the body needs a nudge rather than a kick to the face. And so I'm interested in how important is gauss. And then I'd also like you to talk a little bit about the concept of waveform. So we hear about sawtooth and square and so on. How important is the gauss and the waveform when we're talking about PEMF therapy?

I have a blog on my website about adenosine. So adenosine is a molecule that's been discovered to help with inflammation. And PEMF has been shown to stimulate the adenosine receptor. So the NSINE receptor takes the adenosine, puts it through the receptor, and then the receptor does the jobs in the tissue that need to be done. 15 Gauss has been determined to Be the optimal intensity, not never my frequency. It's 15 gauss. Actually, the frequencies that were used in those studies were anywhere between about 10 to 75 hertz. So they varied. It wasn't just one frequency, but nevertheless, they discovered that 15 Gauss 1.5 millitesla is the optimal. And the curve goes like this. So add about 15 gauss, it flattens out the benefit. Flattens out.

That's relatively low. Correct. In the instrument world, 15 Gauss, is that considered high or low?

Well, there are tons of systems that are being sold to people that are less than that. They're not even a gauss, but that is relatively low. So I have magnetic therapy devices that go up to 7,000 gauss. Right. But there's a chart on that blog that tells you the magnetic field intensity you need in the tissue to give you 15 dubs. So what happens is a magnetic field drops off very rapidly. It starts off here, and the farther you move away from it, magnetic field drops off logarithmically, exponentially. So, for example, I have a chart here that's in the book, or in that blog, rather. If you start off with 1800 gauss, 4 inches into the body, 4 inches into the body, that 1800 gauss will go to 15. All right, if you start off at 200 gauss to deliver 15 gauss, where you're trying to treat especially for inflammation, it's going to go down to 15 gauss in about an inch. Right. So it's very shallow in terms of it acting so 200 gauss here, and by the time it gets here, it's 15. So you have to calculate the intensity that you need for the tissue that you're trying to treat. So you're trying to treat for the. Through the whole brain, you're going to go from the front of the brain to the back of the brain. Then you have to know that distance, and then you have to calculate the magnetic field intensity you need to start with to get to where you're trying to go. So that's critical. If you do just on the basis of the 15 gauss based on the research study. So I'm not guessing about this. It's based on research. Then you're going to have to make that calculation or get a table. Like, I have to tell you what you're going to need. When I do consultations with people, I do lots of consultations. We talk about this. What are the problems you're trying to treat? Headaches or Parkinson's or Ms. Or encephalitis brain fog, then you're going to have to do that kind of calculation. If you try to treat Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, a lot of inflammation in the belly, then you're going to need to calculate what the distance is going to be to deal with inflammation through that whole volume. Fortunately, when you reach the peak, when you reach that plateau, the it's lost energy, it doesn't hurt you, but you don't need that much energy. So if you try to treat a shoulder, you don't need a 2000 Gauss magnetic field or 4000 Gauss magnetic field. But if that's all you're treating, or an elbow or a carpal tongue, you can use a very low level magnetic field. But if you're trying to treat deeper, you need clearly more intensity. So then the waveform, the job of the waveform is basically to deliver that energy. And it's the upstroke of the wave where all the work happens. If a wave goes up and stops, goes across, nothing is happening here. It's wasted time and energy now on the way down because it's reversing direction. There is some level of benefit, not as much as on the upslope, but there is on the downslope. So the waveform, I don't care what the waveform is, this is called DB dt, the amount of time it takes for it to rise. So the time that it takes to rise and the peak, that's called the change in intensity divided by the change in time. So the DB DT is really the key element. I don't care what wave you use. So the people who say this, you need this waveform or that waveform or that form. No, that's not the, that's not the issue. That's not the answer. That's not the question. Even the question is what is the DV dt? What is the energy? And we don't normally get dvdt we can do, sometimes we can do those calculations what we have to do. And we mostly go off the peak intensity of the magnetic field.

One of the things that was interesting in reading some of your material to prepare for this was the calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium and the potential benefits associated. And I wondered if supplemental electrolytes can that synergize PEMF therapy to make it more effective.

So calcium is a good question. The answer to your short answer to your question is absolutely, but only if you're deficient. You can take calcium, but the body says when I go up to this level, if I exceed that Level I'm going to pee it out, right? I'm going to get rid of it because I don't need that much. So there's a lot of things in the body that are like that, that if you're deficient, if you're starting low, you need this much, but you're starting down here, then you need to make yourself sufficient, but that's all you need to do. Taking more won't make you better. So having two glasses of water when you really only need one is just going to make you pee more, right? So basically the answer to your question is yes, you need it, but you only need it to a point. And the same thing applies to nutrition. If you don't have the protein, you can't repair molecules, you don't have the carbs, you're not going to keep the energy levels going in the cells and maintain body temperature. You need to maintain body temperature for all the metabolic processes of the body to be functioning optimally. Because we need that 98.6 approximately temperature in our core to do most of the metabolic work of the body. So if you don't have those, then the magnetic fields are not going to be able to work quite as effectively.

I want to talk a little bit about people that are dealing with chronic fatigue where maybe they don't have a adequate production of ATP from the mitochondria. I know in some people, when we look at this concept of the cell danger response from Bob Naviaw's work at UCSD that sometimes coming in and really aggressively supporting the mitochondria with supplementation and things like that can backfire because the extracellular ATP is actually the danger signal in that cell danger response state or hypometabolic state. And so what I'm interested in, when we're using PEMF to potentially support mitochondria and ATP, do we have to be concerned about that same potential for supporting the mitochondria, creating more ATP that then further reinforces that cell danger response?

Well, the beauty of magnetic field therapy is that the body tends to ignore what it doesn't need. Healthy cells ignore the magnetic field. So the magnetic field says, oh, that was interesting, and goes back about its business. The body tends to respond or use or need the magnetic fields for where there are deficiencies, where there's a lack of homeostasis, it needs that extra charge. So we'll tend to use it. Once the cell gets to homeostasis, it doesn't need anymore, it shrugs it off so you can't exceed the body's capacity to do it. If you need to make more ATP and you give the body the stimulus from magnetic field therapy to make ATP. But if you don't have enough adenosine, if you don't have enough sucrose, if you don't have enough ribose in your tissues, then you're not going to make enough ATP, no matter how hard I push that process. So all of these things are kind of working together. And you can't expect any one thing. Just giving you loading with ribose is going to fix the problem, and it's going to reach saturation. And after that, you need to do the stimulation to get it to go to the next level.

So what I'm hearing is we do not observe a backfiring using PEMF like we might with direct mitochondrial support when the body's not ready for it, where.

You see problems the most. And I do warn people about this all the time. I have a concept called going low and slow. Never mind the people with hypersensitivities, multiple chemical sensitivities, chronic fatigue, you name it. People who have sensitivities in general because they're so inflamed and they have so much irritability going on in their body that you're pushing them too fast, too hard. Yeah, you gradually building the body's capacity to take that stimulation. Another metaphor that I use is athletic training. Essentially, with magnetic field therapy, you're doing athletic training in the body. You don't get off the couch and run a marathon the next day. Right. So with, with magnetic fields, you're pushing the tissues, you're stimulating the tissues, you're pushing them to do more up to their capacity again, homeostasis. And then you find out how the body reacts. If your body says ouch, then it's too much, too fast, then you back off the intensity, you back off the time. You keep doing that to let the body equilibrate at that level. And then you try it again. Like athletic training. You do 20 reps one day, the next day you do 25, the next day you do 30. Well, if you did 30, but now you started really hurting, then you got to go back to 25. And you may want to do 25 for another few days before you go back to 30 again, and so on and so on. So when you get the 30, then you want to go to 35, and you may have the same reaction. So you're going to gradually build up your stamina. You're going to gradually build up the functionality of the tissues of the body, till finally you get to, let's say, the maximum time and maximum intensity. Then you know you've arrived.

In conditions like lyme disease, there is often hypercoagulation. I know personally one of the challenges I had recovering from lyme disease was babesia and babesia triggering hypercoagulation. Excess thrombin, fibrin, those types of things which then impact oxygen and nutrient delivery. Is there a role of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy in terms of helping to counter or address hypercoagulation?

Absolutely. One of the earliest studies that was done in Russia, they discovered this, that PEMFs have both a platelet adhesion reduction capability. So they decrease the stickiness of platelets, or what we call rouleaux formation, or blood cells. Rouleaux. In addition to that, they have a fibrinolytic function. So magnetic field therapy has an equal level of function to aspirin or most other platelet inhibitors, where they inhibit the ability of platelets to clot, to clump. So it has that action, but at the same time as you're using magnetic fields on a regular basis, it has a fibrinolytic action. Now, if you happen to have a big thick clot sitting there and you hadn't been using magnetic field therapy, can you start using magnetic field therapy to break down that clot? Probably, but it's not going to happen overnight unless you're using enzymes to break down the clots, where you specifically have the enzymes break down the fibrin that breaks down the clot. The reverse is true too, that if you're on anticoagulation and you're doing magnetic field therapy, I've seen this many times. Increased bruising happens. You're more likely to have a problem with bleeding. So again, it's a seesaw. You have to be careful. You're already on anticoagulation. You have to be really careful with magnetic field therapy. Doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. But you have to watch out for.

Bruising because you may need less of the enzyme therapy as you introduce the.

Pef or the anti clotting therapy or the less of the enzyme therapy. Exactly.

Let's talk a little bit about the impact of PEMF on the immune system. So looking at microbial overgrowths in the body or microbial burden in conditions like lyme disease and chronic fatigue and so on, can PEMFs have the ability to support the immune system so that over time the body can itself reduce that chronic microbial burden? When we're thinking About Lyme disease, for example, is that something that PEMF therapy will help with longer term?

So I think In Lyme disease, PEMFs have a lot of different actions and many roles. It's not just a one horse Shay, it's not just a one trick pony. So in terms of coagulability, that's an important part of this. In terms of helping to dampen the immune response that's become chronic as opposed to acute. PEMFs have been shown to decrease pro inflammatory cytokines. And it doesn't matter whether it's Babesia or Lyme disease, even if you have a lot of visceral adiposity, you're producing a ton of cytokines, pro inflammatory cytokines. So somebody who's got a lot of visceral obesity, if they're using magnetic field therapy sufficiently strong enough, they're going to decrease the amount of cytokine production in their belly by their fat. So it doesn't matter what the condition is, they just have this natural anti inflammatory action. So what it's doing then basically is it balancing the immune system? You're especially dampening the pro inflammatory component of it and that allows the anti inflammatory component to do its job better because it doesn't have much fighting to do. Do all sorts of other things that help with the healing processes too.

So is it fair then to say that PEMF could be an indirect antimicrobial strategy through its ability to modulate the immune response, that the immune system then can better manage these chronic infectious states?

Yes, absolutely. In my book, again in the power tools book, I do talk about infections and there are limited studies that show that magnetic fields actually decrease or they kill bugs themselves. There is some evidence, but not a lot of evidence, and I can't say this across the entire microbial spectrum, but there are some of that action going on. They help, but mostly they help the macrophages and they help the anti inflammatory cells to do their jobs better. And if you take natural anti infectives or antibacterial agents combined with magnetic field therapy, the combination works even better than either one alone.

So you mentioned that PEMFs can dampen the pro inflammatory side of the immune response. Does that mean that if we have, let's say an autoimmune hyper reactive effect side system or even. We talked about mast cell activation syndrome, histamine intolerance. Is that dampening of the immune system helping to reduce autoimmune tendencies and mast cell activation? Potentially.

Well again, mast cell activation does not happen in A vacuum. It's usually happening in a hyper inflammatory environment because those mast cells are just, those cells are more activated already to release mast cells. So in general, probably the most important aspect again goes back to inflammation. If you could decrease the inflammation, then you decrease the production of mast cells, you decrease the easy release of cytokines and histamines and so on. Now, but going low and slow, so you can't sort of jump in the deep end of the pool with magnetic field therapy and expect it to all of a sudden work, you're much more likely to have a very significant aggravation response or even, even a hurting response. When you do that in those situations where there's a lot of inflammation, a lot of mast cell activation, a lot of irritability, that you really have to go low and slow. Those tissues have to gradually build themselves back up again and receive homeostasis. So the faster I push it, the harder I push it, you're going to react. And we don't want you to react because you're going to stop doing magnetic field therapy. But if you gradually allow the tissues to condition themselves, then you start the repair work without getting a significant aggravation. You probably have to experience a little bit of aggravation, but you don't want to go over the top.

I want to talk a little bit about hypermobility, structural integrity, collagen. If we think about things like Ehlers Danlos syndrome, maybe taking it into bone loss, osteopenia, osteoporosis. How might PEMF help us from a structural integrity perspective over time?

Well, they certainly, again, there's information in the book about gags and collagen and fibroblasts and the fact you can take mesenchymal cells, mesenchymal fat cells, even fat cells, convert them into, convert the stem cells in fat into fibroblasts, they can convert into other tissue building cells.

So we're talking here about supporting the extracellular matrix, essentially.

Correct. So collagen production is one of the key elements of PEMF therapy, is that they increase collagen production. But there's a whole again, all the gang is turned on. It's not just one element. You cannot dial a magnetic field to turn on one thing. If that's what you're looking for, you're not going to get it. All the different 25 actions that I mentioned of magnetic fields and I just recently discovered that actually they also turn on the endocannabinoid system. So that's a relatively recent discovery in medicine. Magnetic fields have been around for 75 years or so. Well, did we know about endocannabinoids 50 years ago? Right. But we're now discovering that actually they affect the endocannabinoid system too. So all these actions are happening at the same time. The body decides what it's going to do with the stimulus. Right. If you give it enough push, you know, stimulate enough over a long enough period of time, all these processes will. Will be done by the body in the ratios and proportions and timelines that the body wants or can invoke or use. We know, for example, wounds will heal in half the time. That's increasing collagen, gags, fibroblasts, growing new cells, bringing in the stem cells. All that's happening. But you don't heal, you know, again, you don't heal this overnight. You could take a fracture and you might be able to heal the fracture in half the time. You can take a wound and you might be able to heal it in half the time, but it's still going to take all the building all the molecules and elements that you need to rebuild the tissue.

Have you worked with anyone with Ehlers Danlos syndrome that saw benefits from pemf?

So in my mind, the first stage of helping somebody with EDS is to help them with their pain, is to help them with the amount of inflammation that's caused in their bodies because the joints are too, too liberal, they're moving too much. So it takes years for somebody with EDS to notice a significant difference in terms of their joint mobility. How do you repair a joint that's hypermobile? You have to tighten it. So what's the fastest way to tighten a joint?

If it was a ligament or tendon, I would say prolotherapy, but.

Exactly. All right, that's causing inflammation, causing irritation to create scarring. That tightens up a joint. In the long run, that's not a good thing, right? In the long run, the best thing to do is have the body rebuild itself to tighten those joints and ligaments. But then you're fighting the genetics that's caused the problem in the first place. So it depends on the momentum of the genetics and how rapidly those joints are breaking down. The problem with EDS is that we don't get at these people early enough. If we got at their problem when they were children, very young, in the first year or two years of life, they would be able to do a lot more, a lot quicker. If they're an adult, you're your age, my age, then at this point, to try to reverse all that that's been going on for 50 years or 60 years or even 30 years, it's not going to happen overnight.

Yeah, I mean, interestingly, what I see with Ehlers Danlos syndrome is some people do have that more primary genetic variant of it. And then there are people that they get Bartonella, for example, that triggers the eds. And I have seen people that when they treat the underlying infectious trigger, that maybe epigenetically then accelerated their genetic expression, that they can reverse the condition when they start focusing on the microbial piece as well. And so it sounds like maybe this could be a good adjunct therapy to help support the rebuilding of those structures as well.

It's giving the body a fighting chance is what it's doing. You still need all the nutrients, you still need to affect the genetics. All these other co factors have to be dealt with at the same time. You can't just rely on magnetic field therapy to help.

We know that in many chronic illnesses that there is a terrain aspect of these conditions. You mentioned heavy metals and pesticides and so on. So can we think of PEMF therapy as a detoxification modality? Does it help support the body and getting rid of these environmental toxins?

One of the very earliest things I learned about pulse magnetic fields, and I saw some experiments done in Germany with that, is that PEMFs help open up membrane channels. And it depends on the scientists and the membrane channels they're studying, but nobody's studying all the channels at one time. Essentially the concept is that magnetic field therapy is throwing open the doors and the windows. Nutrients get in better and waste gets out better. So yes, we see her, we see aggravation responses. Some of that's related to inflammation, but some of that certainly could be due to the release of embedded materials. But if somebody's locked into a cell and locked into a cellular structure, it's hard to get that out. If it's sitting loosely inside the cell fluid, interstitial fluid, or intracellular fluid, and you open up the membrane channels, it's more likely to get out. Obviously, if it's a gas, it's more likely to get out. So again, these processes take time. So there is that risk. There is that benefit. Now, if you're in the brain, what happens when you start to release things? They just move from one place to another. We can't direct them to go where we want them to go because we don't know exactly what they are, where they are, and how much you have to get rid of. So I always recommend if we're doing detox work, you have to be doing chelation, you have to be doing other things to mop up all those molecules. And for that purpose I use zeolite.

Yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned the brain. I mean, one of the things that I've heard Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt talk about is that it is difficult oftentimes to get at the toxins that are stored in the brain because of the blood brain barrier. And that that is an area where the application of physics based solutions are necessary.

And PEMFs do affect the blood brain barrier. They generally tend to open it up a bit. But again, you need to talk about the right intensity of the magnetic field to be able to do that. So if you take a 10 Gauss magnetic field or a 200 Gauss magnetic field, it's not going deep enough into the brain to across the brain basically.

Do.

Blood brain barrier like opening it. So you have to match, you have to match the field, the time and everything else you're doing.

Many people today are in a sympathetic dominant state where the nervous system can really never relax enough to rest, digest, detoxify. We look at things like autonomic nervous system imbalances or dysautonomias, things like pots or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Is there a calming aspect of PEMF on the nervous system?

What's the cause of pots?

Well, it depends. I mean, bartonella can be one, adrenal insufficiency can be another, Autonomic nervous system issues can be another. I mean, I think there could be several.

It could be stroke, it could be vascular disease, but most of the time I think that the dysautonomia is caused by infection. And the most common infection is ebv. All right, so EBV attacks the ganglia of the body. The ganglia, the sympathetic parasympathetic they contain, they control that balance. So if the ganglia are infected or inflamed, then you're going to get that hyper reactivity in either direction. It could be too much parasympathetic drive. It could be too much sympathetic drive. In other words, you don't have a balance. That's why we call it dysautonomia. So PEMFs help basically, again, going back to inflammation help to basically try to get the cells back into some level of homeostasis. It's not a fix for the problem. But again, if you're dealing with all the other parameters around that problem, then you should see gradually over time an improvement in those symptoms, going low and slow again, because you're kind of pushing that system, the nervous system, with the magnetic fields. And you have to do that gradually.

In some of your writings you've said that certain frequencies can increase tinnitus. If we're looking at people that already have tinnitus, is people PEMF therapy problematic or can certain frequencies also decrease the tinnitus?

So then we go back to cause. So I always go back to cause. I always try to understand the pathophysiology of a problem. If I don't don't understand the pathophysiology, then I don't know exactly how to advise dosing the intensity of the magnetic field and so on. So tinnitus, A lot of the research has been done on tinnitus has been done using high intensity PEMFs, RTMs, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulations, a very high intensity PMS aimed at the brain. And that research is ongoing and it's showing benefit. But you're not talking about 100%, 0% from a statistical perspective. All you need to do is to show there's less than chance. Is that 10% benefit, 20% benefit. Because again, there are different causes and reasons for tinnitus. Most of the time it's not the ears. You can rule that out pretty easily and that the ears themselves are the easiest part to treat. Then the question is, is it bilateral or unilateral? And one study I read actually showed that it didn't matter which side you treated, even if it's unilateral. So some frequencies can aggravate tinnitus, some intensities can aggravate tinnitus. PEMFs, as I said, can aggravate anything. If you're too much too fast, then you got to back off and go gradually. One theory of tinnitus is that it's more common if people have hearing loss, right? Most of it's coming from the auditory cortex. And when you start to have hearing loss, you don't have enough feedback in the auditory cortex. And nature abhors a vacuum. So what is it? What happens is the cells start talking to each other. And that's essentially what tinnitus is, right? So if you want to heal it, you try to heal the hearing is one of the key aspects of it. And then otherwise you're trying to stimulate circulation, increase circulation into the brain, decrease whatever inflammation there may be going on in that parietal cortex, whatever noxious factors have contributed to it. Tinnitus is very common in people. Who have hearing losses like 70 to 80% of people who have tinnitus have hearing loss.

I want to talk a little bit about sleep. That is such a common issue that people struggle with. You've talked about the flex pulse and we'll get into talking about some of the devices that you use. I know you also talk about the earth pulse. How are these devices potentially helpful for sleep? And then how often do you find in those that really have difficult sleep challenges? How often do you find that they help them get deeper, more health, restorative sleep.

So sleep issues, you still have to do hygiene. You cannot ignore hygiene. And that's the fundamental. So you always have to start with improving the hygiene, making sure the hygiene is correct and improving place, you know, dousing the lights, taking, putting yourself, not having a cell phone at your bedside, certainly not on. If you have it at your bedside, put it on airplane mode, turn off your routers. You know, all that, all the sleep hygiene things that you need to be doing after that. Sleep is basically a set of oscillation patterns in the brain, frequency patterns within the brain. Right. We know that the brain goes through a series of cycles throughout the night. So we normally start off in theta, which is, I call it light sleep. So as your head hits the pillar, we drop down into theta. We drop down fairly low into theta because it's lights out. Then about an hour, an hour and a half into theta, we move into something called delta, which is called slow wave sleep. It's considered to be the most restorative sleep that we have. So that happens usually within the first three hours of sleep. And then you come out of delta and you're basically bouncing around in theta for the rest of the night. So we have all the different forms of theta are rem and non rem. So the first phase of theta when you first fall asleep is non rem. Delta is considered non REM sleep as well. Non rapid eye movement sleep. But it's not theta, it's delta. So dreaming is rem sleep. So we bounce around between. And there are phases of REM throughout the night and then phases of non remote throughout the night. We spend probably 70 to 80% of our nighttime in theta. When we're aware that we're not sleeping, then you're out of theta. You bounced up into alpha. If you're dreaming and you're aware that you're dreaming, that's REM sleep. But you're in high rem or high theta, which means that you're aware. Once you become aware, say you're not quite awake, but you know, you're not sleeping deeply, you're not unaware, you're not unconscious, then you're going to be in high theta. I used to use audiovisual entrainment techniques. I used to use all sorts of techniques to keep the brain at the levels we wanted the brain to be. The problem is doing things during the night. People are bothered in different ways by different appliances that are put on their heads, where they have earphones, where they have goggles. People don't keep these things on. Also, I've discovered over the years audio visual entrainment using specific frequencies, and they're trying to guess where you like. This is one of the problems that I have with the Earth pulse is you design. So you're going to go down and then you're going to bounce around at a lower level, and then you're going to come gradually come up. So you're trying to basically tell the brain to do something. My brain wants to be awake, and I want to put it to sleep, that I'm going to resist falling asleep. Right. If I want to be asleep, but I'm awake, I'm not going to be able to stay awake very easily. My brain wants to be awake asleep rather than awake. So we kind of battling against the tendencies of the brain towards what we think the brain should be doing at that moment in time. So artificially, synthetically, trying to ramp down, and what I call ramping, ramp down and stable and then ramp back up again is artificial. So what I've learned over the years is it's better to give the brain one frequency, and the brain will do whatever it wants. But if I give one frequency, the brain is going to be listening to that one frequency more likely than it will to a whole jumble of frequencies. And how long do I have to give a frequency to the brain before it says I hear you? If I change the frequency too soon before it's actually heard it, then there's not going to be any benefit to that frequency. Right. So what, what I recommend is that people use delta. They put it under their pillow or on top of their pillow, not under the mattress. You need a strong enough magnetic field to capture the brain. So if you're listening to somebody whispering, you're going to have to really pay attention to their listening, to listen to them. If they're having a conversation like we are right now, relatively audible, then you're going to hear it for sure. But if I'm yelling at you, you can't ignore it. But you don't want to be doing that because that's disruptive. So that's a jangly to the nerves. So essentially what you want to do is to present enough of an intensity over enough of a period of time where it's going to listen. The brain is going to listen. So you start in delta, the brain's going to drop down into theta and it's go down into delta probably faster than it would normally. And. And it's going to stay in delta longer because that's the most restored to sleep. Hooray, we're happy for that. Then we start to come back up into theta naturally. Then you're basically wearing a weight around your waist. Your brain is trying to have you be relatively awake and aware. So what we're doing is we're dropping you down below the surface. You're going to swim the rest of the way below the surface. So that's. I call that tethering. You're basically tethering theta to keep the level of theta down in the brain so you're able to sleep better, longer. One frequency delta. Now, which part of the brain controls sleep and awareness the most? Right there. Back of the neck, top of the neck. It's called the reticular activating system. So ideally, you'd want to put the coil there.

Okay.

It's close to the ears. And so some people would find that disruptive. And so I've coined a new term called audio magnetic entrainment as opposed to audio visual entrainment. So you're hearing the clicking from the magnetic field in the coil. Now that becomes a pacer for you as well. So now you have two signals. You have the magnetic field going in the body, which you can't hear, but you can hear the clicking. So now you have another way of tuning your brain. So you have to translate for yourself and say, clicking is good. Clicking is my friend. Clicking is telling me that it works.

Are there any contraindications for PEMF therapy that people should know about? If you're pregnant, nursing have dental implants, maybe titanium screen screws or pacemakers? Do we need to worry about PEMF erasing credit cards or hurting the cell phone? Talk to us about some of the contraindications.

All right. Pregnancy is always stated as a contraindication, and I would consider that a relative contraindication. And the government does that with drugs as well. Unless you've done studies to prove that it's safe in pregnancy, you can't say safe in pregnancy. So therefore, if you can't say it's safe in pregnancy, you have to say it's contraindication, don't use it during pregnancy. However, we know women who work in MRI units who are pregnant, who get pregnant and are pregnant and continue to work in those environments. And there have been no significant reports of major issues, occupational health issues. I know many women who get pregnant, they've been using magnetic fields already. They get pregnant, they breeze through their pregnancies with magnetical therapy. So we can't tell you for sure that it's safe, even if you. All the studies in the world may not tell you that it's sure to be safe because who knows, random things happen in pregnancy anyway. So pregnancy is a relative contraindication. The only other absolute contraindication in my mind is organ transplants. If you're on auto. If you're on immune suppression, you're on immune suppression for a reason. You don't want to reject that organ. So we don't know how the magnetic field is going to affect the immune system relative to you. We don't want it to be stimulated, clearly. And we don't know for sure that it's going to work with the immunosuppression to keep your organ safe. So I recommend against it during transplant. There's no evidence, there's no studies because people haven't done that. Most people have stayed away from magnetic magnetic therapy during transplant. Metal. Metal is a very important discussion, but most of the time metal is safe unless you get to very high intensities. I happen to have some dental implants before I got some wisdom. And when I bring a high intensity magnetic field close to my head, close to the implants, I get these sharp jabbing stabs. I don't know if you've ever touched a spoon to a filling or anybody listening has. It's a shock. Is it like electrical shock? Well, that's what you get across the implants for several reasons. One is that the material of the implant material is not your own natural teeth. Fillings are not your own natural teeth. Other kinds of composites in your mouth are not your natural teeth. So all of these create electrolysis. All of these create electrical charge differentials similar to electrogalvinism. It's electro galvanism. So if you wear copper bracelet, people say that it works. Well, what's it doing? It's creating, in a sense, a piezoelectric field, a very tiny electric field because of the interaction of the copper with the sweat with the perspiration under it. And that sends A signal up the nervous system which makes you feel better. That's another form of galvanism. So magnetic fields will create some of that galvanism. And if it's around a nerve, it may be. If it's too much of a field, that nerve is going to tell you, ouch. Now, ideally, you should be using the magnetic field around that nerve because that nerve is telling you that it's in trouble. Magnetic field therapy doesn't normally cause problems. It usually reveals problems. So if that's happening, then you clearly that area needs some work with joint replacement. Everybody on who, Everybody who has a joint replacement should have a magnetic field. They should be using it every day. Why? Because these joint replacements are metal. Even if it's titanium, titanium is still not completely inert in the body. It's still a foreign material in the body. MRIs have shown that people who have these implants, like hip replacements or even knee replacement, they show inflammation around the implant. Okay. That's why implants tend to have a lifespan because the tissues are breaking down.

Because of the foreign material and biofilm formation as well. I understand.

Then the biofilms and PEMFs have been actually shown to help with biofilm just like they help with other infections. So magnetic field therapy causes osteo integration. So anybody with metal in their body is going to have inflammation, and you want to decrease the inflammation and you want to help the bones to knit with the titan with the prosthesis. That's called osteointegration. And magnetic field therapy improves osteointegration.

And when we're talking about the dental implants, is that an issue with zirconium implants as well, or only titanium implants?

Zirconium is not metal. Right. But it's a foreign body.

But in terms of the potential issues with pemf, we wouldn't expect that with zirconium.

Not at all. Even less cool.

Yeah, that's what I thought. I've heard people say that PEMF devices can erase your credit cards and mess with your cell phone and what?

The higher intensity devices will absolutely have that potential. I was working with a laptop with a high intensity system, actually, my Mac and I, it was basically around my hip and I had it on my lap and the screen froze when I moved it away. It was fine. I had a couple television remotes while I was doing that treatment. Blew them. So, yes, certain electronics, especially vulnerable sensitive electronics, are going to be affected by it. The rule of thumb is keep it away at least 2ft from the magnetic Field from the applicator, that's usually safe enough. So credit cards, iPhones, iwatches, tablets, pads, computers. If you're working at a desk at a PC as long as a foot or two feet away from your coil, you should be normally fine if your system is squawking at you. Obviously if you put it right next to it, you could freeze the screen. Is it likely to damage the circuitry? Unlikely, unless you lay it on top of the circuitry. So that's like right there. So the farther away it is from the circuitry, the less of a problem it's going to be. Pacemakers, implanted electronics. Same issue applies with them nowadays. Most of the implanted electronics are what we call Mr. Conditional. If you're. And people have to find this out is your. If your doctor says that you cannot do an MRI, then it's not Mr. Conditional. If it's Mr. Conditional, then we have no problems with magnetic fields that we use. They're not strong enough. An MRI gets down to maybe one and a half Tesla, 15,000 gauss or higher, 2,000, two Tesla, three Tesla, four Tesla. So you're talking magnitudes well over 10,000 gauss. Most of the PEMFs that we use for clinical use are way below that level.

One of our listeners was referring to the book the Body Electric and their question was, does PEMF have a pro cancer effect? Potentially. Is there any concern that PEMF can promote cancer?

Research is showing that PEMFs are not a cancer initiator, they're not a cancer promoter. I routinely recommend magnetic field therapy for cancer because magnetic fields have been found to actually improve the effectiveness of chemo. If you go with chemo, they help the tissues to recover from radiation. You don't want to recover the tissues that were cancerous, but you do want to recover healthy tissues from radiation. They may actually, if you use them before radiation, they may actually help with radio sensitization. That was, it may make the tissues a bit more sensitive, especially cancers to the radiation. Absolutely help with recovery from surgery. So at this point, we do not have evidence that PEMFs actually are cancer initiators. Except for EMFs, the Environmental Magnetic fields, the high frequency fields, they are more likely to. Because they're genetically disruptive. EMFs are genetically supportive or gene supported. The ELF PEMFs.

I know some of the devices that you talk about, the flex pulse, the biobalance, the Tesla fit. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about where those might have application? If someone has a shoulder problem, for example, compared to A need for more systemic support. What devices are you recommending and where they might fit in a particular protocol or health maintenance program.

So health maintenance is one issue and then treatment is another. So they're separate in terms of the way you have to think about them. You have to decide whether you want whole body or whether you want local. Whole body is more likely to be used for health maintenance. On the other hand, if you have osteopenia or osteoporosis, you need whole body treatment because the whole skeleton is involved and you need a high enough intensity magnetic field that it's going to penetrate with an adequate level of magnetic field through the whole skeleton. Inflammation is one of the most common causes of osteopenia and osteoporosis is hormones. But there's more to it than that. We know that people who have gluten sensitivity are more likely to have osteoporosis. So inflammation is a big reason for osteoporosis, generic inflammation. So again, if you're obese, you're more likely to have osteopenia, osteoporosis because you have a lot of inflammation in your body. All right, so local versus systemic. If you have problems throughout many areas of the body, you're going to generally want to have a whole body system or a bigger magnetic system. Flex Pulse is a local system. It's battery operated. It has a maximum magnetic field intensity of around 200 gauss. So again, it doesn't go that deep. So we try to work with a shoulder, that's fine. If you try to work with a hip, it may not be strong enough for a hip. If you're trying to work with Ms. Or Parkinson's or brain trauma, it's probably not strong enough. It can be helpful. And I actually did a study on brain trauma and concussion using a 200 Gauss magnetic field, which showed some benefit, but after for three months, then after stopping it after three months, the benefit basically regressed. So we know that it's probably not strong enough deep. Now, there's lots of research actually on high intensity PEMFs and percussion and brain injury, TBI. And I actually wrote a review article in the Journal of Science and Medicine, Josam, it's called Josam. It's a good journal that has a lot of magnetic therapy information on it, and it's free access. Local problems that are relatively superficial. A portable PEMF device is adequate. The Earth Pulse is a smaller gut machine, but it's not portable. You have to plug it in. So a downside of some of these machines is you have to decide whether you want something that you can put on and walk around with or drive in your car or take on an airplane. Then the Flex Pulse would be more ideal for that. If you need higher intensity and you're going to treat for a short period of time, then you can use a more local device. There are lower intensity, medium intensity and high intensity local systems for whole body. Again, if you're treating a condition like stage 4 cancer or osteoporosis, osteopenia, then you need the high intensity whole body system. If you don't know what you need, go to our website and we have a consultation form on the website. You can actually book a consultation.

So where does the Bio Balance and the Tesla Fit fit into that conversation that you just shared with us?

Very important. I think I'm glad that you asked that question. So Flex Pulse is portable, battery operated, local and that's what I use for sleep. That's a great sleep device. Also. It's good for alertness. If you're going to be driving long distances, you can put that one coil in the back of your head at say 23Hz, 24Hz, 40Hz and it'll perk up your brain to make you alert. So it's the cup of coffee without the buds. Right. As soon as you take it off, the brain just goes back to what it wants to be. The other devices that you talk about, Biobalance is a whole body PEMF system that's really more for health maintenance. It will run all night and for some people, particular people with a reasonable level of sensitivity, then putting a whole body system on your bed and running it all night can also help with sleep a lot rather than just totally tuning the brain with a higher intensity device. So the Flex pulse goes up to 200 gauss for a single coil, the BioBalance is 10 gauss. But because you're distributing that energy over a larger part of the body, you're treating, turning off, turning up a lot of cells at the same time, as opposed to a local system which is not turning on that many cells. So biobalance again is probably more for health maintenance than anything. Then you go to the TeslaFit devices. Tesla Fit has three devices, the TeslaFit Plus 2, which is the base system, Tesla Fit Duo and the Tesla Fit Pro. Tesla Fit Pro is really more for the professional setting. It's very high intensity and can cause muscle contractions. So that's again more, more professional. That's why it's called the Pro Tesla Fit Duo is nice because you can run two applicators at the same time. So it's a duo, it's got two channels and that allows you to treat two body parts at the same time. Or you could actually treat two people at the same time. Two different people, but it's again, it's going to be more expensive. And that magnetic system goes up to about 5,200 gauss, strong enough to cause muscle contractions as well. That's, that's a system that I have been recommending to chiropractors, to acupuncturists and naturopaths because the cost of that system is low enough that it's reasonable to bring into a practice. You can get, you can get return relatively quickly, it's easy to use and operate and it still produces an obvious sensation to the person that it's working. So the Tesla Fit Plus 2 is really more for home use. So that I have lots of people who buy the Testifit duo who are not practitioners because it's stronger. It goes, goes from 4,000 gauss for the Testafit plus 2 to 5,000 gauss for the duo. Again, the duo has the advantage of having two channels. The TeslaFit plus only has one channel. None of the Tesla Fit devices are whole body. You can get a half body pad, but none of them are whole body. So they're not really that useful for whole body treatment. Although every time you treat part of the body, the whole body is getting benefit from that as well. Just the area getting treated is getting a lot more benefit than the areas that are not getting treated.

So for the people that are listening to this, that are dealing with chronic Lyme disease, mold illness and so on, what I'm hearing is out of the ones that you shared, probably for sleep, the flex pulse has some application. And then for whole body support, which sounds like maybe the most appropriate of those tools, the biobalance. And then for practitioners that are listening, that want some application in their clinic setting, the Tesla Fit might be the place to explore.

Correct. And then we have if there again none of these meet your needs, we have other devices available. You have to again consult with us for us to make the proper recommendation for you.

So my last question is the same for every guest and that is, what are some of the key things that you personally do on a daily basis in support of your own health?

Primarily eat properly. I walk three and a half miles every morning with my wife. Every morning? Well, except maybe when there's deep water, sheer ice, two feet of snow and really gale strength winds. But that's only probably 20 at the most 20 days a year that I have those restrictions. I use magnetic therapy every night. I use a magnetic therapy device under my pillow every night. I sleep with it. I drink a good big green drink every day. I use CBD and I use pea.

Beautiful. For inflammation.

Well, PEA works together synergistically with cbd, but yes for inflammation. So it's a good anti aging molecule as well.

And it's also good for people with mast cell activation syndrome and histamine intolerance itching.

Exactly.

Beautiful.

And then I do a whole bunch of supplements. I take a handful of supplements every day.

This has been a fun conversation. Your passion for the topic is electrifying. Your personality is magnetic and just appreciate all that you've shared with us today. Thank you for taking the time to share your wisdom and your knowledge and experience. I hope that people will explore the PEMF therapies. I know personally in my own journey recovering from Lyme disease and mold illness, I have found PEMF to be very helpful, particularly with the hypercoagulation and those areas that we talked about. So thank you so much Dr. Pollock for being here.

Scott, thank you very much for inviting me and sharing with your audience and may you be well be safe.

To learn more about today's guest, check out the show notes@betterhealthguy.com Episode 134 that's.

Betterhealthguy.Com Episode 134 betterhealthguy.com Episode 134 thanks.

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