Meet Magnet, P.I - magnet therapy for pain
Natural Health, July-August, 1998 by Sarah Fremerman
New evidence is giving credence to this curious form of pain relief--and may be silencing long-time critics in the process.
In 1993, a patient of Carlos Vallbona, M.D., told him that a cushion made with small magnets had cured his lower back pain. Vallbona was skeptical. "I thought it was a psychological effect," he recalls. "There was nothing in the scientific literature that indicated magnets were helpful."
At the time, most scientists would have agreed and some, like William Jarvis, Ph.D., executive director of the National Council Against Health Fraud, still do. "There's a lot of huckstering going on," Jarvis says. "Marketers are making extravagant claims for which there is no evidence."
Physicians and scientists ridiculed magnet therapy with good reason. Until last year there was not a speck of scientific evidence showing that magnets did what patients--and magnet manufacturers--claimed they did. In fact, one informal study, conducted at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York in 1991 by physical therapist Benjamin Gelfand, tracked a group of 24 patients suffering from bursitis, tendonitis, and lower back pain. The patients wore magnets 12 hours a day for up to six weeks and none experienced any pain relief that could be attributed to the magnets. Gelfand concluded that magnet therapy merited no further investigation.
But magnet therapy wouldn't go away. Anecdotal evidence continued to mount, despite the inability of science to explain how magnets worked. Chronic pain sufferers, like Vallbona's patient, went on claiming that magnets worked for them. Consider
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