NASA: PEMF’s Effect on Stem Cells & Optimized Waveform

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Okay, well, I’m Bob Dennis. I stumbled into PEMF. I think the great thing is that that Dr. Pawluk and I approached this totally differently. He came from a clinical observations and I came from a engineering and scientific where I was trying to disprove it. So, my background is mechanical electrical engineering. I’m a professor of biomedical engineering, UNC, and I’ve had a laboratory at MIT in Michigan. And so I’ve been working on this for a long time, but my entry into it was very different from almost everyone else in the field. As I was saying, my entry into it was as a skeptic. I was asked by NASA in 1996 to build a system for them, for growing cells to do gene expression experiments on the space shuttle in the med deck lockers. And the idea was, could I build a PEMF system that would modulate gene expression? And my answer as a skeptical practical mechanical engineer was, “That’s a stupid idea. Where is the science for that?” And they said, “Oh, you can read it.” I read it. And I thought the science was terrible. And I went back to ’em and I said, “This is really bad stuff. You wanna waste your time on this?” And they said, “Yes, in fact, we do so.” So my background is in sort of medical device design and scientific instrument design. So I tried to design a really, really reliable system, but my intention was to disprove the effect of PEMF. 

And I thought, if you were careful enough, you’d be able to disprove this effect so that you wouldn’t get these spurious things happening. And so I was very, very careful. I forced the guys at NASA to do a completely double blind experiment, and we ran it and we got very strong results for certain kinds of waveforms that I’m sure Bill want to talk about here soon. And I was wrong, so I didn’t believe it. So I said, “Let’s replicate it.” We, I took all the equipment back, re-calibrate it, and I was wrong again. So, it turns out that I had to change my opinion entirely. There’s definitely something to PEMF. So for the last 25 years, my whole career has been focused on finding out what that is, right. And, I have to use PEMF every day, cuz I had a really bad back injury as a firefighter and going on a rescue and, and nothing else was working. I was one of those many people who got prescribed opioids, was not given anything else that was effective, that wasn’t effective, but PEMF was. And so I completely changed my opinion on this. So I didn’t enter into PEMF as a clinician. I didn’t enter into it as a person looking for a business opportunity. I entered into it as a person who needs it and who came in as a skeptic. And I think that’s kind of the different angle that I bring to it.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, of course, you have that scientific background, the query background, the rigor, the precision that engineering requires, right? So you brought the academic side of this, engineering side of it, personal side of it. So that’s all very important, but why don’t we talk about that NASA study and tell us, what you found, because I think that study with stem cells, neuro stem cells was, I think, a very, very important study. And early on in the research that people have done with stem cells, and because it was with NASA, it’s got our huge amount of credibility. So, let’s talk about what you found, including the waveform discussion.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Okay. So I will share a screen here, okay? So this was the original device that I built for NASA. It occupied a whole tissue culture bioreactor and a shelf full of equipment, right. And what we were doing, That was published by NASA, and I subsequently published the… Oops, pardon me. My mistake. Okay. I’m sure you can edit that out. We subsequently published the waveforms, which I’m showing here a, B, C, D in ENF. And the real finding of the NASA study was that certain waveforms had no effects whatsoever. And other waveforms had profound biological effects, and by profound biological effects, what I mean are a manyfold increase or decrease in gene expression, not small amounts, but this is early in the age of gene chips and being able to measure gene expression. And we used these different waveforms, a sinusoid for A, and then a B would be like a steady, like a solid magnet.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

BC?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, yeah. A B is like a steady magnet, C and D are just saw tooth waveforms. And then E is just square wave. And then F which is just a very narrow duty cycle square wave sometimes called a Delta pulse. It just goes on and off really quick. So F is all about looking at the effects of the edges of a square pulse E. And it turns out that the really significant changes in gene expression in particular and cell growth and colony formation happened with waveforms E and F consistently all the time. Nothing at else really happened with the other waveforms.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Now, C and D being diamond shaped or triangular waves, there’s a variation to these called the saw tooth.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

That would be D. So, I didn’t draw it enough to make it show it. I didn’t want to have like the straight edge saw tooth in there because actually with those saw tooth generators, I wasn’t getting good controllable edges. And I didn’t want D to be a mixture between C and E, right? So I wasn’t finding any sort of controlled slope saw tooth waveform. All a saw tooth is is a bias triangle, right? One way or the other. And if you control the slope up and down, at a slower rate, you don’t see anything. The only time you start to see things is if you jump from one end of the saw tooth back down or from low back up, and it’s because of the edge and I was separating those two effects.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

The front edge.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, though the whatever edge is steepest. If you have a really fast changing saw tooth, which whichever edge is steepest is the one that’s gonna have the biological effect. And it was really quite significant, in some cases, we would see genes up and down regulated by seven or eight times what they normally would be. And the interesting thing was this was families of genes. So it wasn’t just like some random genes somewhere, but like all the genes related to extracellular matrix or growth, or regenerative activity, growth regeneration of the cells were all upregulated, and other things related to apoptosis and other things were down regulated.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So I raised that point about saw tooth, because there are many magnetic field devices where people are making claims that saw tooth is the only waveform that you should be using.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

That’s what they say, right. But I think that it’s not because of the part that makes it look like a saw tooth, it’s because of the steep edge. And if they, if they just had that saw tooth part of that, if they reflected that angle in both sides, they’d see no biological effect. It’s because of the edge. And so you don’t need the ramp part of the saw tooth. If you just keep the edges, it will work just great. That’s my finding.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And so what happens is you can design almost any waveform, except for B. You can design almost any waveform to produce a really rapid rise curve.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

You can, you can. And, and so that’s why some of the shiny soil based ones are really high intensity because in order to get the effect that they’re looking for, it’s really just the steepest crossover from negative to positive, positive to negative, that’s having a biological effect, and probably 99.8% of the sinusoid doesn’t really do anything, in my technical opinion. It doesn’t. But if you turn it way, way up, then you get a very high steep slope crossover, and that’s what’s having the biological effect.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So that’s what you see with the RTMS devices. They’re basically, I think, a very rapid rise and then gradual will fall off.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s the rapid changes that put ’em into sort of the sweet spot for biological effects.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And tell us what the results of your stem cell study were.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Well, the main results of this particular study that were at NASA and it was published was that there was a lot of gene expression changes, and those genes were related to growth and production of ECM, things like that. And those were upregulated quite a lot. Some other ones were downregulated, but it was not as systematic. And then when I further published that data that hadn’t been published in the first NASA report, what we found was a lot of differences in colony formation. And there was a lot of pictures of that, but it wasn’t really included in the first paper. So if look here where you have big biological effects, these are basically, this is what the cells look like. If you just look at them. And the thing is that you can see this with a naked eye. You don’t have to look at under microscope. Here’s a hundred millimeter culture dishes sitting over an electrode at the NASA study, and you can see, it looks like a fingerprint, almost. What that is is a colony of cells forming, right?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Stem cells.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, exactly. These are normal human neuronal progenitor cells. So they’re actually a human cell line that was neuronal, right. And when you take those images and you grade them, like the image you just saw, that would’ve been about a three, and that was as the colony was forming under a square wave, right. So after, a fairly short period of time, it doesn’t take a lot of time cuz we’re not trying to grow a whole tissue, just a mono layer of cells. You start to see pretty thick colony formation and it perfectly lined up. Like, we could just tape the electrode to the bottom and then you’d see these colonies forming, but you wouldn’t, it wasn’t thermal because when we would just run current through there, it had no effect, right. Sinusoids would have no effect. The triangle waves would have no effect, but the cells really responded well when you had a sharp edge, like a square wave or a vertical pulse, right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

You were stimulating these cultures, the culture plates hours at a time, right?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Continuously, actually. So these culture plates had the cells seated. And then, we taped the electrodes to the bottom with, like, scotch tape and then put them on the signal generator and put them in the incubator. And they would just, there they would sit.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

For how many hours?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

They would feed them for a few days. And it takes three or four days to get the cells to really start growing, another few days to really get the colonies to fill out. But if you let ’em keep growing, it’s interesting. And you can actually off the electrode from the bottom, just peel the tape off and you could see a perfect outline, solid square of cells that were growing right over where the electrode was on the outside of the plate, cuz the cells were growing right over where the fields were changing the most.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

The key there I was trying to mention is that even for very sensitive structures, like neural stem cells, that are outside a biological system, they could handle days of 24/7 stimulation.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It was continuous. It was continuous from the moment they were plated onto the plate for, it could go, I think it went long as two weeks continuous. It was no let up, it was a continuous wave.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

All right. Cause that’s an important question, Bob, that I have for you with all your experience is that it depends on what you’re studying. The, to categorically say, you should only do eight minutes a day or categorically say you should only do four hours a day or 20 minutes or an hour a day, they shouldn’t do any more than that, is false. What you should do is what you should do for what the tissue or what the problem needs, right? You adjust it to the conditions that you’re trying to effect.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I agree with you and I don’t wanna be too cynical, but I think that a lot of times when they say, “Oh, you should do this for exactly 20 minutes a day, two days a week or three days a week,” that’s a clinical expedient so that you can shuffle people into their treatment room every 15 or 20 minutes. What I find, and the reason that I have really gravitated toward personal PEMF something as that’s portable, something you can carry around is that I find that I respond better and many thousands of people who, who use the technology that I’ve developed, they really respond better with a low amplitude, low dose continuous use. They really do. And the reason for that is that PEMF isn’t forceful so much as it is permissive, in my opinion.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Define that. What do you mean?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

What I mean is that a lot of people want to take a drug or get shocked, get some kind of aggressive therapy, and box it into a short time and then they’re done with it, right? And what I’m saying is that that’s when you’re trying to force a biological effect, right? You kind of really juice the system. You blast it and then you get an effect. And sometimes that works with some things, but I think PEMF is better utilized by gently suppressing pathologic inflammation and the longer in the day that you do that, the better it is, right? So if you can walk around with it, if you can sit down with it, maybe sleep with it on, then you’re allowing tissues to heal at a natural rate, which by the way, seems to be two or three times faster than what we think of as natural when we’re 50, cuz we have this chronic, underlying, things that are slowing down our healing. But by maintaining the exposure to much lower level, peak dosages but extending the time, what you’re really doing is extending the time over which you’re by has to regenerate and heal, right?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, that brings us to a point that you and I discussed earlier having to do with fractures that don’t heal. Again, we have this conception that you only need a short period of time. And the reality is that need whatever time you need for the problem that you’re dealing with. So let me share my screen and show you this slide. This is from a study done on people with about 370 people who had fractures of the tibia, tibia and fibula, or fractures of the scaphoid. So, the scaphoid is in the hand, and the tibia and fibula, we know are in our lower extremities. So this magnetic field system produced about 18 gauss peak and they did about 15 pulses per second. And the recommended treatment time was 10 hours a day. So a non-union fracture is a disaster. It’s a bone that can’t be used because it’s got this fracture in it that won’t heal. So there are no good therapies for it until PEMFs were found. So right before that it was all kinds of invasive procedures that often failed, even by themselves. So, this research was done at NYU, and they did all kinds of modeling and animal studies and laboratory studies, et cetera. And what they found is that as they assess the people over time, what they did with their machines and how they used them, they were recommended to do at least 10 hours a day. And then what their research, looked at this library of people, went back and asked them how much they used it on average per day. And what they found then basically was that if you do close to what they recommended, greater than nine hours a day, a non-union fracture will heal in 112 days, but it’s 76 days earlier than if you do less than three hours a day. So the people who did just a little bit of treatment time took a lot longer to heal their fractures. And there’s a direct correlation with how much time you spend doing your treatment. So six to nine hours, 141 days earlier, three to six hours, 29 days earlier. And again, if you’re barely treating yourself, less than three hours a day, it’s gonna take a lot longer to get a benefit. So that’s, again, you gotta design your testing, you gotta know what you’re treating and you have to treat it for what it needs. Not just because there’s some theoretical construct. I get calls all the time, Bob, and I’m sure you do as well, all, “I only wanna do half an hour a day.”

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That’s all I wanna do. I don’t wanna do it anymore.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I hear this all the time. Or somebody says, “Well, your device doesn’t work.” And I’ll ask them, “Well, how are you using it?” And they’re all like, “Well, I used it for five minutes a couple of days ago, and I didn’t feel anything.” But this really brings out a good point when you’re talking about dosage. And as far as I can tell at any of the data that I have, dosage, the way it’s applied really, really matters. It’s like, you don’t want to cram it all into like, the shortest time period with a maximum dose. You really wanna spread it out with a lower dose over a longer period of time. And this study shows, actually I think pretty convincingly, although there’s not like a, people using the same total exposure, more intensity over shorter time, but that’s what most people would want. They wanna just blast themselves, and then spend the rest of the day not thinking about it, right. But PEMF doesn’t seem to work that way. It’s permissive. And that is that while you’re using it for a period of time afterwards, it’s actually putting the tissues into a condition where they’re much more able.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

They’re better balanced.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, they’re better balanced, and they’re not inhibiting their own ability to regenerate. And that’s what I mean by PEMF being permissive, and having a huge dose of it, by the way we find, even with our systems, that many people respond better, if they turn down the peak intensity, if that’s all they do is just turn down the peak intensity. Don’t even extend their exposure time. They find that most people actually, the vast majority find that they respond better. It’s because too much can be too much. And there’s not like a linear, use twice as much power you get twice as much benefit. I don’t believe that’s really true when you have a good therapeutically valuable waveform. I don’t think more intensity helps you but longer exposure time definitely does.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And our goal is the problem with, again, that short term, thinking, that all I want is the magic pill. I don’t want to be involved in my own healing, right. Just help me, heal me. I want one pill, that’s it. I’m done. Our goal. I think we agree on this. Our goal is not to just help you with your pain. Our goal is to heal the cause of the pain so the pain doesn’t come back. So to the extent you can, you’re trying to initiate and recruit and support and prolong healing processes. To that end, you’re going to do whatever treatment time you need.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right, exactly.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Part of my job then becomes educating people on the reality of biology and what PEMFs can and cannot do.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I think you and I agree on this completely in this particular point. And just for the listener, Bill and I talk about a lot of things, we don’t necessarily agree on everything, right. So I’m not a yes man. He’s not a yes man.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yes. That’s science, isn’t it?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It’s science. Bill and I have lively discussions about things and there’s lots that he knows that I don’t know about. And hopefully I can contribute to his understanding of some of these things from an engineering standpoint. But on this point we absolutely agree. And that is that, it does require more engagement from a person to get the most outta PEMF. And you have to find the sweet spot where you’re really responding well to it. It’s not that hard to do. You just, mostly, you just need to pay attention. Right. And there you go. And it’s like, I do a lot of work around my house and around my laboratory and stuff like that. And if I twist my ankle or do something, it used to be before I had developed this, then I was looking, in my forties, I was looking at, oh, it’s gonna be a week or 10 days for it to recover. And now, almost 60 years old for me, you’d expect that to be longer, but I apply PEMF and I keep it on. And the first day, maybe it doesn’t seem like it’s helping that much. But then all of a sudden, by the second day, it’s helping a lot, right? And it’s like, I just more or less keep it on continuously. And so now I’m, and this is no exaggeration. I regularly recover from the same kinds of minor, orthopedic type injuries in about a third of the time or less, just by very quickly going right to PEMF, which means I think you need to have one and not say, “Okay, I’ve got an opening in my clinic three and a half weeks from now.” You need to have it right now and then need to use it during the day and at night. And if you do that, it really makes a big difference. I’ve had some fairly serious injuries and some that I was considering seeking more medical attention with, but with the application of PEMF, a lot of things can heal a lot more quickly, but you gotta use it right. It’s not like 15 minutes and you’re done.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I tell people that aging is death by a thousand cuts. And some of those cuts are deep. And some of those cuts are scratches. They’re barely discernible. But all of what you’re talking about, all that sort of lifetime stuff that you accumulate, you can dispense with a lot of it just with the PEMF therapy.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Well, I think you can, and what I’ve taken two in the last year or so is actually, I have built myself some pads and some stuff that work really well when I’m sleeping, and I more or less sleep with it. And if I have any kind of ache and pain, like if I was using a hammer a lot during the day and that repetitive impact is really quite damaging to me now, as I’m older and it would last for weeks, sometimes the discomfort and the tightness, and I, more or less sleep with my arm on a PEMF pad. The next morning, I’m ready to get up and do stuff. And I know this sounds like some kind of infomercial, right. But I developed a thing.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, you’ve been working with magnetic fields for 25 years. I’ve been working with magnetic fields for over 30 years.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, and the thing is I keep doing it for the same reason I do a lot of other things, because it really works well.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It works, right.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

But you have to use it properly. It’s just like a hammer. It’s great for pounding nails. It’s terrible for fixing watches, right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Or you could give the watch a permanent fix.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

You can give a watch a permanent fix. Right. Exactly. So it’s like any other tool. And I think, the other thing that’s awesome about PEMF that does not get talked enough about there’s two things. One is everybody seems to use it as the modality. They call it a, it’s a last resort. And Bill knows this. I gave a online survey at one of the meetings that Bill and I attended, and I was asking people, “What had you tried before you got to PEMF?” And there were people who were listing 20, 25, 30 different things they had tried and failed. “Oh, I did this. And I did that. And this other thing.” And they climbed a mountain in Tibet and all kinds of stuff. And then the terminal treatment was, “Oh yeah. And then PEMF worked.” So, I don’t think PEMF should be a treatment of last resort. Cause it’s so non-harmful. I don’t, maybe Bill knows one, I haven’t been able to find a case where somebody hurt themselves with properly applied PEMF. I don’t know of a case. I can’t find one anywhere.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I routinely tell people as well, PEMF therapy does not cause problems. It reveals problems.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It reveals them. That’s exactly right. And, it’s like, so I would say first, before you go under the knife or anything like that, I’d love to tell you about my sister, type one diabetic, if we have time. But I would say, I would say, first of all, PEMF first resort, not tool of last resort. And the second thing is, I think it’s the greatest adjunctive therapy that I know of. It just makes everything else better.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Everything work better.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, especially like, dieticians that I know, like four or five of them have told me now, “I was doing this for my dad or for my best patient, or my friend or somebody close that really matters to me. And I know that this nutritional adjustment should have helped them, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t, and it wasn’t.” And then they applied PEMF and they found all of a sudden, that everything else was working better. And this seems to work with chiropractic. And it works with chiropractic and acupuncture and every, stem cell therapy, mainstream surgery. There’s a whole surgical group out in Utah. There’s over a hundred of them that use it regularly for like, tendon repair. And they say, it makes the tendons heal two to three times faster. Post-surgically, right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

There’s no doubt about it. So Bob, let’s let’s let’s switch topics. Since you’re the engineer, the guru, you’ve done quite a bit of research. Let’s go back to some of the studies. So you told us that you had a about a 400% increase in stem cell growth at about 150-60 growth factors, significantly increased as a result of that stem cell study. But you also did a study on rabbits and rabbit fibulas with surgical wounds. Could you tell us about that please?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Did you want me to pull up that slide?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yes, please.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Okay. So the idea here is, let me find the correct one. That’s the right one. And there it is. So the idea here was that the veterinary school at Texas A&M was very interested in this to see if there would be, the effect of PEMF would, have any effect on what’s called a non-union fracture. And that means, of course, the bone, would never heal. And the way that this is studied is by making critical defects. And so they make a critical defect in the bone. In this case, they cut a centimeter out of the ulna of a rabbit.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Which is that left picture, there. That 0206.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

All along the bottom, you can see there’s the defect. And after four weeks, that defect is just there and it never closes, right?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Now, Bob, it’s important to say that that particular defect, that particular critical defect removed the part of the bone that causes bone cells to grow the same cells come from, which is the periosteum.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right. And in fact, when they first did this experiment, they didn’t do that. And they found that the results weren’t as clean, but when they removed the periosteum, actually at first, they were like, “Well, we’re not really getting very clear results here.” And then we talked about it and they said, “Oh yeah, it’s new technician.” And they didn’t… Surgeon wasn’t doing exactly that, but yeah. To do a critical bone defect, you have to remove the bone and the things that bridge the gap.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

The lining of the bone.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Lining of the bone, right? So above what you see is when you, is a bit more representative of what you see. We did a whole bunch of them, but I just have all of these on one screen. When the gap starts to close at four weeks, you can see it. Sometimes it doesn’t close very much like on the left. Sometimes it seems to be partially filling in. And sometimes it seems to be really reaching across, right? So these are CAT scans after four weeks of the bone. So in these cases up here, we’re starting to see the gap definitely closing. And it’s not just growing up from the periosteum, it’s like, it’s really sort of like this, bridging across, whereas where the periosteum has been removed and there’s no PEMF, you don’t really see any indication of any kind of bone regrowth, right?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So, and these rabbits were getting treatment for how many hours, or?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

these were continuous. I would, I could show you, so… Oops, hold on a second. We have to do this in a way. There’s the waveform. So what they were wearing were these cuffs. And so it’s just like this. It was a little battery with a pulse generator and a cuff. And then that plugged into the PEMF pulse generator here. And the cuff was just placed around them, post surgically. It was placed around their forearm, post-surgically, or their foreleg. And it just ran continuously on this battery. And so they went, did, they studied at two weeks, three weeks, four weeks and six weeks and eight weeks. And I was just showing, I was just showing like intermediate, so you could see the difference in the regrowth process, right. But we got really astonishing results, essentially no bone regrowth, which is what you expect in a critical defect model. Because critical defect model is designed to not, surgically designed for research, to not ever be able to heal, right? So, anything that you do that causes it to heal is a real improvement over the baseline, right. Baseline biology, which should not heal. And so we found in our study that none of the 18 or so animals that had the critical defect ever heal, showed any signs of healing, but most of the animals with the properly applied cuff that was working throughout the study were showing very significant healing, which is like, a really big difference.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So, that critical wound was that your control group.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

That was our control group, right. And then we had a group where… This is one of these interesting scientific findings, right. Started off with a small cuff so that, I had calculated it so that it would be right in the sweet spot. I could tell from the NASA data, we want to have this much magnetic change. We want the waveform to be a certain amplitude, certain slope. And so, you can’t just make a cuff the size of a room. You gotta to get a magnetic field properly, you gotta have the right size. And so I designed them all the right size and they should have fit just fine over the rabbit leg. But then about halfway through the study, the surgeon said, “Well, it’s a little tough to pull it over the alna, doesn’t quite fit, can you make it larger?” And I said, “Well, not really. We shouldn’t change that halfway through the study because that will vary a parameter dramatically.” And the problem was that this was a commercially funded study and the CEO of the company said, “Change it.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to.” And he said, “I don’t care, change it anyway.” So I said, “Okay, well, I’ll just keep track of what happens.” And so we doubled the size of the cuff in terms of area. It wasn’t double the diameter. It was like 1.4 times the diameter, but it fit nice and easy on the rabbit of any size. And we continued this study and we found that the effect dropped off because it was below the therapeutic threshold, right. So that gave me this information where it really needs to be above 80 or 90 kilogauss per second, steepness of the pulse on the edges in order for it to have the desired biological effect. And then, when we used the smaller cuffs and we were getting the steeper edges, worked just great.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Worked much better. Well, so that’s an in-vivo study. That means it’s done in a live creature, live animal. As opposed to the Petri dish, which is a test tube, well, a Petri dish study.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

In vitro, in glass, right?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

These scholarly references, that you know.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yeah. Now, beyond that, you did another study with mice, I believe it was. And the healing of artificially induced inflammation in a mouse.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

That was rats!

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I’m sorry, that was rats. Okay.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, yeah. And I actually didn’t control that animal. That was a separately carried out third party study.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Neutral.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Done by Charles River Labs, which, they’re a contract research company. And they do all the contract research for drug discovery, right? And there’s a standard test that you can pay them for. And they will actually take whatever substance you have and they can test to see whether or not it’s got an anti-inflammatory effect. And this was, I think this is probably our strongest data because I talked to the division head for inflammation studies at CRL. He was in Finland at the time. This is a big international drug discovery company, right. It’s not some mom and pop organization, and this is what they do. And he told me that this data would be, the FDA or any other agency would be legally compelled to accept this data because it’s done to all the standards, good laboratory practice and everything, all the certifications to make it, I mean, I had no hands on it at all. And it was all analyzed separately by statisticians and everything. The data that you can see here-

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So, there’s a mistake there. Obviously, it’s not a mouse paw. It’s rat paw.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It’s a rat paw inflammation study. So what they do is, that’s okay. The standard here is they inject carrageenan, right, which is an extract, as you know. I think it’s like, a seaweed.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Some kind of herb.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right, and it’s very standard and they inject it and it causes a great deal of inflammation. And then that inflammation slowly over a course of eight or 10 hours will just start to go away, right. And it’s very, it’s very standard and repeatable. So all you have to do is measure the volume of the paw of the rat. And they have a standard way of doing that and dunk it in water, right. And measure displacement. And so they get very, very repeatable, reliable data. And what this data shows is that black line… Okay, so let’s look at the graph here. The foot pad volume. So how swelled up does it get? That’s a vertical line, right? And that’s your vertical line. It’s like, how swell, and time, how many hours into the study, that’s the horizontal line, right. So you’re doing some thing, what are you doing? It’s the black, red, green, blue, purple or light blue is telling you what you’re doing. And so the standards that they use for this testing is, the black line is they just inject as a test. They just inject saline. So it’s nothing. It’s supposed to have no effect. So if you do absolutely nothing, it should follow the black line. Then they give it a very large dose of dexamethasone, which is the red line, right? So if you do the best thing we can do for suppressing acute inflammation, it’ll be the red line. And so all your data for all your testing should fall between the red line and the black line. 

It’s like, there’s a negative control that’s black and a positive control that’s red, right? So, the closer you get to the red line, the more effective your treatment, and the closer you get to the black line, the less effective your treatment, right? So you, what we have and the colors here, green, blue, violet, and sky blue, that’s different doses. And the dose in this case is measured by the steepness of the edges. And for light green, for example, it’s 400 kilogauss per second. For dark blue, it’s 800. And for violet, it’s 1200. And then for light blue, it’s 1600 kilogauss per second. So how steeply is the magnetic field turned on or off? And the take-home message from this is that you can almost completely eliminate the inflammation, the acute inflammation from carrageenan with the right higher dosage of PEMF. And this, by the way, is the same dosage that we deliver with our small, portable units. So it’s not like a big wallop or anything like that. So we were testing like really low dosages, where my earlier study at Texas A&M, we thought that when you get much below 200 or 100, you don’t really see much of an effect. And then you get up over that range, 200 and above, you start to see an effect. And that’s what we see here. So this is actually this second in a series of studies that was done by Charles River Lab for us, this was our dose response study.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

You can see that the light blue and the magenta. are relatively equivalent. So there seems to be a threshold that around 1200 kilogauss?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, that’s right. So what you see is if you did a standard toxicological dose response study, you would see would be a sigmoidal response, right below threshold, which should be in the one or 200 kilogauss range, you wouldn’t see anything. And then it would start to increase and go up like a sigmoid S shaped 200, 300, 400 all the way up through about, a thousand, then it starts to roll off to about 1200 and then you don’t see much more anymore, right. So what’s really cool about this is it shows you that there’s a range of dosages that’s optimal, and you don’t really benefit from more than that in terms of amplitude.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So, the black curve in this diagram shows you what happens naturally, essentially.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

With just nothing. Yeah.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

You start at zero with no inflammation, then you do the injection, and then you see what happens over the next eight hours. So the maximum swelling happens at around four hours, right. And then it tails off, but it doesn’t go away at eight hours, right? It doesn’t go away at eight hours, but it gets closer.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

They don’t didn’t show me data, but they tell me that within a day or so, it’s completely gone. But the real differences show up at about four hours. And what they’re looking for, like fast acting, anti-inflammatories is, can you do something in two hours? And does the effect persist for at least eight hours? So they’ve had different drugs that they’ve tried, that seemed really promising for an hour or two. And then they just didn’t do anything after four or six or eight hours, right. So I didn’t have them vary their experiments at all. This is what every anti-inflammatory that you can buy or be prescribed has been subjected to this exact test.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Protocol.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yes. Now, I would like to tell you what the director of inflammation studies said to me, if you don’t mind. He called me the next morning, the day after the test was done. And he said, “Well, can I talk to you off the record?” And I said, “Sure.” And he said, “I’m not supposed to call you.” But he said, “The whole lab is abuzz because we’ve never seen an effect like this. We’ve seen it with some pretty potent drugs, but we’ve never seen it with anything electromagnetic.” And I said, “Oh, really?” I said “Like what, for example,” He said, “Well, I can’t tell you because we do all these on contract,” he said, “but pretty much any one that you could find, we’ve studied it here. They’ve asked for this kind of study. He said, we’ve never seen effect.” And in fact, he said, this is like the most effective that they’d ever seen of anything electromagnetic. And it’s about the same as pretty high doses of some of the most powerful anti-inflammatory drugs that they can give. But he thought it was amazing, cuz it was completely… In fact, the PEMF coils were outside the rat cage. So they weren’t even inside the rat cage. It was about as noninvasive as you could get. And he said that it was in his 32 or 36 years as an inflammation researcher. He said it was actually, in his opinion, the most exciting data he had ever seen. And he actually asked me, he said, “Could we do a follow-up experiment?” “Sure.” We did. And we kept getting the same results, basically.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I have a personal experience with the ICS device, the A9. My wife broke a toe. And it was black and blue right away. And you could see that probably it was broken. So she started, she put on her a ICS, the A9, put it on her toe right on. And we put her in a flat shoe, which is what you’re supposed to do to prevent the toe from moving. And she treated it 24/7. So this is like, midday. The next morning she woke up, bruising is gone, swelling is gone, pain is gone. So then we, you’re not supposed to walk. So basically she treated for another 24 hours continuously. And again, pain’s gone. Then she walked 24 hours later. Basically she’s walking more than 24 hours, but 12 hours, 36 hours later, she’s walking in tennis shoes. She walked a mile in tennis shoes.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Awesome, awesome!

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And another 24 hours later, she continued to improve. She felt great this whole time. So another 24 hours later, she’s now walking three miles in tennis shoes. And that was it.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Wow. That’s fantastic.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That’s continuous use.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

That’s great. It sort of reminds me of the story, “Hey doc, when this heals up, will I be able to play the piano?” And doctor says, “Yeah.” He goes, “Oh great, ’cause I couldn’t before!” I thought you were gonna tell me, she was gonna say, “Can I dance?”

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Oh, sorry about that.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

But that’s wonderful. Stories like that just make me light up. So one of the things that keeps me really doing this, honestly, Bill, it must keep you engaged in this too. You and I have never talked about this, but I get a call or an email about once or twice a week from somebody who says, “This has really changed my life.” This is really, God, I sound like an infomercial. “This has really helped me.” So, and they’ll tell me their personal story. And you’ll notice, I don’t put any testimonials up. I don’t do that because this is a personal thing between me and that person, and man, I’ve heard some unbelievable stories of people. I would actually like to tell you about my sister, what happened to her. So, if I may, my sister is an eighth grade science teacher, smart girl, she’s about five years younger than I am, but she is not always smart, right. So in November-

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Not practically smart.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Sometimes, yeah, she’s a little bit like not thinking, right? So she’s a 52 year old woman getting up on a chair, trying to put up decorations in her eighth grade science class, falls off the chair, really serious injury, right? She’s type one diabetic. So she doesn’t heal as well as a person her age could or should normally heal. So they go in, they go, “Oh, sorry.” They gotta put in a titanium rod in her tibia. So they did big, big, complicated surgery. Didn’t go well. She’s had to go back for a couple of surgeries since November. They had her in these really aggressive casts. And so she’s getting these diabetic ulcers, right?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Oh boy. Yeah.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

And so about three weeks ago, the doctor said, “We might have to take your leg. It’s not going well. We need to see some forward progress on this.” Her leg was all swollen. They had to keep replacing the cast cuz her leg ended up being about twice the size of her other leg, right? And just really bad. Rashes everywhere, diabetic ulcers, and the imaging was showing that the bone ingrowth was not the way it was supposed to be in the textured surface of the titanium implant. She had zero load allowed on it. They’re like, “Don’t you ever get up on this leg.” And so anyway, her doctor was telling her, they’re gonna probably have to take her leg. And she was like pretty upset about it. Talked to me about it, about three weeks ago, and she’s never really believed in PEMF, cuz a few times I’ve tried to help her and she’s like, “Yeah, well it’s inconvenient and I’m a restless sleeper. I knock it off. I really can’t use it. It’s too inconvenient for me.” So I’m gonna be pretty brutal here, Bill. Maybe you’ll have to-

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Desperation! She’s coming to a point of desperation. 

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

So she says to me, “Well, will it help me?” I said, “Well, if you do what I tell you to do, there is a roughly 94% chance its going to really help you.” Some people don’t respond, but most people do. And the type of injury you have is the type of thing that people tell me when they use it, I’m not a clinician, so I’m not testing them. But when they tell me, this is one of those things where it responds really well. And she’s like, “Well, I’m not so sure I can use it.” She said, “I’m a really restless sleeper and I have restless leg syndrome.” And I said, “Well, restless leg syndrome is not going to be one of your problems in a couple of weeks, cuz you’re gonna be missing that leg.” Oh gosh, I was so brutal with her because she was not listening. I said, so let’s keep restless leg syndrome as a problem you have in that leg for the rest of your life, okay? Let’s do that. Maybe we’ll deal with that separately, right. Well, magnesium or something. So, she finally listened to me and I said, “Okay, you’re in a wheelchair.” So you’re seated. So you’re not walking around. So put it on and wear it all day and then wear it all night, and just do this, right? The next morning she calls me, “It’s not really working. And I knocked it off. I unplugged and everything.” I said, “Stop fidgeting around, get serious, or you’re gonna lose your leg.” She’s like, “Okay.” The next morning, and she lives in Colorado, at like 8:00 AM, which is 6:00 AM her time, I get this text. “Oh my God. It’s really working!” And then she started taking pictures of her legs, she had taken some pictures before and after and her swelling was like, gone. And she said she had to wake up because her cast fell off. Because her leg swelling went down.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

So, so anyway, it looked so bad. I could hardly look at the pictures like before. And then after now a couple of weeks of this, it’s just down to, you can see the suture line, but she said her diabetic ulcers were, instead of getting worse, they’re getting much better and starting to go away and the swelling is down and she said, “It feels a lot better. And the pain is down to almost nothing.” And so in a week or so she’s gonna go in to get it reevaluated and hopefully she sticks with it.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I’ve had similar experiences that as well, I had a brother-in-law who, well, he’s type two diabetic. And he had something called Charcot foot with an ulcer where it was draining, continuously draining. And he’d been in wound care for two years. They didn’t handle it. They didn’t deal with it. We got him on an A9, which he was wearing 24/7 again. And you could see the pictures, as you said, the pictures, like complete shrinking, basically like a flat foot compared to a volcano.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I think you showed me the pictures of this. It looked like a little volcano shape.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yes, exactly. ‘Cause where they put the pressure on it, the skid was going through where the pressure was.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, and it just went away. That’s what’s amazing to me. And so like, this is one of those things where you just can’t seem to get the signal through because there’s so many charlatans and snake oil salesmen out there telling you they’re gonna sell you monkey pick organic broccoli and it’s gonna cure all your ills and stuff. That’s fine and everything, but it’s really hard to get this signal out there. But I have never had anybody tell me that it didn’t work at all. About 6% of people.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And this is not placebo. Let’s talk a about your cat study.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Oh yeah, yeah. Let me pull that one up. Cause that’s one of my favorites and I know you like this one too. So like with humans you can, you can have a placebo effect. But not so much with animals. And so here’s another thing, too.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Bring this screen up. The bottom of it, please.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Okay, yeah, there’s-

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Up, until you see the colors underneath.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Can you see it yet?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

 

Okay.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Let me pull it up a little.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

There you go. Perfect.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

There you go. Okay. So the thing is that one of those diseases of animals that is, and humans, but especially in particular cats, that’s lethal. It’s like, half of all cats get this, chronic kidney disease, right? And it creeps up on ’em and owners don’t know what’s happening. And it’s a big business, I think, with a lot of veterinarians giving treatments for cats that have this, my brother went to one of those veterinarians for like, a year and they gave it all kinds of homeopathic and naturopathic treatments. And none of them really helped their cat. And so a lot of people agree that pretty much all you can do is palliative care, right? So here on the vertical axis of this is the creatine level, which is measuring kidney function. And then on the horizontal axis is time. And it’s about from September of 2014 ’till almost August of 2019, right? And the blue line with black dots shows you the time course of my brother’s cats. This was my brother who did this. He was like, “What can I do to help my cat?” My brother went ahead and he’s another engineer. So he kept meticulous records and every black dot was a laboratory test done by his veterinarian.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Bob, hold on one second. Let’s go back up the, the near the top of your article, you give the ranges of creatine levels by the severity of the disease.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, I do up here and it’s, let me see if I can find it. Yeah, here we go.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

There you go, right there.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Stage one. Stage one is, yeah, there’s an accepted disease state above 1.5, and above stage four is lethal. So it’d be above five. So stage one is 1.5. Stage two is 2.2. And here we, so his cat was, 1.5 is just off the bottom line here. Can you see the colors on the bottom?

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yes. Yes. Perfect.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

So, so his cat was way into like stage three, right when we started them on PEMF. So we don’t know before that first vertical.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, on that 2.8, the life expectancy of a cat, continuing at that level, it’s normally gonna be progressive. And then it moves very rapidly towards .

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Very rapidly. So, we’re talking about like six or eight months, I think, at that point, and my brother was fairly desperate. So we started him on, so if you look across in the horizontal direction, which is time, there’s a red, green, and yellow orange bar there, and wherever you see red, that means there was no PEMF being used, whenever you see green, that’s where the PEMF that I developed, which is ICS PEMF. That’s what I started developing at NASA.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And Bob, when the treatments were being done, they were being done two to three times a week, right? For about 30 minutes to 60 minutes?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

He would have his cat sit in his lap and he would hold it on its kidneys and the right anatomical location two or three times a week for about 20 to 30 minutes. Yeah, that’s about right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That’s a relatively low dose.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It’s a very low dose. And I told him, I didn’t think it was long enough to really do anything. And yet over the course of months, what you saw was the most remarkable thing, was it got better. It didn’t get worse. It wasn’t progressive. So, the thing was that even that very low dosage halted the progression of the disease. And so he used it pretty consistently, brought it way back down, to where he was below the stage two threshold, kept it on for, until the end of April of 2015. And then he didn’t use it again. He just discontinued use. And then the creatine level started creeping back up. And then in late October of 2015, he started, he resumed use and kept that going on for almost a year. And you can see it dropped back down to almost normal levels. And then he told me starting there, he got around around September of 2016. He started getting lazy and using it less and less frequently until he pretty much stopped altogether. And then even with these really low doses, it stopped the progression of the disease until mid-December of 2017, where he really discontinued the use and it started to shoot up again. And then he thought to himself, okay, he’s gotta get serious. He’s gotta sit down with his cat, use it all the time. And he did, and it was just going down and down and it just brought his cat back into at or below the normal level 1.5 and it held it there for the rest of the cat’s life in the cat ended up dying of old age, last year.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And not of kidney disease.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Not of kidney disease.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So the cat was about eight years old, approximately maybe around eight years old when you started the treatment, and then the cat died.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, it was a rescue. So I think he started when it was about eight, I think. And then it was, it just went through the normal course of its life without the burden of this disease being severe enough, right, that it was life threatening. So I believe, Bill, this is the only data ever showing that happening with cat kidney disease for any treatment.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I’ve seen it in patients. I’ve seen it in people who purchased systems from us, right? They they’ve had significant benefits. What this study though, what you’re showing here is really very important. It’s in a very important principle with PEMF therapy. They’re what you call crossovers, right? So you treat, you stop, you treat again, you stop. You treat again. And so you see this pattern of worsening and better, worsening and better, with stopping and starting.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right. So the patient is its own control, right? So you have treatment negative. No. Then you have treatment positive improvement, right? No treatment, gets worse. Positive treatment, gets better. Progressive disuse of the treatment, gets progressively worse and then consistent use of the treatment, gets better. So that is like, you’re taking out the biological variation there. You’re not talking about comparing different individuals. Now you’re comparing the same disease state in the same individual with the same diet. They are getting older, but that’s as close as you can get. And this crossover just showed time and again, that even small doses of PEMF are better. And I’m of the opinion, I had been able to talk my brother into doing this daily for a couple of hours.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Who knows, who knows. Exactly.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

And so I’ve actually tried to formalize this study. So I’ve approached numerous veterinarians and numerous people, my research colleagues here at UNC and NC state, and they have no interest in it. And I say to them, “Look, you have no other treatments.” “Oh, we have plenty of other treatments.” I said, “Okay, allow me to correct myself. You have no other effective treatments.” And so, I can’t help but be cynical, Bill. When I showed this to this graph to some business partners of ours, actually some business friends related to a different business we’re doing The woman, cat owner, they had just buried their cat, right. She said, “I paid more for two clinic visits.” And we made dozens of visits to the clinic for this cat. She paid more for just two clinical visits than she would’ve paid for a PEMF system.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yeah. We absolutely hear this all the time. This also tells me, that’s something that I experienced, as well. I’m sorry, we’re getting a signal, there. That I experienced, as well. So for patients, for people who are actually using these therapies, one of the most instructive things that they can do is to stop their treatment, especially for chronic problems, they stop their treatment. Then they begin to discover what it was doing because they take it for granted, after a while, they take the benefits of the PEMF granted, because they’re not jumping over tall buildings, so they say, “I’m not sure that it’s still working.” So if you stop it and the problem comes back, that’s meaningful. Because especially when you go back on it, you say, wow, it really was working. So this one off is actually an important personal experience, right, that people can .

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It is. It really is. And you, and I’ve discussed this before, but for everyone else’s benefit, right. What we started doing when we were starting selling PEMF systems, we had a few people say, “Well, I’m not so sure that it’s helping. And so I’d like to send it back and get a refund or a partial refund or whatever.” And at first we would say, “Okay, send it back right away, we’ll see if we can…” And almost every time before even reached us in the mail, the person would say, “Actually I want it back.” Right? And so we actually got this policy now, which we’ve had for years, which is, okay, you don’t think it’s working. Here’s what we need you to do. Stop using the system, set it aside for a few days and don’t use it for a week. And then if you still wanna return it, then we’ll take it, right. And we’ve never had a return since then. Not for that reason. Because the effects of PEMF are quite subtle as they come on, but when you stop using it, they can persist for a day or two and then abruptly you go right back. And that was my personal experience. The very first time, I guess I didn’t go through my story of how I discovered my way into this, but I took the NASA systems and I was building them commercially for doing controlling gene expression in cells for industrial purposes. And I had this terrible back injury and I used one of these big, expensive devices on my back and it worked beautifully. And I was like, “Wow, okay, I’m cured.” But then like two and a half, three days later, all of a sudden the pain really came back with a vengeance. And I was like, “No, I better go back to it.” So yeah, PEMF is persistent in a way that TENS is not.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, TENS doesn’t do heating and most other other technologies like infrared and laser and so on, they don’t penetrate the body deeply enough.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

They just don’t, yeah. That’s right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

You’re not gonna get the deeper healing benefits from it.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right. But they’re more subtle. And you’re absolutely right. People who use PEMF and especially these gentle forms that we sell, you can’t even feel it, but it’s doing something. People really start to wonder. Eh, is it really helping me? Meh, not that much. Until they stop using it, then all of a sudden the pain comes back and they’re like, “Oh, yeah.” So a lot of people need to go through that crossover before they can fully appreciate what they’ve got.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Now, one of the things I wanna talk about is, you and I have discussed this many times, is the loss of the magnetic field over distance. And it’s hard to calculate that. So it’s hard to actually simulate what the magnetic field is in a volume of tissue. So if you start off at say 200 gauss, what is the magnetic field at say, three inches? ‘Cause if you’re trying to treat a back, from the skin all the way into the spine itself, then how do you calculate that dose distance?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It’s like light. How bright is a light? Well, how far away are you from the source? It drops off one over the square of the distance. Same thing with sound. You go, of course there’s heat, cold… Right. These radiant energy. Energy that’s radiant linearly tends to drop off with an inverse square, as you go further away, but magnetism doesn’t work that way. It’s not radiant in the same way. It’s actually very difficult to calculate. Magnets don’t radiate rays of magnetism out to the edge of the universe. The magnetic flex lines curve around. And they go like this.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

They form closed loops.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right, they close.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Field is a closed loop.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

If you had a flashlight that sucked light back in, on the other end, it would work very differently. You’d be able to see things about a half a foot away, and then you’d go about two feet and be totally dark. ‘Cause it would’ve sucked all that light back in. That’s not how light works, but if you could see magnetism, that’s what you would see. And so magnetism is a lot more complicated than light. So when people ask me, “Well, how many gauss is it?” I’m like, “Well, how good is your math?” It’s really complicated. And that’s that’s for the simplest possible. Like solenoid, single, configuration is very hard to calculate. When you start adding in multiple coils and different orientations and stuff, it’s virtually impossible. So, I guess my short answer to you is that, yeah. The nice thing though, about magnetism, unlike light is that it penetrates very, very deeply through tissues. Especially dry tissues like skin and everything, and gets very quickly and very easily deep into your tissue. So whereas heat and other radiant forms of energy, they can penetrate, but they get absorbed by tissues. Magnetism does not. And I’ve started doing some experiments to show that, and I’ve never actually talked to anybody about this. So you’ll be the first to hear. What I think I’m seeing is is that if you disrupt cell walls, that is equivalent of causing a lesion that has a larger volume of conductive fluid, cause you’ve disrupted the cell walls, right? There seems to be a focusing effect with PEMF when you do that, because it can actually cause Eddy currents, the resulting sort of induct coupled currents there. So where you have intact tissue, it’s less absorptive of magnetic fields. So it’s the equivalent. If you look at it from a conservation energy standpoint, your magnetic fields will tend to collapse into where they can have this Eddy field effect. And that happens to be at lesions. So the really cool thing about magnetism is that it is a, what do they call it? There’s a clinical, it’s pathologically activated, right? Like, they’re talking about certain substances, it’s activated at the point where the pathology is, right.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

More than a tissue away from it that’s .

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Right. It’s basically for fully intact tissue. It seems to be more or less you dry like skin, pretty much inert, right? If it’s wet and disrupted, inflamed, cuz inflammation itself is tissue disruption, right? The ECM and everything, you get much more continuous volume of a conductor, right? You’re gonna get much more of an induced field. Whereas if you have intact cells with intact memories and intact junctions between cells, you don’t get these continuous conductive paths around cells so much, you’re gonna get much less energy dissipated there, which means it’s gonna propagate further. So this is a fiendishly complicated discussion, but it’s cool that way.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Can you describe an Eddy current?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Okay. Yeah, sure. So if you have a magnetic field, use a screwdriver here, you have a magnetic field line going like this, anything that’s conductive in its way, anything that can conduct anything which include fluids, like body fluids that have ions in them. Like so, in your cells, there’s fluids between your cells. The physical world tries to stop magnetic fields from flowing. So as a magnetic field changes, as it goes up or down, that’s why the edge is so important, in the waveform. As a magnetic field changes, that’s directly proportional to this Eddy field, which is a current, electric current. It can be an ion, right? It doesn’t have to be electrons. That spins around like this to make an opposing magnetic field. So as you try to change a magnet, magnetic field, the world around it will generate these Eddy currents, which are currents of anything with a charge on them to generate an opposing magnetic field.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, the magnetic field is actually generating those Eddy currents.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It is. The magnetic fields generating the Eddy currents, which in turn are attempting to inhibit the magnet.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Fast, yes. Okay. Fast.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah. And so that works really poorly in dry air, dry skin, anything dry like that, anything that’s really conductive. Metal, salt water, or whatever. There’s plenty of opportunity for the generation of these Eddy currents. And those will oppose the magnetic field. And so like what’s happening, there is an energy transfer, it’s called induction. The process of creating those Eddy currents from changing magnetic fields is called induction. And that’s what I personally well, professionally you scientifically believe is what’s going on. And that’s the part of PEMF that we do understand is the electronics and magnets right up to that point of induction. And beyond that point, the biology becomes kind of murky. We’re not a hundred percent sure what it is in the cell that’s picking that signal up, but it’s certainly being picked up. And there’s certainly a biological effect. If you have the right shape of waveform, then you get the right rate of change of the magnetic field. And that induces the right range of Eddy currents that seems to have a biological effect. So you can imagine if my face was a cell and I shoot a magnetic field line through that cell, that’s gonna cause an electric current around the cell. And also around every one of the components of the cell. So when you apply a magnetic field, which you’re really doing, if you change the field rapidly enough is you’re applying an electric field around the item that you’re shooting the magnetic field line through. And I think that is, well, first of all, I know for a fact that’s happening, you can calculate it. There’s no real discussion about it. The question is, why does it have a biological effect? And we don’t know that yet. I don’t know that anybody knows that, but I think in the future, somebody’s gonna get a Nobel Prize for figuring that out. ‘Cause the effect is very real. And if you control the right parameter, which is the rate of change of the magnetic field and how long that rate of change persists, you can get extremely reliable biological effects all the time, every time.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yep. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a cell in a Petri dish or whether it’s a frog or a rabbit or a cat.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It could be a seed. It turns out this is, this really crosses, my recent experiments, as you know, ’cause we talked about ’em, it crosses all kingdoms of life. And the thing that’s interesting about PEMF is not just that it has an effect on humans or has some kind of specific resonance with a specific kind of cell. It seems to affect all forms of life systems. It affects plants differently than it would affect humans, but nonetheless.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It effects plankton and amoeba, and anything living, basically.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Anything living seems to be influenced by these properly applied PEMF, and very, very often it’s a beneficial effect, yeah.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Let’s change the topic a bit and become a bit more theoretical.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Sure.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So give us your thoughts on the challenges of doing magnetic field therapy research.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I would say the first challenge is intelligently applying PEMF in a way where you’re controlling the parameters, the electromagnetism itself, correctly and consistently where you’re seeing an effect. And the thing that I think has been the bugbear of electromagnetic biological effects, the research of them, has been that people will say, “Oh, I apply a 10 Hertz square wave.” And they’re not giving you any really important information. Exactly how steep are the edges of the square wave? That’s what you need to know. And that’s the most important thing for you to know, and how long, what’s the duration of that slope and what’s the steepness of it. And actually the duration of the slope and the steepness of it is like those two things, if you multiply them together, give you the peak magnetism, but many people just report only the peak, right? It’s like saying, “Well, how fast are you going?” You say “An hour.” What do you mean an hour? Well, what distance are you going in an hour? Right? If you’re going fast, you go twice the distance in an hour. How long does it take you to get somewhere? Half as long, if you go twice as fast. So you need to kind of know that the two main parameters, which is how fast are you going, and how long are you traveling? And that multiplied together gives you the distance, right? And what a lot of people think is they can just say, “Oh, this many gauss,” but it doesn’t tell you the two parts of how you get the gauss level, the peak that you need. So this is why people say, well, they’ll argue with me, they’ll say, “Well, if I turn up the gauss, it’s more effective.” Yeah, but it’s more effective not because there’s more gauss. It’s more effective because in order to get more gauss, what you’re doing is you’re increasing the duration and/or slope of the line to get there, right. And that’s what makes a difference.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That’s what’s called the Faraday law, right?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It’s Faraday’s law. This has been well researched and studied. If it didn’t work, this phone call would not be happening. ‘Cause it’s the Faraday. This is the basic law that makes everything electrical, electromagnetic work, from your cell phone to GPS satellites, your car, entirely if it’s an electric car, everything about your car works because of Faraday’s law. So this is something we really understand well, but we just don’t understand how it interacts with biology. That’s the thing that’s missing still, but science will eventually catch up with that. And then eventually it’ll be very passe. They’ll say, well, of course, a pulse field of these parameters has biological effect. What, are you crazy? Every child knows that.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

We are trying to move people along, get more and more people understanding this. What do you think the future is of PEMF therapy?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

What I think the future is? I think it’s the more that you and I, and the few of us, I think we would all fit into a car, but we need to be careful not to get on the same car or airplane. ‘Cause we could get wiped out.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Or at least not go for a long distance.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah, exactly. I hope that there’s no dark period. My goal is to make this something that anybody can buy off a hook at a neighborhood pharmacy, ‘cuz this is something that needs to be available to everybody. I really think that portable PEMF is something that everybody needs. Reliable, safe, portable PEMF, everybody should have in their medical cabinet, in their first aid cabinet. They should just have it because if you use it right away, when start to see something terrible happening like a diabetic ulcer, all the way down to bumps and bruises, it can really dramatically reduce the amount of unnecessary pain and suffering you go through and really dramatically improve the healing rate. There’s so much that could be improved by this. Like I think that abdominal fistula, for example, what 11% percent of all abdominal surgeries in the United States result in fistula and I’m confident from the data that I’ve seen, although I haven’t studied it systematically, that could be something that is essentially eliminated with just one of these portable PEMFs in the same way you could eliminate, as you know from personal experiences, I now know from personal experience, you can eliminate diabetic ulcers. So I think this is one of those things that it’s just too good and too important to be completely snuffed out. So I think it’s a matter of time before people really embrace it. But it’s like so many is in life and in history and in medicine, that like Gandhi says, “First they resist you, then they beat you.” Then eventually, they embrace you and they agree with you, right? So it’s a question of, my approach has been to just tell the truth over and over and over again. 

And there are thousands of people who listen to me, my wife is not one of them. Right? But there are thousands of people who listen to on this. And by and large, they get the vast majority of them get excellent results. And I think there will, soon enough, there will be just too many people who know this, who know about it, but I think what harms the future of PEMF, to say if the future could be bright and will be bright, the thing that harms it is up until a decade or two ago where everybody selling PEMF was selling some kind of secret frequency. Like they had some kind of secret, they wouldn’t reveal. And they were charging vast amounts of money for these really primitive machines. They were pretty much a hundred year old technology. So, I think the thing that hurts it more than anything, is this turning it into like some kind of mystical thing. It’s not. This is science. We’re slowly figuring it out. And eventually, the right person, unfortunately, is gonna get the right kind of injury. He’s gonna have somebody recommend this to them. And like I often say, when the pretty, blonde, blue eyed daughter of a Senator gets hurt by something, then laws change. That’s when it happens all of a sudden. Hey, you can’t drive drunk anymore. We’re gonna name it after the daughter of a Senator, right. Because gee, she was the first person to ever get hurt by a drunk driver. Well, when the right person gets a miraculous recovery and then just becomes a tireless advocate of this, that’s what it’s gonna take. ‘Cause that’s what people listen to. Celebrities. That’s the…

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That’s way the world is, right.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

But you find that a a lot of athletic celebrities wouldn’t want to talk about it because there’s this stigma associated with it. So it’s gonna take the right combination of people, and it takes people like you and me to just keep telling people the simple truth. You don’t have to lie about and you don’t have to exaggerate the effects of PEMF, cuz they’re so astonishingly good.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

You need, Bob, like you said, people like us, you need to be, if you’re gonna get PEMF equipment, you need to be talking to people who are knowledgeable about the science. You can’t talk to a salesperson cuz they’re not gonna necessarily get you into the right machine, for the right amount of time, using it properly. They’re not gonna teach you proper use. ‘Cause if you don’t use it properly, it doesn’t matter what you are.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

It’s like anything else, if you don’t use it right, you can’t expect the right outcome. Now, I’m actually not the best person to talk to either. ‘Cause I’m a technical person, but not a clinical person, right. I have talked to, literally, I’ve talked to many hundreds of clinicians. Yourself, of course, primarily, but many others and thousands, maybe, coming up on 10,000 people, about their experience with this. And that’s what I use to tweak my designs, get everything just right. It’s a combination of science, but also clinical outcomes, right. And I’m a real believer that the science of PEMF is less important at this point, now that we know things, certain things are effective, then actually dialing it in for clinical benefit. Like for example, we don’t have to have hard study data to show that you should use it, 24/7. But we know from clinical experience and you know from clinical experience that it’s the right way to use things is like, is using them properly. It doesn’t have to be 24/7, but enough time during the day or night or both.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Enough time. Understanding physiology, the body…

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Understanding it, right. And simply making the clinical observation that by far that you get the best outcomes when you do that. And there’s always gonna be people who say, like my sister, “Eh, I don’t have time to mess with it for that much time.”

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, and you saved her leg.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I think so. I think so. I just checked with her last night and she said things are looking really good. So I’m looking forward to that text from her saying, yeah, her doctor said, everything’s cool and they’re gonna be able to take the cast off and everything. I hope she sticks with it long enough to do that. But I mean, you and I both know of cases where people use it, they get a benefit and then they, they decide against it. It’s just in too inconvenient for them or something. You can lead a horse to water.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Okay. And then what’s the end of that expression?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Well, the way I say it is kind of crude.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Oh no, the way I say it, Bob, is that you can lead a horse to water. Then you start an IV.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

You can lead a horse to water. You can put its muzzle in the water. You can pull its tongue out and connect it to the bottom of the trough. And you could put a suction tube on the other end of it, but you still can’t make it drink.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Or when they get bad enough, you have to start an IV.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yeah. There you go. Yours is less crude than mine. But what I’m trying to say is there are some people that it does not matter what information or data you show them or how much it helps them or even how much they’ve experienced it themselves. They just will simply not change. There’s there’s an actual term for this in psychology. It’s called mind freeze. And you just, certain people, it’s a pretty big percentage of the population. Once they have formulated an opinion on something, doesn’t matter what it is.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

They won’t go.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

No amount of anything will change their mind.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Another expression that I’ve learned from a colleague, pharmacist friend of mine, is that mind forced to change its will is of the same opinion still.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

There you go. That’s exactly right. So, my strategy is different from a lot of scientists who do this kind of thing that’s on the fringe or on the edge. They’re like, “I need to convince the scientific community, right?” But there was this beautiful paper in The Atlantic last year and the, and the title was, “Prof, No One Reads Your Stuff.” And it was like a sort of an open letter from students to their professor. And apparently there was a study where like the average scientific paper gets read eleven times. Eleven readers of the typical scientific paper. In medical stuff it’s a little bit more. In some fields it’s as low as average of one or two, the readership is as low as one or two. And very often people download papers without reading them. They’ll even cite them in their own papers, as citations, they don’t read them. And the funny thing was, it’s like professors are thinking they’re having this big impact, but the vast majority of them are writing to this extremely narrow, tiny little audience. And I pointed this out to my colleagues, talking to them about it at the university. They’re like, “Oh, you need to publish this more and you need to publish that more.” And I was like, “No.” My 13 year old son has a Minecraft channel where he talks about himself, one of those things where he play the game Minecraft, right. He has much more impact than most of my colleagues do publishing papers. He’s got dozens of followers, like, these are people who are listening to ’em about playing Minecraft. A typical professor has got less than a dozen people paying attention to them. So, I don’t think the answer is more science.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

More science. So, your experience with your sister, our clinical experience, our real live people experience is what’s gonna drive the change because people who have success talk to other people.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

I think that’s what it is. I think it’s that’s exactly what it is. You know us, right? Because full disclosure, obviously I sell these devices, but I build them by hand. So it’s not like we, some junky mass produced thing that we make hundreds of thousands of. We make every one of ’em. We test every one of ’em. We make sure it’s right. We support it and give people technical advice after we sell it. And it’s like, every one of these people becomes our best sales representative. We don’t spend, we never have, we don’t spend money on marketing. My company, we do everything by word of mouth, every single person that comes to us… I wouldn’t say that, actually, now. Many of them are starting to see my videos on YouTube and everything, but still we don’t invest any money in that, right? It’s more or less trying to get the message out. And I make a message that I think is very clear, which is, I think PEMF works and it’s not something magical to my product or anything. I try to optimize mine to make ’em really small and efficient, but that’s not the only kind of PEMF that works. There’s tons of good ones out there. You just have to use it properly.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And in my book, “Supercharge Your Health With PEMF Therapy,” we give people multiple options of different devices for different problems. Bob, I wanna thank you for coming on with us and spending all this time. It was a great pleasure to reconnect and rediscuss many things.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Oh, absolutely. Happy to talk to you about this anytime. I appreciate the opportunity to be on your summit. Thank you very much.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

My pleasure. What’s your website, please?

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Go to micro-pulse.com. Micro-pulse.com. That’s us. And there, we give links to papers, and we have a user forum, we respond to emails. Anybody sends us an email, we we’ll respond to them. And it’s one of these things, we don’t really advertise it, but we got a lot of traffic and a lot of people come into our website because very typically people will say, “I heard about this from so and so, they’re doctor,” much more often it’s from a family member or a friend.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yeah, and we sell your A9 especially and have tremendous value from it too. Bob, again, thank you. One of the most intelligent people about PEMF therapy that you’re ever gonna hear and talk to.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Thanks, Bill.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Enjoy the rest of your day.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Yep.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

We’ll talk again.

 

Robert Dennis, PhD

Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Bye.