Articles

Healing With Electricity

   Unlike chronic pain where electricity is being used to stimulate nerves you have a multitude of potential applications using electicity - electromagnetic energy, to treat many of the illnesses found today.  Today we've refined the application of electicity to the point we can define the flow of electrons and add or subtract them from an area in or around the body.  This process of adding/subtracting electrons in an area increases the chemical responses throughout our body.  A very simple example of this is if you place two magnets beside each other with the "south" ends facing then no matter what you do you will not be able to make the two magnets stay together as you have the similar poles repelling each other.  If you switch one magnet to the "north" pole then they immediately come together.  In a simplified form this is what happens when you have negative or positively charged particles (ions) in an area and you have receptor sites to utilize the chemicals the body is producing but if the charges are the same then no attraction, but if opposite then there is an attraction to the receptor site(s) and chemical changes do occur thusly facilitating healing.    In the sick or injured state there may be the chemicals being produced by the body needed to facilitate healing but often those chemicals do not have a receptor site that can utilize them due to the electrical charge of the receptor.  This process may have been prevented by the receptor site lacking the polarity to attract them. i.e. opposites attract, similars repel. 

   The field of medicine using electromagnetic energy is certainly not new.

   Hippocrates used magnets to treat various ailments in his practice of 450BC. The use of magnets evolved out of the Greek dynasty and was practiced in Rome where Galen, a Greek citizen, may have been the first sports-medicine doctor, and electromagnetism the first sports-medicine technology as he wrote often of using it on gladiators for trauma and injury around 150 AD. He later became physician to the armed forces of the Roman Empire and personal physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. 

  Noted astrophysicist,Stephen Hawking,stated “electromagnetism controls all chemical reactions, all biologic response, and life itself” as he discussed microscopic events in his book, “A Brief History of Time”.  Our biological processes
of staying healthy or healing are dependent upon our body and it's electrical properties.


  Doctors have been using electrical and magnetic fields since the late 1970s to help mend certain kinds of severe bone fractures that would otherwise require a bone graft. The electricity appears to increase the production of calcium inside bone cells.[1] Doctors in both Europe and the United States are obtaining astounding results using electromagnetic fields to treat damage ranging from ulcers to severe burns. Research studies show that magnetic fields predictably accelerate the healing time of soft tissue injuries as well as bones and joints.[2] 



   Pulsed EM fields (PEMF) or pulsed magnetic fields (PMF) have been used therapeutically with great benefit. Areas of application include:

1.    nerve stimulation for intractable pain, multiple sclerosis (Sandyk, 1997), Parkinson’s disease (Sandyk, 1994b; George, 1996), and spacticity reduction in cerebral palsy;

2.    soft tissue repair (Lee et al., 1993), healing of surgical wounds with increased tensile strength, decubitous chronic ulcers (Salzberg, 1995), increased angiogenesis, and the healing of recalcitrant chronic venous ulcers (Cadossi, 1990; Stiller et al., 1992);

3.    bone repair;

4.    treatment of osteoarthritis, including reduction of pain, swelling, and increased mobility (Trock, 1994); and

5.    neuroendocrine applications for epilepsy (Sandyk et al., 1992), relief from symptoms of drug withdrawal and alleviation of depression (Kirkcaldie, 1997; Conca, 1996), anxiety,

and insomnia (Erman, 1991).

   Clinical studies indicate that biofield therapies are especially useful for treating anxiety (Keller et al., 1990) and pain (Quinn, 1984).  A very limited number of studies suggest they may also stimulate immune function (Olson, 1997), hemoglobin formation (Krieger, 1976), and facilitate the healing of wounds (Wirth, 1992).

   Today we are on the cusp of defining new, non pharmaceutical methods of treating disease and injury but research is still needed and of course the issue with research is always funding.  With electromagnetic energy one has a basic not proprietary process that does not reward the research with a patent protected product that can fund research so many applications will not be properly researched due to the financial constraints.

  



References:
 

[1] http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9d0ceed8173af93ba25756c0a967958260&n=top/news/science/topics/bones
[2] http://www.atlantisrising.com/backissues/issue5/ar5heal.html