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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.
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.
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!
I work with field mapping in NMR magnets. I've had to pass most of the work to others. 3T fields now give me migraines. Even the silver and gold dental work in your teeth are affected - the magnetic fields generate eddy currents in the metal. Nothing better than the weird taste of metal in you mouth. Once or twice, I've been in 7T research magnets - what a trip (not the fun type) - woozy and dizzy for hours after even a few minutes in one of them.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?