Pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) therapy is being widely recognized for its ability to treat a wide range of conditions safely and effectively.
What exactly is PEMF therapy, though?
And could it help me with my health problems?
This short guide offers answers to your most burning questions about PEMF therapy, including the health benefits that it could bestow on you.
We explore the many systems and tissues that PEMF stimulation can influence and how it can treat and even reverse many medical conditions.
What is PEMF Therapy?
All living things produce and use energy, including the human body.
Every cell within your body emits an electromagnetic field (EMF).
Energy is always moving and being used within your body to perform the necessary functions that keep you alive and healthy.
When your cells get depleted of their natural sources of energy, or when disease or damage cause your EMFs to become disrupted, you can use external stimulation in the form of pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMFs) to restore the balance within your cells and improve your health.
Through damage, disease, injury, and aging, your cells naturally lost their natural electromagnetic stores of energy.
When this happens, cellular metabolism is slowed, cells become weak or dysfunctional, and, over time, vital functions can stop altogether.
When a cell has lost its ability to restore its own EMF, PEMF therapy can be used to help.
PEMF therapy is a tool that can help restore your cells’ natural function and metabolism, to health the body, and to improve your overall health and well-being.
Low-frequency, low-intensity pulses of electromagnetic energy are emitted from an electrical device.
These waves penetrate deep into the body, where they stimulate your natural chemical and electrical processes at the cellular level.
When cells work correctly, they can repair any damage, rejuvenate when depleted or energy, and create new cells to replace aging and damaged ones.
PEMF treatments are performed using a specific device that generates the appropriate waveforms, frequencies, and intensities that are needed by your body.
These pulses of energy can have many significant benefits to your health.
Below, we explain the most significant and well-documented of these benefits.
PEMF Therapy Benefits
PEMF therapy can have many significant benefits on the body because it works at the cellular level and enables your body to restore its natural processes and to heal itself.
Below are the most significant categories of benefits and specific examples of how this type of treatment can improve your health.
PEMF Therapy Reduces Inflammation
Perhaps one PEMF therapy’s most significant accomplishments or benefits is that it can help stop the inflammatory response in the body and reduce the impact of inflammation on joints, soft tissues, organs, and other parts of your body.
Inflammation is a natural response from the immune system, which can sometimes be helpful.
But, when it is left unchecked and continues for extended periods, inflammation can lead to many problems.
Pain, swelling, and stiffness are among the leading symptoms associated with inflammation, but it also can lead to autoimmune issues, chronic ailments, loss of mobility, and many more issues.
You can have inflammation in any part of your body, including your brain, blood vessels, muscles, connective tissues, organs, and skin.
Increased blood flow to the area is the first inflammatory response, and then your body begins producing neutrophils, which are specialized blood cells that have specific enzymes that destroy pathogens in your system.
Chronic inflammation can cause a wide range of conditions, including arthritis, fibromyalgia, asthma, Crohn’s disease, and many other ailments.
Controlling this inflammation, then, can restore balance and improve your overall health.
The inflammatory response is controlled by T cells, and PEMF therapy can help to turn off these cells and thus stop inflammation from occurring.
In doing so, you can inhibit the symptoms that go along with the inflammation.
Reducing inflammation can help our body recover from injury or surgery while also improving your ability to move without pain or stiffness.
PEMF therapy has been found to effectively reduce inflammation in diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (1), osteoarthritis (2), and various forms of tendinitis (3).
These types of joint problems result in pain and often a lack of mobility for the sufferer, interfering with their quality of life.
PEMF therapy has even been shown to reduce the permanent damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis, which is a chronic condition with no cure (4).
Additional research shows that PEMF therapy can reduce inflammation in the brain that may be linked to neurodegeneration such as dementia (5), as well as the inflammation that is present after a stroke (6).
By reducing this symptom, PEMF therapy can help people recover from damage while also slowing the effects of aging on the body.
PEMF Therapy Helps with Poor Circulation and Improves Cardiac Function
Your blood circulates through your body, bringing necessary nutrients and oxygen to your cells and transporting wastes and pollutants away and out of the body.
Without proper circulation, your cells do not get what they need, which can result in many different problems, including several chronic disorders that can cause lifelong problems.
When you stimulate your blood vessels using PEMF therapy, you improve their vasodilation, which allows more blood to flow through each and deliver needed nutrients to your many millions of cells.
When your circulation is weak, it can cause everything from high blood pressure to strokes, heart attacks, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), peripheral artery disease, and aneurysms.
Therefore, improving circulation can improve your chances of not developing these conditions or of recovering from one or more when they occur.
Another way that PEMF therapy works to improve circulation is that by restoring the proper electrical charge to blood cells helps them to resist clumping together, which makes them form clots, which can lead to some severe medical problems (7).
There is significant research on PEMF therapy’s ability to lower high blood pressure (8) and to help those who are recovering from stroke heal faster (9).
Better circulation also enables faster and more complete healing from wounds.
PEMF therapy is quite effective at treating diabetic ulcers, which are a common outcome for those with untreated or poorly managed diabetes (10).
PEMF therapy improves the healing of all types of wounds and soft tissue damage due to increased oxygen and nutrients delivered to the wound site (11).
By improving circulation, PEMF therapy can also help with conditions of the brain like traumatic brain injuries (12).
Circulation plays a role in diabetes, too. When cells receive less oxygen, they utilize insulin poorly, resulting in higher levels of sugar in the blood.
When PEMF stimulation is used, cells used their stores of nutrients, including insulin, more efficiently, resulting in more stable and healthier levels of blood glucose in patients with diabetes.
PEMF therapy also helps with another symptom of diabetes, neuropathy, by increasing circulation.
Neuropathy is nerve damage due to high sugar levels, but by restoring the electrical signaling of these nerves, this form of treatment can reduce nerve pain and restore the function of the nerve cells that had previously been damaged by diabetes (13).
Your heart uses electrical signals to open and close the various valves that pump blood out to your body, thought your lungs, and back through your heart.
When your heartbeat is irregular or too rapid, which is known as atrial fibrillation (AFib), it can cause problems and put you at risk for severe heart issues.
PEMF therapy has been shown to help regulate AFib and improve heart rate regularity (14).
PEMF Therapy Improves Brain and Nerve Cell Function
The cells in your brain also can suffer from energy depletion and dysfunction, which can result in many different conditions and symptoms.
Using PEMF therapy on your brain to stimulate neurons and enhance the electrical firing of nerve cells has been shown to help a number of conditions of the brain and nervous system.
PEMF therapy has proven to be an effective form of treatment for migraine pain (15).
This includes reducing the severity and frequency of headaches and reducing the need for medications to treat this sometimes-debilitating condition.
It is not known whether the positive effects are due to improved circulation in the brain, effects on neuronal firing that generate pain responses, or something else.
PEMF stimulation can help damaged nerve cells repair themselves, increasing their ability to fire correctly while also reducing pain and restoring function (16).
PEMF therapy is often quite effective at neuro-regeneration when other treatments prove ineffective.
Multiple sclerosis can also be treated using PEMF stimulation, which results from scar tissue forming on nerve cells and thus impairing their function.
PEMF therapy can reduce pain, restore nerve function, and slow the progress of this degenerative disease, providing a better quality of life for longer in some patients (17).
Those with Alzheimer’s often see an improvement in memory, cognitive function, and spatial learning when they use PEMF therapy regularly.
This treatment can also slow the progression of nerve damage and decay that is characteristic of this disease (18).
PEMF stimulation can even help those who suffer from epilepsy and depressions (19, 20).
PEMF Therapy Improves Bone Health and Healing
PEMF treatments can also improve the function and structure of your bones. Your bones are different than other tissues in your body because they are made from hard minerals.
However, they are still living tissues that need nutrients to perform their functions, and PEMF stimulation can help them to repair themselves and remain healthy.
Several studies have shown that, for example, PEMF therapy is effective at assisting broken bones to heal (21), especially those that are having trouble healing properly (22).
People with osteoporosis may be able to halt or slow the loss of bone tissue by using PEMF stimulation.
By stimulating blood flow and ensuring the delivery of critical nutrients and oxygen, PEMF therapy makes sure that your bone cells have everything they need to keep your bones strong and healthy (23).
PEMF Therapy Helps Treat Pain Safely
Pain management is a challenging goal for modern medicine and often results in the use of prescription medications that have severe side effects and can result in dependency.
PEMF therapy has been used successfully to treat diverse types of pain, including from chronic conditions like fibromyalgia (24), chronic inflammation (25), osteoarthritis (26), joint problems (27), and other medical conditions.
Because PEMF therapy is safe and non-addictive, it is an effective alternative to other conventional treatments for pain.
PEMF Therapy Can Treat Many Other Conditions and Illnesses
Because of its ability to influence cells in such a positive way, PEMF stimulation is also able to address a number of medical conditions and symptoms.
For example, the use of PEMF therapy can help improve your sleep and alleviate insomnia (28).
It has proven to reduce eye pressure, which in turn helps treat glaucoma, as well (29).
PEMF stimulation can have a positive effect on skin conditions, including scleroderma.
PEMF improves immune system function in several positive ways, including helping your body do a better job of healing itself (30).
Immunity is influenced by a number of factors, including nutrition, oxygen saturation, and other mediators that PEMF therapy can positively impact.
Final Thoughts
PEMF stimulation is effective at reducing inflammation, relieving pain, improving circulation, enhancing neural activity, improving immunity, and bolstering bone health.
This treatment can effectively improve sleep, mobility, healing, and quality of life to those with chronic disorders, diseases, and conditions.
In short, there is not much that PEMF therapy cannot help or improve.
This concise overview just gives you an introduction to the many health and wellness benefits of PEMF therapy.
When you investigate further, you will see that scientists have, in many cases, identified the exact positive change at the cellular level that PEMF therapy can achieve, showing us the miraculous way that simple electrical stimulation of the right frequency and intensity can improve the function of the human cell.
Researchers are continually learning more about the positive effects of PEMF therapy, and this list continues to grow all the time.