Supercharging Health with Magnetic Field (PEMF) Therapy

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

All right, well, let’s talk about magnets. So PEMF stands for pulse electromagnetic fields. Electromagnetic, so the basis of it is magnetic. So you can have magnets that are fridge magnets, or little horseshoe magnets or bar magnets, things that stick to fridges and metal, right? Those are what we call static magnets. They’re permanent. They have benefits on the body as well. In fact in our discussion, we were talking about acupuncture and how magnetic fields can affect acupuncture points. So static magnets apply to an acupuncture point, affects the acupuncture point, just like needles do or electro-stimulation does, but they’re static. And that means they don’t penetrate very deep into the body and they’re hard to move around. And if they move around, they have to be in one place long enough to make a change in that tissue to affect that tissue. 

So ultimately static magnets have significant limitations. On the other hand, if you take a magnetic field and you move it, you start moving that magnetic field in and out of the body, for example, then that magnetic field is now very dynamic as opposed to a passive field. Now you have a much more dynamic field. The static magnet interacts with the body, but everything’s in motion in the body. So you’re relying on the motion of the body, not the magnet, and as the body’s motions pass through that static magnetic field, you get some action. Pain relief is one of those actions and tissue reduction and swelling reduction and so on, that works. But pulse magnetic fields feels that pulse right through the body in and out, much more active. Let’s get rid of the elephant in the room right away. And that’s PEMF versus EMF.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh, good.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

All right, EMF is WiFi and cell phones and all that or I call environmental magnetic fields, but they are electromagnetic fields too. They’re just environmental and they’re made differently and they’re made for different purposes. So they don’t account for biology. The people who made those cell phones, WiFi routers and microwaves that blast you through the atmosphere, their interest is not biology. They just cross their fingers that it doesn’t affect biology, which we know it does. But again, that’s different. So an EMF is broadcast by a tower, a microwave tower, into the atmosphere, and then it lands on whatever’s gonna receive it, just like radios and televisions. They’re out in the airwaves. And then there are receivers. The receivers take that signal, transform that signal, and now you hear it or you watch it or see it or whatever. But microwaves are the same thing. They’re just broadcasting to the environment. 

They’re what we call open field, you know, magnetic fields, they’re open. Pulse magnetic fields, on the other hand are, are produced by a current flowing through a wire. And we call that the right hand rule. My thumb is the current, the direction of the current, and the magnetic field is developed that’s perpendicular to the flow of that current. So every time that current pulses, the magnetic field gets created and opens up and collapses back on itself. It’s called a closed loop. It doesn’t get broadcast into the atmosphere. It’s restricted to the environment of that wire. Now, the current can determine the size of the magnetic field that’s produced, so a very weak magnetic field, or a very weak current is gonna have a very tiny little magnetic field. Power lines clearly are producing magnetic fields. 

And they’re huge ’cause they’re very powerful currents in those power lines. Fortunately, they die off with distance, just like all magnetic fields do, just like sun does and sound and heat and cold. So, but basically a pulse magnetic field that is a current in a wire that’s producing a magnetic field around. The current is shielded as opposed to tens of machines or electrical stimulation where it’s touching the skin. It’s not shielding. You’re doing it on purpose. You’re basically electrocuting the tissue. Control the electrocution, hopefully, right? Magnetic fields don’t touch the skin. They go right through. They’re shielded. They go right through the shielding right into the body. And we use that principle then, that magnetic field pulsing through the body then has all kinds of actions in the body. That’s the primary distinction between those.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s perfect. So then we’re gonna get into all of those distinctions and we’ve been interested in PMF and I think it’s a great tool. And, on my journey of integrated medicine for the last 15 years, one thing that happens is everywhere I go and all the clinics that I visit and the people that I meet and see, one common theme that you see almost everywhere I go is people working with PEMF from big, expensive units to little, you know, handheld units that people use. And so I’ve been very interested in it. Now you’re a clinician, you’re a family doctor and we have some of the same training. I did the Helms acupuncture course in, I don’t know, 2003 or something like that. But you did it a little bit before me.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I finished in 2000.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, oh, so we were like ships in the nights.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Three years apart.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, okay, and then tell me how your experience of that and how that kind of led you into PEMF and how you got kind of going in your clinical practice ’cause I’d like to hear about that.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

What got me into acupuncture was I was a medical director of a group of family physicians in New Jersey. I had developed a practice, actually it was a multi-specialty practice, but my group was family medicine, family practice. And we had 14 family physicians in that group. So it was the biggest group of family physicians in the whole east coast back then, back in ’69, ’70. But you know, we all shared patients. We all rounded on each other’s patients. We had our rotations and so on. And in a very short period of time, we had two patients who almost died from GI bleeding and the commonality for those patients was ibuprofen. Right, one almost died, and one was, you know, very, very sick from it, had to have a partial gastrectomy. So I said, this is crazy medicine. You know, we’re treating people for their pain with something that’s going to potentially kill them, or wipe out their kidneys or cause GI bleeding or whatever other problems. 

I said, I have to find other alternatives. And I looked around at my peers, looked around at my specialists, my consultants and so on. They didn’t have any better solutions for me. So I said, obviously I have to go outside the house of medicine. Medicine is not going to give me the solution. And I knew about acupuncture. So I said, okay, I’m now gonna really step outside the house of medicine. I gonna really step outside my group, and they’re gonna go like stupid man, you know, what are you doing? This is not right. It’s not good medicine. Anyway, I did it. And unfortunately in 1990, nobody wanted needles. 

I couldn’t convince patients to do needles as much as I explained it, tried to explain, explain, explain, they wouldn’t do the needles. And so I said, well, how can I do acupuncture without needles? And discovered it in the orient, they were using magnets. There were other ways to do it as well. But I focused on the magnets ’cause now I could put a magnet on an acupuncture point or I could put it on the ears or I could put it in other places of the body and lo and behold you get benefits. It’s not as powerful as a needle, not necessarily. And it’s not as powerful as electrified acupuncture needles. So you and I were trained in electrical acupuncture, essentially, right, electrical acupuncture?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, actually, I still love that as the modality, because with that, basically what happens is you take a whole bunch of needles and you daisy chain. You basically hook electricity up and it basically runs an electrical pattern through muscles. And I found it to be extremely helpful for relieving muscle spasms.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Absolutely.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Especially for back pain.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Absolutely, no question about it. Plus a whole bunch of things, all the things that it does with the acupuncture system. But I discovered along the way that the acupuncture system is actually a DC current system. It’s DC current. And we know that acupuncture points have little wells in them, right. They have reduced resistance to electrical simulation. So that’s electrical, but what about the meridians? Well, it turns out that people have done studies now and proven that magnetic field, that basically it’s a DC current system. And when you have current of any kind, magnetic fields and current go together, hence electromagnetic. You cannot separate the two.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then just for people who are listening to this, at a high level, imagine that there’s an organ. And an organ in the body has a fairly significant electrical charge because of a concentration of mass, and the electrical charge creates an electrical field around that organ. And then that field is mapped onto the body. And then it is mapped and where it maps onto the body is where the meridians are.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Correct, but it’s not an electrical field.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Oh that’s right, it’s a magnetic field.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It’s a magnetic field.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s right. So then this got you into the idea of trying to basically use an external source to map a magnetic field onto the body, which is PEMF?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Correct, what sort of went beyond that, once I started using the magnets on a regular basis, you know, like we know that we can put a needle into an ashi point, a pain point, and it’s gonna do some stimulation to that pain point. It’s gonna increase circulation to the pain point. It’s gonna cause a wheel response of basically a healing response, an acute inflammatory response as part of the cell injury process. Well, I would put magnets on parts of the body or points of the body where there weren’t acupuncture points and there were still tissue effects. And so then the question becomes, what’s it doing? Why is this happening? And you go back to electromagnetic. 

You know, lo and behold down the road, I discovered PEMFs or magnetic fields had all kinds of other actions beyond acupuncture at a physiologic level. And I found out basically that acupuncture works a lot more indirectly, and acupuncture doesn’t really work so well at the cell level. It’s a much more indirect approach. And magnetic field therapy, because it does acupuncture, if you happen to overlay an acupuncture point and meridian, you’re getting that benefit anyway. But at the same time, you’re getting the direct cellular benefit of the magnetic field.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So tell me about your perspective on the cellular benefits of magnetic fields.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

So all cells that are not working, all organs that are not working are subject to what we call cell injury. At the cell level, they’re damaged in some fashion, whatever the cause, heat, cold, toxicity, burning, trauma, you name it, whatever the cause of the cell injury is. And when the cell injury happens, there’s a whole cascade of events that happen in that cell. And you could obviously multiply that to the cells in a tissue locally, a spider bite, or a wound or a burn. So once you get a wound, a cut it’s not one cell. Now it’s a collection of cells and there are different degrees of injury to the cells in that injury. If you can impact that cell damage process, the cell injury process, early in the process, you stop it from crossing the Rubicon. You stop it from crossing the line of no return. You get to a point of irreversible injury. 

And when you get to the point of irreversible injury, then eventually, at some point you might be able to see it with a naked eye. Certainly a cut, you’d see with a naked eye. But if you look at it in terms of microscopes and electron microscopes, and then CT scans and MRIs, and you can drill down to almost at a cellular level. Now you can see what’s happening directly at that tissue. And then you can see the magnetic field effects at those levels. Again, if you start early in the process, you could reverse the damage. Once it’s irreversible, apoptosis kicks in or necrosis kicks in and it’s very hard to recover it. 

But it’s rarely one cell, as I said. It’s usually collections of cells. So you have degrees of cell damage in the tissue. And again, the cells that are gonna die, they’re gonna die, but you want to get to the cells that aren’t gonna die, but they need help to do their processes and recover. So a good example is a nonunion. It’s a fracture that won’t heal. The body has done everything it possibly can to heal that fracture. In six months, if it hasn’t healed, it’s called a nonunion. You could have a nonunion for seven years and start PEMF therapy, and all of a sudden the fracture starts healing, a completely stalled injury.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And I’m glad you said that. That was literally my next question, because I’ve personally had probably 40 or 50 cases of either reviewing a chart or talking to someone or meeting someone who had a nonunion fracture and then PEMF helped them. So tell me what’s going on from a magnetic field perspective with a bone that broke and didn’t heal, and then what happens with that? What’s the process of that healing?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Well, first of all, you won’t be able to recover that bone if the periosteum is destroyed. So what happens is that you need the periosteum because that’s where the osteoblasts come from, the stem cells come from. So you need to stimulate the stem cells basically to cause that bone to start growing again. But you have to decrease the edema. You have to improve circulation, so you need angiogenesis. You need to stimulate the stem cells. You need mineralization. So there’s a whole bunch of processes that have to happen and PEMFs impact all of those in the sense, by providing more energy to the cell. So the cells in that area, they now have more energy. They could produce more ATP.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What’s the mechanism of the more energy to the cell?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It’s electrical, so basically it goes back to Faraday’s Law. When you pass a current through ions, when you pass a current through other charge flows in the tissues, then that activates and stimulates that charge flow, and that’s called Faraday’s Law. So based on the intensity of the magnetic field, how strong it is, how rapidly it rises, produces that slope going up on the way form, that slope increases charge in the tissues. That’s inductively coupled electrical stimulation of the tissue. Now the tissue has more energy and then it activates all sorts of processes.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So basically we’re fundamentally batteries. And so when you run a magnetic field through a collection of cells that fundamentally has an electrical charge, like a battery, you charge those cells up.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Exactly, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re charging the cell. We’re causing the cell to make more energy. The magnetic field is not the energy. The magnetic field is like the wind in the trees. It’s just passing through. It doesn’t get used up. It doesn’t stop, right? But passing through, now its got the ions here. All of a sudden, the ions start vibrating, and they start vibrating, they start producing charge. And then you have ion cyclotron resonance. You have all kinds of physical phenomena going on that caused charge to build up in the tissue now. And that charge is now used by the tissue. So a cell is damaged, we know that, right? The charge on the outside of the cell becomes compromised. There’s too much negative charge buildup. And that happens because the cell membranes are not working properly. So charge builds up. Cell becomes sick. Now you do magnetic field therapy and all of a sudden you open the membrane channels in that cell and everything starts to equilibrate. And now the cell can produce more energy and can stimulate DNA production, stem cell production, and so on.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then, at a cellular level, those cells are getting healthier. There’s some mobilization of stem cells. But then what is actually happening at the mineralization and then the bone healing perspective from that?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Well, if you improve circulation, if you get rid of the edema and you have angiogenesis and you start delivering more oxygen, you start delivering more nutrients into that tissue. Now, if the tissue is mineral deficient, calcium by itself doesn’t heal osteoporosis, right? Calcium has its limits in terms of how much calcium you could deliver. So calcium is only one of those things, but increasing circulation to the tissue, reducing edema, all of that is a foundational benefit to the cell now. So first of all, you have to have the stem cells. You can create osteoblasts. You can create new bone, but it’s very soft, new bones, like a callous. The callous ain’t done yet. Right, now you have to mineralize that callous. So once you’ve got the callous going and you start to improve the circulation, then the minerals start to flow into that tissue. And the body then uses that the DNA and all the repair processes, and the body begins to use the minerals now to solidify the bone.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Now then fundamentally, this is gonna be the case with essentially any tissue in the body. And so then anywhere where you apply a magnetic field, you’re gonna be working on the charge on the cells, in that area, and then you’re gonna be improving cellular efficiency. And so then if you were thinking from peptides or thinking from regenerative medicine, or thinking from wellness, and just getting supplements there, then you’re gonna be having a benefit depending on what dose you’re using and how you do it.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Absolutely, go back to the nonunions. What they found is that the FDA actually approved magnetic therapy devices for nonunions specifically, for that purpose over 25 years ago. And it’s a very low intensity magnetic field. And they found that people using that intensity magnetic field over a nonunion had to use it for about nine hours to 10 hours a day. And at six months to a year, the fracture’s healed. Now the healing process hasn’t finished, but now like we do with medicine, we put a cast on it, 12 weeks later, the callous is good enough to take the cast off. And then you cross your fingers that they don’t do something stupid to re-fracture.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I have a friend of mine who had a nonunion type of injury on his leg, and then I looked at it, and he doesn’t have pain. And it was the one time in my life that I was just dumbfounded because it was so deformed and just gnarly-looking in terms of how significantly it had been damaged, and from a failed surgery. And so then I said, well, what did you do? And so then he had one of those real low intensity PEMF things that he would put on, and he had to put it on for like four hours a day,

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Which is still not enough.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

But he said he did it for about six or eight months, and then the pain went away, and he doesn’t have any pain now, which is crazy.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right, well, in that research, there was study done recently on about 170 people who had nonunions of tibias, tib-fib fractures, or scaphoid fractures, the most common factors.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s what his was.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

They found that they were recommended to do 10 hours a day. So they evaluated them to see how many hours a day they actually did their treatment. And they found that if you didn’t do nine hours a day, if you did nine hours or more a day, you would heal about three quarters of the time as fast. In other words, three quarters faster than the people who only did three hours a day. So there was a clear trend for how much time you actually use for magnetic for therapy, but that was a very low intensity system. So can you get faster healing with higher intensity? Probably, there may be a trade off at some point where the return doesn’t get any better by doing more of a higher intensity, but it’s probably gonna still be faster than using a low intensity magnetic system. ‘Cause it just doesn’t have the power deeper into the tissues.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Talk me through then because there would be some home type of units that would be low intensity, and then obviously like in doctor’s offices, we’re using the higher intensity ones, what’s your perspective on how they work, and how do you like them?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I started out working with PEMFs depending on what was available in the market, what I could buy. And I started working with very low intensity magnetic systems. Most people don’t even know what the intensity of their magnetic system, the peak magnetic field is of their magnetic system. You got to find that out, but if it’s less than 15 gauss, we talked about the inflammation and the adenosine receptor, so if it’s less than 15 gauss, you’re barely getting any action beyond the superficial layers of the skin. So you’re stimulating the superficial circulation in the skin and you’re stimulating the acupuncture points or the meridians, which are all very superficial. They tend to be. So you’re getting at least an acupuncture benefit, but you’re not getting as good a direct cellular injury healing benefit. 

So you have to titrate, calibrate the magnetic field. So the home based systems, depending on the problem you have, you have to determine the system that you need for your particular problem. And a low intensity home-based system is gonna make you feel better, but it’s not gonna do much healing. And I gave up on those low intensity home-based systems early on because again, seeing a lot of patients, they weren’t responding adequately. They felt better, but they weren’t responding. I was not seeing fractures healing. I was not seeing wounds healing faster and so on.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then what intensity did you need for a fracture healing?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It depends on where. So as it turns out, obviously the nonunion fractures are healing faster with 15 gauss, actually about 60 gauss magnetic fields. So they’re gonna heal faster, but if you have a 4,000 gauss magnetic field, four inches into the body, it’s now 15 gauss. You start with 4,000, four inches into the body, it’s dropped off in intensity to 15 gauss. That’s a natural phenomenon, a physics phenomenon of anything that produces a radiated field. This is a non-ionizing radiation, but it’s still a radiated field. So I have a book, “Supercharge Your Health With PEMF Therapy.” I have two books. “Supercharge Your Health With PEMF Therapy” is the most recent one. And then the first one was “Power Tools for Health.” So for the scientists and those that want the references, the “Power Tools for Health” book is the better one. But if you want to know what magnetic system you need for your problem, that’s the most appropriate for your problem, then the “Supercharge Your Health” book has protocols, has tables in it that allows you to sort of figure out for yourself what’s best for you.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It’s been my experience too that the nonunion would be number one, what’s your number two condition that you’ve had success with over the long term, over the years with PEMF?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Anything that needs healing. Anything that needs healing. Surgical wounds will heal in half the time, even a normal fracture. I’ll give you an anecdote, case history. My wife broke her right little toe immediately, hit it on lawn furniture, swelling immediately, bruising immediately, pain on motion, you know, classic signs. She was a nurse, but she refused to have an X-ray. So I’m guessing that it was truly a fracture, not a dislocation or something minor, but she started treatment with a low intensity magnetic system, a 200 gauss magnetic system, 200. And she wore it constantly over the fracture site. So I put her in a platform shoe, Buddy taped the toe, you know, elevation. Although she was doing the magnetic therapy, so she wasn’t complying with elevation and ice. Next morning, so basically about 12 hours later, no swelling, no bruising, no pain. All the swelling was gone. Continued in the platform shoe, continued the magnetic field therapy. The following morning, she walked a mile in tennis shoes. Continued for another 24 hours. She walked three miles in tennis shoes. And that was the end of the story.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

How long was each one of those sessions?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Continuous, it was a little battery operated machine that she wore in her shoe or in the brace around it.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That was continuous.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then this is the Peptide Summit, so I’ll see cases like that fairly regularly. And then interestingly, if like this was the pinky, then one thing that we’ll do is we’ll start to inject peptides subcutaneously around where the fracture is.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Where the fracture is, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, and you know, some of the fragments of thymosin beta-4 or BPC-157, those are kind of traditional things that have been used quite a bit. And we will see a similar thing of swelling going down and rapidly healing. But then that was kind of one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, ’cause I think that that is an area where you can supercharge. I like the title “Supercharge Your Health.” So then maybe we’ll supercharge peptides by running electromagnetic field through an area where you just injected peptides, for example.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Well, fortunately a fracture is a short term process. It’s an acute problem, unless you’ve got somebody who’s immune compromised and is already horribly depleted nutritionally and so on, then you have a lot of work to do to get those tissues beefed up. But in that circumstance, otherwise yes, PEMF therapy combined with anything else, including oxygen therapy, including ozone therapy, including ultrasound, infrared, all of these things are highly interactive ’cause each one is somewhat different in its mechanisms and the benefits that it gets. And in the case of your injury, if somebody went home with a PEMF device and was able to use it continually, they’d heal even faster than they would just with the magnetic therapy. We know that for arthritis of the knee, ozone combined with arthritis of the knee will heal it about half the time as well.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, what’s the synergy between ozone and the magnetic field?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Primarily because ozone is delivering oxygen to the tissue. So ozone systemically is not as good as ozone local, right? And so if you injected those peptides systemically, you wouldn’t necessarily get the same value or the same benefit as doing it locally. Well, same thing with magnetic field therapy, if I’m stimulating the right foot for a problem in the hand, it’s gonna help somewhat. ‘Cause we know if for example, I put a magnet in somebody’s palm, I could see the palm turned red right away. I could look at the other palm and it’s redder than it would’ve been, but it’s not as red as the palm where the magnet is. So we have all these systemic reflex changes and part of the circulation improvement on the other hand may also been to the acupuncture points that we stimulated in the hand.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, I remember when that was like one of the initial ideas that I really liked in Chinese medicine, and you know, we learned it in the Helms UCLA course, but then when I studied acupuncture in China, they talked about this too, which is that there’s always a local treatment, an energetic treatment and a systemic treatment. So we’re always working kind of at all of those levels.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

We as integrative physicians do that all the time. You don’t just treat the problem, you treat the person.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah and ozone also is gonna be kind of interesting because ozone is an oxidative therapy that donates an electron. And so then ozone will I think help the electrical sort of magnet, the electrical charge in an area. But ozone is 99% oxygen.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right, so oxygen by itself is beneficial, right? And if you have an injury, you have arthritis or whatever, then you don’t have adequate circulation.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Do you recommend doing the magnetic field before or after the ozone injection or both?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Yes, so what happens the way I think about it is that if I do it before, then I’m already preparing the tissue. The magnetic field therapy increases heat stressed protein. And when you increase heat stressed protein, then a stressed tissue is then going to be able to heal better, faster, not to mention the circulation. ‘Cause you know, you can’t assume that that tissue, even though it looks like it’s normal circulation, it isn’t necessarily. And when you have a lot of arthritis because of the edema, you don’t have good circulation a priori.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right, now is it micro circulation, maybe. It may not be macro circulation, but you’re not getting all the nutrients you need to that tissue at again, close to the cellular level at the capillary level or lower.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, and so then that goes into you know, when I think about treating an area, I’m always thinking about treating the nerve and the arteries and the lymphatics, and veins, that you’re either going to or draining a tissue bed. And so then for example, we’ll do nerve hydro-dissection sometimes to treat a nerve that goes to a knee. Sometimes we’ll do a systemic treatment that is gonna affect biochemistry overall. But then obviously a lot of times then we’re trying to go right into the joint or into a nerve there. But anything that can improve the overall health and blood flow is going to A, be helpful, and it kind of resets cellular homeostasis. That initial, all of that edema is this result of kind of a mini cytokine storm in that area. And that has the intention or the reason it’s there is to increase blood flow, but sometimes inflammation can lead to a state where it gets a little dysfunctional. It gets stuck in an inflammatory state that doesn’t get reset.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

When does it turn itself off? When does it become dysfunctional inflammation?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, which is interesting.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Let me go to that point for a second. I’m sorry to interrupt you. So magnetic field therapy will help along the entire spectrum. So magnetic field therapy not only helps amplify the inflammation you need for acute healing. So wounds, as I said, will heal at half the time, acute wounds, post-surgical wound will heal in half the time. So you’re improving all the factors that go into improving that wound or healing that wound, including stem cells, including DNA, including mitochondrial function, including ATP. All of that gets turned on. But then as the magnetic therapy continues, the body begins to move to the next phase automatically. And the PEMFs then stimulate apoptosis of chronic inflammatory cells. So they not only help with the acute inflammatory process, but then they kick in apoptosis for the stuff that’s not supposed to be there anymore.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, yeah, that is an important point then to keep in mind. Because then that’s gonna be either because if cells are in kind of that zombie state, then they do bad things. And so they need to be either converted out of the zombie state or they need to go.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right, well, and magnetic fields do increase apoptosis in healthy cells that are compromised. That again, have crossed the line of no return.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then it’s a good conversation because I was always kind of like, well, how did you get here? For me, I was an anesthesiologist. And so then a lot of all of my early cases that I would pick up would be people, and you know, it’s kind of interesting, as an anesthesiologist, somebody would have a surgery and then they would have a problem with their scar.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And it wouldn’t heal. And so then, because I was doing this, they would send those people to see me. And so then I had done a little bit of work with acupuncture, which was I would say minimally helpful. And this is maybe one of the greatest moments of my life personally, because when you’re a young doctor and I started doing the electrical acupuncture where you would put basically needles all the way around a scar and then hook up this electrical daisy chain. And then you would have somebody with kind of a red inflamed, painful scar.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Yeah, hypertrophic.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then next thing you know, that scar, and I did it for a couple good friends of mine, and then just like miraculously got better. And that was kind of like a sea changed moment for me when I realized, oh, this definitely 100% works. And I kind of related it to my own kind of experience of doing anesthesia. And that really was almost the beginning of my practice, you know, in terms of having like a great success with something. And I, right around that time, also knew people who were using PEMF and achieving similar goals. And so then it kind of hit me as like a really an amazing moment.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Could I share an amazing moment with you?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

I’d love one.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I had a three year old girl, cut her thumb off in a door jam below the level of the nail bed just beyond the joint, complete avulsion. The father called me, the plastic surgeon wanted to clean up the wound, you know, graft it. I said, no, hold off. I heard way somewhere in my training, that in the UK if a kid before age 11 has that happen beyond the joint they can regrow. Well, I’d never seen it. Nobody else around me ever talked about that. You know, that’s not the first reaction that a surgeon has. I said, well and we know that if a surgeon did that, that child would have an abnormal thumb for the rest of her life. It’ll be deformed.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

If you operated on it, yeah.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Yep, exactly, so I said, you got nothing to lose. Basically, I used the same magnet that I did for my wife’s toe, one and a half to three hours a day. And I have pictures, serial pictures, not that many serial pictures, but serial pictures. Put it back on again, you can see the suture marks black as you’d imagine. 12 weeks later, she’s growing her nail.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

That’s amazing, when was that?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

’76, ’78.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Really, and she ended up being totally fine?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Yeah.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Isn’t that crazy? It’s awesome to go through, you know, for young doctors out there, you get a moment like that. I remember in the Helms course, they said, go out and our angels are gonna be supporting you, you know, for the next year. And that gave me the confidence to go out there and kind of look for more amazing cases, you know?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

And you’re not gonna see them in medicine. We just don’t see that in medicine.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

But more and more, there’s such a merging overlap between, you know, these different fields, and they’re all coming together. And that’s why I kind of was excited to have you on, because this synergy between device-centric things, which is nice because it’s, I think, lower cost. It’s more of a simple thing for people to do. It’s not product intensive. And so then when that can be supportive to biochemistry and biology, then that’s exciting. If I was to say next in your career, maybe either like of a similar genre of sort of a life changing or a career trajectory changing kind of diagnosis or set of things that you’ve seen people really experience benefit from PEMF, what would it be?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

You know, that’s such a hard thing to say, ’cause it really depends on the problem that you’re dealing with. I’ll give you another story. A 76 year old nurse who had arrhythmias and she had cardioverted 24 times. And the cardiologist said, don’t bother coming to the ER anymore. So he contacted me, we got her on the right magnetic system and this was three years ago. She hasn’t been back to the ER once. She hasn’t needed to. She hasn’t felt like she needed to. So it’s not healing, it’s not necessarily curing her heart, but it’s making it functional enough that she is able to you know, live her life.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What kind of system did you give her?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It was a higher intensity system. I believe it was called a Parmeds Multi Flash.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What kind of time for treatment would that be?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

In her case, she had to decide for herself how much time she needed. ‘Cause what happens is when people treat and they start backing off, issues often come back if they’ve not fixed. So she would have to decide. I told her at a minimum half an hour three times a day.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, how long did it take before she started to see a benefit?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

She started feeling better and generally more energy and able to do a lot more chores around the house within about three to four weeks. And some people you see that happening very, very rapidly. Within a day or two days, they already feel a significant jump in functionality and energy.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

So then that is an interesting idea to think about just because what happens is there’s an electrical called a conduction pathway. It just spontaneously creates a beat in the top part of the heart, goes down to kind of a junction in between the top and the lower part of the heart, and then the electrical wave goes through. You know, we’ve certainly seen more electrical problems. And so one thing that can happen over time is people can go into an irregular heart beat, something like atrial fibrillation or, you know, other aberrant electrical conduction problems. We’ve also seen this quite a bit in the long COVID population.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And sometimes that’s in patients, who’ve had myocarditis and sometimes it’s in patients who didn’t have myocarditis, but just started to have a lot more ectopic electrical activity. Have you had patients with similar problems?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

So there was a study done in dogs where they had the dogs under surgery, had the chest opened, the heart exposed, and they stimulated the heart electrically to cause an arrhythmia. And then they treated the dog with magnetic field therapy and then redid the electrical stimulation, nothing happened. So the magnetic field therapy depolarizes excitable nerves. They’re already inflamed and excitable. So it causes them to sort of chill down or relax. And again, if you decrease inflammation, then nerve conduction is better. And then atropine or epinephrine or whatever you’re gonna throw at the heart doesn’t cause it to fire off as much. 

Now the goal long term is not only to help to decrease that from happening, but to try to repair the heart. And AF, atrial fibrillation, it’s now been pretty well established that fibrosis and inflammation are the root causes of the development of AF, AFib. And so the long term perspective would be long term treatment of the heart to try to reduce and reverse the fibrosis. Talk about the wound stuff that you were describing, but it’s hard to do acupuncture on the heart with a wound, but you can with magnetic field therapy ’cause it’s safe enough. It’s safe in virtually any tissue.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, and so then that one’s kind of interesting ’cause if you imagine that there’s a magnetic field around the heart. The expression of that magnetic field around the heart would be the heart meridian. And so then we would used to have tried to treat that or even to try to treat that heart meridian with electricity, but then even then that’s not gonna begin to do the type of therapy that you could do by actually treating the actual heart.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

The heart directly, the muscle cells of the heart directly.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Correct, the cells of the heart directly. And I do think that that’s gonna be a very interesting direction for people to think about because from the heart perspective, you know, it’s been a challenge. And I agree with that idea of excitability of those cells. And then if you can begin to regulate that, then that’s gonna be an interesting idea. And you know, from the heart, on the peptide front, we’re talking about peptides, there’s a bioregulator cardiogen for the heart, and then there’s a bioregulator for blood vessels. And then traditionally, Dr. Khavinson, who’s kind of one of the, I would say top peptide gurus in the world, who really fundamentally developed the Russian bioregulator peptides. And he would always give a blood vessel bioregulator with whatever other one you’re doing. So you would do for example, heart and blood vessel. And then a lot of times for people with heart problems, they will sometimes benefit from neurological bioregulators. The neurological bioregulators can have a benefit, not just neurologically, but also to peripheral nerves.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Autonomic nervous system, basically.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Autonomic nerves, exactly. And so then those are Cortigen, Pinealon, and Epitalon. And so then together, the five of those, we call them the fab five, kind of the heart-brain connection, and so then that would be one idea that you could do things like add BPC. BPC will stimulate angiogenesis to some extent. And so then there’s gonna be other peptides that can kind of come into play, but these are all fundamentally systemic things that are going into the ocean of our biochemistry.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Yep, yep.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

But then the idea that you could dial in some magnetic field therapy to the-

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Locally targeted.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

In parallel to that is interesting. We haven’t talked about this. For the AFib, one population that I see that gets AFib is older endurance athletes. Do you have any thoughts on that? Have you ever noticed that?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I’ve heard of that. My guess is that they’re on adrenaline drive. And that kind of constant pressure on the heart or any other organ, and the heart is like incredibly autonomically dependent, you’re constantly pushing it, but then also endurance athletes are chewing up protein, right? They’re breaking down a lot of protein. Are they keeping in balance with their loss? Are they rebuilding the protein that they’re losing? So that’s always an issue for us, isn’t it? Do you have the right balance? And how do you figure out if you have the right balance? You wait until you have an imbalance and they say, uh-oh, I have an imbalance. But by the time you get there, can you reverse it? Now do you have fibrosis?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, now then we’re talking about the heart. And I was talking about some of the brain. PEMF in the brain, what are your thoughts?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I did a study actually on concussion using a low intensity magnetic system. So we had objective measures, Rivermead concussion scale, and we had a measure called brain gauge, which measures neuro-sensory functioning of the brain. And we treated them two hours a day, basically each side of the brain for an hour here and an hour here, two pads. And they did two hours a day. We monitored them for three months. They all got better. Everything improved, all their scales improved. The scales that were off improved within two weeks. 

They maintained that benefit. Then at the end of three months, we had them stop for a month and retested them. They all lost about 50% of their benefit, their gain. So my conclusion, I was hoping to be able to show that magnetic field therapy at the level that we chose of the protocol that we had would be able to repair tissue. So I’m not comfortable saying that we repaired tissue, but we did improve function. So maybe we improve function well enough that they only lost half of their gain after a month. Well, we actually did some healing.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

What was the dose that you used?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It was a hundred gauss to each side, each temple. So it was not my optimal. Now there’s a lot of research that shows a high intensity magnetic field to the brain does a better job with concussion.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, Sean Berman and his dad, Dr. Berman at Cell Surgical Network are some friends of ours. And they did a very interesting animal model for traumatic brain injury where they took mice and exposed them to an acoustic shock.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Oh okay.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then they did that and then they did a whole bunch of tests of those. And then they took another group and exposed them to the same shock. And then they gave them stem cells.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And this is Mark Berman and Sean, and I’m not sure there was, I think, a couple other authors on this. So then what they did is then they took those animals and then they sacrificed them and then looked at the brain. And the animals that were not treated-

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

With stem cells?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, exactly, they just got the shock wave and then you look and you see a hematoma right there. In the brain, you can see it right in the cortex. And then for the animals that got treated and they got treated with an IV of stem cells, they basically put an IV into the tail vein, and then they gave them stem cells. And then basically the ones that don’t get treated have a hard time rolling over and doing the things that they do. The ones that do get treated, basically start to move around and start to act like almost nothing had happened. And then when they sectioned them, the ones that were not treated basically have this hematoma and then the ones that were treated for the most part don’t have hematomas, or one of them had one, I reviewed the slides, had a tiny area compared to the untreated ones. And so then this goes back to our conversation and I think it’s kind of beginning to make sense. You’re treating a vascular bed. And so you’re treating that vascular bed where there’s a hematoma. In the brain it’s particularly challenging because it’s under pressure. And so then that hematoma is gonna recover more slowly than a hematoma in your leg.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Well and a hematoma in the brain, it doesn’t have the same blood supply as a muscle does, which can more easily and readily remove the volume of blood that’s there, right? And also like with the brain, like with those hematomas, those injuries, you’re not only reducing. In fact, there was a mouse study as well where they dropped the weight onto the brains of mice, and then sacrificed them and then measured cytokines and their CSF. And they all had significant cytokines, acute injury, bang, just like that, bang. They immediately had cytokine production. So the injury causes cytokines and then the cytokines themselves, as you can imagine, then caused their own, you know, further damage, especially if you don’t clean it up rapidly. We know that PEMFs increased stem cells. In fact, there was a NASA study on neural stem cells using magnetic field therapy. And they were stimulating these neural stem cells 24/7. And they found that they had the right intensity, had the right frequency, plus the right wave form. And they had a 400% increase in stem cells. And over 140 growth factors were turned on.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, and that’s because every tissue bed has a whole bunch of stem cells in it, basically waiting to be activated. And so then if we get hit, bam, then inflammation is gonna cause an inflammatory response that’s gonna lead to healing. And part of that healing is gonna be stem cells that migrate in, but part of it is gonna be stem cells that happen to be there that just get turned on.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

They get activated, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Start to get activated. And so then whether we’re dealing in the brain or whether we’re dealing in the heart, we’re basically dealing with our vascular beds, nerves, arteries, veins, fascia, inflammation, and then basically working our way through turning that on. And for me, what I have found is in simple problems, they’re pretty simple to fix. And there’s a hundred different things that could fix one simply problem.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Approaches, exactly. Each approach does its sort of thing. The better thing would be to have 10 different approaches to address the problem ’cause then you’re gonna be sure to cover most of your bases.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, but for a simple problem, you might only need one or two.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That’s right, especially acute.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Especially acute, but for these big problems, then you begin to say, oh, okay, they need multimodal therapy. And so then that would be how we think about almost everything.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It’s peeling the layers of an onion, right? You have one effect at the beginning and then that gets better, then the next effect below it shows up that needs to be regulated as well and so on. So you’re working at multiple layers.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

We were talking a little bit about, you know, some of the autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. Have you had the chance to treat many people with arthritis?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Well, we treat regular arthritis, osteoarthritis on a regular basis. And very rapidly, you get significant increases in reductions in pain. One of the first magnetic field effects is anti-nociception. You get decreased pain just from the perception of pain itself. And as the healing process, all these physiologic processes start moving through the tissue, then you start to see progressive improvements and retention of benefit with time. So arthritic patients have increased mobility very quickly, have decreased pain very quickly, have decreased swelling very quickly. Rheumatoids are more complicated because it depends on the level of severity. So how much inflammation does the rheumatoid have? So if they have a CRP of 15 or a SED rate of 120, you got a lot more inflammation that you got to quiet down and that takes more time. 

But generally speaking arthritis responds very well. And if you do whole body magnetic field therapy for rheumatoid arthritis, then what happens is that you’re decreasing inflammation in the body in general. And if you have 10 areas in the body that are inflamed, then you got a rheumatoid joint, MCP joint, say thumb, well, how much of the body’s energy is going to dealing with the thumb and how much is going to dealing with all the other areas of inflammation, right? So then if you’re dealing with the whole body, then you can also focus on the local area too, but you have to deal with the whole body. I say the same thing about cancer. So breast cancer, for example, 40 to 60% of women at the initial diagnosis of breast cancer already have breast cancer stem cells in their bones, 40 to 60%. So what do you do with that? How do they get activated? We can go through all the different mechanisms of how cancer stem cells get activated. One of the key factors clearly is inflammation. So where do you treat? You treat the whole body. 

You can’t be treating just the femur or just the legs. Where do women with breast cancer get fractures? Spinal, long bones, ribs. They’re not the places you normally expect, but what that means then is you don’t know where it’s gonna happen. And as a result, what you need to do is to do the whole body. And I’m sure that peptides also could be very helpful in that setting too. But now you’re really talking about lifetime. So I don’t like the concept of cancer survivorship. ‘Cause I think once you have cancer, you’re at risk for the rest of your life, right? So that means you need to be in a preventive maintenance program really for the rest of your life. And we hear this all the time. People change their diets, change their behaviors, change all sorts of things, and they’ve never felt better in their lives. And the risk of the cancer coming back decreases dramatically.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

At a high level, I would say that, you know, you think about the major killers. You have vascular and infectious inflammation, and then that’s basically heart attack and stroke, and vascular disease and all of those things. And then what is the antidote to that is sort of living a super healthy lifestyle that’s a non-inflammatory sort of lifestyle.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That doesn’t stretch your metabolism.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Yeah, and so there’s a metabolic conversation. There’s a sort of a resetting autoimmunity, kind of decreasing antigen load, and kind of resetting immune system that kind of overlaps with the infectious stuff ’cause the infectious stuff is such a trigger for a lot of auto-immunity. And so we’re thinking about, you know, peptides as a way to optimize and balance metabolic, immune and auto-immunity. And then that would be like, let’s say a big segment, and then on that whole cancer thing, you know, developing a strategy of living that you’re not doing things that are carcinogenic and adding in things that are somehow anti-cancer.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Anti-inflammatory, as well.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And then having that as a lifelong sort of journey.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It has to be a lifelong journey.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

It’s a lifelong strategy, yeah. Well, amazing. Do you have any final thoughts you want to share with people? Where can we find you?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

So that’s another question. People who want a consultation, they want to combine whatever other therapies, including peptides with their magnetic therapy. ‘Cause how often can we do the peptide therapy? How often are people willing to come in to get their peptide injections? So that’s always an issue. So I consider magnetic field therapy to be a home therapy. It can be used in the office setting clearly to augment and help what’s happening in the office, but with the cancer, you know, you have to keep doing it. Osteoporosis, you have to keep doing it for the rest of your life to varying degrees. And no matter what you do, if you’re treating a joint or arthritis in your hand, or your rheumatoid arthritis, you’re getting all the other benefits of magnetic field therapy through the rest of the body. So it’s still antiaging, no matter what you’re doing, especially if you have whole body therapy. 

So they can reach me at drpawluk.com for a consultation. Now, I don’t really appreciate consultations from people who are not willing to spend more than $25 for their health. I don’t imagine you see those kinds of people either, right? And we’re talking about serious magnetic field therapy. You’re talking maybe 4,000, $6,000 or more for a magnetic system. So if you’re not willing to listen to that as an option for you, not willing to consider that, then there’s no point having the consultation ’cause I can’t help you then. So drpawluk.com and on that homepage there’s an area that says consultation. The other option is the books that I mentioned. “Power Tools For Health” is more the science, and “Supercharge Your Health with PEMF Therapy.” So those are the two sort of best places for resources. And then drpawluk.com has a lot of information on it. It’s a library all by itself.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Okay, now then I’ll take that, but then interestingly, one of my philosophies and I got this in COVID because you know, I’m an injection doctor. And so I used my ultrasound and I inject around every nerve in the body or joint in the body. And so then what happened was all of a sudden I started getting phone calls, my country’s shut down because of COVID, and so I can’t even come see you. And people would call me and they’d say, I’m gonna see you in 2022 or 2023, because the whole world got shut down.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Right, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And people are literally calling back like, oh yeah, hey, remember I talked to you two years ago and we’re coming out. But the interesting thing is we started teaching people all over the world how to do peptide injections themselves.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Themselves, right.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

And so then one thing you could do is just inject in your abdomen or over your gluteal area to have a systemic effect. And so then that’s going into effect all of biology and then you could do a local treatment. But then a lot of times what happens is people can pinch some subcutaneous tissue and then inject a little peptide in there. And then we teach people how to do that. Now then notice that was just in some subcutaneous tissue by my wrist, but then what I could do afterwards is do a PEMF treatment right there locally.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Yep, amplified locally, but also amplify the benefits systemically.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Right, and so then we’ll use PEMF here in the office before and after treatments.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That’s what I would recommend.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

But then I also have a lot of people who will use PEMF to activate when they do injections at home. And so they’ll have a system at home. And so then they’ll do a treatment and then they’ll run a magnetic field through. And I have noticed that that is kind of a way to supercharge, to use your terminology, a peptide injection, particularly for things like joints, where we’re injecting locally. So if we’re injecting BPC-157, or maybe one of the fragments of Thymosin Beta-4 or GHK, some of the things that are good for pain relief, then we’ll do the PEMF there. And then I have noticed that that is a great one-two combination.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I think that’s great, and I totally would agree and support that. And then the only other thing about home treatment again, is that you’re getting all the other benefits of PEMFs So you kind of, in a sense, don’t have to second guess what it’s gonna do for you. And it seems to target the body, seems to target where it needs the help.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Well, you just seem like a wonderful human being and a wonderful doctor, and that’s what everybody says about you. And so it’s just totally a delight to talk to you and thank you. I’m grateful for what you’re doing for the world, because this is important and profound therapy. So thanks to the work that you do.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Well, thanks for the work you do. I’ve learned a lot about peptides. I left practice, so I haven’t had a chance to use peptides in my practice. So now my focus is almost entirely on PEMF therapy, and there’s enough work to do there too, right?

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Well, I think there’s an enormous amount of work. And then as we bring these modalities together and kind of get synergistic with them, I think that it’s gonna make the next 20 years a real exciting time in medicine.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

I hope I’m around.

Matthew Cook, M.D.

Me too, me too, I hope we both are. Well, thanks and totally have a fantastic week. And thanks for being here.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Thank you, Matt, appreciate it.