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Tom McCarthy is a husband, father, author, speaker, entrepreneur, and investor who has owned businesses in the training, software, financial services, and restaurant industries. Tom’s clients in his training business include some of the worlds leading companies such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, and MetLife. His latest book,... Read More
William Pawluk, MD, MSc, author of “Supercharge Your Health with PEMF therapy”, was recently a holistic doctor near Baltimore, MD. Previous academic positions at Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland. Training: acupuncture, homeopathy, hypnosis, energy medicine, nutrition and bodywork. Considered the foremost authority on the practical use of Pulsed Electromagnetic... Read More
- How do you define energy healing?
- What is the history of energy healing?
- How do magnetic fields relate to energy healing?
- What are pulsed electromagnetic fields or PEMFs?
- What are the intensity levels of PEMFs versus the body’s magnetic fields?
Related Topics
Acupuncture, Acupuncture Points, Acupuncture System, Atp Increase, Chi, Circulation Improvement, Current Flowing Through Wires, Electrical Charge, EMF, Energy, Energy Creation, Energy Healing, Faradays Laws, Fda Approval, Fracture Healing, Growth Factors, Healing, History Of Energy Healing, Hypnosis, Imagery, Impact On Healing, Inflammation, Inflammation Reduction, Interaction With Charge In Tissues, Magnetic Field Therapy, Mainstream Acceptance, Maxwells Laws, Meridians, Non-unions, PEMF, Pemfs, Pulsed Electromagnetic Fields, Shaman Medicine, Static Magnetic Fields, Time-varying Magnetic FieldsTom McCarthy
My next guest, and I were just having a stimulating conversation, and the information was so good. I said, hold on a second. We’ve got to start hitting Record, because I want all of you to learn from him. His name is William Pawluk, M.D.. He’s a medical doctor, an MD, but he’s much more than that. Several years ago in his practice, he was seeing that as hard as he worked and as much as he followed what he had learned in medical school, some things still weren’t working for patients. And I read a bill, I read in on your website about three patients that, I think it was 1983, got admitted to the hospital with bleeding from the stomach, and they were being treated for pain with this standard treatment, giving them ibuprofen, aspirin, and it was masking the pain a little bit, but the side effects were disastrous. And so you really launched into looking at alternatives to helping people, and I’m so thankful you did, because your history is amazing. And some of the things that you launched into, and I’m just gonna look at a list here, but acupuncture. Let me just see where some of these were. What were some of the other techniques? Oh, hypnosis, bodywork, energy medicine, homeopathy, like you looked at everything which very few doctors ever do. They go down such a rigid path. And so your traditional training with all these additional things that you’ve learned have made you a master of healing. And the thing that we’re gonna talk about today is PEMF. And I’ll let you explain what that is and just a little bit, but you are the authority on PEMF, and you have found amazing results in pain and I think like 50 other different types of diseases or conditions people have. So this is gonna be very valuable for everybody watching this. So welcome to our summit. We’re really excited to have you on board
William Pawluk, M.D.
Thank you. I’m excited to be here as well. And one of my passions of course, is energy healing, and magnetic field therapy is like classic energy healing.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, and so talk–
William Pawluk, M.D.
That is enemy healing.
Tom McCarthy
Enemy healing. Talk about the history of energy healing, ’cause I know you’ve gone into so many different modalities, studying energy healings, spiritual healing, acupuncture, which is a form of energy healing. So give us the history of energy healing and also how it’s becoming maybe hopefully more mainstream or starting to become a little bit more mainstream here in the western world.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, I think traditionally over millennia, obviously people were trying to solve problems, health problems. It used to be said that acupuncturists would only get paid when people were well. Well, the reason for that is that when they weren’t well, they went to the hospital, or they died, right? So if they died or went to the hospital, the acupuncturists no longer got paid. So it was they had an incentive to keep you healthy because otherwise, they’d lose the patients, if you will.
But people knew energy transfer is something that’s been known through in humanity, all along. Shaman, shamans, or however you want to say that, but basically, shaman medicine is shamanic medicine is ancient, and that involves energy healing. But shaman also do hypnosis. Shaman also do imagery. They do all sorts of things to help to heal people. And that was at a time that they did that because that’s the tool they had.
Now, at some point, the technology advanced to the point where people would have a needle, they would make a needle. So it was like having a nail, you know? How much effort does it take to make a nail? It takes a lot of work to make a needle and then make a nail. And so eventually, they discovered that they could do needles into points on the body that they saw as energetic points, and they were less confused than we are today because we’re surrounded by… We’re drowning in information, we’re drowning in noise, we’re drowning in stimulation. So we’re no longer sort of attached to the subtleties of nature.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And as a result, they developed this acupuncture system. But the best acupuncturists were also energy healers. They could sense the acupuncture points and the meridians, and they knew which ones were out of balance, and they would put a needle in that point. Rather than guessing, they would sense it, and then they could see the effects of the energy flows in the body, which they called chi.
Now chi is, who knows what chi really is, right? It’s a lot of things, I think, but what we’ve discovered now, modern science has now proven that the acupuncture points and meridians are at the very least, there could be more, but at the very least are electrical, and an acupuncture point is like a wealth, like a vortex where you have a decreased resistance to the electrical charge, and the skin conducts charge all the time.
It’s constantly conducting charge, and these little wells or vortexes then became energy conduit. So you can put a needle in that vortex, and what you’re doing is you’re increasing the energy, the electrical charge in that vortex, and it’s like a capacitor on a DC current line.
Tom McCarthy
Huh.
William Pawluk, M.D.
It’s an electrical current system that’s been established. There’s no doubt about it anymore. And as a result, and I teach a course for acupuncturists on the use of PEMFs with acupuncture, because PEMFs have this law of nature called Maxwell’s laws and also Faraday’s laws where magnetic fields and electrical fields interact, and current flowing and electrical fields produces a magnetic field, and that’s how PEMFs work. They are electrical fields generated by current flowing through wires. And so what–
Tom McCarthy
Also just tell them what PEMF stands for, because I don’t think I got into that yet, yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So there are two types of magnetic fields. There are static magnetic fields, and there are what are called time varying magnetic fields. So there are magnetic fields that are in motion. Static magnetic fields are like the fridge magnet. Once you make a magnet, it’s there, it’s made forever, essentially, right? But a dynamic magnetic field, a time-varied magnetic field is basically pulsing.
Now, wifi is a magnetic field, light is a magnetic field, sound in its own way is a magnetic field. So they’re all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But the kinds of magnetic fields that we’re producing for healing purposes are called pulsed electromagnetic fields, or PEMFs. So that means that there’s a current flowing through a wire. It’s pulsing through the wire. And every time it pulses through that wire, it produces a magnetic field. So basically, a current flowing through a wire is like my thumb. It’s flowing down that wire.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And there’s a perpendicular magnetic field that’s made because of the current law of physics that happens every time, you can’t stop it from happening. All right? So then what happens is the magnetic field goes like this, at the time the current pulses, the magnetic field goes like this. It goes up and collapses, goes up and collapses, goes up and collapses. And the magnetic field is, the body’s like air to a magnetic field. A magnetic field goes through the body completely without being stopped, used or absorbed.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? And so that’s called a PEMF. So it’s producing basically that kind of action in the body.
Tom McCarthy
Wow. Okay. It’s almost like a little bit of… So it’s almost like massaging the cells or manipulating the cells as it goes, yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
In a sense, it’s a little bit of a like a pressure effect from that as well, but it’s mostly an electrical phenomenon.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, and so how can that impact healing? That pulsed electric electromagnetic field, how does that impact the body’s ability to heal?
William Pawluk, M.D.
So a magnetic field ignores the body.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
A magnetic field is like the wind in the trees. It doesn’t stay in the trees. It moves on through, and this is moving through, it’s jiggling the leaves and moving the branches and swaying everything and so on. So that’s what a magnetic field is doing going into the body. But what it’s doing then is because of Maxwell’s laws and Faraday’s law, the magnetic field is interacting with all the charge in the tissues. Our bodies are basically electrolytes soup. It’s like a battery, right? There’s over 2,000 chemical processes per second in every cell in the body.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So we have a hundred trillion cells approximately. Right?
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So there’s 2,000 chemical process. So there’s all this motion going on in the body, and all that motion is driven by electromagnetic forces. And so magnetic fields interact with those forces in the body, the natural forces within the body to then create energy. And that energy then is used by the body to finish work that it wasn’t able to do, or as we get older, our energy levels generally deplete, called the entropy, all right? And what the magnetic field is doing is it’s waking everything up. So a magnetic field is actually creating charge in the body, millivolts of charge in the body.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Even sometimes higher than that.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And what does that do? Then the body then that translates into about 25 different actions in the body, at least 25, 27 different actions, including increasing ATP, including circulation improvements, including reduction in inflammation, and including growth factors, all the healing processes get engaged. So how did all this start in the sense of the US? About 25 years ago, the FDA approved magnetic devices to heal fractures that wouldn’t heal.
Tom McCarthy
Ah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
They’re called non-unions. So non-unions would be basically a fracture that stalled in its healing process. And when it stalls, that’s it. You basically have a bone that you can’t use.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
‘Cause now it becomes like a synthetic joint, an artificial joint. And so surgical processes were used to try to heal these non-unions, but whatever caused the non-union in the first place was still already there as a problem. So surgery often failed or caused other consequences that were not acceptable, and they would put hardware on the fractures to try to stabilize the fracture. It was a miserable stuff. But what they found is that magnetic fields, as they pass through the fracture site, wake everything up.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
All of a sudden, the healing restart. Even in seven-year-old, non-unions will wake up and start healing. And with four to six hours a day of treatments, even four to 12 hours a day of treatments, in within 12 months, six months to 12 months, the fractures heal.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. It seems almost magical. This is really, really cool. So you’ve identified pain obviously is something that can be impacted, but there’s so many other conditions that PEMF can help with. What are some of the things, ’cause there’s people watching with all sorts of things going on in their life now, or potentially in the future. What are some things, what are conditions that you’ve identified where this is really a phenomenal treatment?
William Pawluk, M.D.
So in my book, “Power Tools for Health”, I’ve identified 50 conditions for which there were scientific support that was they had done studies and they had done adequate studies.
Tom McCarthy
Well, that’s what I love. You’ve really delved into the science of this too. It’s not just hypothetical. You have 500 scientific research.
William Pawluk, M.D.
References.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. I mean, you’ve really gone into it super deep as I would expect you would as a medical doctor, as a scientist, and that’s what I love, and that’s why I was excited to have you on board. So what are some of these conditions that you’ve seen research on?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, again, there’s about 50.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
But before we go to the 50 conditions, it’s actually more important ’cause that’s just the beginning.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
This is just based on the science that’s been done. But the most important thing to look at is what are the actions of the magnetic fields in the body?
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And if you understand the basic actions, it doesn’t matter what the diseases. Right?
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
It doesn’t matter what the condition is, because it’s working at a cellular level at a functional level in the body to help to rebalance, and that’s the definition of energy medicine is to rebalance basically the functions of the body. And ideally, you want to not only rebalance, but you want to heal.
Tom McCarthy
Yes.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So pain management is actually not as important as healing the cause of the pain.
Tom McCarthy
Yes. Yes.
William Pawluk, M.D.
As you can bandaid the pain, right? And you’ll feel better, but unfortunately, if you’d stop the pain management, the pain comes back because you haven’t healed the cause. So what are the causes of pain? Inflammation, damage to the tissues, damage to nerves, decreases in circulation, basically lack of energy in the body, antioxidant support. The list is about 25 different actions. We recently discovered that magnetic fields reduce inflammations through a molecule called adenosine,
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
which is part of ATP.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, that was what we were talking about earlier, which I was so fascinated with. I love that, yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So inflammation through the adenosine receptor then causes all sorts of things to begin to improve in the body. But, there is a big but. The science shows that the optimal magnetic field intensity is 15 gauss.
Tom McCarthy
15 gauss, okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
15 gauss. So if you know that that’s what you need, so superficially, at a knuckle or a wrist or tennis elbow, 15 gauss, probably is gonna work very well, or we try to heal the brain or a lung or a heart or deep into a hip, it’s not gonna be good enough,
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
’cause it’s not gonna produce the 15 gauss, ’cause magnetic fields drop off very rapidly just like sound and light and heat and cold, right? As you move away from the emitter.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So inflammation is one of them. We also discovered recently that PEMFs have an action on the endocannabinoid system.
Tom McCarthy
Ah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
That was the cannabis, right? System on the body, the marijuana system of the body.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So there are receptors, and it’s called the endocannabinoid system. So PEMFs also impact the endocannabinoid system, and they have natural effects of reducing pain. So they decrease the irritability of nerves, they reduce swelling in tissues, every injury in the body, a bang on the wrist, every injury produces swelling.
It’s called edema, and you got to reduce the edema to get the healing to get going ’cause that limits blood supply to the tissues, which you need to then initiate healing processes. So this energy that you’re producing in the body creates all of these different actions. And I have a bunch of those on my website, but mostly, if you’re interested, I would recommend getting the book, “Power Tools for Health”.
Tom McCarthy
“Power Tools for Health”. And your website, let’s give them that right now. We’ve got lots more to talk about, but your website that they can go to, it is amazing. The information you have on your website about PEMF and the research is phenomenal. Can you give them that website?
William Pawluk, M.D.
So the website is drpawluk, that’s p-a-w-l-u-k, d-r-p-a-w-l-u-k, no period after doctor, drpawluk.com.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. Perfect.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Drpawluk.com.
Tom McCarthy
I love it. So these PEMFs, what they’re really doing, if I’m understanding right, and correct me if I’m wrong, is they’re working with the body to allow this natural healing mechanism to be unleashed. Is that what’s happening?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yeah, so the PEMF is actually not doing anything.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? It’s the wind in the trees.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
It’s moving on through. What happens though as it’s passing through, because of the interaction with charge in the body, currents and charge, electrolytes, and so on, ions, because of that interaction, based on the laws of physics, it’s stimulating them. So essentially, the magnetic field is simply a catalyst to cause the body to start to do things that it wasn’t able to do at that point or before that.
Tom McCarthy
I love it.
William Pawluk, M.D.
All right? So the body does the work. The magnetic field is simply the stimulus. So if I say boo to you, all right? You’re gonna react.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
All right. You might not. If you people have been telling you boo too many times and you kind of discarded, but if I say it loud enough, you’re gonna have to react.
Tom McCarthy
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, the magnetic field is causing the body to react.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And then the body’s reactions then are positive. It’s very hard to do damage with a magnetic field. Now, EEMFs, the power line fields and the microwaves and so on, all that environmental stuff, 5G, 4G, that is harmful, that can be harmful to the body. But PEMFs, because of their nature, because they just pass right on through, they don’t absorb. Microwaves absorb in the body. That’s why we use microwave ovens to create heating.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? So they heat the body, they damage the body. But PEMFs, because they pass all the way through, they don’t create problems. Magnetic fields, generally reveal problems, they don’t create problems.
Tom McCarthy
Yes. So the PEMF by using a PEMF technology, does that help counteract some of the damage of the EEMFs that we’re experiencing?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yes. So when there’s overheating of the tissues, the tissues are damaged by the heat, whether it’s putting your finger on a stove or stalling yourself. Well, that damage has to be healed. Well, magnetic field therapy stimulates all the regenerative processes of the body. So yes, and when you do magnetic therapy on a regular basis with a sufficiently strong enough magnetic field, you’re basically defending the body.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Essentially, the body puts up a shield. So the EEMFs could come to the body, they may create a little bit of a reaction, but the body says, hey, you don’t bother me.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
They have a huge exposure. If you’re standing right in front of a radar gun, a big military radar gun, well then, you’re going to be very much affected by it.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
If you stand in front of radiation, ionizing radiation, like for treating cancers, well, you’re gonna be effected by it, and then you’re gonna have to repair the damage to the extent that you can and you should. So the PEMFs will rebalance it, stimulate the body’s processes, do what it’s supposed to do.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Not causing anything unnatural. It just causes the body to react to heal.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, that’s really beautiful too, because like even these people that had these broken bones that weren’t healing for seven years, the body knew how to heal it. There was just something preventing, something not working right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
It got stuck. It got stuck.
Tom McCarthy
It got stuck, yeah. And so PEMF allows the body to get unstuck. The body knows how to heal. The immune system knows how to heal, right? The body knows how to mend a broken bone, but when it gets stuck, you need something to kind of like, as you said, like the wind blowing through the trees that rustles the leaves.
So this is really a beautiful concept. It’s not something that people should be in fear of, oh, what will that do to me? It’s like, it enables your body to do what it’s supposed to do. So one of the things that’s really cool too is that there’s a myriad of these devices out there that people could get for helping their body with PEMF. You’ve really done a ton of research on trying to find the right devices, you know, the ones that you have several on your website, some you probably love more than others, but how have you done all this research on these devices? It just sounds overwhelming to even look at all these things. Like, I guess it’s a passion of yours though.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, clearly is a passion, but you know as a doctor, as a medical doctor, I’m a problem solver.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
I call myself an unhappy doctor. I’m unhappy until I can solve your problem or provide you with solutions.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
That work. And so over 50 years of medical practice, you’ve seen, kind of seen almost it all, and then you have to sort of figure out what’s gonna work, and you know the general in the field of medicine and what the tools are and how they work and how well they work for problems, and then when you delve into all of these different healing techniques, you discover their limitations as well, their strengths and their limitations.
And so when somebody comes to me and says, this is my problem, usually, it’s rare that somebody comes to you with only one problem. Right? So then you say you do a history, you find out what their problems are, then as a doctor with all my experience, I know what the mechanisms, I know what the pathophysiology is in that body, and then you say, well, here’s the device that’s going to work the best for you.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Sometimes you can get away with like a tennis elbow, you can get away with a small little portable battery-operated system that’s relatively low intensity. That’ll work. If you had a concussion, or if you have MS or Parkinson’s, then you need a different magnetic system to treat the brain.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So these whole-body, low-intensity PEMF systems, they tickle you, they make you feel better, they stimulate the acupuncture system, but they don’t work deep enough with a sufficient intensity to help you deepen the body. I’ve mentioned the 15 gauss.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Most of these whole-body systems are actually probably less than five gauss, 10 gauss.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So they’re just not gonna go deep enough to do good work or deep work. They could make you feel better, but like the pain problem, they’re not gonna heal the cause of the pain, they’re gonna make you feel better.
Tom McCarthy
Okay. Okay, cool.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So then what we have to do with that is we have to do a consultation, and because we have so many different devices, we actually provide consultative services on our website.
Tom McCarthy
Awesome. So people can come to your site and actually get help and find, if they buy into PEMFs, which I do, certainly, they can come to your site and get help finding the right device and one that probably fits their budget too, right?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Hopefully.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, hopefully.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And the biggest, I think the biggest mistake that people make is say, I have a budget
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
and that’s all I’m gonna spend.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
But if you need a $6,000 machine to do the job that you need it to do, and if you have cancer, then you better not trifle.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, exactly.
William Pawluk, M.D.
You need to get the right piece of equipment. If you have a serious condition and you’re on the edge of a cliff and a gale, then you better get the right piece of equipment.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, what have been some of the most amazing things you’ve seen with patients using PEMF, recoveries that they’ve been able to make, and some might be atypical, but what are some things that you see it can be helpful with that maybe even amazed you?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, one of my first experiences actually was a three-year-old child,
Tom McCarthy
Huh.
William Pawluk, M.D.
and this is in my book. She cut off the end of her thumb in a board jam.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
You know, sharp-angled board jam.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Get tore off the end of her thumb. And fortunately, they called me before the surgeon’s gone at it. And what I said is that let’s put it back on.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Reattach it. The surgeons, what they were gonna do is they’re gonna clean it up and put a graft skin on the edge of the wound.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? In which case this child would have a deformed thumb for the rest of her life. So we’ve got nothing to lose based on my medical experience, we’ve got nothing to lose. If you reattach it and it falls off again, you’re back to where you were before.
Tom McCarthy
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D.
But I heard long time ago, as an older clinician that in the UK, often, children under age 11, if you do that, they cut off the finger below the last joint, that the body will often regenerate. So a three-year-old has huge regenerative capacity
Tom McCarthy
Yes.
William Pawluk, M.D.
compared to a 50-year-old or a 70-year-old. So we did an hour and a half a day with a small portable battery-operated machine, 12, literally you could see the first picture that I took, purple black, and you expect that, there’s no blood supply. 12 weeks later, she’s regrowing her nail. It completely regenerated.
Tom McCarthy
Wow. Amazing.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Own and all.
Tom McCarthy
Wow, that is amazing.
William Pawluk, M.D.
For an hour to an hour and a half a day.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, I wish I could have interviewed you back when you first became a medical doctor and now, because I’m sure this shift of coming out of medical school, being trained with the science that you learn there and the way you think now is pretty radically different. Can you even imagine where you are now based upon where you started?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Oh, no doubt about it. But I brought with me
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
my understanding of anatomy, physiology, psychology, healing, and so on is to learn from all these other technologies that you look at. But if you have that basic understanding, then you know what has to be applied to deal with the problem,
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
and what’s probably gonna work best. I’ve tested and used a lot of other devices like lasers, ultrasound, and so on. So what I found is that the best value comes from the PEMFs. It does so many more things than almost any other technologies, primarily because it goes right through the body.
Tom McCarthy
Wow. Amazing. Yeah. Why do you think you were so open when other doctors who are brilliant and are doing great work and doing the best they can are not as open? What is it about you that enabled you to kind of open your mind to these other things?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, I think a lot of doctors today who go to acupuncture, medical doctors who go into acupuncture or begin to go into other disciplines to learn other things, like hypnosis, for example,
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
they’re already saying to themselves, there’s a limit to what I’m doing. I don’t like being limited. That’s what makes us unhappy doctors.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So as an unhappy doctor, I’m motivated to become happy. That means I start to do research, I start to evaluate, I start to think outside the usual box. You don’t necessarily forget where you came from.
Tom McCarthy
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? But you apply new techniques and new technology. So you have to be open-minded, you have to be willing to work at it, you essentially have to be motivated because you are unhappy,
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
motivated to look at other solutions.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And once you get out of that medical box, because it’s constraining you, and you don’t have to be frank and say that acupuncture has a box, okay? Hypnosis has a box.
Tom McCarthy
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Chiropractic has a box.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So everybody has got their parlor, if you will.
Tom McCarthy
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D.
You get kind of stuck in your part. I know many acupuncturists who have never done anything but acupuncture. But now there are acupuncturists who are doing herbal therapies, and then other acupuncturists are doing PEMFs or they’re doing other kinds of therapies. Even they eventually come to the realization, I don’t have all the answers. So I gotta find answers somewhere else.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And that means that you’re going to be, to some extent, separated from your peers who are still in that box.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. Yeah. And that must have been challenging for you many years ago when you started separating from your peers, and I’m sure not everybody was a loving kindness to you. There was probably a few arrows thrown your way, like, what’s he doing?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Well, I’m either stupid, or I have a shield,
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
or I wear a cape.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yes. I’m willing to deal with the slings and arrows of convention.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And I can do that, I’m happy to do that because I see results.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
I wasn’t seeing results.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? When I started doing magnetic field therapy, people were feeling better, they got better. I was seeing results in people who were supposed to die,
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
and they got better. I had another gentleman talk about a story. I had a gentleman come to see me who was purple from the knees down. The surgeons said, “We have to amputate your legs.” He had gangrene in both legs from diabetes. And his boss bought him to see me. He didn’t come to see me because he wanted to, his boss brought him to see me.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And he was an unwilling patient.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
But I looked at his legs, I said, you’re ready to die. I mean, these legs could go septic any moment, and you’re gonna shut down your kidneys, and then you’re gonna blame me for trying to put you down another path. Anyway, they convinced me to do something. So we put them on a nutritional program. We got rid of the smoking, got rid of the drinking, and got him on magnetic field therapy. Literally, again, about three months later, he went back to the surgeon and the surgeon said, “Oh, I guess we don’t have to amputate.”
Tom McCarthy
That’s awesome.
William Pawluk, M.D.
That was an awesome story.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s so cool. Now, you originally with magnets, you were using the, you know, you call it the refrigerator magnet, but they were more powerful than that, you were using some of those, seeing some results, and then you learned about PEMF after that, and then saw, wow, this is like supercharging results? Is that what happened?
William Pawluk, M.D.
So again, once you get a tool, once you start using it, you begin to see the value of it, the strengths and the weaknesses, what it can do and what it can’t do. And what I discovered very quickly is that the stronger magnets that you often need to work deeper into the body, while they worked, they had their limits as well. It’s very hard to put a strong magnet on the brain to help you with concussion. You would need a very, very powerful magnet.
Then you got the problem with practicality. And so I began to become aware of Eastern European literature and research, but most of it was in Cyrillic. I met a guy at an MD-PhD from the Czech Republic at a conference, and we talked and he said, “I got a manuscript for you.” So he had reviewed all the science previously in the Eastern Europe. So he had already, essentially reviewed and translated about 25 years of Eastern European science. So then I co authored a book with him to go over all that science. And so now that opened up the vista and a whole lot of other tools. And pulse magnetic fields are much more dynamic.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
‘Cause they can go right through the body completely. A static magnet goes into the body, but because the magnetic field drops off so rapidly, you need a very big magnet to go through the entire body. I worked with Dr. Robert Becker, who many people know of “The Body Electric”. So I talked to him several times, and he had found that he could put salamanders to sleep. He was doing experiments on salamanders.
He could put them to sleep by putting little magnets across the skulls. Well, a salamander skull is the width of my thumb. Right? So you don’t need a very strong magnet to put a salamander to sleep. So I said, well, can you do this in humans? He said, “Yes, you need a huge magnet.” You get the magnetic field and touch it that you need to put the brain to sleep. But we found that actually pulsed magnetic fields, we sell, and we have magnetic fields available that help people to sleep, but it’s pulsed, as the magnetic field goes right through the brain with a sufficient intensity, that pulsation is much more dynamic than a static magnet is.
So the static magnet relies on the body’s own motions, ion motions and electrical motions and so on, but a pulsed magnetic field doesn’t, because it’s moving itself constantly through the tissues. So it’s much more dynamic, and therefore you need lower intensities, you can do a lot more action and you go all the way through the body.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, let’s talk about the brain a little bit, because you brought that up a couple of times now. So you mentioned concussions. My son was a college athlete, had a couple of concussions as a basketball player. One of the concussions, he had to sit out an entire year as a basketball player, right? And they call it a red shirt for entire year, ’cause it took him a while to not have headaches, and bright lights
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yeah, sleep.
Tom McCarthy
and things like that. So I wish I would’ve known about this back then, but PEMFs help with concussions?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yeah, so in fact, there’s a blog on my website about concussion, TBI, and I did a study actually using a low-intensity magnetic field on about 10 concussion patients. So we did before and after measurements with them over about three months. And they had dramatic benefits to their symptoms using a lower intensity magnetic field, and it got pulsing through the brain.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
I did a review of the science, the research on this that was published about concussion in a journal called the Journal of Science and Medicine, and a lot of those studies use high intensity magnetic fields. They are commonly used to treat depression.
Tom McCarthy
Okay. Yeah. I’ve heard of it.
William Pawluk, M.D.
RTMS, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
The different types of magnetic fields work on the brain. They help to improve function,
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
they may help with healing in the long run, but the healing process can take quite a while. But the study that I did, we found people improved in a lot of ways, a lot of their clinical parameters improved within about a week.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And then when we stopped it up to three months of magnetic treatment for two hours a day and they could have done more, but that was a study, two hours a day, at the end of three months, we stopped the magnetic therapy and remeasured them, and most of them lost about half of their gains.
Tom McCarthy
Okay, meaning they need to continue to do it.
William Pawluk, M.D.
They need to continue to do it, or we needed more time or we need higher intensity magnetic fields, but the research stopped at that point.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
But at least, we found that we did improve function significantly and we did improve symptoms significantly. But at that point, it didn’t heal the brain. It didn’t reverse the problem.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So how long should people continue for? Probably for months to years even depending on the magnetic system. So if you have a high intensity magnetic system and you have a brain injury or Parkinson’s or MS, you need much stronger magnetic fields to go through the brain. Remember I mentioned 15 gauss.
Tom McCarthy
Yes.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? So across the skull, it’s approximately six inches for most people, right? So for a six, if you want to penetrate across the entire brain, you’re gonna need a strong enough magnetic field that’s gonna deliver at least 15 gauss from one side of the brain to the other, and that means you’re gonna need about a 4,000 gauss magnetic field.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So that’s why the consultations become important ’cause then you design the therapy for the problem, that’s more specific to the problem. So the research in JOSAM, published in the Journal of Science and Medicine, shows that these higher intensity magnetic fields have stronger benefits than low intensity magnetic fields do for the brain.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. What about anxiety? Is this something that PEMFs can help with also?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Tremendously. So there’s a device that I use called the Flex Pulse, which is portable, battery-operated. I had to talk about a story. So I had a patient come in. She’s completely frantic. She actually just fidgeting and just wouldn’t sit still, nervous. And I said, I can’t conduct the interview. She had an hour appointment, said I can’t conduct this interview. She got up and was pacing. So I put a Flex Pulse magnet on the back of her neck, top of the neck, because that’s the area of the brain that controls alertness.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
All right? So I put it in the back of her neck and literally 15 minutes later, you could see the elevator going down.
Tom McCarthy
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D.
She sat down and finished the interview. So I asked her at the end, what was your anxiety level before we gave you the magnets, out of 10, zero to 10, 10 being the worst you can imagine? She said seven. I would agree with her it’s 10. Right? But she said seven. I would hate to imagine her when she was really frantic, panicking. So anyway, at the end after treatment, she went from seven to three,
Tom McCarthy
Ah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
and she was delighted, absolutely delighted. She bought a system and she uses it every single day. So magnetic field therapy can be extraordinarily helpful for anxiety, and what you’re doing with the Flex Pulse basically to the brain is you’re causing the brain waves to slow down. So as we know, brainwaves are changing throughout the day. So when you and I are talking, we’re learning, we’re processing, we’re judging, we’re remembering, all that causes increased levels of brain activity.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
But when we’re relaxing, watching soaps, or just watching TV, the Discovery Channel and not thinking, we’re relaxed, we’re in what we call the alpha state.
Tom McCarthy
Yes.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So you’re relaxed. Then the next level down will be like theta or light sleep, and then the deepest is delta. So magnetic field therapy can actually tune the brain at each of these levels. You have to pick the right frequency to do that. And you could also wake people up. So you’ve got truck drivers who are getting road hypnosis, and I have this happen to myself, I did it. I put a magnet coil on the back of my neck. I had to pick up my daughter at two o’clock in the morning at the airport, and I usually go to bed at ten.
Tom McCarthy
All right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? So I didn’t want to have a cup of coffee because then I knew that I’d be up all night.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
So I put the magnet on the back of my neck at beta, 23 hertz, and alert. And it was like pain or else, I didn’t get a buzz or anything, I was just alert.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
And then got home fine, took the magnet off and right to sleep.
Tom McCarthy
That’s awesome. That’s great. Yeah, it sounds, that was almost magical, but I am a big believer in PEMF, and so I am so glad we had this opportunity to talk. I know you’re gonna help a lot of people.
You’ve already helped tons and tons and tons, but people watching this, I would highly recommend you go to dr, d-r, pawluk, p-a-w-l-u-k, no C in there, l-u-k.com. Check out everything he’s got on there. It’s amazing. It’s just a incredible resource, and if you want a PEMF machine, you would be very smart to get a consultation with Dr. Pawluk and his team, so yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Also, I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’m gonna provide people with a bonus,
Tom McCarthy
Okay. Cool.
William Pawluk, M.D.
about why PEMFs are an energy medicine.
Tom McCarthy
Beautiful.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Explain it to some extent, but also in that ebook that we’re gonna provide people, it talks about the difference between say, chi gung and healers and dosing and so on, or those, et cetera, and how magnetic fields relate to them. And one of the points that I was trying to make in this ebook is that the legacy of healing techniques and technologies has to do more with not having technology available.
Tom McCarthy
Yes.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? But today, we have technology. So PEMFs are a modern development in having a technological solution to do very similar sorts of things that we were able to do before with healing. The problem with healing often is it’s unreliable because the practitioners are not on all the time.
Tom McCarthy
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? Their ability to heal comes and goes, ’cause their ability to produce charge and energy comes and goes, and I explained that in that ebook.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah, versus a machine is always on. When you turn it on, it’s on. Right? The technology.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yeah, it’s on, yeah. You just have to find the right technology.
Tom McCarthy
So thank you. That’s a great bonus for everybody. Makes sure you get that ebook that we’re offering you. It will be a huge resource for you and give you some really, really great information. Any final words you have built for everybody that’s watching this right now?
William Pawluk, M.D.
Yeah, the biggest question, one of the biggest questions I get, we know if you read the book, clearly there’s no doubt about it, magnetic field therapy works. You don’t have to believe, all right? It even works on snails and plants.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Right? You don’t have to believe. Of course, people say the plants are sent in too, and sort of snails are sent in too. But we talk about the placebo effect. Supposedly, there is no placebo effect in the snail.
Tom McCarthy
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D.
All right? But from an energetic perspective, your intention is important even for that. So the key is that this is a technology that is extraordinarily safe. It works, you don’t have to know how to use it to get the proper results, and it’s extraordinarily safe. So you can’t hurt yourself. As I said, magnetic fields tend to reveal problems, they don’t cause problems.
Tom McCarthy
Yeah. Awesome. And it works with the body’s natural healing mechanism. It actually reinforces it or awakens it, which is really beautiful. It’s not like something artificial like a drug where we’re counting on it to pull the whole job on its own.
We’re looking at PEMFs as something that will integrate with our bodies to just awaken this healing mechanism that we’ve been built with, we were given by the Creator, which is really, really cool. I love it. You’ve been just such a wealth of information. I know I’ll be talking with you a lot in the future about PEMFs and learning more and working with my body, and I hope everybody will too. So thank you so much, Dr. Pawluk for being on. It really has been an honor to have you here.
William Pawluk, M.D.
Thank you very much, Tom. I’m honored as well to be part of your tribe.
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