#189 Lower Inflammation and Pain Using PEMF Therapy with Bob Dennis PhD

Bob Dennis (0:00)

And the assumption that I've made, and this is only a working hypothesis, because I haven't been able to prove it yet, but it's that the body mammalian tissue recognizes that type of induced electric field as a signal for growth and development.

And therefore, when you apply those fields, whether they're endogenous from the body, or whether they're exogenous applied by a magnetic pulse, either way, the body sees the same induced electric fields and responds to them with growth and development, which means not inflammatory response. So it will tend to dial down an inflammatory response. It will dial up a developmental growth response.

SPEAKER_2 (0:44)

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Siim Land (1:00)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Bob Dennis.

Bob has a PhD in Biomagical Engineering. He's one of the first people to use Pulsed Electromagnetic Frequencies or PMF therapy in NASA. Bob is working with Flux Health, which is a PMF company that brings unbiased and scientifically backed information about the benefits of PMF therapy. They have convenient and affordable micropulse PMF devices. PMF can reduce pain, lower inflammation, and trigger healing in the body. You can get 10% off all their PMF devices with the code siimland at fluxhealth.co, that's siimland at fluxhealth.co.

Bob, welcome to the show.

Bob Dennis (1:40)

Hi, Sam. Thanks for inviting me.

Siim Land (1:44)

Yeah, I'm really excited and interested to talk with you because you have a very fascinating background as a scientist and your work at NASA, so how did you get that job? How do people usually get themselves involved with something like that?

Bob Dennis (1:59)

Well, actually, I wasn't looking for that. I had just finished my PhD in 1993 and I got a phone call from a friend of mine who had a friend at NASA who was doing some research that he was working on and needed some help. So I talked to him and they ended up hiring me as a consultant for NASA. I didn't work for NASA directly. I was hired as a consultant for a laboratory that was run by one of their astronauts, Dave Wolf, actually. And he was training for and then headed to the Mir space station. And he was also training for doing research on a space shuttle. And they wanted to try to, they were having difficulty growing cells in space. It's difficult to grow cells in zero G sometimes.

It's difficult to grow cells, you know, real cells at all, primary cells are difficult to grow. So they were asking me if I could do something with pulsed electromagnetic fields, which I didn't actually know anything about. I had done electrical physiology of muscle and instrumentation development.

And I told them, so let me look at the literature and see what the scientific literature says. And I thought the literature was pretty poor quality. This would have been in about 1994 or so, 1995 And I said, you know, I really think you guys are wasting your time. I think this is pretty bad scientific literature. And they said, well, no, no, they'd like to prove it. And they'd like to see if there is anything of value in the scientific literature.

So they hired me as an external paid consultant for which I'm still paid royalties. I was still paid yesterday, actually, by NASA royalties. You get paid by the Treasury Department, not by NASA. But so this work has really been, you know, it's done. And it's, you know, a matter of public record. It's something anybody can verify. But at the time, what I did was I offered to do for them was review the literature. And I looked at what ended up being about 660 papers that were directly and indirectly related to PEMF. And this was in the mid 1990s.

And I determined that I thought the literature quality, scientific quality, was actually quite low.

And there was some nonetheless, there was some indication that there might be something happening, but it was so poorly done. Like people would make suggestions that something really wonderful could be done, and then they wouldn't do any further research. It was as if they would start doing research and then just stop for no reason. And this was dozens of researchers all around the world, you know, in Eastern Europe as well and different places. So I actually surveyed the entire literature and I came up with an experimental plan. And, you know, they asked me to design and build the scientific instruments for them. And that launched my career in PEMF. I was a pretty strong skeptic.