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Dr. Raffaele received his B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University and his M.D. from Drexel University Medical School in 1989. He trained at The New York Hospital/Cornell University Medical Center and was formerly a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Dr. Raffaele is board certified in internal... 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
- Understand the physiology of PEMF in regenerative medicine.
- Effect of PEMF on stem cells and telomerase activity.
- Practical recommendations on PEMF use in clinical practice.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Welcome to another episode of the Telomere Summit sponsored by Doctor Summit. I’m Dr. Joseph Raphael, your host of the Telomere Summit. And I’m very happy to have here today with me, Dr. Will Pawluk, who will be talking to us about PEMF and his interesting journey over the past 30 years toward using it to help patients with many conditions and aging process overall. Welcome Dr. Pawluk.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Thank you, Dr. Raphael.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Dr. William Pawluk, MD and MS of science, is the author of Supercharge your Health with PEMF Therapy and was recently a holistic doctor in Baltimore, Maryland. Previous academic positions, he held at Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland. He has training in acupuncture, homeopathy, hypnosis, energy medicine, nutrition, and body work. He is considered the foremost authority on the practical use of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy in North America. He is interested in holistic pain management, sleep, anxiety, anti-aging, tissue healing and general health. To promote the healing value of PEMFs, he has well over 50 radio podcasts, magazine and TV interviews combined.
He has also been a co-host of a two hour Holistic Health radio show in Baltimore for 10 years. And most recently he hosted the Pain Solution summit interviewing more than 30 experts on helping people with chronic pain. He has recently been awarded the ACIM lifetime achievement award in 2019 for work with PEMFs and as Maryland’s top preventative medicine specialist award in 2021. His new book, Supercharge your Health with PEMFs is a practical hands-on guide to PEMF treatment, how to select and properly use the right PEMF system for over 80 different health conditions and cuts through the online confusion about PEMF devices. All based on his extensive knowledge and clinical experience with PEMFs. And we’ll show you those books at the end of this broadcast.
So welcome Dr. Pawluk. I’m a bit of a neophyte when it comes to PEMF, but our conversation that we had in Las Vegas was really interesting. And I’m really happy to have you on this episode today. So I’d love to start, as I often do with telling us, you’re telling us about your journey over the past 30 years from sort of traditional medical training into PEMF and how you got to be where you are in this field.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well, thank you for that intro. My background, basically, I’m an MD and I was in charge of a large medical group, like 30 clinicians in New Jersey. And we shared patients, did rounds, you know, on mutually on our patients in a very short period of time. I had a couple of patients admitted to the hospital with GI bleeding and in evaluating that, one of them almost died and evaluated that the cause was related to Ibuprofen. So all of them, both of them had been on a long-term Ibuprofen. And I realized at the time it said, when I look at my consultants, I thought about what options were available to me.
I didn’t see any better options than what already existed. Now, again, that was back in the mid eighties. So there weren’t that many options, so opioids and Ibuprofen, Tylenol, and then the consultants and all the things that they did, the procedures, et cetera. So I had to do something different. And it couldn’t be within the house of medicine because obviously I knew what the options were there. So I decided to study acupuncture. And when I started doing acupuncture, people were refusing to do needles. That was in 1990.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Yeah, sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
I went for acupuncture back then, right? So then having studied that and couldn’t use needles, people, then I thought, well, I have to find a different approach. So I started looking at using magnets on acupuncture points. I knew that in the Orient in Korea and also in China, to some extent they use magnets on acupuncture points, small little tiny magnets that could place some on acupuncture points and stimulate a point that way. But we know now that you can stimulate acupuncture points in a lot of ways, including light, heat, friction, pressure, and so on. Well, it turns out that the magnets were doing different things than just acupuncture. I would see lesions disappear under the magnet.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And I had a personal experience where I had a spider bite on my leg, and I didn’t realize I had it, that I’d been bitten. At that point, it was not that itchy or sore or painful. When I looked down, I had a quarter size lesion on my leg. So I put a magnet on it and I was reading on my patio. Three hours later, gone.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Just a regular magnet?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
A regular magnet, fridge magnet.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Three hours later, it was gone. You and I know that a spider bite is going to last a week to two weeks.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Absolutely.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
I caught it right away. I caught it right at the very beginning. So basically it just melted away. And that’s one of the, so that again became very intriguing to me. What’s going on here? It’s not just acupuncture stimulation. There’s a lot of other things going on in the tissue related to the magnet. So I just started working with more magnets and discovered a lot of different actions. Started using magnets of different kinds around necklaces, bracelets, back magnets, flat magnets, all kinds of magnetic systems. And they’re all doing very interesting things. I mean, it was not in my paradigm as an MD.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
To think that, what is going on here? In fact, I actually visited with a, a PhD, chief of bioengineering at Hopkins, I said, “What’s going on here with these static magnets and biology?” He said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.” And I said, well, clearly it makes sense to me as a clinician because I see the results and benefits all the time. Say well, I’m used to time varied magnetic fields, pulsed magnetic fields. I know what they can do, but I don’t know what a static magnet can do. So I started working beyond that, that intrigued me as well. So I started working with pulsed magnetic fields. Time, what are called time varied magnetic fields. So a static, a magnet, a fridge magnet is a static magnet. It’s not varying in time. It’s permanent. So if you want to make it more dynamic, you start to vary the magnetic field.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And that’s where pulsed electromagnetic fields come from. And a magnetic field is produced by a current flowing through a wire. People are worried about power lines, right? Because of the magnetic fields they broadcast.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Even though the current is contained within the power line it’s still producing a pretty large magnetic field. And so I discovered in fact, that pulsed magnetic fields were much more dynamic, could reach much deeper in the body, could do a lot more stuff, you know, a lot more, provide a lot more help to people with different problems. And along the way I’ve met a doctor from the Czech Republic and MD, PhD, Dr. Jerabek and he had, his PhD was on pulsed magnetic field therapy. So he was an MD, trained MD and got his PhD in PEMFs. So he translated a lot of Eastern European literature.
What I tried to find the literature, the science to support what magnets could be doing in the body, it was almost, it’s very difficult to find, I think almost impossible. And what I could find was in other languages, foreign languages. So it was in German or again, the Eastern European line, which is Russian most commonly. So he translated all of these studies, basically for his PhD. In addition, he was recruited by the government of the Czech Republic to be a consultant for them to help them advise about approving PEMF therapies in the Czech Republic, primarily for rehab purposes, because that’s what he was doing. Mostly rehabilitation medicine. And in the end, he provided me his translated review.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh great.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And so we would work together and produce the book called Magnetic field therapy in Eastern Europe, how magnetic fields basically works. And there was the research evidence over 30 years of science in Eastern Europe. Wow. I had the science.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
The static magnets and the pulsed magnetic fields. And that, that book then basically provided us a really solid foundation for me to understand what magnetic fields were doing. I expanded my work with it and then bringing us up to date now, I published the book with him and I’ll show you that in a second. Now it’s a fairly, it’s a fairly technical book.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Back a little bit. There you go. Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So it’s still available. You can get it through our office here. I did sell it for a while on Amazon. So anyway, this book has lots of citations and lots of evidence and talks about different uses and different clinical specialties. Well, then I started, produced a website, put as much content on as I could, acted as basically a consultant or an educational resource about magnetic field therapies. And subsequent to that, then I continued to review the science myself, whatever I could find, in addition to what I had with Dr. Jerabek. Also got access to an abstract library of over 30,000 abstracts under the effects of EMFs and PEMFs on the body or biology in general. So, okay, now we have pretty solid science, but you know, I was one person. I had all this knowledge. Nobody else did.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Other than the experience of people had in Europe. So I kept working with magnetic fields and then produced the website, www.drpawluk.com And there’s a lot of content on there, but the content on the website is limited. Websites are limited in what you can say. It’s almost like sound bites. You know, you have a small amount of information you can provide. So eventually then I produced a book called Power Tools for Health, How pulsed magnetic fields help you.
That, in that book, then I have about 500 references. Part of the problem clinicians face is that it’s not, there is a journal called bio electromagnetics, Euro bio electromagnetics. But the problem with that journal is that it is mostly basic science, very little clinical science in it. So it doesn’t help, you know, the clinician basically to figure out what to do with magnetic field therapy. And so we published the book, Power Tools for Health. Provide a 500 references to back up all the actions I discussed. And in my work, my research, I discovered that magnetic fields basically have about 25 to 27 different physiologic actions in the body.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yeah. Let’s talk about some of those. And also, if you will, I know some people are thinking, I was thinking about it, that there’s electromagnetic fields and there’s, you know, we talk about EMF being not good, being bathed in EMF, your cell phone, you know, your router, et cetera. But then there’s also EMFs that are beneficial, pulsed EMFs. My understanding is, it’s about the frequency and the intensity. So if you can get in a little bit about, about that so that we’re not, the listener is not confused about, “Well, I’m supposed to avoid them, but on the other hand, they can be healing. What’s going on here?”
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Unfortunately, the terminology is common between the two. So PEMFs stands for pulsed electromagnetic fields.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And EMFs are electromagnetic fields without distinction. Right, so unfortunately it shouldn’t be pulsed, it shouldn’t be EMFs, it probably should be, in fact, I even consider EMFs environmental magnetic fields.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
As opposed to pulsed magnetic fields. The basic distinction between them is that EMFs are essentially broadcast in the space. They’re not directional. They can be somewhat directional, but basically the broadcasts in the space. So that’s considered an open loop system. Magnetic field just goes out into space.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Current producing a magnetic field is contained, it’s closed. My thumb is the current. This is called the right-hand rule. So the direction of the current flowing produces a perpendicular magnetic field to the direction of the current flow.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
With every pulse of the current, what you get is a magnetic field that opens and collapses. In other words, it goes back to zero. It goes to zero, out and then back to zero. It’s not broadcast, it’s contained.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
How far does it go? And does it depends on the intensity?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Depends on the intensity primarily, intensity and frequency, to some extent. So very extremely low frequency magnetic fields, let’s say under a hundred megahertz, I would say under it under a kilohertz, basically can go quite a long distance, but it’s not a wavelength. It’s a pulse.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
That’s why they’re called PEMFs, pulsed magnetic fields. So because they’re pulsed magnetic fields, they’re designed for therapeutic purposes. It could be designed for other purposes as well, like an engineering and equipment of different kinds, including in the medical environment.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And I think the lower frequency, I guess, in intensity differs from the higher intensity broadcast EMF and that those EMFs, the latter can heat up tissue and cause damage and change gene function versus the lower one.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
That’s the key. So most of the frequencies that we’re concerned about, most of the EMS we’re concerned about are microwave frequencies. Extremely short frequencies, like our microwave ovens, right? We use that principle to heat food.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. Because it absorbs the frequency. So these frequencies are absorbed by the body. They don’t pass all the way through. Whereas the pulsed magnetic fields pass completely through the body. The body is completely transparent to a magnet, to a pulsed magnetic field. And that’s valuable because what it’s doing that is not staying resident in the body, if not used up by the body. It doesn’t matter whether they have clothing on or not. It doesn’t matter whether it’s muscle or bone or a brain or a skull. It’s going to go all the way through. That’s just the general principle about EMFs. And that’s useful for us. EMFs are designed for other purposes. They’re designed for communication.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. They’re not designed for therapy. So they may have incidental effects on the body, as you mentioned, DNA damage and heating and so on. That’s where the risk comes in. So for example, if you hold a cell phone to your ear, almost doesn’t matter how long, but the longer, the more effect you’re going to have. You’ll see the ear turns bright red. In most people. So that ear is effectively getting cooked.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Even if you’re not touching it. Cause I mean, obviously touching, it would be-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Doesn’t matter. Yeah, you can, you hold it like two or three inches away from your head. But because it close enough and the intensity is high enough then that dose, that exposure dose, it’s going to create physiologic actions. Now, EMFs in general, most people are not exposed to EMFs in high doses unless you’re working on towers, cell towers, you actually, somebody working on a tower. That you’re going to be exposed very close to that field. Now all magnetic fields, like any other radiation, whether it’s sunlight or sound or heat or cold, drops off extremely rapidly, according to the inverse square law. There are other laws that could be invoked as well. But I use the inverse square law. And we use the inverse square law for radiation dosing, right? That’s a classical use for inverse square law.
So all of these fields drop off very rapidly. And so you have to calculate the dose based on the distance that you’re targeting. And PEMFs are the same. You should calculate the dose based on what, what you’re targeting and what your intentions are. So PEMF basically are very, very, very safe.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And much lower frequency and much lower intensity as well.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Much lower frequencies, if you under a hundred megahertz, usually the heating effects are minimal.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And most of the heating and “heating”, caused by PEMFs is actually due to, it increases the circulation locally. So you get local heat because you’ve improved circulation.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
So we’re all familiar with MRIs. Where do they fit in that range?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well, MRIs are, there’s two aspects to MRI. Radio frequency fields and a huge static magnetic field. So the radio frequency fields can have a potential for harm. And there is some discussion about MRI having harmful effects, but you and I know hundreds of millions of people have been, gotten MRIs, many, many MRIs with virtually no damage. And the people who work in MRI environments are not reporting significant health issues.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
They’re not therapeutic, high-frequency and static field. So there was a study done at McLean hospital. They had reports of people who had their depression get better after an MRI. So based on that evidence, they conducted some research to look at the use of say, magnetic fields for the brain for MRI. And of course, now we know from PEMFs. And now we know there are devices approved called RTMS or TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
For treatment resistant depression.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And there are also fields approved for call TTL, basically for glioblastomas. And they’re approved by the FDA for that purpose as well. So there are uses of those other kinds of fields to some extent. And there are magnetic field therapy devices that are approved by the FDA for healing non-unions. Now we’re using RTMS for depression, which is still a pulsed magnetic field, high intensity pulsed magnetic field. And that’s approved for depression. There’s also a field approved for pain and wound healing.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay. So we, I think we have a good idea about what the range of electromagnetic fields are from damaging to therapeutic and in between diagnostic. Can you tell us, I’m really curious to know what is the mechanism for the therapeutic effect of these lower intensity, lower frequency? I know there’s something to do with the mitochondria and ATP membrane ion channels. Let’s talk about that.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So the primary law of physics that governs the effects of magnetic fields on biology particularly is Faraday’s law. And Faraday’s law says that as you increase your charge, as the charge increases, magnetic field increases from zero, say to a hundred, then it’s, that happens over time. So Faraday’s law says dB, the change and B, the intensity divided by the dT, change in time gives you something called tesla per second. That’s the measure of the likely induced field.
So the higher the dB/dT, the greater the induction of charge in the body. So a pulsed magnetic field passing through basically ions, electrical charges of any kinds, ionic charges of any kinds will create charge, will create more energy. In other words, it’ll create more electrical charge in the tissue. So the dB/dT have a magnetic field passing through the body is where the action is. It’s the induced charge in the body. Now, if you apply a electrical charge to the body, that’s called capacitatively coupled electrical stimulation. And that’s limited by the body’s ability to absorb that electrical stimulation. Let’s call that control the electrocution.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It will then go deep into the body.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It’s very superficial. Whereas magnetic fields are inductively coupled electrical stimulation. So it’s inducing charge in the body.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It’s coupling to the charges and the tissues that are there already amplifying them significantly. And that extra charge then is used by the body to produce all the physiologic actions of magnetic fields. So those actions in my book, the Power Tools book, I list 25 and since then, I’ve discovered a couple of more. So some of those actions include acupuncture. So that’s how I got started on this journey in the first place, trying to find a solution for pain that was not conventional and acupuncture certainly does that.
So magnetic fields clearly stimulate acupuncture points and meridians. And if you stimulate the whole body with a magnetic field, use a whole body magnetic field pad, you’re basically stimulating all the acupuncture points and meridians in the body, simultaneously. So rather than having to be directed and ancient science, ancient acupuncture, that’s the tool they had. So there was, one point at a time or multiple points at the same time, but fortunately with magnetic field therapy, because now we’ve actually discovered, science has discovered that the acupuncture meridian system is a DC current system.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, really? I did not know that.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
From a engineering perspective, it’s called a loss-less. There’s no loss in that system. And each acupuncture point is basically a capacitor. So it takes charge from the previous acupuncture point, builds the charge and sends that onto the next one. That’s what happens in a DC current system. So it’s a DC current system and because it’s a DC current system, it applies to Maxwell’s equations and Faraday’s law. So then basically you can amp up that system using magnetic field therapy. And I’ve measured that, actually we did some EMG studies looking at magnets and the acupuncture points. And we certainly found effects. In fact, I teach a workshop to acupuncturists about why magnetic fields work on acupuncture and how to combine acupuncture and magnetic fields to get even better benefits.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay. So there is, we know that acupuncture works and we’ve all had patients have beneficial effects, but there’s now good science and physics around exactly why it works and how it works. But you’re saying like sort of a electromagnetic mat, a field mat is almost better in some ways for general therapy.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
For general therapy. So one of the, one of the actions, physiologic actions of the magnetic fields then is the acupuncture stimulation. Stimulating the meridian system. And then you get all the derivative benefits of simulating an acupuncture system.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So that’s one of the key elements. That was one of the first things I discovered in my own journey. Since then, we’ve also discovered that magnetic fields have antibacterial, basically microbiological benefits. They have anticoagulant effects, naturally almost equivalent to aspirin itself, much safer than aspirin. They have anti-edema effects. They’ve muscle relaxation effects. They have increased autophagy. They improve autophagy, not in a bad way, but they improve autophagy.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And how did they do that? Just wanted to know more, if that’s been worked out.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Probably because of the charge, partly because of all the different effects that it has on the cell membrane. And so we talked about, you mentioned mitochondrial function. So mitochondrial function is approved and we know research shows that magnetic fields increased ATP production by between 100 to 600%.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
What? That’s a lot, as far as the Tour de France guys, aren’t using a door or any, I mean are a lot of endurance athletes tapping into it.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
More and more and more. It’s hard to get through the trainers. It’s hard to get through the orthopedist to get to the athletes. But more and more athletes are discovering these benefits. In fact, anecdotally, I had a guy who was number three in the world with golf ball driving. Long distance driving, how far could you hit them all?
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
He was number three in the world, into his forties. And he was using magnetic field therapy every single day. He would use it before competition and he would use it right after competition. Anecdotally, a friend of mine, an MD, worked with American Olympic teams and they would do tryouts, they do competition and so on. And he said, our guys, in this case, it was guys, our guys would take two to three days to recover from prelims or a competition. The Russians and the Eastern Europeans were back there next day like robots.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Well yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And he couldn’t figure out why, why what’s going on here, that they are doing, that’s different than what we’re doing. He walked past their camp. They are laying in magnetic tubes.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And that’s not doping.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
No, it’s not. It probably will be at some point maybe, I don’t know for sure. I mean, that’s an interesting thing that WADA would have to deal with to decide whether or not, I mean, I would hope that they wouldn’t make it, cause it’s helping people to recover, but-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It’s physiologic, not pharmacologic.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right, right, right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And it doesn’t matter whether you use infrared or whether you use sound. There’s so many ways of simulating the body physiologically, EMFs or PEMFs are actually just another mechanism. It’s a physical therapy mechanism basically.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
So we’re talking about recovery in athletics here. There is a, and I want to get back to that in a way in a second, but if you had to think about what the sort of the number one treatment indication is for it and tell us what that is, I mean, I’m kind of assuming it’s it’s pain or, or the non-union kind of stuff. And then we’ll get into sort of how to use for preventative and anti-aging purposes. But let’s talk about that first.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So if we, I’m going to preempt you, if you don’t mind, a little bit. Let’s go back to the mechanisms.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Because when you understand all the mechanisms, then you can say, “Oh my goodness, what else can we do with this stuff?”
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
All right. So we talked about edema, talked about muscle relaxation, autophagy, ATP, circadian rhythm rebalancing, stimulating collagen, hyaluronic acid, GAGs, detoxification, brainwave tuning.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
I wanna talk about that for sure. Absolutely wanna talk about it.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Stimulates growth factors, nitric oxide, tissue regeneration, stimulates stem cells, balances immune functions, stimulates nerves and nerve conductivity, both up and down. Oxygenation, improves oxygenation significantly. Transmembrane oxygen transfer in the lungs. And then the release of the oxygen in the tissues is enhanced by PEMFs.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And how does that happen? I’m curious about how that happens, physiologically.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well, first of all, if the cell membrane is, we open all membrane channels. ATPs, sodium potassium ATPs, calcium magnesium movement across cell membranes. In injured cells, that stops. It doesn’t work. It’s dysfunctional. So magnetic field therapy seems to open the membranes and allows those processes to reactivate. So it’s basically rebalancing the internal cellular environment with the external cellular environment and you get better electro magnetic movement in the tissues. That then allows oxygen transfer. So PEMFs affect oxygen capacity, carrying capacity of hemoglobin.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh really? Just like being at altitude, sort of.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
To some extent, yes, whatever the altitude happens to be. So basically when you’re then transferring oxygen from the lung, from the alveoli past the membrane, if you’re opening these channels, you’re then increasing the ability of the oxygen to transfer and then because of the effects that it has on the red cell membrane itself, that you get better oxygenation of the red cell. And then once the red cell is getting into the capillaries into the smaller spaces, they release the oxygen better. And once it released better, then obviously you have more energy for the cells as well. So oxygenation is one of the key principles, I actually did a pulse-ox study in an acupuncture practice, looking at pain patients at an acupuncture practice and doing a pulse-ox, before and after magnetic field therapy. And we had a statistically significant increase in PO2.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Now you’re not talking about going from 67% SaO to up to 97%. We’re talking about, you know, again, 1 or 2%. 1 or 2% is still pretty significant.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Interesting. Yeah. So, okay. So we understand the mechanism that it’s used clinically for which-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Okay, so if you think all of the different mechanisms, it really doesn’t matter what you use it for. All disease has most of these mechanisms in common and the probably the most common, in common, the final common pathway is probably cell injury. An injured cell has a series of events that happened in that cell. And that cell then has to adapt to that imbalance. So you know, dysfunction, that’s dysfunctional change. And that dysfunctional change slips down that slope of dysfunction till finally it reaches a point of irreversible injury. So if you’re targeting the cell, let’s say on a regular basis, cells on a regular basis, you’re able to restore those functions.
Membrane stabilization, ATP production, genetic stability, providing more nutrition to the cell because of the improved membrane transport, getting rid of detoxification, getting rid of waste out of the cells better. All of these things begin to happen. So it doesn’t really matter what the condition is. We put a label on the condition, but what are the physiologic, so when I look at a problem, somebody says, I got this problem. I never heard of it. So I go, look it up. What is the pathophysiology of the problem? Does any of these mechanisms in play in that problem? Then magnetic field therapy is going to help to at least some extent. But what drives people to seek magnetic field therapy?
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Not-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Cost.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well pain. I mean, it’s the discomfort. So pain is the biggest driver. People are going to spend more money to deal with pain than almost anything else.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And it’s the most common. Since you have a hundred million people in the US with chronic pain. That’s probably one of the most common problems that we deal with.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
For sure. Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So pain is probably the most common use. That doesn’t mean it’s the best, or that doesn’t mean that it should be the only one. But again, if we understand the mechanism, then we can understand application.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
So for diabetic neuropathy, does it help with even things like degenerative disc disease and spinal stenosis and that sort of thing?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yeah. So again, going back to mechanism. So with spinal stenosis, the cause is either going to be a disc, usually, disc or arthritis.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Now, you’re not changing the arthritis and you’re not changing the disc. Those are mechanical. And magnetic field therapy doesn’t fix a mechanical problem. If your arm is hanging off your shoulder by a thread, then you got to sew it back.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right? So what we do then is we’re decreasing, mechanisms again, the inflammation, irritability of the nerves, the tissues, then they cause problems with function. So if you can reduce the swelling and pulsed magnetic field therapy has a natural anti-nociceptive effect.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
That’s been proven. So pain reduction by itself without any other mechanism also happens with PEMFs. So one of the first things I tend to see with people with pain, is the pain goes away. But I know that’s not a solution.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Is it making the pain better? But what we want to do is to deal with the cost. We want to be able to reverse the problem if we can. And so with the back pains, spinal stenosis, we reduce the edema, you reduce the irritability of the nerves. So you , you reduce the edema reduce the pressure on the nerve from the edema. And then hopefully if you continue to do the therapy over time, you may be able to stop the progression of the arthritic process. And in terms of discs, you may be able to hydrate the disc pair because the disc is hydrated passively. Right, there’s no blood vessels going into it.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It’s by osmosis. But if you increase the blood supply around a disc, because often with a disc problem, you also have muscle spasm, reflex muscles spasm. So that tends to aggravate the problem, compression makes it worse, right? So relax the muscles, increase oxygenation, increase hydration, and then maybe longer term, you’re going to get a stability of this problem. So you’re working at multiple levels, basically with the magnetic field therapy.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And would that be for sort of the back issue? And now I’m thinking about myself, cause I got a little spinal stenosis. That would that be lying on a pad then? Or would it be more directed?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It depends on what your, what you have and what you buy. So I happen to be, my philosophy is if you’re going to get a magnetic system anyway, if you’re going to make that an investment and you get a proper magnetic system, you should be doing health maintenance anyway.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right?
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Cause the biggest investment is the control unit. The applicators are less expensive. So get a good control unit and then add whatever applicators you want. So yes, whether it’s whole body or local, in the case of, if somebody wants to limit how much they spend, they say fine, then you need a high intensity local applicator. They could treat locally and you’re gonna get better results faster, typically with higher intensity. And we can get into that in a second with inflammation. Cause PEMF stimulate, this is one of the new mechanisms I found since I wrote the book, is the adenosine receptor. The magnetic field therapy addresses the adenosine receptors. And you need about 15 gauss optimally, at the adenosine receptor to decrease inflammation. Studies were done on adenosine receptors on neutrophils. So where’s inflammation.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. It’s coming from neutrophils. Yeah, sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Everywhere, anywhere in the body.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So if you get the right magnetic field intensity to address the neutrophil wherever you have inflammation in the body, you’re decreasing the inflammation through, at least through the adenosine receptor mechanisms.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Well, it sounds like virtually anytime you have trauma or wounding, and that would be, you know, from an accident or from a diabetic ulcer or something like that, or even post-surgically, PEMF should be used.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Absolutely.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
How come it isn’t?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
I’ll give you another anecdote.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Case study. So myself, I had an elective appendectomy. I had a small fatty tumor at the entrance to my appendix during my routine colonoscopies. And so we decided that we had to find out what it was. They couldn’t just snip it out. You had to remove the appendix. So I had an appendectomy as elective. Had it done on Friday midday. I was back to work on Monday.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Laparoscopically, it was done, but you had quick healing cause you were-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Using magnets on my stab wounds.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Oh, okay. So then that also then begs the question, you mentioned collagen, GAGs aesthetic use of it for like for facial rejuvenation or wrinkles.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well, you can, theoretically. You may have to, you’re paying a lot of money for a piece of equipment.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
You pay a lot for Botox too. So, I think you can.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
This is true and it doesn’t last.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. And fillers. So I’m curious about to what extent you have collagen increase and you know, the glycosaminoglycans increases. I mean, other studies that look at PEMF devices-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
In the Power Tools for Health book, there is actually a section. Let’s find my space, my spot.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
There you go. Right there. Good.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
There’s actually a section in there on collagen and GAGs and hyaluronic acid. So you can get somewhere between 25 to 30% increase in collagen production.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
That’s a lot, that’s a lot. And in what, over what time period?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well, again, the treatments typically in most research studies, the treatments are like 15 minutes to half an hour. And then you repeat periodically. So probably over two to three weeks.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Really? That’s pretty impressive. Okay. Well that, I mean, I know we have people that practice aesthetic medicine, listening And so I wonder, you know, whether that’s an area that they could enhance, enhance their practices as well with one of those devices. I think certainly more physiologic and less invasive than, you know, other things. Hopefully, if it works, you know, 25% is a pretty big increase in collagen. So that would be interesting to see. You know people that are using it in aesthetic practices?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yes. There’s a, you know, there are biases, we all have biases, right? It depends on who’s been sold what by whom?
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right, in the aesthetics world, they tend to be a lot more high-frequency oriented.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Yeah, sure. The lasers, et cetera.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Exactly. And even light therapies. So the more mobile and useful it is, the faster it gets the results. So some technology will produce results better and faster for certain problems and others. So the answer is yes. Those doctors who are willing to do this, but I find that magnetic field therapy is much better. The kinds that I recommend and use is much better in orthopedic applications
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
and post-operative applications than it is in dermatologic.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Cause you need, you need a very rapid results, right? Short treatment times, very rapid results.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
But, if you’re a home user, you have the time and the luxury to do it on yourself at home. So, you know purchasing-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
You’re doing whole body therapy anyway, you’re getting that benefit anyway.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay, okay. Point well taken, good. So you mentioned TMS and I know I read on your website, this idea of entraining brainwaves, that you get the same frequency in the EMF, the pulsed EMF, and you can get potentially a beta for higher concentration. Can you pulse it at an alpha for the same calm inducing that you get with meditation or neurofeedback?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Absolutely. There are plenty of devices being marketed now that do that kind of work. And I was, I did audio visual entrainment years ago, decades ago. And that’s how I got these concepts. And then I had some additional training in the past three or four years in neuroscience using basically entrainment processes for it’s called well neurofeedback, essentially.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So with the brain, frequencies now become more important. Most of the time, my emphasis has been on intensity. Particularly if we think about the adenosine receptor or the optimum magnetic field intensity is about 15 gauss, then you have to calculate the mega dose that you need at the tissue that you’re targeting for inflammation. So for the kidneys or the lungs or the heart or a lower back. So for these kinds of purposes, for entrainment purposes, you don’t necessarily need a stronger magnetic field. But we’ve designed device called the FlexPulse. So I was involved in the design of that with a company in Germany. And so we have individual frequency, so we’ll have delta, which I use for sleep. And when I’m flying across the country, I fly delta. I do a magnetic therapy machine on across my head or the base of my spine over the RAS. And I’m okay.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Very good. So you can, go ahead.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So then, so then you could design frequencies for delta. You can do theta for meditation, you can do alpha for relaxation. You can use beta for alertness. Again, case in point, I had to pick up my daughter at the airport in Baltimore about two o’clock in the morning. I normally go to bed at 10 and I knew I was going to have a problem. If I drank coffee, I’d be up all night. So I did magnetic entrainment using beta over the RAS, small disc over the back of the head. And I was wide awake. Got to the airport, picked my daughter up. I didn’t have hangover. Didn’t have a buzz. You know, I was just alert. Got home, took her off, went right to sleep.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Nice. That’s very interesting.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It’s increasing the amount of frequencies in the brain that are now oscillating at the beta level. That doesn’t mean the whole brains oscillating at beta, but enough energy, enough oscillation is happening that now consciousness shifts into that level of awareness. So you can tune the brain to those specific frequencies. And the FlexPulse does that.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
It’s called the FlexPulse. It’s a portable device to be-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Portable, battery operated, yeah.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Well. Very, very interesting. So we’ve been having a really good conversation and you know, anything in terms of healing is obviously of interest to our listeners. But, you also did mention that there are a few studies looking at the effect of PEMF on telomeres or telomerase. And I’ll also, I would think then through that on senescent cells, which could potentially help with many conditions of aging. Can you talk a little bit about that?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So I could only find two studies that specifically looked at telomerase, and one of them was done in leukemia cells. And what they did is they looked at the use of DMSO, to stimulate the cells, the red cells, and found that the DMSO caused between a hundred, cause a hundred fold increase in telomerase activity versus . DMSO caused a hundred fold increase in telomerase activity.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Well, that’s pretty wild.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
All red cells, obviously in culture.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Now what happens in the body, you know.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yeah, yeah sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And of course the dosing of the DMSO is on which you can do more in-vitro than you can in-vivo. But they found is that the PMF activity and I have to read here, “Exposure to a thousand to 10 gauss magnetic field reduced that increase in telomerase activity.” I’m sorry. It was a decrease, 100 fold decrease in telomerase.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
It’s not what we want to see, right.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Well, in a cancer cell, yes. It is what you want to see, but not in a healthy cell. So interesting.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So in a leukemia cell model, they found a hundred fold decrease in telomerase versus exposed. Now with magnetic field therapy, 10 gauss that field reduced that in the decrease the telomerase by tenfold, from a hundred falls to tenfold. So in a sense it has a protective effect against the supposedly negative effects on telomerase, in the leukemia model.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yeah. I mean, that’s a, you want the opposite to happen in cancer and telomerase is constituently activated in cancer cells. I mean, I would think that just from the stress reduction and other beneficial effects, reduction in pain, that over time you would see either a slowing of telomere attrition just as, you know, stress reduction, meditation, all those things help. Those studies just probably haven’t been done, but they would be interesting to see. So from a standpoint of practical-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
There was another study too. An x-ray exposed ovarian cells. So these ovarian cells were exposed to 10 gray units of x-rays and they increased telomerase activity by 2.6 fold. So x-rays increased telomerase activity by 2.6 fold.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
All right. And then, so that’s, that’s a negative action and we know that right, x-rays cause radiation damage.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. That’s interesting. Go ahead.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
All right. So then magnetic fields were applied as a control and they marginally decreased the telomerase. Barely, barely touched the telomerase production initiated by x-ray. So that, I wish it would be more, but again, in this case, it’s not a negative effect. In other words, it didn’t decrease the telomerase activities to a point where the radiation would be even worse.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Yeah. I mean, I’d be curious to take a closer look at this study. So they’re on your website?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
No they’re not.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay. well, I’ll take a look for it.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
These are in unusual places. I’ll have to show you, I’ll have to send you the abstracts.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
That’d be great. That’d be great. So from a practical standpoint, in terms of implementing PEMF in a longevity practice or an age management practice, or in your own personal life, what kinds of recommendations is, talking about daily exposure to PEMF and then of course, localized for particular treatments, higher intensity, et cetera. But it sounds like that’s what you’re recommending and then, but perhaps the FlexPulse for sort of specifically brain and mood stuff.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
All right. We think about the things that tend to shorten telomeres.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay. Yeah. I mean all bad habits shorten telomeres.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
There you go. So stress, obesity, basically.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Sedentary lifestyle.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Sedentary lifestyle. PEMF increase stem cell production by about 65%.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Wow. That’s a lot.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Between 35 to 65% and most stem cell lines. So we’re talking about mesenchymal stem cells, which are the most common stem cells, right. Then their production is increased and their differentiation is improved. So PEMF therapy act on the entire, basically the entire stem cell process. They increase production, they improve differentiation. They increase survival, right. And they increase the longevity of the cells that were produced. So PMEFs act on the whole stem cell process from beginning to end. I’ll give you an example, a clinical example. I had a three-year-old child. Children three-year-olds have a lot more stem cells that 70 year olds.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right?
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yep.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Huge difference. So this girl is a little girl cut off the end of her thumb in a doorjamb. And the father contacted me right after that happened. He had a small portable magnetic therapy device that he purchased from us. He said, “What do I do with this?” I said, well, my recommendation is that have a surgeon reattach it.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
That’s good advice.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. Have a surgeon reattach it because, you know, if it doesn’t work, you’re back to where you were anyway.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So they reattached it. And I have pictures in my book where you can see the suture marks. It clearly is black because the blood supply was disrupted completely. So she did an hour and a half to three hours a day of this magnetic field directly on the thumb. 12 weeks later, she’s regrowing her nail.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Wow. And so it was the nail that came off, not the whole-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Her thumb.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
The whole thumb.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
The whole thumb.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
So her-
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Past the joint.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And so the nail growth and she had full function and everything.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yes.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Wow. Yeah. Well, you know, we, maybe there’s some processes being induced as similar to, you know, sort of the tadpole that can grow the tail back, kind of thing, where in it, and that likely involves telomerase activity in stem cells.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Stem cells, telomerase. Stem cells and telomerase go together. Right? Most of stem cell activation involves telomerase.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Absolutely. That’s why stem cells are different. They have more, more telomerase activity and continue to replenish degenerated tissues with it. Telomerase is turned down as a supposed tumor suppressing, tumor suppressor mechanism in younger people, so they don’t succumb from cancer, but later in life, that is a deleterious effect of it because we’re living longer. We need that regenerative capacity. So that does kind of pull it all together there. What’s your thoughts about the future of PEMF and how it’s growing? I mean, you’re obviously doing lots of work to try to get the word out there.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Well, but let’s go back to your previous question. I interrupted you again, sorry. With the finger example. So how would you use it? The thing is most people tend to want to make the investment because they got a problem they’re dealing with. And most of the people that I work with and I do consultations. So everybody wants advice, specific advice on their particular situation, clinically that I will, we’ll do a half hour consultation and then provide you advice on the best system for you to have for your problem. Constellation of problems. Rarely is it one problem.
Mostly it’s multiple problems. So whole body systems are the best, because again, you’re doing prevention. The biggest investment is the control unit. And then you have a whole body system and you can have a smaller applicator that you can apply to different parts of the body separately.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So you make an adequate investment, and then it’s a question of how much do you use it? And there’s no good answer for that. So I tell people, I can’t look at your body. I don’t see what’s going on at the cellular level. So but if you have, what is it, a hundred trillion cells in our bodies and every cell has about 2000 biochemical processes per second.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yep.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
How much should you be using it?
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Exactly. What do you find in your years of experience is effective? I mean, 15 minutes flying on it.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
No. There are companies that are selling magnetic therapy devices that are 1 gauss or less. So anybody buying a PMEF system, if they don’t know what the intensity of that system is, don’t buy it.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right. Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
They’re not willing to tell you what it is.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Then don’t buy it.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So always ask what’s the intensity, because the intensity drives the inflammation. We talked about the adenosine receptor. You need 15 gauss optimally.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So if the system is delivering only one gauss it doesn’t matter how much you use it. It’s not going to do, it’s not going to do much. It’ll still help. It’ll still make you feel good because it’s stimulating the acupuncture points.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
But they’re not going to not going to do much healing. Time is a problem for everybody.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yep.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So I think the more motivated you are, the more time you have available, the more time you’re going to need. So typically the answer is if you’re taking it for pain, if you’re doing a treatment and the pain comes back an hour or later, then retreat. Now maybe it is only five minutes or 10 minutes, but if you did an hour of treatment and the pain took eight hours to come back, that’s probably better than a 15 minute treatment. So physiologically people are gonna have to find out for themselves how much time they really need to get the best results.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
My usual recommendation, even for health maintenance is a half an hour, twice a day.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, okay. So that’s a substantial time commitment. I guess you can be doing other things, meditating, whatever at the same time.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
You can meditate, it’s hard. You can read, with a smaller applicator to your back.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
You can do whatever. Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yeah. So, but this is the point you have, people have to decide for themselves what benefit they want.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Considering the investment they made. If you can get by with eight or 10 minutes a day, fine. What happens is at the beginning, you’re going to need more time to get everything tuned up, get everything they can optimize, optimized. And after that, all you need to do is to maintain. And if you back off your maintenance level, your back off your therapeutic level, back to maintenance and the problems reoccur, then you haven’t done the job yet. You haven’t healed the tissue.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So everybody’s going to find out for themselves how much time they’re really going to need.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
And I’m sure our listeners and viewers can go to your website to get more deals, but just generally, what are we talking about for a good system? Cost-wise what would be the range?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So, because intensity matters.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yep.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Some of the one gauss magnetic systems that people are being sold in multi-level marketing programs are about 5,000 to $6,000.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, wow. Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Okay. That FlexPulse device, I mentioned to you is about a thousand dollars.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. So that, but that’s a small local device. If you want a whole body device, it’s going to give you enough intensity to help you deepen your body with healing purposes. You’re going to be talking minimum 3,500 gauss, probably closer to 6,000.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay. And it’s a pad you lie on basically.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yes. It’s a pad you lie on. It has got a small control unit and then you plug an applicator in and you lay on the pad and then you can unplug that applicator, put it a small one to treat your spinal stenosis or whatever else.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
That’s what you should expect to invest. Again, it’s an investment.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Sure.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. And it’s going to be an investment in time as well. But you know, when we are dealing with anti-aging what we want, what we need to do to-
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Live longer healthier. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, that’s not a crazy investment. You’re sort of along the lines of, of other types of things, you know, some of the portable sauna type things or the, you know, infrared devices, et cetera.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Portable HBOT or portable light systems, you can spend 3000, $4,000 for those. And the problem with those is they don’t penetrate the body deep enough.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
So you feel like if you’re doing the PEMF, you don’t necessarily need to do the light therapy for photobiomodulation.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
They combined. But everybody’s got issues with resources and time. Right. So I found over 30 years of doing this and having used all these other devices as well, magnetic field therapy is the best value because it reaches completely through the body.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. Most of these other systems are limited. They’re very shallow.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yeah. They don’t go, they don’t go that deep. Right. Exactly. Looking for skin, fine. But otherwise, yeah.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
For the brain, for example, you’re going to need 4,000 gauss to go from one side of the head to the other.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
4,000. Wow.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Gauss. Yes. To deliver your 15 gauss optimal intensity.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, I see. Okay. So, and there are devices that do that.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yeah. The device is the ones that I mentioned, especially at the $6,000 level are going to do that.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Great. A little thing just popped into my head before we end. And you tell me whether this is silly or not, but with all the advent of the electric cars, is there going to be an issue with PEMF people driving around in these electrical vehicles? Not PEMF, EMF?
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Yeah. So EMF. Going back to the original discussion about EMFs in general, even radial tires produce an EMF.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
All right, because they have some metal in them and they’re spinning.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
They’re bending and constantly changing. Now people have done measurements on the EMFs produced by a battery in a electric vehicle. And it’s, it’s very small.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Now, if you’re going to be driving long distances, you’re, you’re doing a commute, you drive 15 minutes, a half an hour. It’s not a big enough dose. Because the dose is relatively small and the time exposure is relatively small, your body, like any stimulus, like a cloud passing over the light, or, you know, the light shining through a cloud system, that minimal exposure is going to stimulate the body to some extent, but the body will recover. So for example, a healthy person, when they did, we did brachial artery studies on with magnetic fields and looked at the vasodilatation of a brachial artery. And again, healthy people. And what they found is that the artery dilated probably within a microsecond. Dilated just as rapidly after the stimulus ended, it vasoconstricted for about the same amount of time and then went back to normal.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Oh, okay.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
So all of these EMF exposures create a physiologic response and then the body has to be able to recalibrate itself. So that’s homeostasis, right? So it’s going to change. The body says, “I don’t want to be dilated. I want to be this.” So it compensates, cybernetically compensates go back in the opposite direction and then goes back into neutrality. So all of these kinds of exposures, if they’re not very high and over extended periods of time, most of the time physiologic responses are going to rebalance. Cell phone use, wifi use, cell phone towers, all of that are small doses for most of us, most of the time, over a long period of time.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And when you’re doing magnetic field therapy with good magnetic fields, you’re constantly rebalancing the body. You’re stimulating the body’s natural systems to rebalance themselves. So you can, to a great extent undo the physiologic imbalance as you’re getting with the wrong kinds of magnetic fields.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
So it sounds like something we all should be doing on a regular basis to rebalance that.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Absolutely. Cause you know, again, there’s no minute in a day that you don’t have to rebalance.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Yeah, for sure. Well, this has been a really fascinating and comprehensive discussion. Opened my eyes up about the role of PEMF in health and disease. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us Dr. Pawluk. It’s www.drpawluk.com which is, I looked at the website, fantastic information on there. And you can get consultations as well. You want to put your book up, the latest book up for them to take a quick look at as well. So readers can get that.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And we’re going to provide your listeners in your show notes. We give you some links. One is to get the list of 80 conditions that we have in the Supercharger Health book.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Great.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
And number two, if you want to order the book, you can order it through that link that we will provide you. And number three, if you want a consultation. So if you’re not serious about your health, I’m not going to spend half an hour trying to convince somebody to buy a $5 system.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Right.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Right. You have to make an investment in your health. So if you really want to make an investment in your health, then we will provide you a free consultation.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Great. Fantastic. Well, I may well be giving you a call.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
You don’t have to, if you want to call, well, we’ll have a call offline.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
All right. Very good. Thank you again. Pleasure speaking with you.
William Pawluk, M.D., MSc
Likewise. Thank you all the best with your summit.
Joseph M. Raffaele, M.D.
Thank you.
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