Can magnetic therapy really cure diseases?
From the magnetized cup and magnetized water in previous years to the magnetic therapy pillow and magnetic therapy instrument now, coupled with the appearance of "patients cured by magnetic therapy instrument", our life is full of "magnetic therapy" health care products. But is magnetic therapy really that magical?
Author/Fang
China's articles promoting magnetic therapy usually say that magnetic therapy has a long history in China, and Chinese medicine has existed since ancient times. There are indeed records in Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica and Compendium of Materia Medica that magnets are used to treat diseases. But basically, the magnet is used as medicine, and it is smashed and taken orally. It is said that they can "calm the liver and subdue yang, soothe the nerves and relieve spasm, improve hearing and eyesight, and relieve asthma" and treat dizziness, vertigo, deafness, tinnitus, fright, lumbago and leg pain, impotence, uterine failure, proctoptosis and so on. Few people eat magnets now, because they know that they don't have the Monkey King's ability to "hunger for iron pills and thirst for copper juice", and magnets can't be absorbed by the human body no matter how crushed. Only a magnet prescription contained in Compendium of Materia Medica is similar to today's magnetic therapy: putting a small magnet in your ear is said to cure deafness. Now, even the most enthusiastic advocates of magnetic therapy dare not say that magnetic therapy has such a magical effect.
Magnetic therapy is actually a kind of "western medicine" therapy.
Nowadays, the popular magnetic therapy is introduced from the west, which can be regarded as "western medicine", but it belongs to western alternative medicine and is recognized as pseudoscience by the mainstream international scientific community. The history of magnetic therapy can be traced back to the speculation of Pala Celsus, a Swiss doctor and alchemist in the Middle Ages (1493 ~ 1543). He thinks that since magnets can attract iron, they may be able to attract diseases in people.
/kloc-in the 0 th and 8 th centuries, Austrian doctor Max Mai invented magnetic therapy. He put a magnet on a girl with mental illness, and then swung the magnet bar back and forth in the patient's body, which actually cured the girl's illness. He put forward a theory of "animal magnetism", arguing that many diseases are caused by the imbalance of animal magnetism. If this magnetism can be induced, we can cure diseases. At first, he used magnets as a guide, and later found that he could use his "animal magnetism" to make almost everything (wood, paper, water, etc.). ) magnetic to guide. He used this method-known as "Maxim technique"-to cure many people, and was sought after by many people, which also caused hostility. 1784, when Max Mai was practicing medicine in Paris, King Louis XVI of France ordered the establishment of a committee composed of Franklin, lavoisier and others to investigate this. Through a series of experiments, they found that the curative effect of Maxim's operation comes entirely from the imagination and strong desire of patients. Now it seems that Max Mashu is actually a kind of hypnosis, which uses psychological suggestion to treat diseases and has nothing to do with magnetism.
/kloc-at the end of 0/9, the application of electricity made people see the power of electromagnetism, and magnetic therapy was reborn. Some people began to sell magnetotherapy products in the United States and other countries, and gradually spread them around the world. Since then, there have been more and more varieties of magnetotherapy products, and the claimed curative effect has become more and more exaggerated, and the market has become bigger and bigger. At present, the annual sales of magnetic therapy products in the world exceed $654.38 billion. In addition to magnetic therapy instruments, magnetic therapy beds, magnetic therapy blankets and other equipment, there are clothes, hats, shoes, pants, cushions, pillows, necklaces, bracelets and other close-fitting clothes applied to various parts of the body, among which magnetic therapy insoles are the most popular. Magnetic therapy is considered to be able to treat almost all common diseases, such as hypertension, stroke, coronary heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, insomnia, cancer and so on. It is said that the effect of treating joint pain is particularly good; It also has the health care effects of balancing endocrine system, improving immune function, resisting aging, eliminating fatigue and enhancing memory, and is an "ideal health care treasure for human beings". Most people are convinced of this. According to a survey conducted by the Natural Science Foundation of the United States, 14% of Americans who have heard of magnetic therapy think it is scientific, while 54% think it is somewhat scientific, and only 25% insist that it is unscientific.
Uncover the "mechanism" of magnetic therapy
The so-called magnetic therapy is an attempt to treat diseases with magnetic field. Some magnetic fields are constant, while others are variable. According to Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction, changing magnetic field will produce electric field, which will affect nerve cells and muscle cells. This kind of influence is good and bad. If the magnetic field intensity is too large, it is likely to have a negative impact on health. However, the magnetic therapy products on the market basically rely on ferromagnetic pieces or electromagnets with direct current to generate magnetic fields, which belong to constant magnetic fields (or static magnetic fields). They don't produce electric fields, and their influence on the body, if any, depends entirely on the magnetic field itself. So, is it possible for a constant magnetic field to affect body tissues?
Advocates of magnetic therapy claim that because blood contains iron and can be attracted by magnets, magnetic therapy can promote blood circulation. It seems logical that magnets can absorb iron. But the iron in blood is not an iron metal. The reason why ferrous metals have strong magnetism is that each iron atom interacts and is arranged in parallel and in the same direction. The so-called "ferromagnetism" phenomenon is the result of the synergistic effect of many iron atoms. But in blood, iron atoms are wrapped in hemoglobin. Although each iron atom is magnetic, it is separated from each other and its magnetism is very weak. On the contrary, other components in the blood (such as water) are diamagnetic. Together, blood has weak diamagnetism, which will not only be attracted by the magnetic field, but also be repelled. However, the magnetic field generated by magnetic therapy is not strong enough to affect blood. Its strength is even difficult to penetrate the skin (it can't be detected beyond a few millimeters), and it is even less likely to affect the internal organs.
In fact, it is easy for consumers to verify whether magnetic therapy can promote blood circulation. If the magnet can really attract blood, then the blood in the skin will flow to it, and we will see that the place where the skin touches the magnet is red. In fact, we certainly can't see this phenomenon. Experiments show that even if the intensity of constant magnetic field is as high as 1 Tesla (ten times or dozens of times that of magnetic therapy products on the market), it has no effect on human blood circulation. To take a step back, even if there is a component in the blood that can be affected by the magnetic field, it does not mean that it will be good for blood circulation and health.
So in theory, we can't provide scientific basis for magnetic therapy. If magnetic therapy really has the effect of health care, it works through an unknown mysterious mechanism. So is magnetic therapy really effective? With such a large market for magnetotherapy products, it is obvious that many patients will find it really effective. Some patients will also express their views and introduce how they can benefit from magnetic therapy. But this is of no value in modern medicine, because this case is unconvincing in terms of curative effect. Just because patients are cured after using magnetic therapy products does not mean that magnetic therapy is really effective. It may be self-healing, and many diseases can self-heal without taking medicine (such as scapulohumeral periarthritis); It may be the result of psychological suggestion. Magnetic therapy is aimed at chronic diseases, and the condition is greatly influenced by people's psychological state. It may even be misdiagnosed, and the patient is not sick at all.
"curative effect" comes from psychological effect
To determine the efficacy of a drug or therapy, a large number of clinical trials and statistics must be done to determine. Randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trials are the most reliable way to determine the curative effect: patients are randomly divided into two groups, one group is treated with magnetic therapy, and the other group is treated with pseudo-magnetic therapy, but neither patients nor doctors know which group the patients are divided into (this "double-blind" state can rule out the effect of psychological suggestion on patients and the subjective deviation of doctors in evaluating the curative effect), and the grouping situation is controlled by a third party, and the "double-blind" state will be released after the trial.
In recent years, there have been some randomized double-blind controlled clinical trials on the effect of magnetic therapy, mainly to verify whether magnetic therapy has analgesic effect. Most clinical trials found that magnetic therapy was ineffective, while some experiments found that the analgesic effect of magnetic therapy was significantly higher than that of the control group. However, it is very difficult to conduct a double-blind experiment on magnetic therapy, because it is easy for patients and doctors to find out whether the used magnetic therapy products are true or false according to whether the used therapeutic equipment can adsorb metal objects, which will affect the psychological state of patients and the evaluation of doctors, and the analgesic effect is especially affected by psychological state. Therefore, it is hard to say that those experiments that think that magnetic therapy has analgesic effect are not the result of psychological effect.
In short, there is no conclusive evidence that magnetic therapy will be effective for any disease. Therefore, the US Food and Drug Administration has not approved any magnetotherapeutic products for medical treatment and prohibited manufacturers from promoting magnetotherapeutic products for medical treatment and health care. Some magnetotherapy manufacturers were fined and prosecuted for this.
There are also people in the market who promote the so-called "magnetized water" treated by magnetic field. Water is diamagnetic. Under the action of magnetic field, water molecules are magnetized reversely, and they are not attracted to each other, but repel each other. But once the magnetic field disappears, these effects will disappear immediately, the magnetic field will not stay in water, and the properties of water molecules will not change. So "magnetized water" is no different from ordinary water. It is a naked scam to claim that "magnetized water" has special medical and health care functions.