Using PEMF For Hypertension: A New Approach

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Perfect, thank you. How are you today?

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

I’m good. Thank you so much for joining us.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

We’re going to elevate you to perfect.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

That’s fantastic. I love that. But I’m excited to learn about your topic and topic experts like this because there’s something about it that’s so intriguing. I’m excited to learn, too. Can we start with just the basis? Can you explain the difference between what a PEMF and an EMF are exactly?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That’s a critical difference. That’s the elephant in the room because everybody’s worried about EMF, like 5G, 8G, 10G, all of that stuff. That’s around us. EMFs. EMF stands for Electromagnetic Fields, but I call EMF environmental magnetic fields. the fields around us, and they’re, in a sense, more dangerous in some ways than the fields that are generated by an electric stovetop, a hairdryer, or the electronics that are around us all the time. That’s not EMF in a sense. It is. It’s environmental, but it’s not in the same way and probably not quite as dangerous in a sense. EMFs are designed to be broadcast. They’re designed for communication because they’re designed for communication. They don’t care about what happens to what’s in the way i.e. body. Microwaves, which are, most of our communication with wi-fi, cell phones, and so on, are broadcast into the environment, just like radio signals and television signals are broadcast into the environment. As a result, their broadcasts are designed to deliver messaging in very short wavelength bands. So the wavelengths that are broadcast in the environment are extremely short. As a result, they are absorbed by the body, and that’s sort of the premise behind a microwave oven: they absorb, then heat and damage. They could damage living tissue, but they can also damage dead tissue, water, fruit, vegetables, or whatever. They work on the principle of heating because of the absorption. PEMFs, however, are designed by a machine producing a current that’s passed through a wire. Imagine that my thumb is the wire that’s conducting a current in that direction. 

Every time there’s a pulse of current in that direction, there’s a magnetic field automatically generated by it. The basic principle of physics is called the right-hand rule, and so every time there’s a pulse, there’s a magnetic field, and that magnetic field goes out. As soon as that pulse dies down, it comes back and collapses on itself. That’s called a closed loop. EMFs are open-loop; they’re broadcast out of the environment. They don’t come back. They’ll collapse on themselves, essentially. PEMFs are designed for healing purposes, or they’re designed for other applications, including engineering, electronics, and so on. But the PEMFs that we’re talking about are designed for healing purposes, and you control the current and the intensity or strength of that current, which then produces the changes in the magnetic field. A weak current could produce a very small current. A very strong current is going to produce a pretty large magnetic field. What we want is for a magnetic field to pass into the body, do the work it does, and then pass back out of the body. Magnetic fields and the body are compatible. The body is transparent to a magnetic field. If you take a body here, you have a magnetic field here, and if you take a magnetic field tester here or on the other side of the body, whether the body’s there or not makes no difference to that magnetic field. 

The way to think about a magnetic field is like the wind. wind blowing in the trees; you can’t see it. The only way that it’s there is when the leaves are moving unless you feel it up against you. But that’s the way you find out: you can feel it by its actions, not because you can see it but because you can’t see it. the magnetic fields, you can’t see them either. They pass into the body, go right on through, and come right back out again. Every time it does that, every time it waves into the body like a tree with branches like leaves, it creates all kinds of activity in the body. That activity is based on something called Faraday’s law. Michael Faraday was a scientist back in the 1800s, late 17th or early 1800s. He discovered that magnetic fields, as they pass through charge carriers, as they pass through anything that has electrolytes in it, anything that has ions, has a charge, and virtually all molecules in the body have a charge. Therefore, the magnetic field is interacting with anything in its path, and that means everything is in its path. That activation then is again: Faraday’s law says the stronger that magnetic field is in the heart, the faster it ascends, the faster it goes to its peak, and the more dynamic action there is in the body. The intensity of the magnetic field drives the actions in the body. Magnetic field therapy was discovered and approved originally. approved, was not discovered, and is waiting for Michael Faraday, but it was approved by the FDA to heal fractures that didn’t heal and didn’t need what we call nonunion fractures. After six months, a fracture hasn’t healed. It’s called a nonunion. so what the the options to take care of a nonunion fracture?

A nonunion fracture is a disaster. It’s a big problem, especially if it’s a long bone. Often they’re in the hands or the feet, but they’re disabling. So the surgery doesn’t work very well for those because the conditions that caused the fracture to be a nonunion in the first place are still there. Then you’re operating again. I tell people that you can’t grow a garden in a swamp. It’s hard to fix something like we know with surgery, if you have flat tissue paper, you can’t put a needle through it, you can’t put a suture through it. Magnetic fields have been discovered to heal those tissues. Even little fractures that hadn’t been actively healing, or even seven years or more, all of a sudden you put magnetic fields into that tissue, which just wakes everything up. You start to introduce energy into that tissue, and all of a sudden the fracture starts healing, and a nonunion fracture can heal in three months with the right magnetic field treatment. Something that’s been there for six or seven years already now all of a sudden activates and starts to heal. But you have to have the right intensity magnetic field, the right treatment time, and so on. That’s all part of our discussion today.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

It’s a good segue. The next question is: What are the basic physiologic actions? What you’re saying is exciting. What exactly is occurring on a cellular level, what is going on hormonally, and then what can this be used for besides fractures and stuff?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Because it’s physiologically activating; essentially, it’s increasing charge; it’s increasing energy in the tissue; and the body now has more energy to do the work it should have done in the first place. For example, if you cut yourself, the body has to marshal its resources to be able to heal that wound. That’s to defend itself from the intrusion that it had and from the injury that it had. then it has to initiate repair processes. We rely on the body to do that, but the body is not efficient at doing that. A lot of the fuel and energy that we use to create healing in the body is inefficient. That means the body’s wasting a lot of energy. It’s not as efficient as it should be, but you can increase that efficiency by almost double with magnetic field therapy. The wound starts to heal faster because you have decreased the swelling in the wound. Number one, it increases circulation to the wound. Number two, you decrease inflammation in the wound. Number three stimulates stem cells. Number four, nitric oxide, is produced through all sorts of activity. In my first book, Power Tools for Health, I outlined 2025 different mechanisms of action of magnetic fields and 25 different actions of magnetic fields in the body supported by science. That book has like 500 references and shows you that there’s good science there to tell you why magnetic fields work and how they work in the body. I can’t dial, and I can’t make your body dial up any particular mechanism. The magnetic field is a nonspecific stimulus for the body to start activating processes because it’s nonspecific; the body decides what it’s going to do first. One of the first things the body will do with a wound or injury is to heal itself and reduce the swelling because you can’t get circulation into us and can’t grow a garden in the swamp. You can’t get circulation into that tissue until you reduce the swelling. anti-inflammatory action first, then the second lead becomes the circulation action. Then the stem cells come in because circulation improves, and stem cells come in. Magnetic fields also have a natural, automatic, painkilling effect. It’s called an anti-nociceptive effect. It’s been found even in snails. Snails are treated with magnetic fields. We put a snail on a hot plate. What they want to do. Get off the hot plate.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Right.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

What happens if you give magnetic field therapy to a snail? A snail says, “Oh, why did I take my time getting off this hot plate?”

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Even with that, is there tissue damage and such?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

It depends. Hopefully, you don’t have a hot plate too hot. Now we’ll get cooked. 

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

That’s curious. 

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Then acupuncture. What are the things that I did when I started working with magnetic fields: I started using them to do acupuncture because I was trained in acupuncture. That was in 1990 when people didn’t know what acupuncture was. They said, “Don’t come at me with those needles. Stay away from me with those needles.” So I said, “How can I do acupuncture?” I had had two years of training in acupuncture, so how can I use acupuncture if I can’t do needles? I discovered in the Orient that they were using magnets. I started working with magnets and started working with them extensively. I discovered they were doing all sorts of things that the body couldn’t understand; I didn’t understand the mechanism. Finally, I met with an MD, and PhD, from the Czech Republic who got his PhD in electromagnetic therapies for rehab purposes. He had translated a lot of Eastern European science, and so the manuscript that we published, called Magnetic Therapy in Eastern Europe, is our review of 30 years of research. At that time, in 1985 or so, after 30 years of research, they’d already been doing it for 30 years.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Wow. 

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

He identified the mechanism—all the different mechanisms of action of magnetic fields—and that just blew the doors wide open in terms of what magnetic fields could potentially do.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

As far as when you think about things such as a systemic illness, which I do think of as hypertension affects all parts of the body in different ways. A variety of different mechanisms could be at play. How have you seen that type of therapy be helpful in these types of situations?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Two ways, two things. Number one, the tailbone is connected to the headbone. We sometimes forget that. But when you step on your toe you’ll find out very quickly how connected it is to the headbone. Anything in the body and any treatment anywhere in the body is going to have a systemic effect. There was a study done in people with chronic wounds where they did magnetic therapy to the arm or the chest. The theory is that the bigger the volume of blood that you’re stimulating with the magnetic field, the more action there’s going to be in the body. so they use the arm as a control versus the chest. What they found is that magnetic field therapy, either place, healed these chronic leg wounds, even though they were not being treated directly. They heal the leg wounds in the same amount of time. It would take using standard medical therapies to heal them. Just by stimulating someplace else. However, we do know they didn’t experiment to see whether magnetic therapy directly would have healed it much faster. We know that it would be because the indirect actions are weaker than their direct actions.

There’s a systemic effect. Even if you stimulate your hand, we know there’s a systemic effect. If I did this experiment, I would put a magnet on somebody’s hand, and the hand would turn red because the circulation started to increase in just the opposite hand. It got redder too—not as red, but it got redder. I even looked at the foot, and the foot got redder. So that action caused a systemic reaction, a systemic vascular reaction, by increasing circulation to those tissues. They’re all connected, but the strongest effects are going to be local. Now, if you’re doing hypertension, even though the causes, then the question becomes, What’s the cause of the hypertension?

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

A variety of things.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That’s the problem. That’s the question. Hypertension is not just hypertension; it’s what’s causing the hypertension. Probably the most common cause of hypertension is,

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Stress. I would think that’s a very big priority, this kind of grade-one hypertension that’s just not controlled. I get it. So many people are doing other things too. So resistance is an issue. But absolutely. How would you approach someone with hypertension? What would you do if someone came to you and said, “Can you help me?” Maybe they have hypertension, diabetes, and a few other chronic illnesses. Where does that therapy come into play for the majority of Americans?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

As a holistic physician, as opposed to a toe doctor or an arm doctor. I tend to think of these things more holistically. The tailbone is connected to the headbone. It’s the whole body. Now, if you do have vascular changes, say, with diabetes, you still have to treat the whole person because it’s a whole-person problem. Hypertension is a whole-person problem to me. You have to treat the whole person. Now, if the cause is primarily systolic hypertension and you can reduce their anxiety, their blood has come down, and you do that continuously, and the blood pressure stays down. then that’s probably where you’ve got to be treating more than anything. With chronic illnesses, as you said, the problem then becomes, much more systemic. With diabetes, diabetes is a whole-body vascular problem. It’s not just a kidney problem. It’s not just an eye problem. It’s not just a leg ulcer problem. It’s a whole-body problem. Therefore, you need to do whole-body treatment. So you can design your therapeutic approach based on the etiology and probable cause of any given person. Now there are consequences to elevated systolic hypertension. Chronically elevated system systolic hypertension. Even though systolic and diastolic, you still have to treat the consequence too, because that can cause cardiomegaly. It can cause peripheral changes. Reynolds. Blood vessels are constantly constricted, and then you have smoking on top of that. Then you need to deal with those consequences too. But at the very least, at some point, you just get lower blood pressure. You could do that with magnetic field therapy, too.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Another one that might be partly responsible is, like, chronic pain, as you mentioned bone health and different things. Let’s say someone has chronic pain; maybe even it could be related to vascular health because you can see someone walking, they have arterials there, but the blood is not flowing to the lower extremities very well. Or maybe even with diabetes, there’s diabetes and hypertension at play here that are destroying the vasculature of, like, the farthest points to the body, like the feet. You worry about things like that. How does that play? Because pain can also cause stress and elevate blood pressure in general,

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

As I mentioned, magnetic field therapy has a natural anti-painkilling effect, but I could just give you Tylenol if that’s all I wanted to do. Maybe that’s enough. But again, as a holistic doctor, that’s not what I would want to do. I would like to figure out why the pain is there. What I feel is that if I manage the pain, if I manage the cause of the pain, I’m more likely to take it away permanently. It becomes a cure and not a symptomatic treatment. That’s why the ultimate goal is to heal and not just control the pain. The pain itself, and part of the process then is to help heal the tissue that’s causing the problem, if you can. If you can’t, if you have a chronic pain problem that you can’t fix, you can’t cure it then you may have to treat the brain more. We have what I call a chronic pain brain. Anyone with chronic pain, as you said, is going to have vascular effects or systemic autonomic effects because of that chronic pain problem. But they’re also going to have brain effects from it. The brain registers that chronic pain and then begins to change itself around that pain signal. What you have to do is quiet down the brain’s hyper-reactivity to the pain signal. So a lot of people develop allodynia, which is chronic pain that’s not caused by the original problem, the original problem. Now you have a pain problem that’s caused by the body’s reaction to the chronic pain. Again, chemotherapy can deal with that as well.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

That’s similar to what industry does, like self-hypnosis, and it’s been very helpful for chronic pain in that kind of disengagement, as you’re describing. Let’s see, someone is fairly healthy, but then suddenly they get an injury, and now they see the blood pressure rising. There’s not necessarily a poor diet, or maybe they’re exercising and have some injuries. Like, what does the actual therapy entail? Like, are these pads or something? Like, what is the physical nature of the actual intervention?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

On drpawluk.com, that’s DRPAWLUK dot com,  I have several blogs and several educational pieces on that website. In particular, when you go to the homepage of drpawluk.com and scroll down the page, you can find product comparisons. That product comparison gives you a list of all the different devices that can be used for different purposes. First, for hypertension, I’m going to most often recommend, especially in the setting of co-morbidity, in the setting of multiple conditions that are present at the same time. Something like, what percentage of the population over 65 has three or four chronic conditions? It’s like 70%. So, it’s a constant in the background for most of us, most of the time. In your whole body magnetic system, typically to do that, to do the best job with that. Again, if all you have is an elbow problem or a shoulder problem, you probably have chronic shoulder pain or a chronic carpal tunnel problem. You can certainly treat it locally, and hopefully, that takes care of the problem. If you do have any co-morbidity or any other conditions at the same time, then usually you’re going to need systemic whole-body treatment. Besides, everything between the total and the head is aging as well.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Right.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

We’re constantly aging. After I say that, after about age 25, we start aging, but we don’t notice it that much until after about age 40. Then we can identify the cracks in the rattles. Now, if you happen to be a professional athlete or a biohacker and just do crazy things to your body, you need to start earlier. But so all of us could use whole-body therapy just for health maintenance anyway. If you have an additional condition on top of that, then again, whole-body therapy is going to help you in more ways than just a single therapy session. Therapies tend to be cheaper.

If you’ve got an elbow problem, then you just use a magnet. It’s going to be able to help you with your local problem. If I do a history of somebody, if somebody talks to me, they tell me why I came in with my elbow or with my shoulder pain but I had a history of cancer. Wait a minute. Now, that changes the dynamic, because my job then, as a clinician is to look at the whole person and look at all the risks. If you’re going to make an investment in a PEMF system, make the right investment. Because now you have an investment that’s going to work for the whole of you.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

So does someone come to you in person to be evaluated this way, or is this something that can be done telemedicine-wise, and you send them whatever they need? Like, how does that work?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

That’s a very important question, and it’s an important part of the process of getting the right equipment. My two books, Power Tools for Health and Supercharge Your Health, walk you through the thought process of what kinds of magnetic systems you should get and then how you could use them. In the Supercharge Your Health book, I have advice for about 80 different health conditions. Which of these are the right magnetic systems for you? What’s the right way to use it? Or people with more complex problems like COPD, heart disease, or vascular disease? You probably need a consultation. Because the investment you need to make is going to be bigger. A bigger investment, you’re typically talking somewhere around six, seven, or $8,000.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Okay.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Because you need a strong enough magnetic system that’s going to take care of the whole body. Not just a particular problem. So for that purpose, we do have consultations. So, on drpawluk.com there’s an option to get a consultation. I have a team; there are three of us that do consultations. We spend about half an hour free, but about half an hour for people to get them into the right equipment and then give them advice on how to get the best value from that equipment.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

That’s fantastic. This has been fascinating because you also mentioned just one final question that came to mind: nitric oxide production, which causes dilation of the blood vessels in the endothelial cells. I’m assuming that’s causing some type of body to respond in that manner. 

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

eNOS and the theory of nitric oxide are two of the key aspects of magnetic field therapy. It causes the dilatation of the blood vessels locally, but it also causes it systemically. Again, if I do my hand, I’m going to get some systemic benefit even from a local treatment.

Ideally, you would do a whole-body treatment because some of the nitric oxide circulates, but a large aspect of nitric oxide is local production. Especially what you want to do is stimulate nitric oxide production in the whole vascular system. You don’t know where the plaques are. You don’t know where the inflammation is in that endothelium. You want to be doing the whole system.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

This is very intriguing. I will dive deeper into the rabbit hole. Thank you so much, Dr. Pawluk, for sharing your expertise and knowledge. Thanks for stepping outside of the norm, like we were talking before we started. Just get stuck in a silo as physicians, and we may be missing out dramatically. I’ve had some interesting experiences. I don’t do acupuncture, but I have seen it do some pretty cool things. I did notice them using the little magnets when they did that.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Some of them do it.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

It was pretty amazing. 

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

The question becomes, why did I quit acupuncture?

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. Why did you quit acupuncture?

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Because magnetic therapy is a lot more.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Really? Okay.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Acupuncture is working, and I do a six-hour workshop for acupuncturists on how to use magnetic therapy. You can combine them. The acupuncture system, the home acupuncture meridian system, and the points meridian system are our DC systems. The electrical current is very low-grade and very slow-moving, but it’s electrical current, and you can stimulate it. You can augment that flow with needles, magnetic therapy, or even light, or in some cases, sound. There are so many ways to physically stimulate that. This current system of magnetic therapy has the principles of electro and magnetic always go hand in hand. If you have an electrical system and you pass a magnetic field through it, what you’re doing is zooming it, amplifying it, and increasing it tremendously. So magnetic therapy does heal. Acupuncture does less healing than it does physiologic management. You put a needle in here, and it affects the system electrically. It affects the brain and so on. But it doesn’t do direct healing. It’s not going to heal an elbow, to make the elbow feel better But it’s not going to heal the tissue. Magnetic field therapy heals the tissue and stimulates the acupuncture system. That’s dual duty. 

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

It’s fascinating. Thank you again, Dr. Pawluk, for your time. We will have everything listed here for everyone to look at your resources and your website drpawluk.com. I would encourage everyone to check it out. Thank you again for spending time with us today.

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

My pleasure. Welcome to the world of PEMF.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Excellent.