Feb 28 2007
Science Watch: More on Magnet ‘Therapy’
If you’ve been coming here for a while you might remember this post I did last December about bogus ‘magnet therapy’. I was poking around the ‘Healthy Skeptic’ over at CSICOP’s website, and there was a brief article about magnetic shoe insoles. Guess what? They don’t work any differently than the non-magnetic variety:
In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2003, Dr. Mark Winemiller and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, tested magnetic and nonmagnetic insoles on 101 patients with foot pain. (Fifty-seven patients received magnetic insoles, the others received regular insoles — and neither scientist nor patient knew who was getting what.)
After wearing the insoles daily for eight weeks, both groups of patients reported pain relief, but the run-of-the-mill insoles worked just as well as the magnetic variety.
The good news about magnetic insoles is that they can ease foot pain by providing cushioning and support — just like regular insoles. “If you’re going to get an insole,” Winemiller says, “I wouldn’t bother with a magnet.”
As I pointed out in my previous post on this, there’s no concrete supportive evidence that magnetic fields affect the iron in the blood, which is the basis for many of the claims of the effectiveness of magnet therapy (see that previous post of mine for more on that). I can see why some people might believe it, because on the surface, it sounds like it makes sense. But it doesn’t really work that way.
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