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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
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.
If you can get a bracelet to produce a 1.3 Tesla field I think hawking them as alternative medicine will be the last thing on your mind. And if you did the lawsuits would soon start rolling in from people who've had their hands ripped off by passing cars.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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?
Because it wasn't tested. The more astute question is, how does this change our interpretation of fMRI?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
Going to the hardware store to buy some nails, while carrying a 1.5T magnet, becomes a whole different exercise, though.
Tell me about it. Had some asshat janitor walk into our lab one day, carrying his leather tool bag, despite of all the huge-ass warning signs. The thing of course got ripped out of his hands and stuck to the magnet casing when he came too close. Had the pleasure of removing the contents - including a couple of hundred nails and screws - piece by piece. The magnet survived, at least. Just slightly dented and some of the shim coils where shot.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
Close enough without needing to read it, that's good enough for me.
I'm skeptical. Most clinical MRI scanners have a main field strength around 0.7-1.5 Tesla. If the effect these researchers claim is so significant (lowering viscosity by 30%), then I think that we would have seen a huge number of internal bleeds, ischemic events, etc. associated with undergoing a scan. I (who have worked in hospital settings and around MRI scanners as part of my work) have never heard any evidence like that, even anecdotal. The evidence of the last two decades of MRI use indicate that exposure to the magnetic field has no significant effect on the body.
The hemoglobin in your red blood cells is reasonably paramagnetic; under the application of a large magnetic field it will produce a magnetic dipole. I suspect that the effect they are describing arises when two red blood cells get near each other. Then, the magnetic field from the induced dipole in the hemoglobin gets them to line up, much like what happens with pairs of refrigerator magnets when you bring them close. This grows into a longer and longer chain, until brownian motion overcomes the weak binding induced. The resulting chains of hemoglobin flow past each other more easily than individual particles, so long as they maintain their narrow aspect along the flow direction. The benefit claimed in the article thus pertains primarily to flow along the magnetic field's axis, where the external field keeps them oriented along its axis.
It is unclear what the metabolic effects of such chains are in practical settings--for example, how well oxygen exchange will occur with much of the cell membrane locked up against adjacent cells. Also, perpendicular flow may have a lower or higher viscosity as the unmagnetized sample (though the article is not available for reading yet, so I can only infer that it is still a bit lower due to the statements in the news release-ish article that the effect persists for some time after the magnet is turned off).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
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!