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Researcher Claims Magnets Can Affect Blood Viscosity
BuzzSkyline writes "A few minutes in a high magnetic field (1.3 Tesla) is enough to thin blood by 30%, potentially leading to a new drug-free therapy to prevent heart attacks. The powerful field causes blood cells to line up in chains that flow much more easily than randomly-scattered individual cells, according to research scheduled to appear this month in the journal Physical Review E." I can't help thinking of Penn & Teller's look at magnets-as-medicine, though at least the idea here described sounds testable and doesn't rely on the power of suggestion.
As a treatment in an emergency to quickly resolve a bad situation on a temporary basis, it sounds fine. As a therapy to hold back trouble, it sounds less fine. Not that the same isn't perhaps true of aspirin in some ways but since one can quantify the effect here and since one might not see as many negatives, I predict this will get used with less reservation than aspirin. What holds people back from using aspirin more is the fear of side-effects, but if you were assuming there were fewer to this, you might be inclined to lean more heavily on this one's stated capacity limitations. It eliminates a margin for error such that if a person really regularly took advantage of it, they'd be well over the maximum limit and any failure to use the magnets would sound fatal. Moreover, it won't surprise me if it creates some situation in which a bunch of aligned things, while normally they work well, can also create unexpected kinds of clots or other problems not previously possible to create in more chaotic systems. It certainly doesn't sound as glowingly positive to me as a term like "drug-free therapy" is supposed to imply. It sounds more like the potential pitfalls are hidden in different places, like the way nuclear radiation is "drug-free". Not that we're talking radiation effects here, but we're definitely not talking automatically safer than drugs, either.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
...And immediately goes into business making magnetic bracelets.
I didn't RTFA, but does it explain exactly how they work?
Just don't have your smartphone on you when you go into the machine.
It's just a matter of time before everyone realizes that Alex Chiu is right! :)
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
I wonder why this is not evident after an MRI.
Grandpa has high blood pressure and he can't afford his medicine.
Hey kids, go get that box of 300 refrigerator magnets he gave you for your birthday!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Assuming it's true, is there a concern that an MRI might cause blood thinning when it isn't needed? Is it possible for your blood to be too thin? Might it accelerate bleeding?
Smallest value in a magnetically shielded room 10^-14 Tesla 10^-10 Gauss
Interstellar space 10^-10 Tesla 10^-6 Gauss
Earth's magnetic field 0.00005 Tesla 0.5 Gauss
Small bar magnet 0.01 Tesla 100 Gauss
Within a sunspot 0.15 Tesla 1500 Gauss
Small NIB magnet 0.2 Tesla 2000 Gauss
Big electromagnet 1.5 Tesla 15,000 Gauss
Strong lab magnet 10 Tesla 100,000 Gauss
Surface of neutron star 100,000,000 Tesla 10^12 Gauss
Magstar 100,000,000,000 Tesla 10^15 Gauss
from http://www.coolmagnetman.com/magflux.htm
Another researcher lying, and gettin' me pissed. I mean, fucking magnets... how do they work?
50,000 characters used to live here.
You can already buy them from your local bullshit medicine shop, they're nothing new. But maybe they weren't so bullshitty after all?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The art of deception and misdirection is all part of a magician's trade. How exactly did Penn & Teller become the deciding factor on whether magnets are beneficial to health?
According to the article, this effects only lasts for a few hours. How is that a viable replacement for taking an Aspirin pill ?
Researcher also claims that a high magnetic field can rip out all of the iron in your blood cells and used as a weapon to escape from an impenetrable prison cell.
How would you use a treatment that requires a 1000 lb. 1.3 Tesla magnet every few hours to prevent heart attacks? Driving back and forth to the hospital that many times a day probably increases your risk of dying in a car crash more than it reduces your risk of a heart attack.
This makes the blood cells form chains in the direction of the magnetic field. When the chains get long enough, wouldn't they then fail to flow and/or block any blood vessel that's perpendicular? If you use this on an artery, does blood flow worsen in the corresponding vein? If you used this on your forearm, wouldn't all the cells or chains try to flip over on the return trip, as the magnetic field will be in the opposite direction? I would think that would slow it down. If so, your hand would swell with all the blood that is fast to get there and slow to leave.
I don't see how this is practical, but maybe I'm missing something.
I have a couple Rare Earth Magnets. They have a very strong magnetic pull. So I figure I'll just run them up and down my body. It could be fun.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
How do magnets work?
According to the article the viscosity is not changing only the flow rate. There's an important distinction. Changing the viscosity requires a chemical change to the blood physical composition, this is simply increasing volumetric flow by creating a more laminar fluid. The effect described here is actually old news, as it is the fundamental basis of operation for every MRI machine.
The art of deception and misdirection is all part of a magician's trade. How exactly did Penn & Teller become the deciding factor on whether magnets are beneficial to health?
They don't claim to be. They do however, claim to be the masters of the art of deception and misdirection. The whole idea of their TV show was "it takes a thief to catch a thief", namely someone well versed in deception and misdirection has a better chance of spotting when someone ELSE is using those same techniques to sell, say refrigerator magnets as medical cures...
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
The flow of blood is so turbulent that the cells would become disordered as soon as the magnetic field was removed.
Isn't this basic principal how an MRI works?
Since there is quite a bit of iron the the blood and it has magnetic properties.
Similar effects are used in Corvette's active suspension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_suspension
These guys should have talked to a biophysicist before they stated talking about this in public. A hemoglobin complex holds 4 individual iron cations, in four pockets that are pretty far apart from each other. On top of that, the whole hemoglobin molecule is tumbling around inside red blood cells, without any physical attachment to the cell membrane or cytoskeleton. The magnetic moment of an iron atom is the net result of its electrons orbiting the nucleus, the orientation of the electron orbitals and the nuclear spin, all of which tumble pretty randomly. You only get macro ferrormagnetic behaviour when a bunch of iron atoms are locked right next to each other in a rigid lattice structure, like a crystal of magnetite.
Even if you could align all the iron magnetic moments in hemoglobin, you probably wouldn't be able to get the hemoglobin to aggregate, it would just tumble a bit differently. You certainly wouldn't have any observable mechanical effect on red blood cells. Red Blood Cells are however very sensitive to mechanical pumps. It you mechanically force them through a relatively small aperture (like you would to measure viscosity), they would probably start to coagulate (clump together) until the pressure let off, in which case they would fall apart again.
Since they stored the blood in the fridge for some time and didn't end up with one giant ball of clot, they obviously had an anticoagulant mixed in too, which would impact what they observed (namely that the cells fell apart again some time after they stopped pumping).
Talk to a biophysicist next time guys!
what might this mean for neuroscientists who use changes in cranial blood flow to index brain activity while subjects are in a usually >= 3 Tesla field? would brain regions demanding more oxygen/glucose require blood over a longer time span if the substance is thinned out?
Good, next time I need to shut down a magic/magnetic time volcano to keep an unspeakable evil from escaping the island me and my friends have been stranded on for 3 years, then this should keep me immune from the effects of aforementioned time volcano.
There is an old high school science teacher's trick where you place mushed up boiled corn flakes in a zip-lock plastic bag and stroke a strong magnet to one corner. After a while a collection of dark stuff occurs in the corner, which visibly moves with the magnetic field. This is in fact iron.
I'm not sure how the human body's concentration of iron in the blood compares to corflakes but it's convincing there should be some small effect. Interesting to learn it's potentially beneficial.
Problem is of course 99% of the claims about therapeutic magnets are still bunk.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
"When it comes to combating heart disease, most information sources promote drugs and surgery as the only viable lines of defense. As a result, the demand for high-tech, expensive and largely ineffective medical care is overwhelming, causing medical costs and insurance rates to skyrocket. This chase for 'cures' is both financially devastating and futile. Morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease continue to rise with no sign of abating. Interventional cardiology offers only partial benefits, since these procedures do not remove the causes of the problem. Attempts to intervene with invasive procedures or surgery after the damage already has been done have not been shown to offer a significant reduction in cardiac deaths.
We need to keep in mind that angioplasty and bypass surgery have some significant adverse outcomes, including heart attacks, stroke and death. These invasive procedures only attempt to treat a small segment of the diseased heart, usually with only temporary benefit. Patients treated with angioplasty and bypass surgery continue to experience progressive disability, and most still die prematurely as a result of their heart disease.
The average person is not aware that there are safer, more effective options available. Unfortunately, government agencies are often slow to respond to new scientific information and continue to advocate outdated recommendations. Economic and political forces also make it difficult for Americans to be clearly informed that heart disease is self-induced and totally avoidable by eating a diet of nutritional excellence.
Making significant dietary changes allows people who suffer with coronary heart disease, high cholesterol, overweight or obesity and/or high blood pressure to reduce and to eliminate their dependence on medications, avoiding major surgeries such as heart bypass and angioplasty.
You cannot expect our government or national health organizations to give effective guidance. They must offer a standard approach designed for political acceptance. For example, six of the eleven members, including the chairman of the USDA's Dietary Guidelines Committee in the year 2000, had financial ties to the meat, dairy and egg industries. Not surprisingly, the foods these industries produce figures prominently in government dietary recommendations in spite of their documented links to increased health risks. Similar problems exist in recommendations by non-profit health organizations. Sadly, even the American Heart Association (AHA) advocates a diet that actually has been shown to increase heart disease.1"
====
I wish I had know this cheap and effective advice years ago before my father had an angioplasty for a clog and then had a heart attack a few months later as it clogged bakc up again... He might still be here today. Instead, some cardiologists got to make a lot of money off of his suffering.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Very interesting i am a retired industrial painter and i used to do Electrostatic painting of office furniture frequently i know the machine put out 100,000 plus volts at micro amperes. I have spent hundreds of hours in such a field. My family has a history of clogged arteries but strangely i have shown none of it in tests. However i suffered a burst brain aneurysm shortly after finishing some painting one day (my last). thin blood could have helped with the process.
FTA " Because the field is aligned to the blood flow direction, the chains also form in the same direction, streamlining the movement of the blood."
This only works when the magnetic field is in the blood flow direction. You would have to determine the vessel being blocked and align the magnetic field in the proper direction. If aligned in the wrong direction you could potentially cause a perpendicular alignment of the blood cells, increasing the blood viscosity.
Even if you did align the magnetic field in the proper direction, you could be causing a new embolism some where else.
How do they work??
Dude, thats so gross. Rule 34 in effect? But whatever floats your boat. Just don't use it as a fridge magnet later.
TFA says the viscosity reduction lasts for a couple of hours. I wonder if it would be possible to establish a strong field using, say, a wearable Halbach array on an arm or a leg, with the reduced viscosity blood then circulating into the rest of the body? This would provide a chronic treatment effect and reduce the need for an expensive whole body 1T machine. It's pretty easy and cheap to get a 1T field in an arm-sized crossection by Halbaching some rare earth magnets.
Was this researcher's name Alex Chiu by any chance?
Great post. Just to add to it. I am a mechanical engineer. There are types of stainless steel that are not magnetic even though they are over 70% iron. Also when you are heat treating steel you can tell when it transitions to Austenite because it is no longer magnetic. So that is a case where something that is almost all iron 97%+ becomes nonmagnetic due to a change in the crystal structure.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I hear the process is twice as effective if a female-member runs the magnets up and down your body.
So a single iron atom (each hemoglobin only has one) can constitute a magnetic domain? What about the ol' no magnetic monopole rule?
I suspect something else is at work in their sample.
Just a heads up, we're gonna have a super conductor turned up full blast and pointed at you for the duration of this next test. I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the walls here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do.
I had a sig, but