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by Nathan Scalia

Created on: February 24, 2010   Last Updated: February 26, 2010

With the high costs of medical care and the sometimes ambiguous nature of pain, alternative medicine has experienced renewed interest as a way to deal with medical problems at home without the hassle of seeing a physician. Numerous variations of home remedies exist, with magnet therapy being one of the more popular. While it would be most effective to pull the medical literature and prove that there has been no statistical significance found in any well-defined, unbiased study, I’m instead going to focus on the “common sense” aspect of magnet therapy with the realization that my audience is not necessarily comprised of individuals with a heavy science background.

The idea behind magnet therapy is different depending on what source is explaining the process. Most sources state that a magnetic field affects the iron in blood to promote blood flow and circulation. This is supposed to promote healing, relieve pain, and have numerous other effects. On the surface, this makes sense. You know iron is a metal, and metal is usually affected by a magnet. So a magnet should theoretically be able to affect your blood cells, since there is iron in your blood, right? Well… yes and no. The key problems with the theory arise not only in the composition of your blood, but in the basic physics that govern magnetism.

When most people think of two magnets attracting each other, they think of what is called “ferromagnetism.” If you know your Latin, you know that this literally means “magnetism of iron”, and it’s fairly strong as far as magnetism goes. This is responsible for your every day refrigerator magnet. Without getting too much into physics, this strong attraction occurs because of how the iron molecules react to each other when under the influence of a magnetic field, and this field can stick around long after the initial field is gone. The problem is, as I said, that there have to be iron molecules reacting with each other. In your blood, this simply is not the case. The iron is not in bulk form; rather, it is spread out over various different parts of the blood cell, and this prevents any ferromagnetic effects, even in clotted blood.

Does that mean that the iron in the blood is not magnetic at all? The iron in your blood is magnetic in two different ways. There is paramagnetism, which involves “lone pair” electrons and is extremely weak in comparison to ferromagnetism. In fact, it is so weak that the force of your blood cells tumbling around in your system is strong enough to overcome any significant effect produced by paramagnetism. The other type of magnetism involved is called “diamagnetism”, and is even weaker than paramagnetism. Even wood is diamagnetic, so needless to say, it’s not going to play a role in an attempt to magnetically manipulate trace amounts of iron in the blood.

I would assume that magnet therapy insists its effect upon the ferromagnetic properties of the iron in the blood. If our blood was ferromagnetic, then this would actually be the only way that a magnetic field could affect our circulation and blood flow. The paramagnetic and diamagnetic properties of the iron in our blood are so small that no magnet could realistically affect it. Since the iron is not concentrated enough in the blood to significantly affect any other iron atoms, ferromagnetic attraction between a magnet and the iron in your blood is not physically plausible.

Of course, this is a lot of physics talk, but there is an easy way to prove this to yourself. If you’re on a desktop computer, or near a refrigerator, you are near an object putting off a reasonably strong magnetic field. Hold your hand up to your computer for a few seconds, and then look at it. If the computer’s magnetic field was affecting your blood flow in the ways purported by theory of magnet therapy, then your hand would be quite red due to the increased circulation, like what happens when you blush. Your hand is, of course, the same color as it was, because there was no increased blood flow.

If you want to take a ride on the wild side, jump into an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine sometime. The magnetic field produced by an MRI machine is usually ranged from 5,000 – 20,000 Gauss. To put this in perspective, the magnetic field of Earth is 5,000 Gauss, which means, if you are in the strongest of these machines, you are experiencing a magnetic field four times stronger than the field produced by the whole planet. After doing a little research into the magnets used for magnet therapy, the self-purported “strongest health magnets manufactured in the world” are registered at 6,000 Gauss. You should be thankful, then, that these products actually don’t affect your blood in any way, because if they did, then the MRI machine would cause a fairly impressive explosion as your blood ripped itself from your body. Given that people safely pass through MRI machines every day, this should debunk the idea of the iron in your blood being affected by magnetic fields.

One of the favorite arguments of any alternative therapy proponent is that the medical doctors refuse to acknowledge the power of the therapy, in this case, magnetic therapy, because there is no money to be made for the pharmaceutical sponsors. This argument is confusing on a few different levels, ignoring the obvious demonizing of science-based medicine into greedy, malicious liars. After all, I visited at least two magnetic therapy websites featuring the positive opinions of recognized physicians to promote the use of magnets, which is, at the very least, hypocritical.

The truth is that the magnet therapy business generates around a billion dollars a year. How do they do it? It’s true that it doesn’t cost anything to be told that magnets apparently work, since knowledge is free. But the magnets generally aren’t just any magnets, purport the magnet therapists. You need special magnets that are designed to fit inside of the shoe, or on a belt, or in the car seat. There is a massive industry in selling magnets, so the argument that the alternative practitioner receives no financial reward for your belief in their therapy is an outright fabrication. Not only that, but coming from a kindred spirit with no special love of the pharmaceutical complex, I would have a hard time believing that the medical community would pass up an opportunity to make money using an efficacious treatment. There’s obviously money to be made in magnets, but only through fraud, not healing, and not even the evil, greedy medical industry is going to risk selling a treatment that has no evidence that it works. Luckily for them, alternative practitioners never seem to be legally held responsible for proving that their product works, as the pharmaceutical companies are. So, for the magnet therapist, there is no risk to them if the therapy is a joke, at least not the risk that a pharmaceutical company would face if it tried to sell magnets for health benefits knowing full-well that no good data supports this claim.

Of course, this leads us to the fall-back argument of any alternative therapy: faith. Usually, this is based on personal experience or the experience of others. Magnets are purported by some to cure even cancer and infectious disease, these can be fairly easily disproven with the medical literature, should you care to trudge through the studies. Pain, however, is far more subjective. In some studies, albeit not perfect studies, pain has been decreased with the use of magnets. What’s important to remember, though, is that these studies do not show a significant difference from the placebo effect, at least not that I have been able to find.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the placebo effect is a well-documented phenomenon that demonstrates the “mind over matter” tendency in medicine. A common prank is giving an inexperienced drinker carbonated grape juice, tell them it’s alcohol, and watch them progressively become “intoxicated.” In any valid medical study, the placebo effect is accounted for, because if someone assumes they are going to get better, they will generally feel better. For medication studies, this is easily controlled through the use of sugar pills, which are given to one group, while the medication is given to the other. Knowing that the sugar pills will have no effect, the “control” group, as it is called, is used as the baseline to decide whether the effects in the medicated group, or the “experimental” group, are significantly different. But what you will almost always find is that both groups show improvement with many conditions, especially those related to pain, due to the placebo effect. Even the control group will feel less pain because the members will believe the treatment they receive actually reduces the pain, even though it does not.

So when we are trying to decide whether or not the magnets actually reduce pain, we will usually hear about studies where groups using the magnets felt less pain when using them. However, I have not yet seen a credible study published in an unbiased journal that states that the group using the magnets felt significantly less pain than those who were under the effect of the placebo. Since both groups feel less pain, but both groups feel approximately the same magnitude of reduction in pain, then, statistically, there is no effect. The effect of magnet therapy only shows to be beneficial due to the placebo effect, and magnet therapy cannot be said to be beneficial.

There are a couple of things that I want to address in closing. First, a popular yet woefully misguided belief is that if your magnet isn’t working, you should invest in a “uni-polar” magnet. If you plan to do this, I applaud your enthusiasm, and wish you the best in collecting the several million dollars you will likely need to fund the research in order to create one. To date, there has been absolutely no creation of a uni-polar magnet. Unlike electric charge, where a positive and negative charge can be isolated, this has not been shown to be possible with magnets. A magnet has a north and south end, and if you were to cut the magnet in half, then you end up with two new bi-polar magnets, each with their own north and south ends. Cut them again, and the same effect will be produced over and over. The reason is because magnetic fields, unlike electric fields, always loop back on themselves. Take a magnetic bar and sprinkle powdered iron onto it, and you’ll see a looping pattern from each end of the magnet that outlines the field quite nicely. Anyone trying to sell you a uni-polar magnet is either ignorant about the basic concepts of magnetism, or a liar.

The second point I want to address is whether or not there is any harm in magnet therapy. While having no proof of any beneficial effect on human health or physiology, experiencing a magnetic field even as large as 20,000 Gauss doesn’t have any regular negative effects, as demonstrated by the MRI machine, and most magnets used for magnet therapy are of a much, much lower power. I am far more concerned about those wooed by the false hope of such an easy, painless, yet ineffective treatment for their medical issues. I am saddened to see websites proclaiming magnet therapy to be an effective treatment for cancer and other such ailments. While I understand and acknowledge that this is a claim not held by every believer in magnet therapy, it is still unfortunate to know that there are patients who, when faced with chemotherapy, might be easily lured to a useless treatment that can prolong the diagnosis or treatment of the disease.

I do not think of myself as a close-minded person, and look for any chance to be proven wrong, especially when it comes to the all-important topic of medical care. However, it is also within this field that a misconception can cause the greatest amount of damage, and when a belief like magnet therapy shows no scientific validity for its purported mechanism, nor any credible study showing sufficient efficacy when compared to the placebo, then I don’t feel the need to pull any punches. Any money and time spent toward this ineffective, impossible treatment is too much of a cost.

If you want to get back at the greedy pharmaceutical companies, don’t line their pockets by paying for expensive late-term medical treatment after you find that waving magnets over your body did nothing to cure your ailments.

Callacott, E. A., J. T. Zimmerman, D. W. White, and J. P. Rindone. "Bipolar permanent magnets for the treatment of chronic low back pain: a pilot study." JAMA 283 (2000): 1322-325.

Gould, Todd A. "HowStuffWorks "Magnetic Resonance"" HowStuffWorks - Learn How Everything Works! Web. 24 Feb. 2010. <http://www.howstuffworks.com/mri2.htm>.

"Magnet therapies 'have no effect'" BBC News. BBC, 06 Jan. 2006. Web. 23 Feb. 2010. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4582282.stm>.

Magnetic Therapy Sales: QRay, Jewelry, Mattress Pads, Spot Magnets. Web. 24 Feb. 2010. <http://www.magnetictherapysales.com/default.htm>.

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