Transcript: There’s a question about restless leg syndrome, muscle spasms, which is very common in MS especially at nighttime. Restless leg syndrome plus MS, that’s not a great combination is it? So muscle spasms, charlie horses, etc and taking magnesium but no other prescribed drugs.  This question is from Tracy. 

 I think magnetic field therapy is an essential therapy for MS for lots of reasons. One of the most important reasons is healing and inflammation. The lesions in MS, in the brain and the spinal cord, are inflamed. There’s a lot of inflammation around them and the inflammation causes damage to the ability of the nervous system to work properly. As a result of that imbalance between spasticity, or muscle contraction, and muscle relaxation, it leans on the side of spasticity. You can’t relax the muscles well enough because of the damage in the brain. 

It’s important to treat the brain and the spinal cord with PEMF therapy to decrease inflammation and improve healing.  If you’re too far gone in the MS process, magnetic therapy is not going to reverse the damage. 

There’s an outside possibility in the future, especially if we combine PEMF therapy with STEM cell therapies, what we call intrathecal into the central nervous system space, spinal fluid space that we could.  In the future, as people start doing more of these invasive STEM cell treatments and you combine that with magnetic field therapy, we could potentially start to see some pretty dramatic results.  But at this point it’s just horribly experimental. 

Nevertheless, I have a number of people with MS, who when they started doing magnetic field therapy on a regular basis combined with functional medicine, the MS process settles down. The more damage that has already been done, we may not be able to stop the effects of that damage, but we stopped the progression. Unlike medication, which may stop the progression but causes all kinds of risks of side effects, and it doesn’t heal. So PEMF therapy gives you the opportunity to heal and at the same time to improve function, it can make the nervous system work better to the extent that it has the capability to work better. 

I have one or two people I’ve worked with now for over 20 years that have stabilized, and they have never progressed to canes or crutches or wheelchairs. They used some of that at the beginning, but now they’re relatively free to move about and live the full activities of daily living.  That doesn’t mean that they’re without any problems,  and they can never stop because we can’t necessarily stop the problem completely unless we can heal the problem completely. 

Unfortunately, I don’t see people who have just been diagnosed with MS and are really early in the process. So if you know anybody with MS that’s just been diagnosed, the sooner you start treatment with PEMFs and functional medicine, the better because then you can truly heal.  

Everything that I do in functional medicine is supportive to what the body does. But PEMFs actually help to heal. So they’re using the nutrients and everything that you’re doing in functional medicine and making the body use them better and helping to support the function of the body and then helping with the regeneration of the tissue.  

So, you can decrease spasticity. Unfortunately, what many people with MS do is they treat where spasticity is. I had a consultation about this just the other day with somebody. You don’t treat where the spasticity is, that’s where you’re feeling the pain.  The problem you have to treat is the brain cause that’s the source of the spasticity, that’s where the imbalance is in the nervous system. 

The treatment needs to be done with higher intensity magnetic fields. Using low intensity, like a micropulse, forget about it. The Flexpulse can be helpful in other ways, but you’re not going to get much benefit with lower intensity because you need high-intensity magnetic fields to go deep enough into the brain to do healing work to decrease the inflammation.

Restless legs – so most people now believe that most of the problem with restless legs is in the brain and so most of the medical treatments for it are medication that are used to treat the symptoms of restless legs in the brain.  But the medication does not stop the problem or the cause. One of the causes, potentially, is iron. I can’t remember exactly whether it’s an iron deficiency or too much iron, but iron can often be involved. There are pigments and cells in the brain that have iron pigments in them, and I think it’s too much, not too little, but I better stop there before my guesswork gets me in trouble.  In any event, magnetic field therapy to the brain may help to decrease the irritability of that part of the brain that causes the restless leg problem. 

One other source of restless legs that has been found in a number of people, not everybody, in venous insufficiency.  If you have pooling of blood in your legs, especially if you’ve been standing all day or sitting all day and your legs are swollen,  and you go to bed at night, that blood has to leave those legs. And when you have that kind of blood pooling in your legs, then that can cause that sensation of needing to move your legs. So wearing support stockings throughout the day can be very helpful. Doing exercises before you go to bed to get the blood moving out of your legs or laying down on a recliner, with your feet up for maybe half an hour. So if you have a recliner, watch TV with your legs up about six inches above your hips to get the blood drain back down. 

Most people with venous insufficiency do find, in fact, that when they wake up in the morning that swelling they had in their legs when they went to bed is all gone. But how long does it take for it to go away? Restless legs often happen the earliest in the evening. So, that’s a functional medicine approach to restless legs other than the central nervous system aspect of it.

Transcript: James asks about an adult son with chronic asthma. One of the first research reports that I read about asthma was actually in an early book that I had co-authored about magnetic field therapy in Eastern Europe.  What the Russians and Eastern Europeans discovered is that they treated the spine right in the back, the upper part of the spine. Here’s the head, and here’s the neck, here’s the upper back – so you want to treat it in the upper back. That’s where the spinal nerve traffic goes in that controls the opening and closing of the airways, the parasympathetic nervous system. They found that they could open up the airways by doing magnetic therapy to the back. But that’s an old science.  

The current thinking about asthma is that it’s not only a nervous system issue – a parasympathetic imbalance problem causing the airways to be constricted  – that’s a parasympathetic reaction to closing the airways. But that’s caused by inflammation, that’s caused by irritable airways. So the modern treatment is to reduce inflammation. That’s why the medications that are being used today, the inhalers, are primarily combined with a steroid and a bronchial dilator.  That does take care of the problem chronically and it keeps the airways from constricting, it opens them up. 

Magnetic field therapy can be used to the chest, in the front, to help to deal with the inflammation in those upper airways, but it can also be used in the back and that would get the nervous system involved in managing the airway opening. I use a combination approach. 

Let’s go back to the very beginning of the presentation. Here is where the intensity makes a difference. You have to reach that magnetic field deep into the body. You have to decrease the inflammation. You need a minimum of 15 Gauss at the target tissue. So from the skin or the chest you’d have to go in probably about four inches, five inches into the bronchi. And not only do you have to go into the Bronchi, you have the stems of the bronchi. Here’s the bronchus, and that breaks off into other bronchioles and other divisions of those bronchi. So you have to go down fairly deep into the lungs to decrease the inflammation. 

I have a patient who came to me, a holistic doctor, who had been taken care of by an academic pulmonary doctor. He had horrible asthma. He had at least four hospital admissions of four or five days per year to manage his asthma while being managed by an academic pulmonary doctor. But nobody was managing him holistically. So as a holistic physician, I got him on a bunch of supplements, changed his nutrition, we talked about attitude, we looked at his medications and then we started magnetic field therapy. When we did that combination of all of those things, all of a sudden he has had zero admissions. Zero. He’s had one ER visit in the last four years. That’s the power of this kind of therapy. 

If you want to get off medication – I don’t advise you to get off medication, I don’t take away your crutches if I know you can’t walk yet. That’s silly.  It’s bad medicine. So if you start by doing magnetic field therapy and you’re doing your conventional therapies, and then you make the nutritional changes, you add the supplements, you increase the anti-inflammatory activity in the body and all of that works over the next two to three months, then you can begin to cut back on the medication.

If all of a sudden you don’t need your bronchial dilators as often, you don’t have to rescue as often, then you could look at cutting back on the anti-inflammatory medications. But you need to work with your doctor. Hopefully, you have a doctor who will work with you. If you don’t, you’re going to have to find one who will. Holistic physicians generally will be ones that you should be able to work with, combining magnetic field therapy along with conventional medicine. 

I do use conventional medicines. I’m not opposed to using conventional medicine. It doesn’t make any sense not to if that tool is available, but you have to use it appropriately. In medicine today,  in our society today, if your only tool is a hammer you treat every problem as a nail. So every conventional doctor doesn’t know anything about holistic medicine. They don’t care about nutrition, mostly. They don’t care about your attitudes. They don’t care about your emotions. All they want to do is give you the medications and get you out of the office. 

Now, I’m not disparaging doctors. There are a lot of very good conventional doctors who are very open-minded. But most of the time you’re going to have to find a holistic physician who’s going to be more likely to be open to adding things together to produce a more comprehensive approach. I’ve discussed this on other webinar Q and A’s as well, that you need to combine approaches to get the best results. It takes a village to deal with the problem. And most physicians, because they only rely on the medication do not complete the treatment. They don’t provide a comprehensive and complete treatment. 

A good example of that I mentioned in a previous session is that if you have an infection and somebody gives you something for your infection, all they’re doing is killing the bugs. They’re not helping the infection.  They rely on the body taking care of itself. If you have surgery, what does the doctor do to help you heal yourself? Nothing. They give you painkillers and have you come back in a week or two to see how the wound is doing, and you cross your fingers that you’re healing. That’s leaving things to chance. 

Holistic medicine doesn’t have to leave things to chance. We know that we have a lot of other tools that we can use to provide a more complete healing program. If you’re fortunate enough to have a holistic physician and you get into trouble and you need an appendectomy, then you’re going to be able to see your holistic physician along with your surgeon to get a much better result and much faster, more complete healing with less likelihood of complications and problems down the road.

Transcript: What is the best device for my mycotoxin brain and mitochondria energy recovery? The mycotoxin brain is very challenging to deal with.  The problem is that once they’re in the brain they’re very hard to get out.  The same thing happens with mercury,  or heavy metal toxicities,  or viruses – anything that’s causing chronic inflammation in the brain. What you’re dealing with more than anything is basically just quieting down the inflammation in the brain. You may not be able to get rid of it and sometimes it’s not the fungal infection that’s causing the problem, it’s the toxins that the fungi release.  And bacteria can release toxins as well. And those toxins then are neuroinflammatory and could cause immune reactions as well on top of this. So the goal here then becomes just quieting down the inflammation in the brain. 

I talked about that earlier. Magnetic field therapy can be very helpful for that, but you also need to use other approaches. You may need IV therapy because you have to pass through the blood-brain barrier to impact the inflammation in the brain. So IV vitamin C, IV glutathione, IV alpha-lipoic acid, in some cases ozone therapy can be very helpful.  Certainly anti-inflammatories -C, ALA, and glutathione – IV – to be able to get into the brain. And if you do a few courses of those and then combine that with magnetic field therapy you’re going to be rolling down the road much faster in terms of getting recovery. Nevertheless, this is a long term process. How long does it take to reduce inflammation in the brain? Your body will tell you. Nobody can tell you how long it’s going to take, but at least you start – and you have to start with the right intensity magnetic field, going low and slow to make sure that your brain can handle it. 

You need to be treating the brain directly – transcranial magnetic stimulation. And transcranial magnetic stimulation has been found to be extraordinarily safe, even using magnetic systems. So now there are FDA approved PEMF machines for treating treatment-resistant depression. They’re using magnetic systems that are strong enough that when you stimulate over the part of the brain that controls muscle function in the body, you get a contraction in your thumb.  They’re not stimulating the thumb, they’re stimulating the part of the brain that causes the muscle movement. And they stimulate at or above the level that it causes the thumb to contract.  They don’t stimulate there continually, they’ll now pick a part of the brain, like the front or back, or other areas that will give the magnetic field action deeper into the brain. 

So those devices, at that level of intensity, have been found to be extraordinarily safe. So most of the magnetic systems that most of you are likely to purchase are going to be safe enough. I have three systems that I would consider for treating the brain under those circumstances. If you’re willing to make that investment. 

One is the Tesla Fit Pro, which I don’t recommend too often. That’s more of a professional machine. Uh, and you have significant intensity control and you have about 8,000 Gauss that you could work with. The next is a Tesla Fit Duo, which is still pretty expensive. That allows you to treat two parts of the brain at the same time and has an intensity of about 5,000 Gauss. The Tesla Fit Plus has an intensity of about 5,000 Gauss.  

A magnetic system of about 5,000 Gauss will be able to deliver 15 Gauss about seven inches into the brain.  So, it’ll go right through the brain from front to back.  And you want to deliver the magnetic field throughout the entire brain. So if you use two coils, you don’t need as much intensity side to side or front to back. Again, the head is longer front to back, so you need to have enough magnetic field intensity to treat the entire brain. For mycotoxins, that’s what you really need to do. 

Mitochondria. PEMF therapy increases ATP production. PEMF therapy stabilizes the cells and helps the cells to detoxify. It increases energy production within the cell itself. If you can increase ATP production in the cell itself, then the cell is going to be healthier. But you want a healthy cell in the first place. Cells that are damaged or inflamed are not healthy.

Magnetic field therapy helps those cells to open up the membrane channels, which I’ve discussed in previous webinars in this series. Then you need to be able to heal those cells. Once a cell closes up and becomes more normal than the mitochondria become more normal. Whole-body PEMF therapy is necessary to deal with mitochondria throughout the body. If you’re just dealing with the brain then the localized magnetic field therapy will work very well to increase mitochondrial performance in the brain itself.  

Now, we have a simplistic perception that if I do a therapy session, there I fixed my mitochondria. Not going to happen. The mitochondria are constantly working. We turn over every ATP molecule in the body, 200 to 500 times per day. We create our body weight in mitochondria every day. Now, it’s not all happening at one time, but over the day we essentially create our body weight in ATP. So ATP turns over very rapidly. 

So I stimulate you now, and we’ve got ATP working for a while. How long? It’s hard to know, but it’s not going to be 10 hours. It’s more likely to be two hours, three hours, maybe even 10 or 15 minutes depending on how much ATP is needed. In the areas where you have inflammation, there’s a huge amount of demand for ATP.  So that benefit for ATP production in that area of inflammation is going to last as long as the ATP isn’t used up. When it’s used up, then you need to generate some more. Some people talk about magnetic therapy being something that you could do for eight minutes. Give me a break.  Eight minutes?  For bone healing, healing nonunion fractures, which I’ve talked about before, those systems are used upwards of 12 hours a day. And that’s safe enough. It’s not environmental magnetic fields, the high-frequency magnetic fields like cell phones,  which are dangerous. 

Extremely low-frequency PEMFs, which I use, are very, very safe. You could use it for hours at a time and that’s what you may need at the beginning. You have to have a magnetic therapy system that’s gonna allow you to do treatments over extended periods of time, at the beginning. As you heal yourself, you could decrease the total amount of treatment time. But it depends on healing. It’s not about your symptoms, it depends on healing. 

The challenge that we always have as physicians is to figure out how much time do you need to heal? And you’re going to find that out by virtue of cutting back on your treatment. If you cut back on the treatment and the problem comes back, the symptoms come back then you know you still need to do more treatment time. The brain heals very slowly, so you’re probably going to have to be treating for a long time to heal the brain to make sure the problem doesn’t come back,  or to keep it away for longer periods of time. So maybe only once a day treatments are all you need. And no matter what, we probably should be doing once a day anyway, even from an ATP perspective.

Transcript: The question is, can you inform me if PEMF therapy is helpful for fibromyalgia? The answer is yes. We’ve talked about this on other Q & A webinars, so I think I’ve dealt with that question pretty adequately.  In my book, I also deal with the topic of fibromyalgia. 

Fibromyalgia is a chronic brain problem. It’s more than that clearly, but it’s a chronic pain brain problem. What initiates it? It’s very hard to know. We know that there’s a lot of association between fibromyalgia and viruses and other toxic molecules that have gotten into the nervous system of the body. Genetics probably plays a big part in it. Down the road, as the problem continues, you end up with a chronic pain brain.  I should mention that one of the discussions that we had in the summit was about something called the brain gauge.  

Dr. Mark Tommerdahl and I are going to be collaborating on using the brain gauge to help people with their chronic pain. Using the brain gauge, you’ll be able to monitor the impact of the treatment that you have on your chronic pain and how it has affected your brain. You’ll be able to see the amount of effect that you’re having in your brain as a baseline, and then monitor the effectiveness over time.  On drpawluk.com –  we don’t have this yet, so you’ll have to keep an eye on our website – we will be offering the brain gauge to people who are purchasing some PEMF systems for the chronic pain to be able to have you monitor the effectiveness of your treatments to your brain.

Certainly, one of the recommendations that we’ll be making is that you do treat your brain. So even though your pain is in your elbow, or your shoulder, if it’s been there for a long time it’s affecting your brain. We want to be able to quiet the brain down, so the signals from your shoulder, for example, going into your brain will be lessened in terms of the way the brain perceives it. 

If you do a search on brain gauge or listen to the summit presentation with Dr. Mark Tommerdahl, you’ll be able to get more information about the brain gauge.  We’ll be getting that program going for you in the next two to three months, probably.

Fibromyalgia is one of those conditions that the brain gauge would be very, very useful for. You can purchase it or you can rent it. You could even do it today. You don’t even need to wait till we have our own program. It’s up to you.

So, again, I would treat fibromyalgia in the brain. I treat it in the upper body.  Fibromyalgia is also a condition that you probably need to have a stronger PEMF system. I mentioned before that you have basically superficial systems and I’m going to name several of them right now. The QRS, the IMRS, the Medithera, the Bio Balance, the OMI, et cetera. All of these systems that are gauss or less or even under five gauss are probably not strong enough. They could fool your brain. It’s important to fool your brain. It’s important to lessen the pain, no doubt about it. But you don’t get a long term benefit from doing that, just like you don’t get a long term benefit from using painkillers. 

Painkillers are good in the short term, but not in the long term. But we know by the opioid crisis where we become dependent on them and then we try to withdraw from it, it makes everything worse, including the pain that you had before. So our goal is to try to heal the part of the body that’s causing the problem, and to heal the brain, the inflammatory components, that are making the physical changes in the brain over time. We want to be able to deal with all of that. So we want to treat the shoulder to get rid of the original source of the problem, and we also want to be able to treat the brain to decrease inflammation and quiet the brain down. Combining the treatments becomes important and having the right intensity of the magnetic field becomes important.

So, you really can’t go cheap on this. You really have to think of this as an investment that you’re going to be able to use for a long time. Going to somebody for treatment is going to give you benefits, but how long does it last? Rarely does it last more than a few hours. If it does, maybe it might last for a day or two, then it’s going to be back.  How much money do you want to keep pouring down that funnel to keep going to somebody to get treatment? What you really need is to be owning your own system.  

I think getting treatment with doctors or chiropractors or other people who own PEMF systems is important. I have a lot of people coming to me who have realized they get benefit from these systems. But they say I know I’m going to have to lay out $70, $100, $150 every time I have a treatment session. Eventually, it’s going to add up, right? And you’ve made an investment in those treatments, but you have nothing to show for it, and the problem is still there. 

So basically what I’m exhorting you to do is to think about getting your own system. As a family physician and a holistic physician, I’ve always wanted people to take care of themselves. I tell my patients routinely, I am not your doctor, you are your doctor, I’m your consultant.  You have to take care of yourself. You have to make wise decisions about your own health.  You can’t rely on somebody else to fix you. And I’m sure because you’re listening to this webinar, you’re not one of those people who’s relying on somebody to fix them. It’d be nice if you could, right? If you have a needle in your hand or a nail in your hand, obviously you fix yourself, you remove it. But not all chronic pain problems are that easy to fix. So again, take care of yourself, be your own best doctor, and consider getting yourself your own system and investing in the summit, the VIP series. 

So, fibromyalgia, it’s long term. You have to think of this as a long, long, long, long term process. I wish I could say that you can get a benefit like that overnight. Well, that rarely happens, because you have to heal the tissues. Healing takes time. If you break a bone, it takes time to heal that bone, to make new bone, to repair the bone completely. You can use it fairly quickly, but it takes a long time to repair it completely. And the same thing applies to the brain and fibromyalgia.

Transcript: Janice is asking about PEMF for nerve pain from a wisdom tooth extraction. I’ve talked about dental therapies in prior webinars in the past.  Basically, you need to use local PEMF therapy. You could use something called the micropulse or you could use a Flex pulse. If you happen to have a higher intensity system that cleared you could use that as well. This kind of problem often needs extended treatment because you’re trying to quiet down the inflammation of the nerve and heal the socket where the chronic inflammation is. Again, I talked about this more extensively in prior webinars sessions.

Transcript: My nervous system is overstimulated from early trauma, years of high stress, and lack of proper sleep. Is it connected to brain overstimulation? Does an unbalanced nervous system perpetuate chronic pain? (The answer is yes.) And how do we gradually bring the nervous system back into balance? 

In the pain solutions summit, I interviewed about 30 experts on dealing with chronic pain and the different ways that you can manage your chronic pain.  Chronic pain is not a simple and easy process to treat. You really need to take a multidisciplinary approach to dealing with chronic pain. If you don’t, your results are not going to be as good as you’d like. So I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to purchase the VIP pass to the summit.  What I find is that people pick and choose certain episodes that are of particular interest to them.

As a host of the summit, a former family physician, and now a holistic physician who specializes in magnetic field therapies, I suggest you fully inform yourself.  When you own the summit, you’ll be able to go back and rewatch or re-listen to all of the episodes.  It’s 30 hours of basic information for you to have access to on an ongoing basis. And when you’re dealing with chronic pain, you’re going to be dealing with this, to a great extent, for the rest of your life. Having this as a resource is very well worth it. So I strongly encourage you to get the VIP pass. 

Now to go back to the question of the nervous system being overstimulated from early trauma. There’s all kinds of trauma – PTSD type trauma, physical trauma, toxic trauma if you will. Anytime that you injure yourself, you’re going to have trauma. Physical trauma, like a car accident, falls, concussions, traumatic brain injuries, can cause damage and inflammation in the brain which can end up being within the spinal cord and nerves anywhere in the body. So yes, the nervous system becomes hyperexcitable. If you want to be able to deal with that, the chronic pain summit is important.  A lot of this has to do with your own mindset, stress reduction techniques, meditation techniques and many other techniques that are discussed in the summit. 

Beyond those, I do strongly recommend the use of magnetic field therapy. It’s a physical modality. It’s not an emotional modality. It’s not a mental modality. It’s not a supplement.  You do need supplements and adequate nutrition, which are also discussed in the summit series.  Those are all very important foundational elements for best success. But I don’t think you can do an adequate job without using magnetic field therapy, especially for chronic nervous system imbalances.  And the magnetic field intensity is very important to reach deep into the spinal cord, to reach deep into the brain to decrease inflammation. Again, the goal is to decrease inflammation and decrease the hyperirritability of the nervous system. And that doesn’t happen overnight. Damaged nerves take a long time to heal. So you have to be patient, and that’s why you need to use a combination of approaches.

What I’ve found over the years is that there are many, many other techniques and modalities that can be used and none of them by themselves works 100%. In other words, you can’t just rely on one technique. But if you’re going to heavily rely on one technique than PEMFs are one of the better ways to start while you add on the other things, and while you get the benefit of all of these other approaches that we discussed in the chronic pain summit.

PEMF therapy can be extraordinarily helpful for decreasing overstimulation. The challenge is going to be to do it right. For that purpose, I do offer consultations to people on drpawluk.com to help you figure out which magnetic system is the best for you. 

The other problem that people have in terms of picking the wrong system is they make the decision based on price alone without understanding magnetic field therapy, how it works, the mechanisms, or how to properly use it to get the best long term results. So consultations are important, and that’s the other reason why the book is important. 

Again, I have a ton of information on drpawluk.com about these different issues.  Informing yourself becomes an important part of your journey to help you with your health issues and your nervous system problems. 

One of the questions that Jennifer asked is does an unbalanced nervous system perpetuate chronic pain? Absolutely. Absolutely. If your nervous system is overexcited then any kind of stimuli can affect it.  One of the topics that I’m especially interested in is the impact of chronic pain on the brain. I call that the chronic pain brain. There are one or two episodes in the summit series about that as well, and the fact that you need to use magnetic field therapy especially, but the other components as well,  to manage chronic pain to quiet down the amount of inflammation.

Inflammation in the body, in general, affects chronic pain. The irritable brain becomes sensitive to any stimuli in the periphery. So people whose brains have been significantly impacted by their pain, even touching the skin can fire off nerve receptors in the brain that does not pain receptors in terms of the spinal cord, they’re just receptors. Any information going into the brain becomes registered in the brain as a pain type signal. And so what you have to do there is to quiet down the brain, and one of the key mechanisms for doing that is magnetic field therapy that you can target to the brain itself that decreases the inflammation. There were studies done in animals where they had head injuries and they discovered that the head injuries activated and triggered all sorts of inflammatory molecules that they were able to measure. They found that magnetic field therapy impacted those inflammatory molecules and they decreased them. They measured those inflammatory molecules in the spinal fluid of these animals and discovered that there was a significant reduction in the inflammation. 

The sooner you start treatment after an injury to the brain, the better. The sooner you start treating your chronic pain aggressively, the better –  before it becomes a chronic pain brain. Once it does, then again, you have to use all these components and mechanisms together to be able to help yourself. So, it’s an easy question with complicated answers. You can bring the nervous system back into balance using nutrition and supplements and everything else that we discussed in the chronic pain summit.

Transcript: We talked about eye problems in a previous episode as well, so you’ll have to go back and look at the webinar notes to look at the eyes. Basically, the Flexpulse coils put over the eyes can work very well for eye pressure. Eye pressure problems are due to blockages and inflammation in the fluid channels of the eyes.  If you decrease the inflammation, you can help restore that fluid balance, then that would hopefully decrease the eye pressure. 

If you already have nerve damage from the eye pressure problems, the magnetic field therapy can go to the back of the eye, helping reduce the inflammation in the back of the eye and helping to restore and regenerate nerve tissue so that the nerve damage can be repaired and recovered.

Transcript: Marilyn asked “why does laying on my mat make my arms and hands ache? Does that mean I shouldn’t use it?”

The real question here is why are the arms and hands aching?  Do they ache every time you lay on your back for that same amount of time without using magnetic therapy? If so, it’s a physical problem in your body, not the magnetic therapy, that’s causing the aching. There’s a good chance that the physical issues are coming from your neck, and if you don’t have your neck properly supported, you’re more likely to get that aching in your arms and hands.  

The issue could be arthritis or a disc problem in your neck.  It could also be a result of mobile phone use. The stretching in the spine that results when your head is bent down constantly is causing all kinds of chronic pain problems for people. This can also happen with reading papers on the desk or using a computer keyboard with the monitor too low so that your spine isn’t in its proper position. There’s a great discussion on the summit about the spine, and how spine positioning contributes to pain problems.  

If the aching issue isn’t duplicated in the same position, for the same amount of time, without the magnetic field therapy then we need to look at the PEMF therapy.  I recommend that people go “low and slow,” starting with lower intensities and gradually working up.  Magnetic fields increase energy and circulation in the tissues.  

Think of magnetic field therapy like physical training.  If you want to run a marathon, for instance, you have to start with short distances and train for longer endurance.  The same is true with magnetic field therapy.  You have to see what your tissues can handle before moving to the next level of intensity, length of treatment, and frequency of treatments (the dose of magnetic field therapy).  

If you start “low and slow”  and don’t have any aching, but when you reach a certain level of magnetic stimulation in time or intensity that creates the aching, you are stimulating the nerves too much. 

This only happens in five to ten percent of people I see, but I’ve seen it often enough that I do warn people about it.  If you do have significant irritation in your nerves, you need to back off the treatment time and/or intensity to a comfortable level for a few weeks and raise it slowly, just as you would with physical training.

If you find that you can’t do any magnetic field therapy at all without nerve irritation, you might need to try other avenues to calm the inflammation first. Physical therapy, heat, and other therapies might be very important to your healing.  Short term laser therapy to the tissue may be a good option, just to get you off the edge of the cliff.  In a worst-case scenario, you might need to consider conventional medical approaches, such as a steroid injection or two, just to quiet everything down. 

I don’t often recommend steroids, but in this case, it could decrease inflammation enough that you could then return to magnetic field therapy.  You might even be able to do a higher dose of treatment, in either intensity or time, because of the steroid injection. 

One last thing that I would say, Marilyn, is that if you haven’t had an MRI of your neck, I would definitely consider that.  I like to say that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.  You really need to know what you are dealing with in order to get the best advice.

Transcript: The next question, from Marty, is what dosage do you use for osteoarthritis?  That’s a good question. Dosage is a very important question. And in physics and magnetic field therapy, we actually call it dosimetry, which is basically the concept of dose. Dose is based on several ideas, not just the intensity. It’s the intensity delivered over a period of time and then repeated. The total dose is not just the intensity, it’s how long you use it for in a given treatment session, and then how many times do you repeat that? The answer is: whatever works. What’s your dose? Whatever works. 

This goes back to another concept we talked about in a previous webinar, the idea of how quickly you’re going to get results. That’s the inverse square law and the depth that you have to go into the body. The worse the arthritis, the more time you’re going to need to do treatments. So the dose then becomes much higher. If you have just the beginning stages of arthritis then you may not need as high a dose. You may not need to treat it as much. You could get by with a low-intensity system, a hundred or two hundred Gauss for only half an hour at a time. If you’re bone on bone with your arthritis, then you’re probably going to need to treat a lot more. 

You’re going to need to treat as much as you need to treat to get relief from your issues: relief from pain, relief of range of motion.  How easily can you move those joints?  Can you get a full range of motion in that joint, or are you limited in how much you can move it? As you start doing magnetic field therapy the range of motion improves. The strength improves. You have less pain when you actually try to use that joint. You get less swelling in that joint and it’s the swelling that causes limitations in the movement and also discomfort. So whatever you need. 

The thing about most PEMF systems, even very high-intensity magnetic systems, is it’s very, very, very hard to overdose. Most people tend to underdose – they don’t have high enough intensity and they don’t treat enough.  If you have a very high-intensity system like a Tesla Fit Plus 2 or a Parameds Flash, then you don’t need to treat as much. You may get away with half an hour a day. 

What often happens – and this happens a lot if you do physical therapy – you have an intense course of treatment in the beginning. You might do three sessions a week, and then after several weeks, you’re showing improvement, improving range of motion, you decrease the pain and discomfort. Then you start to decrease the number of treatments. Are you done yet? 

Osteoarthritis is a lifetime problem. It’s not curable. It might be in a guinea pig, but it isn’t in a human. Most humans come to magnetic field therapy late in the process. You’ve decided “I’ve had enough.  I’ve had enough pain, I’ve had enough discomfort.  Now, I want to do something more for it.  I don’t want to take ibuprofen, which causes gastric bleeding. I don’t want to take opioids. I don’t want to do all the drugs that doctors are recommending for me, so I’m going to do magnetic therapy.”

That’s great. I agree with that because magnetic therapy at least allows some degree of healing, especially if you started early in the osteoarthritis process. So osteoarthritis is one of the key indicators for PEMF therapy, but you have to have the right machine and use it the right way at the right dose. 

For arthritis, most of the time, for most people, I recommend a minimum of half an hour twice a day. But that’s not half an hour, twice a day to the whole body. You might need half an hour for each joint. What a lot of people do is they take a magnetic field and put it on the body for 10 minutes and then move it to the next joint for 10 minutes. You’re not going to get a lot of benefit by doing that because the tissue needs to be stimulated to produce changes and get healing to happen.

So, this is not a simple technology. It’s simple, but it’s not simple. Again, most people tend to underestimate what they need to do. If you have a lot of arthritis in different parts of the body, what I would do is take the joints that need the most work and spend the most time with those joints first, and then move to other joints as you need to. But moving from place to place to place in the same treatment session, you’re going to be disappointed in your results, because you’re not going to get deep enough healing work going on to really help you. It doesn’t matter where in the body you’re treating, the same issues apply – to virtually any problem for that matter.

Transcript: Jennifer asks, there are many treatments and strategies to reduce pain in the body. Is it the chicken or the egg? Does a physical problem have to be resolved before pain mitigation or can a pain-reducing strategy somehow lead the way to healing?

That’s a good question, and it’s a very complicated question. Chicken or egg? Pain leads to its own issues in the body, including the brain. So the more pain you have, and the longer the pain is there, then the brain becomes part of the problem. 

I was talking with somebody the other day about sleep. Does pain cause sleep problems? Yes. Do sleep problems cause pain problems? Yes. Do sleep problems make pain problems worse? Yes. Do pain problems cause depression? Yes. All of these go hand in glove. 

Now, did the depression cause the pain problem? Did the sleep cause the pain problem? I would generally say no. Most of the time the pain problem is caused by something going on in the body that is usually related to inflammation, or damage, some kind of injury in the tissues. And by injury, I don’t mean a hammer falling on your toe. Injury can be toxicities, it could be burns, it could be radiation like sunlight, it can be cold, it can be heat. Anything that injures a cell or the tissue is an injury, and any injury can cause pain. 

Obviously, if you burn yourself, you’re going to have a pain, and that’s an acute pain. It should go away in a few days, a week or two weeks, because the body will try to heal itself. Chronic pain means that the pain does not go away after three months. That’s an artificial idea because obviously if it’s not gone in a few days  it’s chronic to some extent. But basically, if it’s been there for three months or more, it’s called chronic pain.

Generally speaking, does a physical problem have to be resolved before pain mitigation? Not always. I would say that if you can mitigate, you can remove the cause, if you can heal the tissue that’s causing the pain signal, it’ll heal.  But if you have chronic pain for a long time, that pain signal can end up going into the brain, and the brain has a memory. Phantom pain is a perfect example of this. The cause of the pain is gone, the leg is gone. Now it’s possible that in terms of leg amputation, that the nerves in the area of the stump can still be irritated and they could still be sending signals to the brain enough to cause pain. But people who have phantom limb described the pain as an itching or a pain in a specific spot in the limb that is no longer there. It’s not at the stump, it’s in a  part of the body that is gone. 

So yes, the brain can have a pain signal memory that stays in the brain and that pain memory then is pain, because that’s your perception. So when you burn yourself, or you stub your toe, or you cut yourself, that signal is going to the brain and your brain registers it and says move your hand away from the hot stove, take the nail out of your foot, whatever. So if you removed it and the pain is still there, then it’s more likely to be a memory issue. In that case, where do you treat? You treat the brain. In the case of phantom limb pain, where are you going to treat? You can’t treat a part of the body that’s no longer there.  You treat the brain.  

Treating both of them makes some sense as well, especially in chronic pain. In a good part of the time with chronic pain, if you’ve got a disc problem, if you don’t get rid of the disc pressing on the nerve, you’re going to continue to have pain. If you have arthritis and you’re bone on bone, you have to remove the joint to get rid of the pain. You have to have a joint replacement. People who have joint replacements, 95% will tell you the pain is gone almost completely within a day or two days after the joint replacement. The cause of the pain has been removed. Will the brain still remember that pain?  It’s a possibility. And if it does after your joint replacement, then you better be treating your brain as well.  

PEMF therapies, and all the other things that we talk about in the pain solution summit – attitude, beliefs, guided imagery, meditation, relaxation, breathing exercises – all of these things can help to do that as well. I happen to use PEMFs a lot because it’s simple to do. So the question, can you resolve the pain problem if you remove the source of the pain? Often yes, most of the time, yes, but not always.

Now the question becomes do pain-reducing strategies lead the way to healing? Healing is a different question, I think, and it’s a very complicated issue. What’s responsible for the healing of the body? The body’s capacity to bring itself back into balance. That’s healing. Restoring the tissue to its natural state. That’s healing. Can the brain, the mind, cause healing? Absolutely. Again, if you have a nail in your hand and it’s still there, then all the work of the brain is not going to help you to remove the pain caused by that nail. It may dull it over time, but you have to remove the nail to remove the cause. But the brain can help the healing. I know people who have done hypnotic work, and hypnosis can cause healing in the body. 

Nutrition is absolutely essential for healing. So even though the source of the pain is gone, the nail has gone from your hand, the hand has to heal itself. The body has to heal itself. But if you’re nutritionally really depleted, if you’ve just gone through chemotherapy and your nutrition is way, way off and you have a lesion, you have a cut or a wound, we know that with chemotherapy, wounds don’t heal well. Diabetes wounds don’t heal well. So all of the mind work that you do to try to help you to heal will help, but it’s not going to be enough. So you have to know how to combine these things and in what proportions to be able to do healing work. But I think ultimately, yes, the mind is critical to healing. Belief is critical to healing. 

I know people have cured their cancers – 20 years later it’s still gone – through mind work, through spiritual healing work. So the mind is very, very powerful. You have to get yourself out of your own way. You have to disabuse yourself of any frustrations, any fear, any anger, to be able to have your mind really fully help to heal your body. We all have to work at that anyway. 

As we get older, we have all kinds of aches and pains, creaks, and rattles. So again, the better the mindset is, then the more likely the body’s going to be able to ignore it. We see people regularly who have horrible looking MRIs – they should be screaming in pain and yet they don’t complain of pain at all.  If you have the right attitudes,  very often the perception of pain is decreased because you’ve quieted down the brain.

Chronic pain impacts the brain in a way that even small signals are more intense if you don’t help your mind to control your pain processes. An anxious brain will feel a small amount of pain that feels like a much bigger amount of pain, but a quiet brain may be able to essentially ignore a big pain versus a small pain. So obviously it could ignore small pain more easily than the big pain. So back to the MRI, there are people who have horrible looking spines and don’t feel pain. Well, maybe they’re in a better place mentally, they have less fear, they have less anxiety, they have less fighting going on in their lives. They’re more balanced. So again, you’re more likely to feel better with pain and live with it better if you have a more balanced life if you are a more balanced person in all the ways that you can be balanced.

Transcript: The last part of Jennifer’s question is about the dynamic neural retraining system. I looked into that recently and I think it’s another mental strategy, and there are many people who can’t do it. But I talked to somebody recently who did it and has been doing it successfully. It takes a lot of work. Any good treatment programs, especially self-improvement programs, take work. Usually, people want a pill, take it now and the pain is gone, and they don’t have to worry about it or think about it. And I don’t have to do anything else other than taking the pill. Well, that’s why we have an opioid crisis. 

So dynamic neural retraining can be very useful. It’s not going to heal you. It’s going to make you be able to tolerate your pain better. If you have a mild problem that’s causing your pain, and healing is part of the solution for that problem, then maybe the neural retraining system can work for you. At the very least, it could help your brain deal with the pain problem a lot better and you could live with it. 

People who did studies with mindfulness meditation wrote a book called Full Catastrophe Living, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. They found in their studies that the people who are doing mindfulness meditation work had the same level of pain, they didn’t get rid of their pain, but they were able to live with it. And that’s a theme that’s in a lot of the interviews in the pain solution summit, that your pain is your friend. It’s a gift. 

How can I say that it’s a gift? Pain is never a gift. Well, if you didn’t have pain, your leg might fall off because you’d be ignoring something that’s brewing and is horrible. People who have congenital absence of pain die young because they don’t have pain signals. So pain is a gift to us. Chronic pain, you could argue, is less of a gift, but chronic pain is a gift because it’s telling you that you have to change. We want to be the way we were. Well, the way we were is what got us into trouble in the first place. So if you want to get rid of your problem, then you’ve got to be a different person. You have to change who you are and dynamic neural retraining is one of those ways. Mindfulness meditation is one of those ways. Any kind of meditation process, any one of those ways that can help, thought field therapy, emotional freedom technique. Any techniques that you do to quiet yourself down to get more balanced mentally, emotionally will help you with your pain problem and lead to healing to the extent that the healing can be done.

Transcript: Will PEMF help decrease the pain associated with bladder spasms in an overactive bladder. The answer is yes. The answer to that question, again, becomes which magnetic system do you need? Because you have to reach deeper into the body, into the bladder. If this is the skin on the lower part of the abdomen and the bladder is back in here you’re talking about four or five inches. That means you need a higher intensity magnetic field to do adequate amounts of decreasing the spasms. So the question really becomes what’s the spasm from? Why does somebody have bladder spasms? That’s called urge incontinence. Urge incontinence is due to a number of different factors. Inflammation is one of them. The other factors are that the nerves become irritable. 

What happens in a bladder that’s overactive and has spasms – which can be painful – but the bladder that’s overactive is contracting too fast. So when you fill the bladder with urine then the muscles stretch.  The muscles stretch where they’re called stretch receptors, or stretch signals, in the bladder muscles.   Those stretch receptors that pass a signal up into the spinal cord, the sacral plexus, go up into the brain. So when that stretching happens, the bladder is telling the brain “I need to pee,” and the brain sends a signal down on another nerve pathway to the bladder saying “contract.” If the bladder is irritable and the muscles have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter over time, then that signal is sent off too soon and the bladder doesn’t fill itself very much. Now if both the nerves in the bladder and the muscles in the bladder are irritable, then it fires off more rapidly and then you can have spasms.

What the spasms are, basically, is your body trying to contract and you don’t want to urinate because you just went to the bathroom a few minutes ago, you’ll hold onto it and now it’s going to go into spasm and it’s going to cause pain. 

Unfortunately what you have to do is you have to allow the bladder to expand, and that takes time, because it took time to get to this place of being too small. The way you treat an overactive bladder is with magnetic field therapy. It’s very easy, and it works very, very well.

 Children who have an overactive bladder called enuresis – nighttime bedwetting- have the same problem. They have overactive bladders, and they also have a problem in the brain center that controls urination. The signal to urinate is immature and it fires too readily. It doesn’t take a lot of signals to fire off. So there could be a combination of things.  Many children grow into adulthood and continue to have enuresis or overactive bladder. That’s the more severe form of it. 

But men in their andropausal age, in the sixties and seventies, particularly in the 70s, and women postmenopausally have urge incontinence,  overactive bladder with a spasm. So you treat the front of the bladder, the front of the abdomen sitting on top of the pubic bone, and it’s putting the magnetic field into the bladder. And you also treat the sacrum because that’s where the nerve traffic for the bladder is going, so you can interrupt it at that level. And then you can treat the brain. So you can treat all three areas. What I would do is start with treatment to the front of the bladder, at least make the muscles less irritable and allow the muscles to gradually stretch so the bladder can fill more. And then if that doesn’t work, that you could add treatment to the back. You could do both,  treat the front first and treat the back second, and then if that doesn’t work you have to start treating the brain. And you may have to treat all three areas at the same treatment session. 

The best treatments for this are going to be higher intensity magnetic fields. And for that, the Pulse Harmonics and the Tesla Fit Plus are the two systems that I use the most. There is a little device called the Soto, which may or may not work because the paddle is too small, it doesn’t cover a big enough area. But that’s a place to start, and if that works for you, great.  If it doesn’t, then you need to go to a higher intensity system to give the magnetic field the ability to go deeper into the body and have a deeper action.  Therapy for overactive bladder is a process. It takes time. And the magnetic field therapy with overactive bladder can work well with the medications.  Some women are able to get off their medication after two to three months of using magnetic field therapy, which is good because there are side effects of the medications.

Transcript: The next question is from Luanne, who asks can this technology be used if one has joint implants? Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.  In fact, it better be used if you have joint implants. Right, I said better. It should be used. You should be using magnetic field therapy if you have a joint replacement. 

Why? The joint replacement is a foreign body, it’s a metal, it’s a material that does not belong in your body. Your body doesn’t recognize it. It’s not known to nature, not known to your body. And what happens when you have a foreign body? Have any of you had a prick like a needle or something sharp implanted in your tissues from the garden, and it develops into a sore area, and it builds up and becomes really sore and knotted down, and then it becomes a thick area of chronic irritation? Well, that’s because that needle, that little pearl, little object, piece of dust, bone, whatever, a carbon molecule, gets stuck. The tip of a lead pencil gets dug deep into your tissues. That’s there as a foreign body. Your body tries to wall it off because it’s infected, it bothers it, and it causes inflammation. A joint replacement causes inflammation. It’s a foreign body. 

If you’ve had a joint replacement, you should have been told that any metal implanted into the body is a chronic irritant. And a chronic irritant causes inflammation around it. If you have a hip replacement or a knee replacement, that metal stem that’s going down into your bone causes inflammation around that area, which then causes weakening of the bond between that metal and the body. The body doesn’t accept it, the body doesn’t grow itself into it, although we do call that osteointegration, so you get some degree of integration. You should build up strong bone around it to make it firm. But that doesn’t happen because the body’s trying to reject it. 

Magnetic field therapy causes osteointegration to be improved. It accelerates it, it makes it more likely to happen. There’s a blog on my website about joint replacements and PEMFs,  a very important blog to read. So if you have a joint replacement, you should be doing PEMF therapy for the rest of the time that you have that joint replacement, which is going to be the rest of your life. You’ll increase the lifespan of that replacement so you won’t have to have revision surgery 10 or 15 years later. It’s very important to use magnetic field therapy to preserve your replacement and to keep the tissues healthy.  Also if you have inflammation, you’re more likely to have an infection.  Any infection floating around in your body, even from dental work, gets into your bloodstream, goes into your body, and infection tends to settle into the areas of inflammation. So you’re more prone to getting infections in those areas of joint replacements. 

Again, PEMF therapy can make a big difference. The only caveat is very, very high-intensity magnetic fields, which most people don’t purchase, so they don’t really have to worry about it. The highest intensity fields are something like the Tesla Fit Pro, or the PEMF 120, or Magna Wave or the Pulse Centers XL Pros. Those magnetic systems that are out in the community are very high intensity and they can cause pain in the area of the implant because nerves have been damaged by the surgery, and those nerves are irritated because of the inflammation. When you pass a magnetic field past irritated nerves they can flare up, so they can hurt. But most of the time, PEMFs are going to help you with your implant to preserve it better,  to decrease the inflammation, and extend the lifespan of that joint replacement.

Transcript: The first question that we can talk about today is about mast cell activation.  Mast cell activation is a relatively newly recognized health concern.  There is an interview on the summit about mast cell activation that I think is worth listening to because it’s a pretty common problem and is fundamentally involved in all inflammation. There are people who have mast cell activation in a much bigger way in the sense that they’re being activated all the time. That also may have to do with the amount of inflammation that they have in their own bodies all the time.  That can certainly be a major contributor to the constant pain. 

PEMF’s don’t directly affect the mast cell activation and they don’t turn off that specific function in the body.  The impact of PEMFs on mast cell activation has more to do with reducing the inflammation. If you reduce inflammation, you reduce pain. That’s one of the core fundamental actions of PEMF therapies of most kinds. I have a blog on drpawluk.com called inflammation, pain, adenosine, and PEMFs. That blog talks about the need to have an optimal magnetic field to decrease inflammation by acting through the adenosine receptor. 

Inflammation is reduced in the body in a number of ways.  One of the direct ways that you reduce inflammation is by working on the adenosine receptor. I would encourage you to read that blog to get more detailed information about this particular action. 

If you reduce inflammation, you reduce mast cell activation. In the areas of inflammation, mast cells and other inflammatory cells release contents. Histamine is one of the key chemicals that’s released that causes itching and pain and further aggravates or accentuates the inflammatory process. Everybody has it. We all need it to help us with acute inflammation. When it’s chronic, that’s when you want to intervene, when you want to reduce it, because it’s no longer serving you functionally as acute inflammation does. You want to reduce it to be able to reduce the pain, discomfort, and further tissue damage wherever you happen to have that excessive inflammation. 

PEMF therapies help with mast cell activation primarily by reducing inflammation.  Now, we don’t have direct research evidence that PEMFs actually decrease histamine levels or decrease mast cell release of histamine, but we do know that this works through that kind of anti-inflammatory mechanism.

Transcript: Migraines – what frequency, intensity and using mat or paddle? Migraines are fundamentally an inflammatory problem. It’s a headache, it’s pain.  And like any other pain in the body, magnetic field therapy can be useful to help with that pain  – as can acupuncture, red light, and many other therapies. But in terms of magnetic fields, again, the intensity is very important. So depending on the system you have, if you happen to have a BioBalance system, which is 5 Gauss or 10 Gauss in the case of the small pad applicator, it’s going to take you a lot longer to get a benefit. 

Clearly, it’s very important with migraines to start treatment at the very beginning of the migraine. If you wait until it’s really settled in, then you’re going to need dynamite to get rid of it.  That’s why even with the conventional medical therapies that are available you often have to clobber them to be able to get rid of them. Once they’re settled in you may have to go to the ER and get injections of painkillers and for nausea and vomiting to get rid of it. So the sooner you start, the better. 

That means if you have regular migraines, you better own your own system. You can’t do this without having your own system, because you have to have it handy right then and there to be able to treat yourself. 

There is research that shows that a very high-intensity system, about a thousand to two thousand Gauss, applied to the back of the neck on a daily basis prevents migraines. It’s approved by the FDA for that purpose.  It’s very expensive and you don’t actually own it.  It has to be prescribed by a doctor, and good luck finding a doctor who would know anything about it anyway.

So if you do own a PEMF system, try it. Use whatever you can. I recommend the smaller applicators if you have a system that has a whole body pad and a small applicator.  If you have a high-intensity system like a Tesla Fit Plus or one of the Tesla Fit systems, or the Parmeds Flash, then you probably don’t need to treat as long because it’s such a high intensity. It could work very rapidly, especially at the beginning. Again, once the migraine is really settled in, then you may need to treat for a longer period of time. You can treat the back of the head, you can treat the sides of the head.  If you have a single pad applicator you can put it on the side of the head. You’re going to have to experiment a bit to find out which placement works best for you.

You’re going to have to also experiment, and have some experience over time, to find which intensity works best for you.  I usually recommend going low and slow.  If you just got a magnetic system and you have migraines, if you’re using it at the highest intensities already, then your body probably could tolerate it. When the migraine is the worst, that’s when you’re going to be the least likely to tolerate the highest intensity. You may find that to be true. If not, that’s fine. But what I would do is start off with lower intensities and build up to see whether you can tolerate the high intensity at the peak of the migraine. But start at the earliest onset of the migraine when the nervous system is not as irritable, because with really severe migraines, light, sound, all of these can make the migraine much worse. So when you’re that sensitive with the migraine you want to start lower and you might need shorter periods of treatment time before you can tolerate higher intensities and longer treatment time.  You’re going to have to figure that out for yourself. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule. Everything is very individual. Every person is different and their reasons for having migraines are different. So it’s trial and error, experimenting.  

If you do have regular migraines, I really do honestly recommend that you consider getting a PEMF system because that’s going to make your life a lot less uncomfortable. And if you’re using the magnetic therapy on a regular basis, like that FDA approved device shows, using it preventively every single day,  then you can prevent the onset of the migraine.

If you have menstrual migraines, you may want to start treating a day or two before the period begins because then you’re going to affect the chemistry of the cycle. You’re also going to stabilize the nervous system and make it less irritable and probably decrease the inflammation in the brain that’s activating the migraine in the first place.  That irritation and inflammation in the blood vessels of the brain set you up for sensitivity to hormonal fluctuations. So again, pretreatment, regular treatment probably will help to decrease that risk for you.

Transcript: How can PEMFs help with adhesive capsulitis or frozen shoulder? I have problems with tendonitis in my shoulder, or capsulitis, tendinosis, whichever terms you want to use. That means that the tendons and the ligaments of the bursa in the shoulder area are inflamed. They’re broken down, they’re scarred. When that goes on long enough, because it hurts to raise your arm or put it behind your back, because it hurts so much when you do, you don’t move it. And if you don’t move it, what happens? Your shoulder freezes. It locks up because you have so much inflammation and that inflammation causes the soft tissues to shorten. Then that shortening process is another burden that you have to overcome to deal with a frozen shoulder. 

The first thing you have to do is to reduce the inflammation. Then, as you start to do that and the tissues become softer as a result of the magnetic therapy, you have to start improving your range of motion. You’re probably going to have to work with a physical therapist and get a home exercise program to deal with that.

No matter what you do, it’s a long term process. Even after you’re finished, you have a full range of motion back and the problem is gone, keep doing the magnetic therapy because what caused the problem in the first place is still there. That usually means that magnetic therapy is long term. If I did an MRI of your shoulder, even though your symptoms are gone, I’d still see the evidence of the inflammation. You’d still see the scarring and the damage to the tissues.  So, probably, this is a long term process.  

I’ll give you a story. I had a small portable battery-operated magnetic system, like the Flex Pulse or the Micropulse – there was an interview on the program about the small battery-operated machine called Micropulse – and this guy lost his college scholarship because he developed a groin injury playing goalie in college hockey.  He had done all the traditional therapies, acupuncture, physical therapy, medications, rehab, all sorts of things for several years. Still no scholarship, and he was out of school for that time because of that. So we got him on that Micropulse type machine and he wore it basically 24/7.  Within a week – gone.  He said after two years of suffering from this, within one week, it was resolved. 

Now, some people will tell you all you need is eight minutes.  Really?  How much do you need to treat the body?  Eight minutes?  You need to treat the body as much as you need to treat the body to resolve the problem. 

There’s a machine available that’s by prescription, orthopedic doctors prescribe it, that’s FDA approved, it’s about 20 to 30 Gauss.  People who do magnetic therapy for Haley fractures that won’t unite, non-union fractures, apply this magnet to their forearm. They treat for upwards of 12 hours a day to heal a fracture. What are you going to accomplish with a one Gauss machine eight minutes at a time? Okay, I’m going to say this. Give me a break. I’m sorry – I don’t want to break anything – hopefully, you’ll go along with my humor here.

The thing about frozen shoulder, capsulitis healing times, you’re going to figure that out yourself depending on the system you purchase. Higher intensity systems need less treatment time and get results faster than low-intensity systems.  The tradeoff is that high-intensity systems cost a lot more. The good thing about magnetic therapy, in general, is that no matter which system you use, you can use it across the body for almost any problem. But again,  you’re going to get better results with higher intensity devices.

Transcript: Chronic tooth pain. You have to go after the cause of the tooth pain.  Magnetic field therapy can actually reduce pain, but if you have an abscess that has to be dealt with, you’ve got to deal with the abscess. In my career as a family doctor, I used to do a lot of incisions of boils and abscesses. You have to drain them. You have to get rid of the pus that’s inside that boil or abscess. You have to clean that out because the tissue can’t heal itself if you don’t clean out that tissue.  There’s no way to heal. It’s a cavity, a cavern now. It’s basically got nothing in it but bad stuff, and you can’t collapse that tissue and get it to heal unless you clean it all out, so you’ve got to deal with that, if that’s the cause of your chronic pain.  Magnetic therapy can help you to deal with it to decrease inflammation, to reduce your recovery time. If you have a dry socket from a previously pulled wisdom tooth or something then magnetic field therapy can be extraordinarily helpful for that. But again, you may need to have surgery to clean that socket out so that new tissue can grow into that cavity to be able to heal itself fully. So deal with it to resolve it completely and to get full healing.

Transcript: For Graves’ disease, or myasthenia gravis, you have to be careful with PEMF because there’s active autoimmune processes going on. Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease. PEMFs will help with that because they improve muscle function.  Even with muscular dystrophy PEMFs can be very helpful because they improve muscle function. If it’s a very aggressive autoimmune problem, like more severe myasthenia gravis, PEMF therapy can sometimes increase the amount of inflammation, which can worsen the myasthenia gravis.  In many other forms of myasthenia gravis, I don’t think there’s a problem whatsoever, but it’s an autoimmune disease and it needs to be treated as an autoimmune disease.

Transcript: Ehlers Danlos (EDS) is a genetic disorder, and there are many levels of it.  One way to know that somebody has Ehlers-Danlos is if you’ve watched people in circuses, Cirque de Soleil, where they do all these contortions. Well, they have loose ligaments and they can bend their joints in many different ways.  If you can take your thumb and bring it all the way down to your arm probably you have EDS. Certainly, you have ligamentous laxity, another term that’s used for it.  Again, there are different levels of severity of EDS. Everybody with EDS develops arthritis. Everybody.  It’s only a question of time.  It depends on the severity of the EDS, and it often happens very early in life. 

People very often know in their teens that they’ve got this problem. Sometimes you don’t recognize it, because of the milder forms, until your late twenties or thirties.  If you start to develop arthritis in your thirties, that’s unusual. It needs to be evaluated and EDS may be one of those contributing factors. 

PEMF therapy doesn’t reverse EDS, but what it does is gives the muscles more energy to work. It helps to decrease the inflammation that’s associated with that laxity. The ligaments are lax. If you imagine your knee, you’re walking and your knee has to sit properly on itself, it’s got to stay in position.  You can’t have a knee that’s sliding back and forth, you see that also with people who have wiped out their collateral ligaments, ACLs or PCLs.  So the same thing happens, you get this laxity. Well, that wears and tears a joint, puts a lot of stress on the ligaments around that joint, and that ligament stress then contributes to the arthritic development in that joint as well. 

The treatment then is magnetic field therapy. And for this particular situation, including myasthenia gravis, I do recommend whole-body magnetic therapy. Because of the severity of EDS, I think a higher intensity whole body magnetic system is probably the most important.   

The one I recommend is the Parmeds Pro Special. If you have other problems, like multiple chemical sensitivity,  fibromyalgia,  chronic fatigue syndrome, then you may need something called the Parmeds Super.  With the Parmeds Super, you attach it to a PC and then you can control the frequencies, you can control the intensity and you can control the treatment time.

The standard treatment protocol on the Parmeds Pro Special is typically about 30 minutes, but you’re kind of locked into those 10 programs that are in it, and that can work for you, but I’ve found over the years that you need a lot more control.  The Parmeds Super is basically the same machine as the Parmeds Pro, but you do have the ability then to attach a PC to it that allows you to have much more control and flexibility over the system. 

There is another system that is somewhat similar, and that is the Sedona Pro or the MAS.  I don’t recommend the MAS or Sedona Pro because I think that they’re more expensive than they’re worth.  They only have a magnetic field intensity for the smaller applicator of about a hundred Gauss and the large body pad is only about 25 Gauss.  

I already mentioned the Parmeds Home System, which is 70 Gauss for the whole body pad and 200 Gauss for the smaller applicator, and it has 10 programs to choose from. I don’t think the selectivity is worth the extra cost for these two other systems. I used to carry them, I used to have them on our website, but I found that I couldn’t in good conscience recommend them to people for the costs that they are for the benefits that you’re going to get. The Parmeds home system is a better value and Parmeds Super is a much better value.  The Parmeds Pro Special has a magnetic field intensity for the whole body pad of 150 Gauss and the smaller applicator, the B coil, is a thousand Gauss.  When you’re talking about a thousand and 170 versus many of these systems, the whole body systems are one Gauss or less and almost the same cost.

For EDS I do recommend a higher intensity whole body system that you’re going to need to use for the rest of your life.  EDS, as I said, is genetic and it’s going to be there for the rest of your life. So the sooner you start using magnetic field therapy, the better.  If you know that you have it in your 20s, then you better get going now because of arthritis you’re going to have when you’re 35 and 40 can be pretty significant. So start treating with PEMFs right away. There are no good medical therapies for EDS. I would also recommend something like adding collagen, MSM, glucosamine chondroitin, Meriva, curcumin, with black pepper extract. All of these are very important to help keep the inflammation load down in the body as well.

Transcript: POTS and multiple chemical sensitivities are autoimmune disorders, and I think that for that PEMFs have less of a role in these conditions except to reduce inflammation in the body. Because of the sensitivity of these people to all sorts of things, whether it’s nutrients, or supplements or electrical fields, sound, color, light, food sensitivities are very common in these situations, then you have to deal with the magnetic field therapy going low and slow.  You may need to use very low intensities. High-intensity systems tend to work better in these situations than the multiple frequency systems, the whole body systems. The whole body systems tend to flood the body with stimulation and very often these nervous systems can’t deal with that well.  

I recommend people get consultations if you want help on deciding on a system that you can use for yourself. I would contact us at drpawluk.com, at our 866 number, and set up a consultation. That’s the best way to deal with it cause it’s just too complex to try to figure it out on your own. 

What I’ve seen happen too often is that people end up buying a very low-intensity system, like a BEMER, iMRS, QRS, Medithera, or even a Bio Balance and it’s just not going to work.  I’m sure that there are people listening who have one of these devices and I know I will have stepped on toes, so I’m sorry about that. But I get calls on a regular basis from people who have these systems, or have used them and are not happy with their results. If you’re happy with your results, far be it for me to say that you shouldn’t use it, it’s gentle enough. It can’t do any harm. The only question is whether it’s doing enough good for the cost.

Transcript: We have a big question about PEMFs and cancer.  There’s a section in my book, Power Tools for Health, on the use of PEMFs in cancer. 

PEMFs have a very important role in cancer. They don’t cure cancer. I will never ever say that magnetic therapy cures cancer. In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of therapies that cure cancer.  I wouldn’t necessarily even rely on chemotherapy and the traditional medical approaches to cure your cancer. We know now that there are relatively few cancers that are “cured”, although doctors say if you survived five years after your treatment, you’re cured. That’s a falsehood.  Cancer, to me, once you have that diagnosis is a chronic disease. You didn’t get it overnight. It took years to happen. And that’s a chronic condition. 

That means the condition that was there, that caused the cancer to develop in the first place had been there for a long time already.  I recommend thermography for women postmenopausally.  I don’t tell people not to do mammography, but you can do less mammography and more thermography. And the reason thermography may be very helpful is it can detect cancers years ahead of when lesions can be detected on mammography. And that’s because the process has been there for a very long time. 

It takes 10 to 15 years for cancers to go from one cancer cell, to double, double, double…in other words, the doublings take a long time before you finally have a detectable lesion. So most cancers, especially solid tumors, have been there for a long time. And most other hematologic cancers, like leukemias and even lymphomas, have usually been brewing for a long, long time before you finally find them.

Anybody who’s doing magnetic field therapy on a regular basis for health maintenance is more likely to prevent the development and progression of cancer. It’s been said that each of us has over 100,000 cancer cells in our bodies on a given day and there are different estimates for that, and the immune system takes care of it.  Cancers will often blow up after a major procedure – heart surgery, appendectomies, gallbladder surgeries, a hysterectomy – a year or two later, cancer shows up. Well, it didn’t show up in that two year period. It didn’t show up when you were discovered to have it.  It was brewing a long time ago, and then the stress in your life at that time, that physical stress and emotional stress and the drugs that you were given to deal with pain and sleep and everything else, suppress the immune system enough that the cancer started to take off.

But if you’re doing magnetic therapy on a regular basis, you’re decreasing the inflammation through the whole body, especially if you’re doing health maintenance. And if you decrease inflammation in the whole body, cancer doesn’t get a chance to develop. So anybody who has a family history of cancers probably should be doing whole-body magnetic therapy with a sufficiently high-intensity magnetic field system for their life, just to prevent that from happening, nevermind all the other benefits you’re going to get. 

When you have been diagnosed with cancer and you’re going to have surgery, I recommend PEMF therapy before you do your surgery because then you’ve preconditioned the body to be as healthy as possible before the damage of surgery happens. The body has to heal from the damage of surgery, nevermind the problem with the cancer before. So do magnetic therapy before the surgery, then as soon as the surgery is done, you do magnetic therapy again. 

Magnetic therapy works very well with chemotherapy. In fact, it doubles the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Magnetic field therapy can be used with radiation as well. Although if you ask your oncologist about using magnetic fields with chemotherapy, they will know nothing about it. If you ask the radiation oncologist whether they could do magnetic therapy with radiation therapy, they will know nothing about it, and most likely they will say no. The oncologists would be most likely to say no because again, they don’t know anything about it and they’re not going to go figure it out for you. I’m saying that the research supports the use of PEMFs around surgery, it supports the use of PEMFs around chemotherapy, and it supports the use of PEMF around radiation.

Radiation is a bit more tricky.  I would do magnetic field therapy to the tissues before the radiation starts because it can actually act as a radiosensitizer to the cancer. In other words, the cancer actually becomes even more sensitive to the radiation. On top of that, it helps to protect the normal tissues that are not cancerous from the damage from the radiation. And then after you’re done the radiation, for sure you could start magnetic field therapy again because the cancer cells have been damaged enough that they’re not going to recover from that radiation unless they’re radiation-resistant. That’s a problem and that doesn’t get discovered for some time. But the damage has already been done to the normal tissue. So you can use the magnetic fields.  If you start soon enough after radiation therapy then you could recover the cells to the extent that they can recover, because the radiation causes a lot of inflammation in normal cells. The tissues are red, they’re swollen, they burn, and certainly, there’s a lot of pain and depending on what part of the body you do have radiation, it’s very important to use magnetic fields. 

I had a consultation just the other day on somebody who had radiation to the jaw, to the neck area, and had basically melted the bones. It’s called osteoradionecrosis to develop the melting of the bones of the jaw. There are no extended research studies, but there are reports of people who use magnetic field therapy to recover that bone. Nothing else does. The only thing you can do is bone implants, and they don’t always work because the tissues are so damaged, there’s so much inflammation that that doesn’t always work. But magnetic therapy can help potentially cause the bone to regenerate. That’s what magnetic fields do in osteoporosis. And so that’s a possibility. That’s an example of a case in which radiation was done that then caused damage that the magnetic field therapy would help to recover that damage.  It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a very slow process. 

So, that’s my answer for cancer. I would also say, and people don’t want to hear this, and oncologists don’t want to tell you this either, but most solid tumors by the time they’re discovered already have, let’s call them daughter cells, out in the body. They’re individual little cancer cells that are broken off and gone out into the body.  Those are called cancer stem cells, and a large percentage of people who at the time they’ve discovered the solid tumor has been found to have these cancer STEM cells. That’s tricky. It’s research at this point, it’s at the research level to detect those STEM cells in the bones or in other parts of the body. But they’re at rest, and the immune system takes care of them. But how do they activate? They activate during stress. I mentioned surgery.  So, if you had surgery 10 years ago and part of a lung was removed, or part of a kidney was removed for cancer, then anytime down the road when you’re going to have a surgical procedure that stresses the body. Natural killer cells, NK cells, significant drop in number and they’re very important for surveillance of cancer cells of the body. So NK cells are critica.  If you use narcotics, if you use tranquilizers, sedatives, and there are other medications that do this as well, it’s amazing how much they impact NK cells.

One session of acupuncture, in other words, one session of magnetic field therapy, can reverse that drop in NK cell activity. So if you’re going to have a procedure and you have a history of cancer, get one acupuncture treatment to a point on the leg called stomach 36.  One treatment can make those NK cells come back very rapidly. So you could do that before the surgery and you can do it right after the surgery.  The surgical process itself would decrease the NK cells so you can bring them back up again. And I do recommend treating stomach 36 periodically in anybody who has a history of cancer just to keep the NK cells up. Your functional medicine doctor can measure your NK cell levels.

So magnetic field therapy then helps the body to keep those stem cells at bay, to keep them quiet. There’s some evidence, not a lot, but there’s some evidence that magnetic field therapy may increase NK cell activity, but the most important thing is to keep the tissues healthy. When you keep the tissues healthy then those stem cells don’t convert.  So magnetic field therapy then can be used for cancer prevention, either primary or secondary – after the fact or beforehand.

I hope that answers your question, Gary, about PEMFs and cancer. I strongly recommend the use of PEMFs in cancer.  If you have extensive cancer in your body, you need high-intensity magnetic field therapy to the area that you’re dealing with.  For whole-body treatment, higher intensity magnetic field therapy is critical. The low-intensity systems are just not going to do the job deep enough into the body.

Transcript: Aspirin works through suppressing prostaglandin.  Prostaglandin is the molecule in the body that is proinflammatory. It causes inflammation. Inflammation irritates nerves and tissues which causes pain. Even one aspirin can decrease some inflammation fairly quickly. It doesn’t do a great job of that, but it works. Does it extinguish the inflammation? Probably not. But in this case, you’re probably just looking for an occasional aspirin. I certainly don’t have a problem with an occasional aspirin or occasional ibuprofen or Aleve. Occasional. 

Now, being a functional medicine  doctor you might say “how could he say that?” Well, I’m a pragmatist, and sometimes it works. So as an MD, we have holistic medicine with all its wonderful things. We have allopathic medicine with all its wonderful things. We have chiropractic and acupuncture. All these other disciplines have all of their aspects that are fantastic and work very well. But all of them have areas that they don’t work so well. 

In the ideal world, you’re going to combine everything to produce the best results for you. And an occasional aspirin or ibuprofen, fine. It’s the chronic use that becomes a problem. There are 16,000 people a year, approximately, who die from gastric bleeding caused by ibuprofen or aspirin.  Sixteen thousand, and medicine thinks that’s okay. I don’t think that’s okay. That’s why I got into holistic medicine and magnetic field therapy because I don’t think it’s okay. So that’s why I use magnetic field therapy. If you have a chronic pain problem, you should be using other techniques to decrease chronic pain.  For acute pain purposes after surgery or bone break, et cetera. it may be okay short term. I  would not say you shouldn’t. And whatever works the quickest, the best, easiest, and probably the safest and the least expensive, sure go for it.

Transcript: We had a question last time about CBD. I recommend looking at the summit interviews. We had two interviews about CBD and there’s more information than I can give you in any time that I can spend with you here now about CBD.  I  value it,  I recommend it, I use it myself. CBD is a great solution for pain. It’s not the only thing you should use for pain and it doesn’t cause tissue regeneration. Magnetic field therapy helps to decrease symptoms, helps to improve function and helps to regenerate the body. CBD helps with symptoms. It doesn’t help with physiology and doesn’t create functional improvements – only to the extent it improves the discomfort that you have. So it helps with anxiety, pain, and sleep, all of which are very important to help deal with chronic pain. Magnetic therapy works really, really well with CBD, they compliment each other in terms of what they do. I use them together all the time.

Transcript: One form of tinnitus is caused by an inflammation in the middle ear or the inner ear.  There are little tiny hair cells in the ear that relate to motion. That’s a minimal cause of tinnitus. It’s not usually coming from there, most of the time it’s coming from the brain.  But if you do have a problem that’s in the inner ear, then local therapy, a Micropulse or a Flexpulse, could come in very handy just to treat that area locally.

Transcript: Any kind of arthritis in the body is managed with PEMF therapies. The earlier you start in the arthritic process, the better. It increases motion, decreases the swelling in joints, decreases the pain in joints and animal studies have shown that you can actually cause healing of the joint itself.  Unfortunately, too many people wait too long to start treatment.  If you’re bone on bone already, then magnetic therapy is just symptom management. 

Arthritis is a good topic because arthritis is not just the cartilage, it’s the whole joint. It’s all the structures around the joint. It’s the tendons and ligaments that support the joint. It’s the synovial capsule. It’s the soft tissue around it, and the cartilage, the ligaments and the menisci in the case of the knees.  All of these structures are involved.

So you’re not just trying to regenerate cartilage. You’re treating the entire knee area. And if you treat the rest of the knee as well, then the knee is healthier and you get better blood supply into the knee. One of the causes of the loss of cartilage in the knee is the loss of blood supply. Cartilage in the knee doesn’t have a good blood supply.  There is some evidence that shows PEMFs can help to regenerate cartilage in the knee. The problem is you need to have cartilage to regenerate cartilage. So you need what’s called a scaffold.  You need to have enough cartilage cells in the knee for cartilage cells to migrate across to cover the gap.

If you’re starting late and you’re bone on bone, then the only thing left for you at this point is a replacement. Five or ten years from now we may be doing cartilage transplants.  It’s also possible that we may be taking your cartilage, which your body will recognize, putting them in a Petri dish, regeneratively regrowing them and then putting them back into your knee. That’s a possibility. But at this point, we’re limited to joint replacements. 

The point is the sooner you start with magnetic field therapy for your arthritis, the better. It doesn’t matter what the arthritis is. In the case of autoimmune arthritis, like psoriatic arthritis, you need to treat the underlying autoimmune disease. We have interviews on the summit about autoimmune disease. I encourage you to get a VIP pass to read about that further.

The drugs that are used for arthritis are potentially disastrous by themselves. Again, they slow down the process but don’t heal anything. The pain solutions summit is to talk about and address the underlying causes and the conditions that lead to these diseases and problems that make them chronic. So addressing the whole spectrum of the problem is the chronic pain solution. The pain solution is in the pain solution summit. Again, I encourage you to get a pass and be able to watch all of these videos and get the downloads, the audios, and the PDFs.

Transcript: Trigeminal neuralgia is a vexing problem. It’s a horrible problem. People commit suicide because of trigeminal neuralgia. Just imagine that you’ve got somebody jabbing an icepick into your face. Yes,  PEMF therapy can be very, very helpful for that. You have to go low and slow.  In the case where it’s just localized in one specific area of the face, you might be able to get by with a lower intensity portable PEMF system, like a Micropulse or a Flexpulse, but there’s a good chance that you need higher intensity because often these things are deeper into the brain. You have to have higher intensity because of the loss of the intensity of the magnetic field caused by the inverse square law of magnetic field therapy that I go into on my blog on adenosine, and also a video called intensity matters. That’s a critical video to watch as well. So the answer is yes, PEMF therapy can be very helpful, but you may need a consultation. You may need some very specific personal advice.

Transcript: Is it wise to use PEMF when you have a foot infection that’s slow to recover even while on antibiotics? I think the topic of infection is very important and because it’s very common I have a whole section in the book on infections. Now, PEMFs are not well-proven to kill bugs – to kill bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites for that matter. It’s not proven. The science is just not there to say that it can do that. There’s some science, some evidence that they can. Even treating contaminated water with magnetic field therapy has been found to be very effective to clean out ponds and lakes and water systems. They’re doing some of this in India with magnetic field therapy.  So, we have some evidence that it works. Would I rely on it?  No.

If you have a small bug bite that maybe looks like it’s getting infected, the question is, “Is it infected or inflamed?” If you have an early lesion that looks like it may be getting infected, apply magnetic field therapy. I actually had this happen to me. I had a lesion about the size of a quarter on my leg. This was before I started using pulsed magnetic fields. I put a magnet on that bite, and within two to three hours, it was gone.  The magnetic fields resolved the inflammation and if you resolve the inflammation, you resolve the swelling in the tissues, you improve circulation, you bring the white blood cells to the lesion, then all of a sudden the body heals itself. You give the body a fighting chance. 

When you do antibiotic therapy for somebody, what does it do? Antibiotics are designed to kill the bugs, right? So if I give you an antibiotic for your infection, what heals the infection? Not the antibiotic. You do. Your body does, so you need to have a healing capacity to be able to heal the infection.  When you leave the doctor’s office, the doctor basically says cross your fingers that the body is going to heal itself. 

The more severe the infection, the harder it’s going to be in terms of healing, the more aggressive you could be in using magnetic field therapy for infections – especially significant infections, deep infections like the kidneys, the brain, bones, lungs, bowels.  Magnetic field therapy decreases inflammation, improves circulation, and increases white blood cell function.  One of the things that PEMFs have been found to do is to make the white blood cells in the body that help the body fight infection more effectively. The reason they’re more effective is because when you clear the swamp, get rid of the swelling and inflammation in the tissues that are compromising the circulation to help to heal the inflammation and the infection, then the body does a better job. 

You don’t want to leave things to chance. So if you have an infection and you have a magnetic system, use it. If you have a really significant infection that’s likely to be chronic or severe, I would strongly encourage you to use PEMF therapies along with the antibiotics. They’ll make the antibiotics work better. I think there’s a proper role for antibiotics. Sometimes the body is just overwhelmed by the infection. You need to do something fast because you get too much damage. Infections can be very rapidly damaging and lethal – sepsis, for example. Significant infections like dental infections, sinus infections, ear infections they often resolve on their own, but if you want to get over it much faster, apply magnetic field therapy at the same time, it’ll make all that work much better.

I want to make a point about that, because with deep infections, like pneumonia, the risk of pneumonia is you’ll get scarring in your lungs. The risk of kidney infections, pyelonephritis, is that you’ll get scarring in your kidneys and that scarring compromises the function of that organ.  Will it kill the organ?  Possibly, but more likely it’s just going to decrease the function. And how many insults can an organ take over the years? Especially if you have polycystic kidney disease, or if you have COPD or bronchitis. So people with COPD or chronic bronchitis, magnetic field therapy helps the body to ventilate better, helps the oxygen exchange better, but also decreases the amount of inflammation in the lungs and decreases the risk of infections. And if you’re using magnetic field therapy and you have an infection on top of that, which is very common with chronic bronchitis, then it resolves faster and you don’t have as much progression of the bronchitis process.  You need a magnetic field therapy system that’s strong enough to go deep into the lungs to be able to do the job.

Transcript: Lyme Disease and Rife, these are two common questions that I get all the time as well.  I have a very expensive Rife machine.  I’ve done something called frequency specific microcurrent. I’ve trained in it and I have the machines as well. I have a garage full of devices.

The problem with these frequency-based systems like the Rife systems is there isn’t enough research. A lot of it has what I call “whisper down the lane.” Somebody tries a particular frequency for some problem and they tell everybody else, and then everybody else says “this is the frequency for this particular issue,” but there’s no good research behind it. The value of the Power Tools for Health book is the 500 references. There’s tons of research.  There’s a lot more research to support PEMF therapy than there is for RIFE or even the Tennant machine.  Why use something that doesn’t have the research value?  But if you want to invest in it and use it, try it. 

Very often people buy  Rife machines, like many things that they buy for health and healing, because of the cost. They buy low intensity, low-cost systems. These don’t have the power to drive the frequencies into the body. Let me give you an example. If you have a radio station that’s transmitting a signal, that’s a frequency. The farther you get away from that transmitter, the less effective you can be to pick up that signal. So the closer you are to the antenna, the stronger the signal is going to be. If you have a very weak signal transmitting a RIFE frequency, how far is it going to go and how deep does it go into the body because of the loss of the magnetic fields.  That happens to sound and frequencies as well. So there are two problems with Rife.  One is knowing whether the frequency is going to be effective, not having enough science around it, and the other is the intensity of the signal. So you have to experiment. 

You can use the books that people recommend – use this frequency for that, there are a bunch of Lyme frequencies, and I’ve had many people tell me it didn’t work. Rife did studies in a laboratory on Petri dishes, on cultures. And when you put a magnetic field next to a culture it’s right there. When you take that bacteria virus and you put it farther away, will that frequency work for that? That’s a problem with a lot of the low-intensity systems, as I mentioned already, you need to have enough power at the tissue that you’re trying to treat. Because I don’t know what Rife is going to do, whether it will work for you, I avoid Rife all together. 

You can use magnetic field therapy with Rife. I would do the magnetic field therapy first, followed by the Rife next. If you’re doing homeopathy, the same thing I would do the magnetic therapy first, and then I would do the homeopathy. If you do magnetic field therapy frequencies with homeopathy they could interfere with each other – that’s called destructive interference, so I wouldn’t do that. 

Lyme is complicated.  It’s challenging and has many different aspects to it. In my mind, there are at least five aspects to Lyme disease.  I may be stepping on toes here, but as an MD I work with quite a number of Lyme patients and I’ve studied Lyme, I’ve read the literature and I’ve listened to the debates.  I’m still not certain entirely what Lyme disease is. You might say, well, it’s the Lyme spirochete.  But not everybody gets chronic Lyme disease from a spirochete bite.  Why?  If it’s that bad a bug, why doesn’t everybody have chronic Lyme disease? That’s an important question, and one I ask myself all the time. 

So in my mind, there are five aspects to Lyme disease.  Number one is the actual spirochete itself. That’s the acute infection and the body deals with it, or we get antibiotics, break up the spirochetes and they hide out inside the cell as what are called other morphologic forms. Those forms are thought to be able to reactivate into a spirochete again, reinitiating the infection. There are many viruses that do exactly the same thing and when they hide out inside the cell, they’re invisible to the general immune system. Then the cellular immune system has to deal with it and the cellular immune system is not as efficient. 

The third aspect to Lyme disease is the damage.  The infection, wherever it lands in the body, causes damaged tissue.  That damaged tissue then becomes a source of antibody reactions because the body no longer recognizes it as self. The body produces all these antibodies to the Lyme spirochete and those antibodies are now floating around in the body. Sometimes these antibodies that are caused by the Lyme bug are indiscriminate. They can go into the body and create problems elsewhere in the body. So there’s the damage issue.  

Fourth, there’s the autoimmune issue. In chronic Lyme disease, I believe that most of the problem happens to be the autoimmune aspect of Lyme disease. 

So it’s not the Lyme organisms anymore. I have had many, many, many patients who have had months and months and months of IV antibiotics for their Lyme disease without any benefit, and they completely mess up their microbiome. We talk about the microbiome on the summit, we have the discussion about how the gut and the microbiome can relate to chronic disease and pain. 

The fifth aspect of Lyme disease is the co-infections and we’re not just talking about Barbecium and Bartonella and Ehrlichia. We’re also talking about, probably the most common culprit of all, the Epstein Barr virus.  85 to 90% of the population has Epstein Barr virus in their body. And Epstein Barr virus is like shingles virus, like a chickenpox virus, like the herpes virus – it’s there forever. The Epstein Barr virus latches itself onto lymphocytes and it lives on lymphocytes and it’s passed from lymphocyte to lymphocyte for generations over time. One of the known common problems associated with chronic mono is lymphoma. That’s been established, it’s been known for a long, long time. 

So how much of the problem with Lyme disease is caused by the Lyme disease and how much of the problem is caused by the co-infection of Epstein Barr virus, which can become chronic Epstein Barr virus. Now it’s no longer Lyme disease, now it’s a different type of culprit in the body. Chronic Lyme disease, I think, is an autoimmune disease and it needs to be managed as an autoimmune disease. We have lots of help for you about an autoimmune disease on the pain solution summit. I encourage you to get a  VIP pass at painsolutionsummit.com/VIP.

Transcript: There’s a question about having the gallbladder removed and getting pain in the arm.  This is a common issue.  That’s a good question. Chronic gallbladder disease can be a vexing problem and even though you have your gallbladder out, you can still have chronic pain in the area.  One of the things that happens with gallbladder surgery is you create scarring.  The scarring happens in the area of the surgery itself and that scarring can cause problems with the bowel that’s next to it.  It can cause problems with the liver that’s next to it. And it can cause problems with the bile duct that’s next to it. And there could be other reasons for having the pain. 

The other thing that happens with when you remove your gallbladder is you can produce concentrated bile and then that causes problems with digestion. Many people who have their gallbladder out need to take bile supplements to be able to help them to digest fats better. If there’s pain in the gallbladder area that causes a reflex problem with pain in the shoulder that may need to be looked at by somebody who does reflexology.  Where pain is felt in the body is not always where the problem is.

You could use PEMF therapy in the area of the pain, in the area of the gallbladder, to see if that would resolve that problem and the pain in the arm. I assume it’s the right arm that has the pain. That’s what I would do. 

Gallbladder disease is caused by inflammation in the gallbladder.  When you have inflammation of the gallbladder and you’re not hydrated enough, then you develop cholesterol crystals that deposit in the walls of the gallbladder. That causes gallbladder inflammation. If that happens over a long period of time, they break off and actually form sludge in the gallbladder, which can concentrate and cause gallstones. Gallstones are a problem because they’re very hard to get rid of once you develop them.

But if you’re having gallbladder sludge or you’re having gallbladder pain issues then I would treat it with a magnetic field over the gallbladder.  You might be able to get away with a lower intensity system like a portable Micropulse or a Flexpulse over that area, or you may need a higher intensity magnetic field system to help you with that. I would start with magnetic field therapy and see if that helps with the problem. 

Related to that, from a holistic perspective, is that if you still have your gallbladder, and you’re not hydrated adequately and you have some gallbladder issues but you don’t have gallstones, then you need to be eating fat.  Fat causes the gallbladder to contract, which then releases the bile out of the gallbladder.  The longer the bile from the liver sits in the gallbladder, it concentrates it, and the longer it sits there, the more likely it’s going to crystallize, especially if you’re dehydrated.  So two things that are very important are adequate hydration and fats.  You have to be drinking at least a liter of water a day, up to 60 ounces or about half your body weight in ounces per day, and you have to be eating adequate amounts of fat that causes the gallbladder to do its job.

Transcript: Magnetic field therapy is extraordinarily important for peripheral neuropathy. There is more information in my book Power Tools for Health about peripheral neuropathy. There’s also information on the website. Often you have to find out why the problem exists in the first place. You need to be treating the brain as well as peripherally. Magnetic field therapy is most effective for diabetic peripheral neuropathy. Other forms of peripheral neuropathy are harder to deal with because we don’t always know the cause. It can be due to toxicities or viruses or combinations of these things, insecticides, pesticides, other types of toxicities.  It’s not easy to get rid of the toxicities, so very often you’re just treating the inflammation.

Most neuropathies do not get treated locally. In the case of diabetic neuropathy, the solution is to get rid of diabetes, reduce the hemoglobin A1C levels. But if there’s no circulation to the tissues, you have to improve that. If the neuropathy is coming from a problem with a disc in your spine, then you have to treat that. For disc problems, you’re normally going to need to use higher intensity magnetic fields. You can sometimes get away with a lower intensity system like a Micropulse or a  Flexpulse, but I usually recommend a much higher intensity magnetic system. The one I typically recommend is the Tesla Fit Plus 2 because it acts deep enough into the tissues to produce a strong enough magnetic field action to decrease inflammation and pressure on the nerve to restore discs to decrease the arthritic process of the spine, and so it can be very helpful, and often very quickly.

You’re going to have to continue to do this treatment for the rest of your life. Going to somebody for a chronic disc problem and doing injections provides at the most temporary relief and you can only do so many steroid injections anyway. They weaken the ligaments and the tissues around the injection site. If you inject the skin with a steroid for people with bad acne, you’ll get a pockmark, a little crater.  What does that do? It’s almost like it melted the tissue. You inject that into joints. You inject that into the spine. What do you do? You weaken the ligaments and the tissues around it. Yes, you’ll often feel better fairly quickly but how many times do you want to inject that tissue with a steroid? Do you want to weaken those ligaments of that area? I don’t think it’s a good idea at all, but that’s what doctors do because that’s the tool they have.

What is the best PEMF machine for cardiovascular health? I go back to cause –  that’s the most important thing. What’s causing the problem?  And the cause of the problem, most of the time, is diet and other lifestyle factors, stress.  It could be genetics. So you could say “blame it on my genes, blame it on my ancestors,” but that’s not the right answer. You have to do something in your life right now to deal with the problem. 

If you’re advanced in your cardiovascular disease, then you need extra help and PEMF therapy can be very helpful for that. You can treat the heart locally if you have a vascular disease of the heart if you have blocked blood vessels in the heart.  If you have arrhythmias magnetic field therapy directly to the heart can be very helpful. There’s information in my book, Power Tools for Health, that could help you with that.

Vascular disease, in general, is caused by endothelial dysfunction. Endothelium is the inside lining of the blood cell. It’s very active, very dynamic.  Inflammation there causes the build-up of plaque and that build-up of plaque is what causes blockages of blood vessels. Medicine says if they have high cholesterol then that’s the cause. That’s the culprit. High cholesterol is the result of inflammation in the blood vessels and the inflammation in the blood vessels, most of the time, is being caused by lifestyle.  The biggest problem, most of the time, is not the fats in your diet – it’s the carbohydrates in your diet. You have to control those. You want to get your A1C under 5.7.  Ideally, you should have it around 5.2 or 5.3, and if you don’t you’re building vascular disease.

For whole-body magnetic therapy, if you want to condition your whole body system, and this is a part of the anti-aging solution, then you need a strong enough magnetic field to help the inside linings of the blood vessels to decrease inflammation. If it’s a local problem, if you have peripheral vascular disease, then you can treat locally to get more aggressive treatment. Again, you’re going to need a higher intensity magnetic field therapy system. 

For vascular disease anywhere, the brain, carotids, the heart, the kidneys, the entire body, magnetic field therapy is great. One of the things magnetic therapy does is increase something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide causes the blood vessels to open up.  So magnetic therapy decreases inflammation, but it also increases Nitric oxide so it helps you to pump blood better. That’s what causes improvements in circulation in general.

If you have compromised blood flow because you’ve got blood vessels the magnetic therapy opens those blood vessels a bit more and improves the circulation.  In the long run, you have to get rid of the blockages, and lifestyle and magnetic field therapy can help to do that, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It takes time to have that work for you. In one of my original books, Magnetic Therapy in Eastern Europe: A review of 30 years of research, had a number of cardiovascular studies being done showing how PEMFs can be very, very helpful. We have other treatments for angina these days, but back then you had nitroglycerin as a primary treatment for it. But even if you’re still using these other nitrates to help open up the circulation, magnetic field therapy is very helpful for that.

There’s a risk.  If you have chest pain that’s due to blocked blood vessels and the heart’s not pumping properly, magnetic therapy can be so effective that you’ll rely on that and not do what you need to do. So there is that risk. But once you know what you have going on and you’re under proper care, then applying magnetic field therapies to your heart can be very helpful in reducing inflammation, increasing the ability of the heart to work.  You could actually increase your workload and the heart will work better because magnetic field therapy increases the pump action of the muscles of the heart and increases mitochondrial production, ATP production in the heart.  One of the organs in the body that uses ATP the most is the heart and the other one is the brain. If you can help the heart to function better, it will help with congestive heart failure. It’s very, very helpful for congestive heart failure. Again, not as a sole solution, but it can be very useful there.