PEMF is an effective tool, learn from a top specialist

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey, everyone, Robby Besner back with another episode. This is an epic episode. I have Dr. Pawluk with me today. We’re gonna talk about PEMF, pulsed electromagnetic fields. This guy is an expert on this. I’m not gonna belabor his attributes because his CV, his bio goes pages and pages and pages, but he’s an author, he’s a speaker, he’s well-respected in the community, has been interviewed by Ben Greenfield. He’s accepted by David Asprey for all you hackers out there, because he’s really on the cutting edge of this kind of technology. So Dr. Pawluk, welcome to the Healing from Lyme Summit. How are you today?

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Thank you, thank you, Robby. I’m great, I tell people actually I’m perfect.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay, great. Well, that’s a good start.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I’m not gonna allow any denial, I’m perfect.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

All right, so tell us about yourself. How’d you get started in this whole category. I mean, you’ve got accolades of background in terms of what got you to the point where you are focusing a lot of your energy on PEMF devices and technologies. So give us a little backdrop and then let’s move forward to where you are today.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Sure, thank you. Basically, I’m a family physician by background. I’ve been trained as a conventional family doctor. I’m board certified, or have been board certified in family medicine in Canada and in the US, but I’ve always had in the back of my head, a sense that I wasn’t doing enough, that whatever I learned was not enough. And along the way, I was a medical director for a group I was the chief medical person in a 30-doctor of medical group. I developed the largest family physician group in all the whole east coast of the US, of 14 family physicians. And where we shared patients, and so we routed it in the hospitals when people were admitted, we took care of the patients in the hospitals, and we shared that responsibility. 

And in a short period of time, we had two to three admissions of people who had gastric bleeding, they were bleeding, and one of them almost died from the bleeding. and the root cause in all of these cases was a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory, it happened to be ibuprofen. Again, being somebody who was always sort of not sure that we are doing everything we could and at the very least avoiding harm, then the question becomes, what else can we be doing to help these people with pain? What we’re doing with opioids, surgeries, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, which don’t heal anything, they’re a band-aid. I said, “Well, there got to be something else that is gonna help.” So that was 1987 and ’88. I said, “okay, I’m gonna go look in acupuncture.” I’ve had an acupuncture in the back of my mind for a long time, and never really found a way to get trained in it adequate without going to China, right? Giving up my medical career and so on.

So along came a course at UCLA for physicians and so I took this course, it was like a one year, one and a half year course, and I started doing acupuncture. So acupuncture, I found helps the pain a lot. In the training, that’s one of the most common indications for the use of acupuncture is for pain. But around 1990, nobody knew about acupuncture, there are only 300 doctors that were trained in acupuncture in the US, the whole of US at that time. Now there are 3,000, 5,000 doctors that are trained in it. So, but people wouldn’t accept needles. So I said, how can we do acupuncture without using needles? Well I discovered that in The Orient, they had also been using magnets on acupuncture points, little tiny magnets, beads or little discs and they worked, but I’ve also discovered as I was using them, that they did other things, they were healing the tissue underneath. 

So if you had tennis elbow, acupuncture would help you putting the needles along that meridian or putting a needle under that spot, but it wouldn’t heal the pain, but put a magnet on that it would actually heal the tissue. So we need to do palpation, so with acupuncture, we do palpation after you do the needling, it’s not gonna remove the tenderness ’cause the tissue is still inflamed. So I discovered that magnets actually heal the tissue. So I started working more extensively with magnets, and that’s where the rest of the story goes. So I’ve been working with magnetic fields now for 30 years. So when I did the magnets, I discovered they had limitations. So they worked, they did good things for what they did, but it didn’t solve as many problems I wanted to have solved as a physician ’cause you need to basically have to deal with whatever walks in the door.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right? Like an ER, doctor, whatever walks in the door, you got to manage.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Of course.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So I said, “Okay, there’s got to be more to this.” Then I tried to find out the science, looking at the science behind it, how the EMFs or PEMFs or magnets work on the body on tissue? I actually visited a professor of bioengineering at Hopkins, so I was on faculty at Hopkins. So I went over there and I have to talk to him about magnets on acupuncture points, magnets on the body. They said, it’s gotta be crap. All the engineering people understood was alternating magnetic fields, or time varied magnetic fields, they couldn’t understand static magnets. 

Well, I said clearly as a physician, they work. I know, and it’s not placebo. I had a spider bite on my leg and I just discovered it, I didn’t even feel the spider bite, but I had a quarter size lesion on my lower leg. And so I saw a spider bite, so I taped a magnet on it, literally three hours later. So I did it acutely, right after the bite, three hours later gone.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, amazing.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

How long does it take for a spider bite to heal.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, right. Days generally,

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Weeks

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Depending on how your immune system responds to it, then if you’re not compromised, you know, maybe within days, but if you are compromised, it could take weeks.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Take even longer. It depends on how deep it is and how much injection of venom you got into the wound and how dirty the spider was. Right, all the other things they carry. So anyways, that was, you know, by itself, you know, a validation to me. Now that can’t be placebo, and if it was placebo, was a powerful placebo, that way it would have been powerful than the magnets.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Plus it’s you, and you know, your body, you see how you, you see a real response and that’s amazing information, certainly not textbook information. Right?

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Exactly. Exactly. So I started studying more and more about this. Eventually I met an MD-PhD from the Czech Republic, Dr. and he said he had a manuscript. He had translated a lot of that literature, the Eastern European literature, which is not accessible to the west. ‘Cause those journal articles that they publish in Eastern Europe are obscure journals. They’re not like the New England Journal of Medicine or the Lancet or JAMA. So it’s hard to get access to it. And on top of that, it’s in a Cyrillic language.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Exactly.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right, so Dr. had translated a lot of this for his PhD, his PhD was in electromagnetic medicine basically. And so he provided me with the manuscript and we published the book together called Magnetic Therapy in Eastern Europe: A Review of 30 years of Research. So that’s now 20, 25 years ago, 20 years ago, that I published that book. So now it’s like 50 years of experience that they’ve had versus what we’ve had, but it was an eyeopening book because it provided at least the doctor from a doctor’s perspective, a lot more science behind what it is magnetic therapy is doing.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Then I started working with electromagnetic therapy devices from Europe, gained a lot more experience. So I’ve been working with magnetic fields now for 30 years, as I said, and set up a website, drpawluk.com, D-R-P-A-W-L-U-K.com. And that’s got a ton of information on it. Objective, I’m not oriented or pushing for any particular magnetic system. Here’s the science, here’s what magnetic therapy does and so on. Well, a website has limitations. A book has limitations. Radio has limitations. So any medium that you want, it’s going to have its own sets of limitations. So eventually I said, “Okay, we’ve got to produce a book.” So that’s what we did. So I published this book called Power Tools For Health. And the basis of that book was to provide people with more of the science. 

It’s not so scientific that the average person can’t read it, but people needed to know the mechanisms of action of magnetic field therapy. And they needed to know what I also want to do is to show how you can take those actions and you apply it to a disease. So once you, as a clinician know, here’s the disease, here’s the pathophysiology of that disease. Here are the treatment options for that disease. Here are the outcomes of those treatments for that disease. Then you say, “Okay, well now we understand what magnetic therapy does. How can that work either in conjunction or as an alternative to other therapies?” So the book then has 500 references, well substantiated supported for those particular 50 conditions. So PMFs do a lot more than that. A lot more. So again, I want you to understand the basic action. You say, well, now you open up a huge vista of possibilities to heal biology heal not only humans, but also animals.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Any biology, so that’s sort of like the Genesis of where we are today. So magnetic therapy is I think very well supported. There are thousands of articles, I have a library of about 30,000 abstracts on the biologic effects of magnetic fields.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Great and bad.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Amazing. You know, this is super important because you know, there’s a lot of fear out there in the audience that’s watching today. Mostly ’cause they’re, you know, like when you’re healthy, you can make sort of good judgments or at least you feel like you have all the time in the world to be able to investigate, read, you know, look around. When you got a chronic element, like Lyme disease. You first off, you’re not feeling great. You know, you’re kind of very anxious to try to get a solution that will work. 

If you’ve had a chronic Lyme challenge, you probably exhausted most of your money. You’ve gone to many doctors, you’ve got your family trying to support you. And then, you know, you have to convince yourself and other people why this technology is going to be a important tool. And, and that’s, and I use that word, those words specifically, because it isn’t a panacea. It isn’t the answer, but it is one of the important tools that a Lyme patient can use in order for them to help jumpstart their bodies back into a good, healthy, vibrant state.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

To have vitality back.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

My goal, one of my goals for… My primary goal using magnetic field therapy is to heal. So like the spider bite, I don’t want to just remove my itching and pain sensation from the bite. I want to heal the infection. I want to heal the, the insult to the body. Now, along the way, you’re going to remove symptoms, along the way you’re going to improve function. But if you don’t heal, everything comes back or it remains, it doesn’t go away and you have to continue to do the treatment.

 Now we are not as smart as our bodies, right? We have about a hundred trillion cells in our bodies. Every cell in our body has about 2000 biochemical processes per second. And it’s constantly changing and shifting and adjusting and rebalancing. Anytime you put a stimulus in the body have to react and try to rebalance itself to what it considers to be good balance or normal balance. So anything that we’re doing has to try to shift that whole balance to a point of healing so that it doesn’t come back and magnetic field therapy has that possibility. It stimulates the natural healing processes of the tissues. And as, as you said, we’re in fear with what we hear about 5G and 4G and wifi and in other words what we call EMFs. We’re at fear of that. People don’t know the difference between EMFs and PEMFs.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, this is big. So let’s really unpack this because the 5G, 7G, 10G however far they’re gonna go.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Whatever it becomes.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, those frequencies act very differently to the body and to nature all plants and animals on the earth than what we’re talking about, because PEMF is very specific frequencies. And, and also what’s really interesting to me is the mechanism of pulsing that stress, that, that puts on the body and everybody thinks of stress. I’m so stressed out like it’s a bad thing, but the way that the body responds and changes and grows is through little stressors. And as you’ve just articulated, the brain is sort of the master mind of all this stuff has to keep rebalancing these stressors. So the outcome at the other end of the tunnel is somewhat normal called homeostasis. And so it works hard to try to create that balance. And I think part of the challenge that Lyme patients that are listening today are feeling is that their bodies, their internal chemistry’s are not balanced. And so we have to kind of try to move them towards balance so that all the systems of the body can work in symphony together to create, you know, a healthy, vibrant person. 

So, so spend some time and, and tell the audience people, the viewers like the difference between unhealthy or the EMFs that people are experiencing that might stress them in the wrong way. And PEMF, that’s used as a, as a health device to create that primal platform for healing.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So we can go back to basics in terms of how these fields are generated. So an EMF generally, same cell phones, wifi, smart meters, those are broadcast frequencies like radio and television waves. They’re in the atmosphere, they’re broadcast out into space 360. Now they may be directional to some extent, but basically they’re trying to be in broadcast 360 degrees and that’s different. So they broadcast out into space and we are in the way. Now, if you have to be a long way away from a tower, your, your exposure is going to be minimal unless you’re extraordinarily sensitized, sensitized, and your nervous system is sensitized, you have a lot of inflammation, then that’s different, but generally speaking, you have to have a strong hit to the body to be dramatically affected by it. 

Now, chronically you could be affected on a, on a sort of a nitpicking basis day-to-day, and that could unbalance you as well. But these frequencies, because their broadcasts are indiscriminate, they’re not designed for healing, they’re just, they’re designed for other purposes. And we happened to have gotten in the way of those other purposes, but we all use our cell phones, right? So we are dependent on them too. And we have electricity in our homes. We have power lines. We have all that stuff because we do depend on it and need it, but we have to be able to live with it. The other characteristics, besides the fact that it’s broadcasted to space is that EMS environment, I call them environmental magnetic fields. EMF stands for electromagnetic fields.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, I call it environmental magnetic fields, EMFs. So they are usually very, very short wavelengths. Okay, so they’re going out into space and they’re, they’re bouncing and they’re waving into space, into the atmosphere. And they’re very short wavelengths, then what happens with very short wavelengths? They get absorbed by the body, they don’t pass through. 

When they, when those wavelengths hit the body, they get absorbed by it. Now around us, they’re passing by us, but our body gets in the way. Now, if a wavelength is a hundred feet long, what’s it going to do? It’s going to pass through the body. So about a hundred megahertz is a defining line about the wavelengths at a hundred megahertz you have a wavelength that’s about three meters, sorry that’s a meter long.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Which is about three feet.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yep. So it’s going to go through the body. Now, if it hits your head, it’s not going to go through your body. It’s going to land in your body. So that’s one of the key differentiators is it goes into the body and they’re very short frequencies. Now PEMFS have a completely different nature to them. They’re still part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but they have a completely different nature. And what you’re doing with a PEMF is you need a control unit. You need something that’s going to produce power and send that power down a line, down a wire. And that wire then produces a magnetic field, but as a subtle difference so we have two wires going in opposite directions right next to each other, which is what most electrical cords are doing, right? 

There’s an outgoing path and a returning path. But when you take that wire that’s now like this, and you separate it into a loop. Now those magnetic fields don’t cancel it, so the wire going like this, the magnetic fields are canceling each other to a great extent. So when you separate it into a loop or what we call a coil, then the magnetic field is free to go into space. And then that’s subject to what we call the right-hand rule. There’s lots of other complicated physics, but other thoughts about magnetic therapy and electromagnetics and scalar energies and all that stuff. But for the most part science says that if a current flowing in this direction, the direction of my thumb, then the magnetic field is, in the right-hand perpendicular dimension compared to the flow of the current. So you need the current to produce the field but that field basically is what we call a closed loop. 

So the environmental magnetic fields are open loop, they don’t return back, like a magnet, a static magnet has a loop, but it closes back on itself onto the magnet. Well pulse electromagnetic fields do the same thing, they’re a closed loop. So they go out and back, collapse back, they collapse back onto themself. They go out into space, in other words, they go out, but they’re collapsing right back again. So if I have an electromagnetic cord right here, and you’re three feet away, depending on the intensity of that coil, you’re probably not going to feel anything. Your body’s not going to have that reaction to that magnetic field, because it’s collapsing back on itself, it’s pulling back continuously. And the faster, the more rapidly the pulsing is, the more it collapses back so that doesn’t get a chance to really go out and do anything to anybody else. So you can have two people or three people sitting in a doctor’s office in a common room, one person getting magnetic therapy, and the other people are barely affected by it.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Understood.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right, because of the closed field. So then the PEMFS are designed for therapeutic purposes, they’re not designed for communication, they’re designed for therapeutic purposes and they’re… So in other words, the wavelengths, they’re not wavelengths, it’s a pulse, but that pulse then collapses back on itself. And as it passes through the body, it’s like the wind blowing from the trees except it’s going through and being pulled back like a yo-yo or an elastic band.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Interesting. That’s an amazing distinction that you’re showing the viewers today because different than the broadcasting frequency is used on these teller, these towers, and you can actually, there’s a website you can type in your zip code and see how many towers are around within a four square mile radius of that zip code. Now, when I walk outside my door, I can see three towers. When I type in my zip code, there’s 43 towers within four miles of my home. And these are broadcasting frequencies that are only going in one direction. They’re not being pulled back in, like you articulated. And that’s a big difference because when my body gets in the way of that micro tower, those frequencies are actually coming into my body and they’re being stored in my cells-

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

They’re being absorbed.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. And that’s the harm potentially, that you could get from, from those towers and from those microwaves and from that form of EMF, as opposed to the, the kind of technology PEMF that we’re talking about, that’s designed for therapy, where it’s a closed loop. We send a signal out, we create that, that short term microsecond stress, pulse, and then we pull it back in so that it’s not being sorted into the tissue. It’s just stimulating the body to create a whole bunch of amazing physiological attributes. And we’re going to spend a few minutes and you’re going to have an opportunity to tell us some of the great things that pulsed electromagnetic fields can do. But I just want to make sure that you’ve completed your thought on, on sort of the technical part of, of differentiating EMF from PEMF.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So the other characteristic about EMF is that because it’s absorbed by the body, it heats. Right, and that’s why we use microwave ovens to heat, to create heating. We’re stimulating the water content of that whatever food is, we are food then essentially to a microwave that’s in the air. So it creates heating, and the heating is what causes the damage in the tissue that potentially causes damage, but it’s definitely a stimulus. 

Now it doesn’t have to be negative, it can warm you up a little bit. So we could use a little bit of microwave energy just to heat the tissue. We use microwaves in medicine to actually burn tissue. If you want to burn a wort, use radio frequencies, we’ll call radio-frequency fibrillation to burn the wort. You can burn a nerve, you’ve got a disc pressing on a nerve and you can’t get rid of the disc. You’re not a surgical candidate, problems not gonna be solved by doing that. Then what do they do? They remove your pain by burning the nerve. So in certain cases, we use that technology to help us, even though it’s being destructive. So it’s controlled destruction.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay. That’s interesting.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yes, it’s hard to imagine that, but yes, it’s used that way. The prostates, for example, you burn a prostate, the prostate is at large, you want to shrink it, you burn it, you can cut it out, but that causes a lot more harm than trying to burn it.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So PEMFs because they pass through the body completely, they do not stay resident, they’re not used by the body. They’re not, they don’t interact with the body. In other words, the PEMF ignores the body. If you do have a magnetic stimulator here and you have a detector here, and you put a body in between, right? You’ll still measure that magnetic field out here, way beyond the body. You move the body away and you continue the magnetic field, it’s the same, no difference.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Interesting. Very interesting.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Body does not affect the field. Now the field affects the body because it’s a stimulus, it’s an electromagnetic stimulus and then that generates charge production in the body is one of the actions, one of the primary actions of magnetic fields is charged production. So in other words, it wakes up the body, you talked about energy medicine. It basically is waking up the body and that, that energy is then used by the body for all the things that it needs to do.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Interesting. Okay. Let’s shift a little bit to Lyme and, and some of the attributes of using PEMF a Lyme patient to use PEMF therapy, to help them, you know, start to create that healthy platform.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So I try to be as reductionistic and as simple as I can with the concepts of Lyme and Lyme of course is very complicated, but in my sort of phenomenology, the way I explain it to patients is that Lyme disease is the infection itself. Then when you attack it, whether it’s attacked by the body, or it’s attacked by antibacterials, or however else, it’s attacked, it breaks apart. It breaks apart, and then those parts can hide out inside cells. So those are called other morphologic forms. So the may be long gone. It may be gone, but it’s hidden whole or in part, right? So those are the two aspects of the infection, but then that infection causes a reaction by the body’s immune system, right? Like it does like any infection would the body attacks it. And that attack is relatively indiscriminate. Part of it breaks apart. You destroy the organism, you may destroy it, you may kill it, but like any other infection, when you kill something, you leave parts behind. 

It’s not like it’s removed like that from the body, it just disintegrates. Fragments and that fragmentation is what we call herxing, the Herxheimer reaction. And we learned about Herxheimer reactions through our studies and research and experience in treating syphilis and syphilis is a disease. And so our knowledge about syphilis is centuries old, right? Over a century old. So it’s a , so don’t have similar actions to syphilis. And the way we treat it, what happens is so you herx, when you’re treating it, you break it apart. But then you get the immune reaction. So the immunity, so this is picking up that part, the immune reaction is relative. It can be focused, but it’s also not discriminate. So you have antibodies that are very specific for the organism, but then you have a generalized immune reaction as well, like with interferon, the production of interferon by the body and the production of cytokines and so on so it gets, the whole picture gets very complicated in terms of what’s actually happening and in terms of the body’s dealing with it. 

So when we use magnetic field therapy, it’s relatively indiscriminate as well. But that indiscriminate response of the immune system can also harm you because the cells that are damaged by the by the infection, and maybe by the other morphologic forms are also impacting normal tissues. And those normal tissues then become attacked because they now are different and the body recognizes them as not itself, which is what we call auto-immune.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right. So you have this autoimmune reaction and then you have the, the damage left by it. So you have the infections, other morphologic forms, you have the immune response, and then you have the damage. Another aspect of course, is the co-infections.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I’m glad you’re going there ’cause that was my next area for you.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And what is the most common co-infection? So people usually talk about Babesia or Ehrlichia, right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Bartonella, yep.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And Bartonella. So those are common co-infections, but what is the most common co-infection? EBV.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Why? 85% of the populations have been exposed to EBV. And when you’re done with your EBV infection, whether you know it or not, you could have had a cold and that was your EBV or you could have been wiped out and lost a semester of school in high school or college by EBV. So there’s a spectrum of EBV infections as well. So EBV is resident in the body, and we know that because we know that EBV can cause lymphoma and EBV could reside in lymphocytes could basically live forever in the lymphocyte as passed along. So EBV is the most common co-infection, and so how much of the, how much of the infections even though you measure yourself for Bartonella, Ehrlichia and so on. Right? Does that mean that, that’s all of you had as co-infections?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

No, of course not.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

No, right. On top of that, anytime the tissues are compromised by any kind of infection, there are come a lot of other co-writers including bacteria. Could reawaken the strep that you may still have in your adenoids. Right, so in other words, the whole thing becomes gang warfare.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Really what you’re describing is that imbalance in the microbiome, we all have a little pneumonia. We all have a little streptococcus. We all have a little Epstein-Barr. We inherit it just in the process of birthing. So these organisms generally live in, in symphony or, you know, they live in harmony together until, unless or until the stressors come in, it could be epigenetic. It could be environmental stressors. It could be just, you know,

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Emotional stressors.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, emotional, physical stress, whatever that is, that kicks in your or suppresses that immune response and then it…

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Or imbalances it.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah and allows the imbalance to, to happen. And the immune system is overwhelmed and can’t manage it. And then at some point we become symptomatic, and so really it’s interesting that you’re the way that you’re showing the audience about the sort of the micro mechanisms that are going on because, because we’re, we think Lyme is the enemy you know and parasites are the enemy, but actually we all have a lot of them and we need a lot of these micro-organisms in order for our digestive tracks to work properly, many of our, of our systems to work well. It’s really the inbounds that we’re discussing today and how we get back to balance, and that’s the, that’s the hard road. 

So, so when we talk about root cause, Lyme could be the root cause, but it creates a cascade of events of all the organisms that are around it. And most recently, and this is the last three to four years of our studies in our lab. We’re noticing the influences of mold. And when they come into the story of all these other organisms, that’s I find really intriguing because we can work with Lyme patients that are perfectly functional and then they get exposed to mold and they go from functional to dysfunctional almost overnight. And so…

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It’s one more straw on that callus back ’cause all you need… And everything else is innocuous and you’re dealing with it just fine, but just that little extra straw.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right. A tipping point. Okay. So, so let’s unpack PEMF, what are some of the attributes? If I were a Lyme patient and I, you know, was debilitated or I was functional, how could I use this kind of technology to either maintain optimal health and or to help me get back to, get back on my feet? It’s kind of a full range, but do your best to try to give the audience a view about that.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Pathophysiologically, what’s happening in the body with Lyme. It’s no longer, as you said the infection, that may be long gone. So now we don’t have Lyme, we have Lyme causes a problem, and we call that chronic Lyme. And in the medical community, the scientific research community, they don’t see chronic Lyme. They don’t call it chronic Lyme, what they were calling it basically is the consequences of chronic Lyme, including the consequences of COVID, including long haul syndrome. Right? All of these other infections can have their tails of reactions in the body. But what’s the most common impact on the body of any infection, inflammation, tissue destruction. So the organism may be an issue, but nevermind that organism. 

What about all the other organisms? What about all the other viruses that are in your body? Nevermind, EBV. How many of us have had the chickenpox? How many of us have a shingles virus in our tissues, right? That we’re living with and when the shingles get activated, stressors, a Lyme disease, and where does the shingle show up? It may not show up in rashes. It may show up in the brain, it may show up in the nervous system, it may show up in the liver. Any viruses can show up in any other part of the body. Once they’re latent and they’re hidden. So then basically we have the infection, we have the immune reaction to it. 

We have the tissue destruction and chronic inflammation is probably at the root cause of all of this. And one of the classic important aspects of what PEMFs do is they help to reduce inflammation. And they do that through the adenosine… They do multiple mechanisms, but one of the mechanisms is the adenosine receptor. And so what research is showing is that the adenosine receptor through ATP, and the ATP’s attachment to the adenosine receptor is responsible for reducing chronic inflammation. And there are about four different types of adenosine receptors. PEMFs basically work through two of them, and what research is showing is that magnetic… Pulse electromagnetic fields at an optimal intensity 15 gauss, 1.5 millitesla. So 15 gauss at the adenosine receptor has the optimal effect on reducing inflammation.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So there’s a problem there, but magnetic fields drop off very rapidly, just like sound like, you know, heat, cold, et cetera. They all drop off very fast and that’s called radiation so that it’s not ionizing radiation, but even ionizing radiation, we have to account for the natural decline in that radiation, as you move away from the source. So if you have white blood cells that carry the adenosine receptor, they’re floating all over the body and you optimally stimulate those adenosine receptors with 15 gauss that you have to account for where the body you’re treating. So if you’re treating the skin superficially, the optimal magnetic field intensity is 15 gauss.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right. If you’re treating the liver or the brain. So for example, in the brain, if you’re reducing inflammation in the brain and helping the body fight whatever’s going on, then you have to account for the fact that you try to stimulate across the whole brain. So for one side of the brain to the other is about six inches. So to have a magnetic stimulus on this side of the brain, to give you 15 gauss this far away, you need to have about 4,000 gauss. You could treat on one side and get 2,000 gauss, you could treat on the other side and get about 2,000 gauss in the middle. So you can do it that way or you can just get a system that’s strong enough to actually do across the whole area.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

But the same thing is true for the liver and the lungs, the long haul syndrome, for example, with COVID, you need to be able to treat through the entire lung. So with Lyme disease, the question is where is the inflammation? And I’ve gone beyond typically gone beyond the idea of antibiotics are going to solve everything with Lyme disease, right? Most of the time, by the time I get to people or people get to me, it’s chronic inflammation. Whether it’s immune reactions or whether it’s just, again just general autoimmune reactions or general immune reactions to help to deal with whatever inflammation’s going on in the body. 

So inflammation is the key, but also if the tissues are damaged, we have to heal them. And where you have inflammation, you have swelling. It’s called a cell injury model. You have mitochondrial damage, you have swelling, you have decreased circulation, you have poor immune response. You have a genetic breakdown of the tissues, right? You have a misfolding of proteins in the, in the cell membranes. So all of these self-injury actions or reactions in the body are dealt with by magnetic fields, they basically work along the whole cell injury model. And so that’s why it’s important. So it’s nondescript, it’s not specific for Lyme disease. It’s not specific for EBV or Bartonella, Ehrlichia, et cetera. So we have to move past the concept that just give you an antibiotic and you’re going to be fine.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right. Well, you know, they sort of MD allopathic approach is to sort of really kind of home it into a micro root cause. And then just deal with that. But what really, what you’re talking about is a systematic approach because all of the systems in the body somewhat are co-dependent on each other. And if you have one that’s out of balance, it draws on another. And that’s where the spiraling down occurs. So I love what you’re talking about because most of the viewers think that the enemy is the Lyme or the coinfection and so forth. And if we move away from that and just take a big, giant step back and just look at the global approach of healing your body, creating that healthy platform, when like, just when you are out of the womb, when you’re brand new. 

Here we’re talking about a real solution to help you find your way back. And it’s not an overnight deal, but you can get results like for instance, I wanted to talk about pain relief and nutritional, you know, absorption. Like there are a lot of other attributes to this stimulus PEMF that people should understand. It’s not just singular and it’s not just like, laser-focused, it’s, we’re talking about full body healing and that involves many systems. And so let’s just talk about that for a minute, like the pain relief aspects and other things that you’ll get along the way while you’re using this kind of technology.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Let’s address that in a second. But to go back to the point you just made that it’s holistic. And what happens is I’ve mentioned that there are like 25, 27 different actions of magnetic fields. You can’t dial it. You can’t dial pain management, you can’t dial circulation. You can’t dial anti-inflammatory action, it’s all happening at the same time. What you’re doing is you’re providing the body with a neutral stimulus and the body’s going to take from that stimulus, whatever it wants when it wants, how much it wants, right? So essentially you’re providing a neutral stimulus and then the body does the rest. 

So I can’t say you’re going to get pain reduction first. I can’t say you’re going to get circulation first. I can’t say you’re going to get anti-inflammatory action first. It’s all happening at the same time, and depending on the tissue and the amount of damage is done, you’re going to see a sort of a cascade of events resulting from the stimulus for the magnetic therapy over time. And the longer you do it, the more chance you give the body to heal the tissues. So since all these different actions are happening at the same time, let’s just understand. It’s fine. Let’s just let, let the magnetic therapy do its job. The body will fix itself, given the rights stimulus and having the, having the tools available. So in other words, you can make a house, you can remodel a house or make a house without bricks and mortar. You can’t rebuild tissue. You got a cut, you got a fracture. You can’t rebuild the tissue unless you have the basic nutrients available in those tissues to do the work that has to be done to repair them. So you need all that as well.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Oftentimes when I’m describing this to, in our coaching and our clinic, I tell people, “If you want to form a word, you need the letters.” That’s your body, your body needs certain core elements in order for it to function properly. When you throw the alphabet at your body, which is all the letters, it will form, it will take those letters and form them into a word because you’re giving them all the tools that they need in order for it to form that word. 

When you put using PEMF technology, your body might be deficient in one or two categories, but you’re giving them the full plate to choose from. And your body will continue to feed on the deficiencies until it creates that normality again. And then it can actually produce, you know, a good primal platform for healing, support your immune system. And once that happens, then you’re self-regulating, you’re able to actually, you know, perform, feel, heal, be vital again. And so this is sort of breakthrough understanding on PEMF that in fact, people are looking for that microscopic tool. But in fact, what we’re giving them is the full plate, so the body can actually pick and choose what it needs at any given time.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I think what you just said triggers in me to explain the fact that we are electromagnetic. We think we’re tissue, right? We have skin, but what makes skin? Molecules, right? We’re made of molecules and electrolytes, right? So we’re not actually water, we’re electrolyte soup, right. We have a lot of stuff in that electrolyte soup, including proteins and all kinds of elements, but what controls, the molecules? Physics. Sodium and chloride can’t dock to make salt, unless the physics allows it and that’s electromagnetic. So all we’re doing to the body is we’re giving the body an electromagnetic stimulus to stimulate something that it’s already doing. It just needs more of it.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So we got into trouble because we didn’t have enough energy, fast enough to deal with whatever the insult was to rebalance things and the electromagnetic energy charge production, that magnetic fields cause in the body now give the body more, more energy to be able to, to do the work. An example, the FDA has approved PEMFs to heal fractures that won’t heal called non-union fractures. So you got a fracture that hasn’t healed for seven years, and all of a sudden you start stimulating that fracture with magnetic fields. And all of a sudden it wakes up and then three months, six months, nine months, depending on the body that fracture is now healed. 

All it needed was the extra energy and the magnetic field provided that stimulus. Now, in that case with those fractures, people were having to use these lower intensity magnetic fields for upwards of 12 hours a day. You can’t just do a treatment and be done, it’s not a pill, you don’t pop it and you’re in heaven, you’re great now. So you have to keep pushing at because the body needs, the process of healing has many, many, many, many phases to it. So you’re providing energy along with the entire distance of the healing process. And that’s what we’re doing with anything we’re doing with infections like Lyme disease.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Interesting. That makes me think about just generally speaking about treatment times. Earlier you told us about, depending on how far we want that signal to travel, you would, based on the device you’re using, you would dial up or down the intensity of the signal. So I know it’s kind of a funny question, or I’m looking for not a, like a complete answer, but generally speaking, if I were to start using PEMF therapy, are we talking about eight minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, 12 hours a day? What kind of, you know, like to get jump-started and then for maintenance, I know there might be two different discussions, but give the viewers a little feel for how long this therapy is in order for them to kind of get back on their feet.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That’s a good question is yes.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay. Thank you. I’m happy that you clarified that.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So yeah. So let me, let me explain what I mean. All of those are true, but I tell people I don’t control anything. I gave you a stimulus. You’re giving your body a stimulus. Your body’s in control. Now, if you honestly believe that all you need is eight minutes. You know, I mentioned you have 2000 biochemical processes per second in every cell of the body, and you know itself, how much stimulation do you need? You need as much as you need.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right, so if you’re going to give it eight minutes and you have a miracle, fantastic. That’s not my experience. So in the fracture healing, people as I said, were having to use the magnetic therapy upwards of 12 hours a day. Now, if they use a different magnetic system and it had much higher intensity, maybe they would only need to do it four hours a day. But it’s not eight minutes. So most of the time you… I usually recommend a minimum of 30 minutes. The problem is people are not going to spend the time that they often need to do the treatment. And then you have to repeat. So magnetic therapy is like a rock in a pond. You drop it into the pond and the waves go on, but they die out. So when the waves die out, what do you do? Throw another rock in the pond, right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You talk about trillions of cells and they’re constantly regenerating. And so this is the kind of therapy that you would mostly benefit if you had access to it and were able to give yourself a energy boost or balancing energy boost almost every day, right?

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Not almost everyday, you could almost say almost every minute, but that’s not, that’s not practical. So the answer, yes, you’re right. I think I’ve always been of the mindset as a holistic physician that you’ve got to take care of yourself. I tell my patients, “I’m not your doctor.” And their face drops, I said, “You’re your doctor, I’m your consultant and teacher, I’ve got to teach you how to doctor yourself.” So we have to do the work and that means you’re gonna have to do as much work as you need to do to meet your objectives. So if you’re 30 years old or 25 years old, you probably need less work. If you’re 60 years old, you need more work. If you’re 80 years old you need even more work. Now, if you started working, when you were 25 with magnetic fields, by the time you’re 80, you may need a lot less time than the person who just started using magnetic therapy, because there’s a lot more to catch up with. 

And because the body’s slower in its healing responses. So you need to find the time that works best for you. You try, so I usually recommend, say, for example, I recommend whole body treatment every day. So even if you get a magnetic system to treat your headaches from your Lyme or your shoulder pain from your Lyme or your tinnitus, tinnitus, or your liver, or your heart, your gut, whatever the effects are in your body, then you treat and you see the response. 

This is the same as athletic training, right? You train, you push, you try out, you see what you’re trying to accomplish. If you can’t accomplish it, you go back and train more. And you keep doing that, you push, you train, you push, you train, you push, you train until finally you meet your goals. So magnetic field therapy is like that too. You push see what the response of the body is ’cause we don’t have the imaging tools if you will, to see what’s going on at an ATP level, at a cellular level at the inflammation level in the tissue directly. We can do a C-reactive protein and tell you what’s going on in the body in general, but it’s not going to tell me what’s going on with my finger. If my finger hurts, my knuckle stiffed and sore, well CRP is not going to be using that help unless it’s a systemic problem. So you’re going to judge, you’re going to figure out for yourself, your body’s responses to the stimulus. And if you can put the time in, you’ll get better, faster, but you can’t get any better, faster than the tissue can allow. Right. So cornea has healed in 24 hours. Skin takes two to three weeks, bones take years.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Right. So if you’ve got a fracture, even though you can take your cast off in 12 weeks, you keep doing x-rays. The x-rays will keep showing you that fracture site for a couple of years. And if you did something even more sensitive, like an MRI of that fracture site, you’ll see that probably goes on for about five or six years, right? That’s why we say we’re a new person every seven years, only because it’s the skeleton that’s the slowest and the nervous system are the slowest to heal so it depends on the tissue.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I wonder why that’s what BMW does when they come out with a new edition of their car every seven years. If they’re just trying to stay in sync with the mind-body experience in driving one of those vehicles.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Yes, we’re gonna have to get you a job for BMW.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. Dr. Pawluk this was just amazing. I could talk to you for days. We only have a few more minutes today and I just want to leave the audience, the viewers with just some thoughts that you may want to offer us as to suggestions that we could use tomorrow, or you know, directions that we can go. And then please let everybody know how we can get ahold of you besides buying your book, which is amazing. I read some of your material already and you’ve been in the Townsend letter, you’re well-documented as well as the videos that are available. So let us know how we can get ahold of you, you know, what kind of, where we can start and what kind of message would you like to leave us with as we come to a close today?

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, we mentioned about bricks and mortar, a body that’s healthy already and then it has an injury is going to heal a lot faster. And even though you’re going to heal on your own, we’re basically leaving it to chance for you to heal on your own. So magnetic therapy removes a lot of that chance, but if you’re already getting plenty of rest. You’re eating a well balanced diet, a nice high antioxidant level diet. You’re getting plenty of proteins and fats and the right amount of carbs for you and types of carbs. 

All of those things are in place already then you’re going to respond a lot faster. If you’re gonna do magnetic field therapy, you need to be doing those other things too. You can’t rely on any one therapy, it doesn’t matter what therapy it is. You can’t rely on any one therapy to be the solution for all problems, it’s got to be multifactorial. Now PEMFs there are different kinds. So in my new book, which is not out yet called Supercharge Your Health With PEMF Therapy. So it’ll be out later this year. It’s a more practical book. 

The Power Tools book gives you the basics, a lot of the basic science and gives you some ideas about how to look for a magnetic field and so on. And there’s even a chart in there of all the different devices that I have personally researched and used and recommend. The new book will give you more practical detail about that. And no matter what magnetic system you get, it’s going to give you some level of benefit. It may not give you the benefits you want. So the idea then is to try to tailor the magnetic therapy to your needs. Unfortunately, and I don’t want to be disparaging, but unfortunately, given the science on inflammation, there’s a lot of magnetic therapy devices that are being sold at… People are being told, all you need is eight minutes a day. That’s a marketing gimmick, it’s not reality, it’s not science. And the people who do that, haven’t read the book and they haven’t been through my website or they’re at a complete denial, they don’t want to read it because now they have to change their minds.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, they’re marketing the latest and greatest, and it’s more about sales than it is about true healing.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Exactly. So again, my perspective is to try to make sure people end up with the right equipment used in the right way and having actually appropriate expectations for what, what the equipment is actually going to do for them. But no matter what equipment you use, it’s going to give you some level of benefit. So, as I mentioned at the very beginning, I learned that magnetic field therapy stimulates acupuncture points and meridians. So every time you do a magnetic therapy session, no matter where you put it on the body, you’re going to be doing acupuncture too. It’s just not with needles. And as we know, we can stimulate acupuncture points on a lot of ways with heat and light and needles, electrical stimulation, and so on. 

So magnetic therapy then get tailored for yourself. You can get that kind of information on drpawluk.com. You can get it in the book, you can sign up, go to my website, you can sign up for the new book, Supercharge Your Health With PMS. And if you got a significant Lyme problem, I consult with a lot of Lyme patients, you can get a consultation, but I’m going to warn people, if you want a $250 machine, don’t bother. If you’re not willing to take a recommendation for what you really need to help you, then yes, if you’re serious about it, then you can get a consultation. I’ll give you a free half hour consultation.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow. That’s amazing. What a great offer what a great offer. If you’re viewing this today and you don’t take advantage of getting a little piece of Dr. Pawluk to understand the true nature of healing with using PEMF, you’re missing an amazing opportunity. Dr. Pawluk you’ve told us so much, you dove a lot deeper than I thought you would go today for the audience but I super appreciate that. I know everybody here will really get something that they can start with tomorrow. And, you know, sometimes you have to pay more to get more. And the other take-home that I just want people to understand is the best doctors, as good as you are, doc, and as good as I might be in my, in my perspective, the best doctor is the doctor that’s inside of us. And if we can wake that doctor-

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

No, no, you’re wrong about that. That’s the only doctor.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay. Well, oftentimes we ignore that voice-

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Our own doctor yes.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah and so I, I really appreciate your words of wisdom. You shared a lot with us today. I’m looking forward to meeting you personally again, and certainly enjoying another interview when we, when you have the, when you have the time, thank you so much for joining us today.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Thank you for having me on. And it’s a pleasure to meet you and your, your tribe, your viewers.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Fantastic.

Hey everybody, it’s Robby Besner. Thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it. And we’re looking forward to having you with us tomorrow for another great interview.