I withdrawl that one. When I was searching the threads I was trying to just get threads you started. You responded to that one and did not ask it.
Your proving my point. The tone of that demonstration was intended to persuade, like you said, that “magnets cannot have any direct effect on subcutaneous tissue.” It doesn’t just say that there is no proof that it is right but goes on to say that there is reasonable proof that it is WRONG. But in the article I cited they indicate that they have no idea whether a magnet could affect internal molecules/tissues or not. They are making a claim which they have not backed up. They are not just saying there is no proof for another claim. They are making their own unsupported claim. If it were just a demonstration, backed up by more rigorous science I would let it go but it’s not. Their demonstration is just as bad as a MT marketer’s demonstration that since that same magnet CAN hold up iron oxide dust that the SE is in fact wrong. No science on either side but one purports to be the ultimate defenders of it.
The commercial could have said that there is no proof that MT works, but they don’t, they try and say that it COULD NOT work all based on nothing.
Argumentum ad Ignorantium
There is no evidence FOR p
therefore, not P
This is SE’s fallacy in the tone of approach to this issue.
Argumentum ad Hominem is Cervaise’s problem
and Argumentum ad Baculum is virtually everyone else’s 
KidC, did you read my post? Indeed, we do know how magnetic fields should affect the molecules/tissues and the conclusion is that we need strong magnets… unlike anything you can buy from high-falutin mail order catalogues.
JS, yes but apparently other’s didnt so Im just basing my argument on the structure of SE’s argument rather than it’s content. Like I said I don’t believe in it either but I won’t stand up as a scientist and say it’s been disproven. And the commercial refutes the efficacy of a magnetic field period, not of any specific device.
(This is from memory. Some innacuracies may pop up)
TCMS does NOT use magnets. It uses precision electromagnets. The em is placed precisely on the patients head. Power is pulsed through at a specific rate. IIRC This induces electricity in the tageted portions of the brain. Thus, instead of zapping the whole brain as in ECT, only a small portion of the brain is zapped.
Patients are brought in for sessions. The procedure does not involve anyone walking around with magnets taped to their heads. Since the equioment is magnetised only during treatment, double-blind studies would be fairly simple.Doc, yes the SE article distinguishs between static magnetic fields and induced. Ill cite it again since noone seems to have read it when i first posted it.
KidC, one of your criticisms of CSICOP here is that they are hsowing the “cheesiest” of ads on the article. I woudl strongly disagree with this. Having worked in the catalog industry, and having had to strenously avoid the psuedo-science market. I would say that these ads are actuallu on the mild side. Ads for “magnetic therapy” items got so bad that The Onion did a parody article of a revolutionary new shoe that uses 5 forms of psuedoscience. (sorry, no link, I’m at work and The Onion is blocked).
I’m having a tough time understanding your argument, KidC, but I think I understand what you’re saying here. I think you’re conflating two different things:
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The magnet-paperclip demonstration illustrates that with the type of magnet that most therapeutic devices are made from, there is no direct effect on subcutaneous tissue because there is no magnetic field there. See Giraffe’s post describing these magnets in detail. This is not speculation. No more experimentation needs to be done. The magnetic field strength vs distance of these magnets is known.
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What would happen if a magnetic field were somehow induced within the body? This is the question that must be addressed by clinical studies in order to put the magnetic therapy issue to bed. But this question is not addressed by the magnet-paperclip demonstration.
I hope this helps. (And that I’m on the right track.)
We are not going to have a pissing match in GQ, and we are not going to debate the general correctness of the Skeptical Enquirer here, either.
Stick to the OP, or take it to another thread in an appropriate forum.
Crap. You guys had me so cheesed off about the rulebreaking that I forgot to mention what The boss has to say on the matter.
DocCathode, minor nitpick. Electromagnets are still magnets. I think you meant to write, “TCMS does NOT use permanent magnets.”
I remember seeing a more complete article. The effect they were studying would only occur when the fields were applied to a specific part of the brain. If the coil was held slightly wrong, the effect vanished. They just had to instruct two groups of operators to place the coils on patients’ heads in two different ways, one which they had previously found to give results, and one which was way off.
KC is right, and that demo with the sheets of paper is extremely misguided to put it mildly. It actually originated with Robert Park, a physicist who writes a highly public “skeptical” column for the APS.
Park made a big blunder. The strength of attraction of 'fridge magnets is highly dependent on the GRADIENT of the magnetic field, not strictly on the field strength, and the gradient is high only near the surface. Modern flexible-sheet magnets are magnetized with parallel-stripe pole patterns and they will stick very strongly to a metal plate, but the attraction force falls off extremely rapidly with distance from the metal. That sort of magnet is NOT designed to hold up pieces of paper. It can barely tolerate a thick coat of paint. However, the magnetic field strength of these sheet-magnets DOESN’T fall off so rapidly across space, only the gradient of the field does. Depending on the width of the pole stripes, the magnetic field could extend several mm from the face of the magnet, yet still the attraction force can’t support a thick sheet of paper.
Either professional physicist Park (and now CSICOP?) doesn’t know the difference between a field strength and a field gradient, or they’re being dishonest in order to be persuasive. Having observed past behavior, I suspect the latter. The demonstration with the sheets of paper is very convincing, but it’s a lie. If they really wanted to know the field strength versus distance, they’d have done the obvious thing: grabbed a magnetometer probe and actually MEASURED the field strength versus distance. (But that might say something very different from what they want to tell us.) The stuff with the sheets of paper is downright embarrassing, it marks either ignorance of simple physics, or unethical behavior.
Regarding magnets and health claims, in all the decades of magnet debunking, NOBODY ACTUALLY TESTED THE CLAIMS! Instead the critics based their attacks on theory; on the fact that magnets are untested fringe science, and the fact that that DC magnetic fields cannot affect chemistry. This latter “fact” is now known to be false. So do they work or not? Nobody bothered to test them until very recently (1997.) The test involved back pain, and it gave a (very controversial) positive result.
Magnetic therapy: plausible attraction?
http://www.csicop.org/si/9807/magnet.html
bbeaty, I have removed that portion of your post not germain to the OP.
Apparently I was insufficiently unclear. The place for a debate about the general accuracy of Skepdic or whoever is Great Debates, not here. It is beyond the scope of General Questions.
bbeaty, it is not up to the scientific community to jump up and stop everything in order to test whether the next snow-job snake oil advertised is the real thing or not. These companies themselves can go legit and raise funds to hire independent researchers to try to determine whether there is anything to their claims. That they have not done that speaks volumes about their scientific integrity. It is not the scientific community that is being dishonest, it is the companies that run the juncket. The scientific community says, “there is no evidence…” The companies talk about the “beneficial health effects…” Therein lies the problem.
At the risk of getting argumentative, let me put plain and simple why these issues irk me:
Magnets are useful in health. They have been used for MRI and to treat depression cases. These were powerful magnets. These New Age meridian alligning magnets are not the same things.
What is really needed to demonstrate scientific impact of these devices is some sort of mechanistic explanation for why such a treatment works. I wait with bated breath for anyone to offer one! The only two conjectures I’ve heard are so utterly untrue as to be pathetic. One is that the magnets allign water molecules (manifestly not true for even magnets with MRI strengths) or they attract the iron in blood (hemoglobin is not ferromagnetic). So, what, pray tell, do these magnets do, you magnet supporters?
When I said I’d like to see how they double-blinded that study, I was reffering to the one that compared rTMS to ECT, which found no difference in effectiveness.
Yeah, but that sentence is sufficiently unclear.
Hoo! Hoo! Ha! Ha! Ha! Get it? It’s a language joke! Hah! I kill me!