Maybe you thought they were good only for attaching to your kids' photograph to the refrigerator. But simple magnets, embedded in mattresses, or strapped to the back, knees, or wrists, are fast attracting adherents of alternative pain relief. Touted by Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, they are selling briskly at mainstream stores, though there is little data to prove how they actually work.
The good news for believers is that there is no conclusive evidence to show that magnets don't work either.
The medical benefits of magnets have been touted since the days of ancient Greece, when Hippocrates reportedly used the magnetic rock lodestone to treat sterility. Some scientists theorize that magnets promote healing by stimulating blood flow to the affected area, bringing extra oxygen and nutrients while reducing toxins. Another hypothesis is that magnets create a field that alters how pains signals are sent along the nervous system.
Perhaps the best study of magnet therapy to date was conducted last year by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine, using magnets not much stronger than those on the fridge. The devices reduced pain in 76 percent of post-polio patients, as compared with 19 percent of patients treated with a placebo. Neither the control groups nor the researchers knew which magnets were real and which were fake in the double-blind experiment. The surprising findings persuaded some doctors who had dismissed magnet therapy as quackery to reserve judgment. But with just 50 patients, the Baylor study may have been a statistical fluke.
More information on magnet therapy is expected soon from a University of Virginia double-blind study, in which patients with fibromyaligia, a painful muscle and joint condition, were given sleep pads to use at home with either real magnets or fakes. But experts like James Livingston, physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of a book on the history, science, and technology of magnets, say the experiment, funded by the National Institutes of Health is flawed. "It could take two seconds with a paper clip to see if you have the real magnets or not," he says. Study coordinator Ann Gill Taylor says she trusts her patients not to check. But critics also point to a source of possible bias: Taylor admits to finding pain relief with magnets herself.
Used courtesy of U.S. News & World Report December 7, 1998
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