Magnetic Therapy: Plausible Attraction?
Long considered only a component of quack medicine, magnetic therapy has received a boost from a recent study at the Baylor College of Medicine. Is it plausible?A double-blind study at Baylor College of Medicine, published last November in Archives of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Vallbona 1997), concluded that permanent magnets reduce pain in post-polio patients, and the results were heralded in The New York Times and on Bryant Gumbel's Public Eye. PBS's Health Week and Time magazine recently reported on the growing use of magnets by champion senior golfers and other professional athletes to relieve pain. Magnetic pain relief products are now sold in many golf shops, and ads for them appear in national golf and tennis magazines. Long a significant component of the health industry in Japan and China, magnetic therapy is becoming a more and more visible part of the alternative-medicine boom in the United States and Europe. Is it all just hokum, as many previously assumed, or is magnetic therapy becoming scientifically respectable?
...Many magnetic therapy products have alternating arrays of north and south poles facing the patient. Some have detailed explanations of why a circular pattern of poles is optimal, while others offer poles in checkerboard or triangular patterns. Nikken, the Japan-based firm that has used a multilevel marketing scheme to expand from an annual business in the U. S. of $3 million in 1989 to $150 million today, primarily offers products with alternating poles...
