What’s the Big Attraction?

Since the age of 11, Alicia Hanna had suffered debilitating daily headaches that interfered with her concentration at school and made her feel just plain miserable. After years of gulping down nine ibuprofen tablets a day, she turned to pain specialists and more prescription pills than she can remember.

In October, figuring she had nothing to lose, she joined hundreds of thousands of Americans tapping into a popular alternative treatment: magnet therapy. She started sleeping on a magnetic pillow and mattress, placing magnetic insoles in her shoes, wearing a magnetic necklace and sticking magnetic disks on her neck.

The pain began to ease.

With her doctor’s approval, she weaned herself from medication, achieving a longtime goal of getting off the pills that had given her a host of unpleasant side effects.

“It’s amazing,” said Hanna, 18, of Newhall, a college-bound high school senior. “I’m not in pain all the time. I have more energy since I’m not on all the medication.” She said her parents’ $1,100 investment in magnetic products is outweighed by savings in doctor visits and prescriptions.

Her doctor, Steven Graff-Radford, a dentist who serves as director of the Pain Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is pleased for her--yet skeptical because there isn’t enough medical research to substantiate her results.

“You just can’t talk about anecdotal responses. You’ve got to be objective about it,” he said. “I’m happy to work with these things if we can prove they work.”

Only a few small scientific studies have suggested magnets may ease pain--the most recent one was released this month in a plastic surgery journal. Yet testimonials from professional golfers who have regained their swing, neighbors and friends whose joints hurt less and migraine sufferers whose headaches have become more manageable have fueled a booming annual business estimated at anywhere from $150 million to $500 million a year.

Magnets that you strap on, sleep on or slip into your shoes are available through department stores, the Internet and independent distributors, ranging from about $20 for a knee wrap to $200 for a mattress pad and hundreds more for a magnetic mattress.

Magnetherapy Inc. a Florida-based company that began supplying magnets to golfers with aching backs several years ago, recently commissioned a marketing study that pegged this year’s U.S. market at $300 million--up $100 million from last year--and $1.5 billion worldwide. According to marketing director Ted Barash, the study projected a $600-million U.S. market by 2003 as more baby boomers--and people of all ages--turn to magnets for their aches and pains.

Hanna and her classmate Michelle Stack of Pacific Palisades are among seven of Graff-Radford’s patients currently trying magnet therapy--and among three who have gotten good results.

Stack, 17, has reduced her need for migraine medicines with magnets and is doing “moderately well,” Graff-Radford said, although she stayed home from school one day last week with a migraine.

Another patient, 55-year-old Judy Bernstein of Sherman Oaks, who recently began selling magnets, said she hasn’t “had any dramatic help from them,” but wakes up less stiff since sleeping on a magnetic mattress. So far, magnets haven’t eased her chronic burning facial pain.

Graff-Radford said the successes of two or three patients fall within the range of placebo effects for pain. He adds that drug trials have shown that as many as 60% of patients receiving dummy pills called placebos report relief--and that number soars to 70% among adolescents.

“A placebo response doesn’t mean you didn’t have the problem to begin with,” Graff-Radford said. “It’s a real physiological change in brain chemistry that actually can inhibit pain. Something is triggering a change in the brain, but it may not be due necessarily to the magnet.”

Scientists and doctors still don’t know how static magnets--something akin to those that you find on refrigerators but more powerful--may affect the body. Many working theories are bunk, said Arthur Pilla, a biomedical researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City. Magnets don’t bind to iron in the blood, nor are the magnets’ weak fields responsible for creating warmth.

What scientists do know is that magnets affect the way calcium binds to certain molecules in cells and ultimately speeds up the release of some enzymes, Pilla said.

“The only thing I would say is even though we don’t understand it we’re trying to because it’s worth it,” said Pilla, who heads Magnetherapy’s scientific board.

“It’s a phenomenon at this point,” said Dr. Joel Saper, an Ann Arbor, Mich., neurologist and chairman of the Pain Care Coalition, made up of two pain doctors’ groups. “People are vulnerable to try anything out there that might be plausible. There’s little science for a lot of claims, and it needs to be subjected to the same type of rigorous scholarly assessment that everything else is subjected to before mainstream medicine can get behind it.”

Therapy Took Off Among Golfers

Magnet therapy took off first among professional golfers, who constantly torque their backs on the green. Magnetherapy Inc.’s poster boys are senior PGA golfers Bob Murphy and Jim Colbert. Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino also uses them.

Murphy’s arthritis kept him out of the game for five years. When he returned in 1993, he tried a magnetic back strap that Colbert recommended. “I was a doubting Thomas,” recalls Murphy, 56. “Within the second week, I began to notice I did not have the same amount of pain. Since then, I wear them every day when I play golf. When I’m home, I sleep on a big magnetic mattress.” He also straps magnetic wraps to his knee for an old football injury.

Colbert, 58--who like Murphy has stock options in Magnetherapy that could be potentially valuable if the privately owned firm one day sells stock to the public--said he hasn’t “missed one day of golf because of my back since I’ve been wearing these magnets. I was leading money-winner two years in a row and player of the year. I got my worth out of them just wearing them.”

Such anecdotes may be compelling, but they’re not scientific.

One of the factors complicating the collection of good, placebo-controlled studies with magnets is that those who receive an active magnet instead of an inactive one usually can tell because a magnet will attract metal objects such as paper clips.

But as more studies come out, attitudes toward magnets are changing.

Dr. William Jarvis, a professor of health and preventive medicine at Loma Linda University and past president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, maintained for years that most magnet claims were “pure quackery.”

Then in 1997, he read a study by Dr. Carlos Vallbona of Baylor University in Houston that found magnets helped patients suffering the pain of post-polio syndrome. At that point, Jarvis had a change of heart. He would like to see more data.

Dr. John Renner, who heads the new incarnation of Jarvis’ group, the National Council for Reliable Health Information in Independence, Mo., and serves as chief medical officer for Healthscout.com, a credible health Web site, is keeping an open mind.

Studies Don’t Add Up to Scientific Evidence--Yet

Studies like Vallbona’s “just don’t add up to scientific evidence yet,” said Renner, who attended a sales meeting for Nikken Inc., a company that markets magnets for “rest and relaxation” as well as better sleep.

“Whether these things are going to cure or fix pain or make you sleep better, we just need more evidence. We just don’t have it yet,” Renner said.

Although magnets are widely touted for pain relief, marketing them is tricky business.

Clifton Jolley, spokesman for Irvine-based Nikken, said the company works diligently to enforce its policy that prohibits marketing the products for pain. That’s because the Food and Drug Administration “does not recognize magnetic devices as analgesia for pain. We make no claims for the magnets because the FDA says we may not. We make claims of ‘rest and relaxation,’ the term the FDA is comfortable with.”

Jolley said that in a company the size of Nikken “you’re going to occasionally find people who break the rules.” But he said Nikken has no control over how customers use the magnets: “Customers may use the products and receive benefits as they see fit, and they may well receive benefits that they ascribe to the products.”

Back Be Nimble, a Houston-based company that specializes in back-care products, says on its Internet site that the Tectonic Magnetic bracelets it sells stimulate acupuncture points and that such stimulation “has a positive effect on the internal organs and on other parts of the body . . . and may help in calming and normalizing the nervous system and the balancing of the entire system.”

In its full-page department-store sales inserts in newspapers, Homedics describes its TheraP magnetic system as a “non-medical method for the treatment of pain” that “helps promote blood flow and enhance the relief of pain.”

Magnetherapy is safely within FDA guidelines when it markets its magnets for natural pain relief, without recommending them for a particular malady or body part, said marketing production manager Dawn Palumbo.

So far, neither the FDA nor the Federal Trade Commission has gone after magnet companies that make general claims about pain, although the FTC and FDA have cited companies that say magnets can cure serious illnesses like AIDS or cancer.

Many distributors say in their literature that they are not in the business of diagnosing or prescribing. They warn against wearing magnets if you use a cardiac pacemaker, because of possible interference; if you’re pregnant, to avoid any risks to the fetus; and if you have metal implants.

So far, doctors don’t see many dangers in trying a noninvasive device like a magnet, and they know that people in pain will try almost anything for relief.

Saper, the neurologist, notes that a culture has cropped up around magnets that includes not only users, but users who have gone into business selling them for companies like Amway and Nikken “and that of course raises all sorts of suspicions.”

He added: “We chase these phantoms in medicine: copper bracelets, electronic pain units. These are fads people go through. Some of us have a responsibility to be very cautious. That’s what I am.”