Andy Smith 00:00 
A quick disclaimer before we begin, the PEMF podcast does not contain any medical advice and the content provided is for informational purposes only. If you have any health concerns, please visit a healthcare professional. 

Welcome back to another episode of the PEMF podcast. And today I'm joined by someone that actually their name has come up quite a lot in this industry. You know, I've been involved in PEMFs now for over 10 years and you know, someone that we really don't want to get on this podcast is Dr. Robert Dennis and his connections with the whole NASA studies. And because that's something that especially when people are new to PEMFs, they start looking into PEMFs. NASA comes up quite a lot because I was talking to Bob just before this, sorry, Rob, we also known as Bob, before this podcast and he was talking to us about how the connection of PEMF and NASA all started. So we'll get into that and we'll get into the number of it. But can you introduce yourself, please, Dr. Robert Dennis? And I know you've kind of collected a few PhDs over your time. So just mention what you've what you've been doing.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:06 
Yeah, I do basic research. I did my PhD in a laboratory, in a physiology laboratory, actually, at the University of Michigan. But I'm a biomedical engineer. So I approach biology from very technical side of how do you build instruments to measure and quantify physiologic signals. And that's sort of like my research background. And I did research on physiology for my PhD. For 20 years or so, I did tissue engineering research. How do you build a tissue or an organ in a Petri dish and culture, and quantifying that and everything. But I've done a lot of other work on the side. I just helped my wife finish her PhD. She's going to graduate in two days with a PhD in bio-textiles. And she and I developed a whole new sort of class of materials for growing tissues on. It's a composite foam. And so I've helped a lot of different people. I've been involved directly, really deeply, in about probably 10 different research areas sort of peripherally related. But I do a lot of consulting as well on the side. So outside the university, run my own company, Micropulse, which probably I'm sure you've heard of. And so, yeah, I had this terrible back injury. I was in the United States. A big thing is volunteer firefighting. Three quarters of the firefighters in the United States, 75% are volunteers. So we go through the same training as a career firefighter would. So we just don't get paid. Right. So I had a bad back injury that had exacerbated earlier injuries on a fire response. And this was about 20 years ago. And I found myself basically crippled with this back pain that was untreatable. So that's what kind of brought me back into this because I had previously, about 10 years before that, I had done this NASA research that you're referring to. But I had no idea until I kind of put the two together, chronic pain and this basic cellular gene expression research I did for, you know, with NASA as a consultant. I had no idea that the two would go together. So, you know, I kind of came into this whole field of PEMF with this no expectations. It's just I kept stumbling over it.

Andy Smith 03:55 
You know, so that's a good, good point to mention actually, because a lot of people come into PEMF through the back pain route, you know, they, they have a pain and they find PEMF through, through one way or another, but, um, and it was a question I want to ask you is what came first. So the, the NASA stuff for you was the first experience with PEMF. So how did, how did, what, what was your first ever mention of, of PEMF was, was that from, from the consulting work you did with NASA or?

Dr Bob Dennis 04:23 
Actually, it's it's let me let me that's a great question because it kept coming up like peripherally. So in the early 1990s, I would run into it. PEMF called different things like PEMF or TV, I'm after something every now and then on a paper because my PhD had to do with electrically exciting muscle tissue to get it to contract and then looking at where the proteins went and everything. Um, so I would occasionally run into it and I would think, Oh, this is kind of kooky. You know, people talking about magnetism, having an effect on cells. And, you know, I was, I was just, I was young. And so I don't, I remember being 20. So I knew everything when I was in my twenties. I don't know about you, but I knew everything. And I knew that was a bunch of nonsense. And so I'd never paid attention to it. All right. Because it didn't fit into my, my universal view of, of legitimate science. And then, um, I got my PhD in the early, you know, you know, after having done all this research, when you have a, get your PhD, one of the things, one of the piece of baggages you carry off the plane is having read hundreds or thousands of papers. And, and, um, so one of my colleagues, her name is Kathy Clark. She happened to be the senior visiting scientist on the international space station. That was the NASA connection. I, she's down the hall. We had shared a few students. I'd helped her with a little bit of her research. And she said, Hey, Bob, you know, these guys at NASA are trying to figure out how to use electromagnetism to, to make cells grow better and low gravity, zero gravity, and they actually call it microgravity. Um, and I was like, okay, well, maybe I can help them thinking it was going to be an electrical stimulation thing. Right. So I, I ended up flying down to NASA and they proposed that we use these magnetic fields to pro cells. And I was like, this was 1996. And I said, you know, this is nonsense. And so I went through this whole thing and we can talk about if you want, where I forced them to really do this as a well controlled double blind study so that we would know if something worked and we also know if it didn't work, because my goal was to prove that it was nonsense to say, okay, we did a careful study. We did everything we could and it, and it didn't work. And so that kind of came to fruition in 1998 by proving that I was wrong. That in fact, there was a very strong effect. If you use the right kind of pulse, the right kind of way on cells, they actually changes their gene expression. Okay. Boom, bang. Okay. I didn't, I didn't believe it the first time we saw it. So I kind of took the instruments back, rebuilt them, handed them back to NASA. And they did it again. In the interim, I had read 660 papers related to PEMF.

Andy Smith 07:23 
Mm-hmm.

Dr Bob Dennis 07:23 
led up to this work and I was like, this is the most pathetic body of science I've ever seen. I estimated at most 3% of those papers were any good. And I come from it on the side of, you know, a strict traditional conservative scientist who needs to have the boxes checked off, you know, did you calibrate your instruments? Are you measuring a number that someone else can measure and repeat, you know, just simple things like that. And just on the basis of those, I thought, oh, at best 3% of this body of literature has any value at all scientifically. So 97% of it is nonsense. So I was shocked to see there was an effect. And that was in the late 90s. And then I kind of, we can get into this, I kind of set it down for a while and was doing my other research. And I was big into research with the Department of Defense here in the United States working on, on actually different ways to help rebuild people, prosthetics, nerve interface stuff until I ended up injuring myself about nine years later, probably 2005. And then I thought I should take this as so desperate to get something to relieve the pain. And I'm dusting off some old PEMF stuff, tried it and shocked me that it actually worked where nothing else had, but we can get into the details of that if you're interested. But that, that was the sequence. It was like, heard about it, did the NASA research 96 to 98, went away from it, came back to it when I needed it in 2005.

Andy Smith 09:08 
No, it's good. And like I say, a lot of people come in the other way around in terms of they're desperate. They're trying to find something to find PEMF. They have an amazing effect for it. But something you said to me off air, which you mentioned in there was really useful that a lot of the studies are done where people are trying to prove that PEMF is working or, you know, like I've developed a PEMF device, you've developed a PEMF device. When we give them devices to people, we, you know, we're giving them to them on the understanding that we want to have a positive outcome. You know, so a lot of the time that these studies are done, there's like a push for a good outcome. But you went on this completely the way around, you know, you went in there as a complete skeptic and you actually went in there to say, no, this stuff is rubbish. You know, move on to something else. And yeah, if you can just explain that in terms of like, you know, how, how was your mind changed?

Dr Bob Dennis 10:01 
Oh, absolutely. I think that's the most important thing because, you know, I'm I try to fight my own mental biases. And if I really believe something's true, I'm just like anybody else. You know, I get confirmation bias. Right. Ok. Yeah. There we go. Right. And you can see people swirling down into these into these, you know, echo chambers where they just keep, you know, they block out other signals. They just keep confirming and reinforcing their beliefs. Right. So at a time, my belief and and I no longer, I no longer I'm going to, you know, harbor this because you learn lessons as you get older and hopefully you learn enough that you're you're not an idiot by the time you get to be my age. In fact, I just turned 61. So in case anyone is interested, I've been around before. Well, thanks. You know, I've felt better. But I know I was a firefighter 20 years ago and knocking down doors and stuff. But the the thing is that when Kathy asked me to talk to the guys at NASA, they were sort of like the management level. People were sort of like, yeah, there's these kind of kooky guys. They didn't put it this way, but, you know, and they really keep saying there's something to this and we don't see it. Maybe you can go and help them. I was like, so even the administration at NASA, the guys who are, you know, sort of mental management, they weren't psyched about it. I don't think I've ever told anybody about that, but that's the fact. I said, well, I can go on as a consultant. And, you know, and and at the time, I was a research scientist at University of Michigan, and I was like, yeah, I can do that as a consultant. Go on and see what they want to do and try to help them. And when I went there, they were they were heavily biased towards. Yeah. PEMF just works. And here's you know, we think the magic frequency is 10 Hertz. And I was like, oh, magic frequency. Oh, yeah. You know. Does something resonates with something harmony? You know, they had read, you know, they drank the Kool-Aid, as we say, or as we used to say 20 years ago, and people remember what that referred to. And they believed it. And I had I had looked at some of these papers and I was like, they're not very impressive papers. They. So before I worked for them, I actually said, you need to let me review the literature here. Tell me what you're reading and let me review that. Let me do a broader search of all the literature because University of Michigan is an excellent, excellent medical research. So they at the time, this is before Google existed, right? They would do translations for you. So, you know, you get it turns out that about half of the research in PEMF was done by Soviet Eastern Bloc countries.

Andy Smith 12:44 
Mhm.

Dr Bob Dennis 12:45 
So a lot of it was just completely impenetrable, right, to the average reader. Well, maybe there's some, something in that. So I had a bunch of these papers translated at the time, collected 660, concluded that only 3% were any good. A couple of them showed maybe positive results, but not really strong. But I'm talking about in terms of scientific, you know, credibility, was it done well enough that you could conclude any positive or negative? So that's how I came into it was thinking, you know, ah, this is really bad stuff. I really don't wanna do this. I didn't, the thing I learned as I was looking it up is that it has a stigma associated with that. I kinda knew this, but going into it, it's like I had many of my colleagues going, you're not gonna study that, are you? I mean, like, you know, two of the people on my doctoral committee were friends of mine. They're like, you don't wanna study that. It's like, you know, you'll never scrub that off, that stain of that off of your academic record if you start publishing on this rubbish. So it wasn't just me. It was a really, really strong bias against it baked into the scientific apparatus.

Andy Smith 13:56 
Why do you think that is because the mention of magnets and yeah or you know what was driving that?

Dr Bob Dennis 14:04 
So, I think it was a combination of things, scientific community, it's sort of like saying that community of cats or something, you know, I'm holding cats, right? So there's no cohesive scientific community. Anybody who tells you there's a cohesive scientific community that is uniformly trying to feed you disinformation, that's disinformation from a different entity that's otherwise engaged right now, but there's so much discord within the scientific community, right? But people who manage it or people who are at a high level, they do. The higher you go in the scientific hierarchy, the more, you know, mainstream your ideas have to be because you have to pass muster with your peers so many times that, you know, if they think you're a kook, they're not going to invest in you. They're not going to give you one of these coveted positions at a university. You know, I've applied for two different university positions in my entire life. And the first one, there were 147 other applicants. And then there was over 150 when I was at UNC and they had actually invited me to apply where I am currently. So the thing is that it's extremely hard to get one of these positions and they're not going, you know, people don't want to hire people who are viewed negatively. And this is true in like the clinical sciences and everything, like medical doctors who deviate from the sort of the belief system that's in place. They don't do well. They don't do well. It's not just a question of licensure. So where did this all start? Well, in 1911 in the United States, there was this guy named Flexner, F-L-E-X-N-E-R. And he was paid by Andrew Carnegie to go around and, you know, assess the state of medicine at the time. And there was all kinds of, you know, in 1911, 1910 and before that, there was all kinds of different ways of approaching medicine. You know, energy medicine, allopathic medicine, you know, chiropractic and so forth. And they basically stigmatized anything that was not, you know, a drug-based allopathic medical model. And there's been this very, very strong bias against anything like that. And it's kind of like this self-fulfilling prophecy and it starts off with, you know, the use of electromagnetism is BS and there's nothing to it. Only an idiot would do it and there's no proof of it. So you want grant funding to see if you can prove it? No. Right? So what they do is they say, you can't prove it because we won't give you money to study it to prove it. And in science, of course, you don't prove things. What you do is you disprove them and then you build up a strong inference that you believe something to be true because you've been testing it, you know, you've been testing the hypothesis. And then you sort of back your way into it, which is kind of what I accidentally did getting into PEMF. I'd like to say I'm, you know, the smart scientist who figured out the right way to approach, but I'm not. You know, I just, I kept trying to say this is nonsense and I kept being wrong when you actually run the experiment legitimately. You keep seeing a signal, you know, some signal like an outcome, right? The cells are doing something and you're like, wow, okay, well, and you know, if you do it the right way, if you do it the wrong way, of course, it doesn't work, but there's lots of ways to apply PEMF and just because one of them doesn't work, doesn't mean the other ones don't work. I actually calculated one time based on the United States FDA definition of PEMF. Like the simple way to look at it is 11 Hertz, different from 10 Hertz, according to the FDA, it is right. And so I called them up, you know, I'm like, okay, is 10.1 Hertz different from 11 Hertz, right? Well, you know, it's like, how precise do you have to be to have it be something different? Because under the US FDA, if you do something different, it has to be reapproved, right? So then kind of backing the FDA into a corner, I said, okay, so this much of a change. constitutes a different thing, something you view as a different thing. And if you then calculate it, I have this on an Excel spreadsheet, there are approximately one quadrillion different ways to apply PEMF. That's one with like 15 zeros after it.

Andy Smith 18:48 
Heh.

Dr Bob Dennis 18:48 
That's about 200 million times more complicated than chemistry, all of known chemistry in the universe. The number of different, you know, number of different chemical species times about 200 million. That's how many, according to the US FDA, hey, that's a different, you know, 10 is different from 10.1 or whatever it is. And you can, you can slide these values up or down. So my point is only a narrow range of PEMF works. It's just like, like if you build a radio and you don't tune it to a station, it's not gonna give you a signal back. That does not mean you should conclude that radio, that radios in general don't work, right? You have to be doing the right thing with it. Not only do you have to have one that functions, but you gotta tune it properly. And this gets into the whole issue of the, you know, the waveform shape and everything like that.

Andy Smith 19:41 
Yes, so we'll touch on each subject, and I think that's quite interesting to know. But while we're in the frequencies, because you mentioned, you know, that the NASA guys were saying 10 hertz was the magic formula, and you've just said that there's a certain frequency range that you think is more effective, what do you, if you're happy to share that, what would that be?

Dr Bob Dennis 20:07 
I'm totally happy to share that I've published it and then it's it's I'm totally wide open with it and I've patented it a few times, four times. So what the guys at NASA said was not that 10 hertz is the magic frequency what they said. I want to correct you here because then everybody's going to go get me a 10 hertz PEMF. Yeah. No, that's not what they said. I said, OK, what exactly do you want to test? And the answer was, well, we don't know. But we see different frequencies everywhere in the literature and we sort of counted them all up and put them into bins. And the most frequent one we saw was 10 hertz. So we think 10 hertz will work. But, you know, is it, you know, and then then then I said, well, you know, I was in the middle of kind of digging through this huge literature. And I said, well, I'm going to go ahead and do this whatever way I think needs to be done. But yeah, OK, I'll take that into account. But the problem with that is that 10 hertz. OK, so there's there's two different ways that we use the word frequency in English, just common English. One of them is how often does something happen? Right. So so frequency is thought of as, you know, how many times you have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom. You know, how many how many clock pulses come out of your clock in your computer? Oh, it's a three point six gigahertz machine. Right. Three hundred three three point six gigahertz. But they're square waves. Right. However, if you're looking for something like a biological response, it's. It's more likely that you're talking about what's called the frequency content. And so that's what you get with a Fourier transform. It's like if you have a pure sine wave, nice, smooth sine wave, it can be one frequency. But if you have a square wave like a clock pulse on a computer or something, then it contains a bunch of frequencies. It only its main primary frequency is the number of pulses per second. But then it has these things called harmonics. Right. And so you. Most people you can define the first thing that's meant by frequency, which is how often does something happen? How many pulses per second? Right. But the thing that probably matters biologically and in many other ways is the signal processing. Definition of frequency and the definition of frequency. I haven't run in anybody who knows that it's like a doctoral level signal processing thing. The definition of frequency is the first time derivative, you know, the rate of change of phase.

Andy Smith 22:49 
Uh-huh.

Dr Bob Dennis 22:50 
It's not really how many pulses do you get per second, it's like it's the first time it's a calculus thing, right? And it's like what's the slope, you know, and you'd sort of figure out what are all the different frequencies that are built into your waveform that's coming out a certain number of times per second. Well, my conclusion, based on the very first two experiments we did at NASA was that it was that second definition of frequency that matters. How the shape of the waveform is, how quickly it's changing, not how many pulses you get per second. So the thing is that when people say frequency to the average person on the street, common English, yeah, you know, how many pulses per second. But I did the experiment where we did everything at exactly the same number of pulses per second, 10 pulses per second, but then I changed the waveform and it only worked for two out of the six waveforms. We got no biological effect. We repeated this experiment, got exactly the same results. So that started me down the path of, okay, what matters here is not how many pulses per second, which is if they don't clarify to you what they're saying, if they just use the word frequency, that's what they mean, pulses per second. And that's how PEMF machines are built. You know, you turn on the coils, you turn them off, turn them on, turn them off. How many times do you turn them on and off every second? That's your frequency. And my argument has been, and there's scientific support for this now because I've tested it and is that what matters is how quickly it's turned on, how quickly the magnetic field rises, and then how quickly it decays. And that all of a sudden, when I realized that, all of a sudden the light bulb went out and I was like, oh, Bob, boy, you've really been thick. Okay, so why there's a biological effect now, instead of me just dismissing it out of hand as not even scientific and there's no reason why it should work, all of a sudden you realize, well, the first time derivative, the rate of change in magnetic field is directly proportional to the induced electric field. This is Faraday's law. This is a well-established, so it's well-established physics and it's well-established biology that biological systems, cells, even ones that are not necessarily excitable tissues like nerve and they respond to electrical fields. And so the connection is the magnetic field changes in such a way that it induces an electric field that the cells can then detect. And so you can detect electric fields in a lot of different ways. But for this to work, you have to induce an electric field of a certain magnitude, and that's your Faraday's equation, right? So it's, you know, you can look it up, but it's most people wouldn't make any sense to them because it's hard to understand. And, you know, I don't want to simplify it. Everybody keeps saying to me, well, you know, can you give me a simple explanation of it?  And it turns out that YouTube notwithstanding, there are things in the world that just can't be explained easily. Like if you want to take a person who's working on their PhD in electrical engineering or physics and weed them out and make them cry and drop out, you put them into a class of like, you know, a course where they have to take electromagnetism. It's really tough. It's like if, you know, looking at any course of study you could take at a university, I would say electromagnetism, just understanding it. Oh gosh, you know, all the people that I knew when I was in college, they're like dreading this because it was just so much math and so non-intuitive, so difficult. But if you weed your way through it, the connection is the shape of the pulse, the magnetic pulse, tells you the electric field that you induce. And if you shape that field the right way, you end up with an electric field amplitude, how strong is the field, and a duration. There's specific, there's old, old physiology for this that goes back in 1907. It's called cronexian real base. How long is the pulse and how big is the amplitude?

Andy Smith 27:23 
Mmhmm.

Dr Bob Dennis 27:24 
very old stuff. So this, like, very classical physiology connects to very classical physics, connects to very classical, straightforward electrical engineering. And then you can, if you look at it this way, you can see, oh, okay, well, if I put out a magnetic pulse shaped this way, I can expect to induce an electric field that has these characteristics. And that's the kind of thing that living cells can respond to.

Andy Smith 27:52 
So breaking that down as best I can understand is are you saying that the waveform is a little bit more important in terms of the amount of frequency that the frequency we're delivering. So if we if we're delivering a range between 1 and 30 Hertz, which kind of like what I consider what some other people consider as like your natural frequencies, we could be delivering 1 Hertz, we could be delivering 20 Hertz, but it's more important for you as to how we deliver them and the waveform that it's delivered through then then the frequency. Does that make sense?

Dr Bob Dennis 28:27 
Yeah, I would say so. So in my studying this and wrestling with it for the last few decades, I would say probably 85 percent. I don't I don't think it's one way or the others like just one exclusive or the other, but I think it's probably 85 percent that the waveform shape has the biological effect. And then the remaining 15 percent is how frequently you apply that.

Andy Smith 28:54 
Yeah.

Dr Bob Dennis 28:55 
OK, and it's like, you know, one way to prove to yourself that your physiology responds differently to the same frequency at different waveforms is if you guys are like audio engineers, go ahead and listen to a square wave. Put it, set it for perfect middle C, whatever that is, 258 hertz, right? Listen to a pure sine wave. It sounds very different than your square wave or as close to pure as you can get through an audio filter at the same frequency. You'll hear all these harmonics. It sounds terrible and discordant if you just play a square wave through exactly the same frequency, exactly the same amplitude through your amplifier and your speakers. And that's because your physiology in your ear is responding to the primary frequency. You'll hear the middle C, but that appended onto that is all this other stuff. Yeah. Right. So in your audio physiology, it's primarily going to be the how often is the pulse frequency because the way your ear works. It's it's mechanically tuned to mechanically pick out the primary frequencies in your ear and then and that. Yeah. And then you can hear these harmonics stacking up on top of it. But that that should prove to you that, yeah, you know, the waveform has some effect on what you hear, the shape of the waveform, not just the frequency of of the signal. Yeah. Yeah. Like the frequently. And the thing is that, you know, you could assign different values to it. You could say, gosh, it doesn't sound at all like a regular sound that sounds terrible, or you could say, yeah, I can. I can pull the main frequency out of that. I can hear it. But then there's all this other stuff. What percentage, you know, is which is up to you? But I would say in terms of positive biological benefit, I think it's probably 85 percent waveform shape and 15 percent waveform periodicity depending on the kind of tissue. This this depends on the kind of tissue you're talking about. If you want to apply this to your head or your nervous system directly, your nervous system is a little bit more, especially in your head. You can get brainwave entrainment. So the frequency, the periodicity by periodicity, I mean, how often does do you get the pulse? Not the shape of the pulse, but how often does the pulse occur? If you're putting something on your head, the periodicity of sound, flashes of light or magnetic pulses matters because that will entrain your brainwaves to, you know, alpha wave, beta wave, theta wave. So so the the periodicity becomes more important when you apply P enough to your head, for example, than it would if you apply it to your leg, where, you know, the the. So it's it, you know, because there's this overall biological effect. So if, you know, if the effect that you're shooting for is to reduce inflammation and pain in your leg, you might pick a different periodicity, but you'd want to pick the same wave. Yeah. Yeah. Because a waveform itself that seems to have this anti-inflammatory effect. So it's the shape of the wave that does. And then then the way that you apply those waves, the periodicity of the waves has secondary physiologic effects. Like if I was going to apply it to my head, I'd set it for alpha wave. If you get the calm awareness as a secondary effect of applying an alpha wave, you know, you're exciting, you know, sub threshold excitation of your neurons with this pulsing magnetic field. And then you're if your primary effect is to actually reduce inflammation in your head, you're getting that as well. So when people use PEMF on their head, I'm always telling them, you know, think of the two things that you're doing. One of them is this cellular reduction of inflammation. The other one is this network effect of of brainwave and training. Right. And you can you can have multiple effects, just like you would with any drug. Right. You get the positive effect and you get the side effects. Right.

Andy Smith 33:12 
Yeah, yeah. And would you prioritize the circadian rhythm when treating the head as well? Because that's something that we look at quite a lot in terms of using much higher frequencies in the morning compared to the evening.

Dr Bob Dennis 33:23 
I think that that's absolutely true. And that's why I said I would use alpha wave unless it was at night in which I would probably use, you know, theta or Delta, right? Because you're looking to do, you know, neuronal network entrainment. And, you know, there's a whole argument I've argued with neurophysiologists of, you know, which came first, you know, which is the driving frequency and which is the driven frequency. And can you, but I think, I think it's really clear that external influences are even tapping on your head at a certain frequency, different frequency, different periodicities will matter. And so, yeah, I think it's, I think it's, you know, um, I've come 180 degrees on this whole PEMF thing, because when I did the science, the answer is there's something really there. And then once, you know, once I realized, Oh gosh, you know, I made a colossal mistake here. Okay. Now what matters? And it's like, when you apply, you know, the thing you, you know, you have, you, you want to take the whole person into account. It's kind of a holistic thing. Uh, part of it is, you know, part of it is, um, you know, there's always this question of, do you apply it for a long period of time every day or just couple of times a week? My argument is the, the answer is it depends on what gives you the best outcome. I think that the couple of times a week for 15 minutes is driven by the, by the clinical expedient that they need to make money on their $40,000 PEMF machine, which means you've got to come in during their, their clinic hours and they got to line people up and change you over every 15 or 20 minutes. And so it's like a clinical expedient. It sort of works, you know, but then I, you know, do these different things where you could sleep with it at home, um, you know, on your head or wear it around during the day, I'm wearing one on my back right now. It keeps my back pain down to zero, you know, I mean.

Andy Smith 35:35 
I think people forget about, isn't it? You know, the device we've designed, and the same with yours, is putting it under a pillow at night, you know, putting it into the delta frequencies at night and helping deep sleep. Like you mentioned with the brain entrainment, you know, people are struggling to sleep, or if they want to move their brain into the delta frequencies, then why not influence it with a PEMF device quite close to you?

Dr Bob Dennis 35:57 
Well, so, you know, so this is, this is the thing and the thing that you'll find out about my take on this whole thing is that, um, and you, and you had, you had said they're the ones that you guys make and my opinion is that I've, that I've trademarked and patented this largely to protect the market in the United States from people shutting it down. I think competition's a good thing and I look forward to the day when, you know, you, you got to have a lot of people competing in this market to zero in on what's the best product. And there's people who like you focus on sleep stuff. I think you do. I, and I focus more on like chronic pain stuff. And so many people, when I, when I said, you know, the, the clinicians try to monetize this, there's, there's a dark side. And then there's a darker side to this. Okay. So if you spent the $40,000 and you have your for $50,000 clinical machine, you know, then you want to line people up and you tend to, you tend to fall into the thinking that two times or three times per week, which maps into Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, you come into the clinic, you pay your a hundred dollars, you get your 15 minutes, and then that's the next person. That's how you monetize it. On the other side of the equation is if you're not making money on PEMF, I've had six or eight chiropractors tell me this, Oh no. You mean if I use this on my patients, they're not going to come back. Do you know how hard it is to get patients to come in? You know, so you actually run into the problem of, and I've run into this with veterinarians too, because there's some animal diseases that seem to be, I'll use the C word, you can edit it out curable. There are some animal diseases that are curable that are terrible diseases, but they make huge amounts because they're chronic end of life diseases for animals, cat, kidney disease is a great one. There's others. Uh, it's not a great one. It's a terrible one, but it's a great one for making money. But if you can all of a sudden cure it, the, or treat it so effectively that it doesn't affect the animals, you know, health span. I don't want to be too cynical, but I think this is really kind of important to say, you know, um, my whole entry into PEMF is to make it more available and then to raise the integrity of the entire field. And I am fully supportive of anybody making PEMF and, you know, that's selling a product that's helping people. And there've been at least three major cases where people who would think of themselves as competitors of mine.

Andy Smith 38:46 
Hm.

Dr Bob Dennis 38:47 
Well, they'll actually reach out to me and say, well, would you be willing to help us with this? And yeah, sure. Of course. Because people have been selling PEMF in a way that was very low integrity 20 years ago. And I feel like my biggest contribution was not finding the magic frequency, but actually my biggest contribution was sort of applying good science to it. And then I'm bringing integrity to the field and pricing it right.

Andy Smith 39:14 
Yeah.

Dr Bob Dennis 39:15 
You know, just doesn't have to be outrageously expensive. But so, you know, the the problem with the clinicians that I've dealt with human as well as veterinarian is that they're afraid because of the experience that we had, you know, tuberculosis and syphilis. And all of a sudden, whoa, if you cure a disease, you put a lot of people out of work, you know, goodness, right? What happened to all these, you know, sanatoria in the United States where they would deal with tuberculosis or they had iron lungs or whatever? You know, what happened to these places? They're gone. So I tell all of my students, I still actively teach at the university. I've been doing this for 41 years now. What would be the primary follow on effect of curing cancer?

Andy Smith 40:09 
Hm.

Dr Bob Dennis 40:10 
Well, in the United States, every major college campus has a medical school and the medical school has a cancer building. And everyone in that building and everyone related to that building depends upon the fact that cancer is a persistent disease that we make money off of. And universities build campuses around this kind of research. And so, you know, cynical as it sounds, feel free to cut this out. If you cured cancer, if you went to your kitchen and found a way with Bisquick and, you know, make a poultice of Bisquick and ground up herbs and could cure cancer, didn't cost anyone anything. They could just go out in their yard or their lard or in their kitchen, find a, you know, figure out the way to cure their own cancer. People would be throwing themselves off the top of buildings at major universities because their career would be over. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. It's like, it would be the end of a massive, I mean, anybody whose retirement account included, you know, firms that do, you know, oncology and cancer research and drug development, they would just flatten them. So there's, there's this, you know, if you look at the, if you look at the economics, it's like, you know, you see this in energy and food and medicine and all these kinds of things, you know, you could have, if you have a big upset to the way that if you solve a huge problem that people had been making money off of before with half solutions, you know, and this is, I think the greatest barrier that I've run into with PEMF in the last 10 years is that there's lots of clinicians who simply won't use it because they're afraid of how well it's going to work.

Andy Smith 41:53 
Yeah, and I go that I mean, we've had clinics in the UK, you know, I'm not going to name names and that's it's not all of them at all. Some of them have got the right, you know, got the right view on all of this. But some of them we work with, you know, predominantly our device is a home use device. So we've spoken to some of them and they say, right, we come in, we treat them with something, we have something maybe a high powered device or something like that. Then they take one of these devices home to use at home. And, you know, we've had people selling lots of systems throughout the month and it's how it's working well and the relationship is working well. All of a sudden it drops off a cliff and, you know, we touch base with them. What's going on? Well, you know, these guys are buying these devices and not coming back to see me for their regular massage. And it's like, OK, and and why they're not coming back? Well, it seems like they don't need that massage anymore. OK, so a good thing. Well, you know, it's putting me out of business. So, you know, I think this whole selling it for people at home is not working out. So, you know, we see this and we see it happen often. And and something else you mentioned, you know, in terms of us talking on this podcast today, you know, effectively, we're both manufacturers. We both make our own PEMF devices. And people have said to me, why do you keep inviting on these competitors? And it's it's exactly like you said, you know, we don't see each other as competitors in this market. A lot of what we're trying to do is raise awareness. A lot of what we're trying to do is get PEMF into homes for people to benefit from it. So the more people in the market, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Dr Bob Dennis 43:31 
This is exactly the way I feel about it, too. I mean, let's let's look at let me let me respond. Unpack what you just said, which I think is extremely important. OK, first of all, yeah, we've had similar experiences. It works too well. And it's putting people out of business and it scares them. All right. And the second thing is competition. What are you talking about, man? I mean, it's like by far the largest. You're correct. What I want, I'm saying other people talking about competition and having to steal market share. I'm like, what are you talking about, man? If you look at the number of people, adults who study, who suffer from chronic pain, it is larger than the next five things combined. Cancer, stroke and cardiovascular disease and diabetes. And, you know, one out of every three adults on this planet suffers from chronic pain of some level. And, you know, just because I'm making something that addresses that doesn't mean that I'm taking market share away from some other person doing that. You know, you're talking about a market size of probably, you know, two or three billion people that need something like this. And so I think what we need is the maximum amount of competition in the market just to serve the market properly. And then, hey, you know, if you want to make how do you make money on this? Well, what you do is you make a great product that really helps people and you price it right. And anybody who's trying to do that, I'm 100 percent in their corner. Now, the other thing.

Andy Smith 45:07 
Yeah, go on, sorry.

Dr Bob Dennis 45:09 
I was just gonna say, the other thing you mentioned was, you know, you send it to these clinics, and a lot of times, they'll do this combined work with it, which many people have started with me, but very few people follow through for the reasons that you listed. The best outcomes, a lot of people will ask, Well, should you use one or the other? And actually, I think the best outcomes are from both. And I surveyed 421 clinicians a few years ago, if you've ever used PEMF, what gives you the best outcomes? Just using the high powered ones or using the take home ones that you use every day, high powered ones, one, two or three times a week. And the answer is, if you do both, you get the best long term outco me.

Andy Smith 45:51 
Yeah, I can't agree anymore.

Dr Bob Dennis 45:53 
And, and there you go. And so if you, if you foolishly help a clinic, you know, I'll use the C word again, cure their people who are coming to them regularly for their adjustments or massage or something. Yeah. Their customers don't come back as, you know, within a short period of time of developing this system as a portable wearable device, I stopped going to see my chiropractor, why I didn't need it anymore anymore at all. It doesn't really help. And the last few times I went to see him, he was like, boy, your back is really well adjusted. It's not like nothing's really needs to be set back. And I talked to him about it. And at first he was very excited about that. Well, this would help a lot of people. Then he realized it would mean the end of his, you know, his clinic really focused on things more like lower back pain, everything he's like, yeah, this would put me right out of business. So, you know, what's the right thing to do? And I don't want to diminish it too much, but I think that trying to force the world to continue to buy buggy whips when we've all moved on to other types of vehicles, I think that's a disservice, right? But yeah. So, so, so anyway, that's, I kind of wanted to say, you know, you, it looks like your, you guys and me, or as we'd say down South here, y'all and me, we've converged on the same answer. And it's like, I would say the things I would say about PEMF is that it works extremely well for certain things like chronic pain so well, that it's a threat to the market in many ways, it really is. And as we discover more and more diseases that it can help to alleviate the more dangerous it is to established cash flows in the, in the, gosh, it sounded like such a conspiracist, but I think this is just, this is just economics, right? It's like, it's like, you know, if you, if you solved any other big, you know, economic problem, then all of a sudden, the way that it's to change. Right. I mean, look at network television, right? Was like, I mean, to watch network TV.

Andy Smith 48:07 
We were talking about that, you know, it's kind of good to have competitors, more people in this field and that sort of thing. But a good question might be, in your opinion, is there a bad PEMF device? So could there be more people entering into this market with bad products that don't necessarily give PEMF the justice it needs?

Dr Bob Dennis 48:30 
That's an awesome question. So let me answer it and then bring me back to this question if I go off on a tangent. I had 38 different companies or individuals contact me to use PEMF for hair growth.

Andy Smith 48:45 
Mmhmm.

Dr Bob Dennis 48:45 
Several of them, I don't have problems with hair growth. I'm an older guy, just never lost any hair. So I doesn't, I don't understand that problem. You know, I would be perfectly happy to be bald as long as I didn't have back pain. You know, so I don't understand it, but for some people it's very important. But I had 38 companies approach me and they were all extremely low integrity. I had several of them tell me, well, it doesn't even have to work. You just have to flash an LED on and off and people will feel better. And so I wouldn't work with them, right? But I finally found a company. We have a product that's coming out very soon for using PEMF for hair loss. And I can't really talk about it because it hasn't launched yet. But, so your question was, you know, could people come off with bad PEMF? Well, one type of bad PEMF is not really caring if it works at all and just sort of, you know, like the rip off type thing, you know, just take people's money and run fly by night. You call it fly by night PEMF. It's something, but you don't know what it is. And they just take your money and they disappear. The other kind of bad PEMF that could come to market that is in the market that I think dominates the market currently is poorly designed PEMF. And this is one of the things that I was able to do spinning off from my NASA research was I kept cutting that pulse down, doing what's called an engineering a binary search. Okay, if I cut the pulse, sort of take one half of it. Does it still have a biological effect? Yes or no? Look at the other half. Does it still have the biological effect? Yes or no? And then you stick with the part that works. It's like you can play the game with it with a child, 20 questions, you can carve the universe down to a dandelion in 20 questions by doing a binary search, and saying, okay, is it something that falls into this half of the universe's categorization or this other half? When you cut things in half that way, you can do a tremendous amount of refinement. And that's what I think is missing from most places. What they'll do is they'll have an inefficient pulse. And then in order to get it to work, they turn up the volume. It's like if you had walked through Detroit airport 30 or 40 years ago, the speakers were so bad, you couldn't understand them, they had to keep turning up the volume rather than making the speakers really clear. You walk through a modern airport, we don't have many of those in the United States, but they exist in other countries. They can be very light and you can hear it very clearly, right, because there's not so much noise. So this kind of comes straight into the issue of your PEMF and why so many people are like, well, how many gouts can I get? They keep thinking that if they turn up the volume, that it'll work better. And my argument is what you do is you cut out the noise, reduce the energy level and make it work better. So your question of, can people come to the market with bad PEMF? The answer is yeah, by not designing this well, not using the available science, the available information that I freely post on the internet to make it efficient. If you compare the PEMF pulse that I was using with NASA with the subsequent PEMF pulses that we use now, it uses one 500th of the energy now to get the same biological effect. It's 500 times more efficient, which means I don't have to plug it into the wall anymore. I can power it with a nine volt battery. That means you can wear it. You don't have to be plugged into lines anymore. It doesn't have to be a hundred watts or 600 watts because the energy that you need is being put into the signal in a way, enough energy that the signal is efficient at eliciting the biological effect and all the other stuff has just been removed from the signal.

Andy Smith 52:57 
Mm hmm.

Dr Bob Dennis 52:57 
Now you can ask the logical question does that matter economically sure you can you can make PEMF devices can just reach over and grab one cuz I'm working on them right you can make them they're portable they use like a camcorder battery can run the thing here's here's the battery for one of the devices they sell us a camcorder right you know you know camcorders are kind of running out of style now so I have to come up with a different battery source for it but the point is that the whole thing weighs 58 grams you put in your pocket and forget about it because of efficiency

Andy Smith 53:32 
Yeah, it's an efficient way for.

Dr Bob Dennis 53:34 
Does it doesn't need all that extra energy so that's number one and then number two is. Do you really believe all that extra energy is benign is your body really ignoring it.

Andy Smith 53:46 
Hm.

Dr Bob Dennis 53:47 
can you just pile on as much as you want? It doesn't matter. And all your body needs is that 0.2% that you will respond to and it will ignore the rest. That's an open question, but I'm going to go ahead and speculate that flooding your body with extra energy that has no beneficial biological effect is ill-advised. That's not a good idea. Yeah. Because we don't know. Is it teratogenic if you do this? So here's the problem. If you have these super high powered PEMFs and we know that teratogenicity in humans can take, you know, the formation of like a tumor can take 20 or 30 years where we could see the same effect in an animal, which I'm not, I'm not in favor of animal research, even though, you know, just as a scientist, I'm just telling you, we can see an effect in a mouse in a year or two that we wouldn't see in a human for 30 years. Right. So if you subject yourself to these overpowered dose of something for, you know, you might not start to see the effects for decades. And so why subject your body to all of this extra energy? So this excellent question of yours is, is there such a bad thing as bad PEMF? And how does, you know, is there a risk of it ending up on the market? I would say, yes, there is such a thing. It can either be fraudulent or inefficient and overpowered. That's the bad PEMF. And I would say it dominates the market. Any of these super high powered PEMF systems, many of them, I don't know if all of them, cause I don't, I'm not the police for PEMF, but the ones that I've looked at are not very efficient at all. And they have a huge amount of extra energy into your, into your body. Now that's just my opinion. And I'm going to, I'll go on record saying, you know, I've, I've had opinions about PEMF that were completely wrong in the past, starting with NASA. So I could be wrong. I, you know.

Andy Smith 55:44 
I mean, one we see a lot is, you know, more of a lower powered home use device that we're seeing dominating the market in the UK and USA and that sort of thing. And you know, I shouldn't do, but I call them the Alibaba mats because you put into PEMF into Alibaba. There's your mat that, you know, it's full of crystals, it's full of these red light, little light bulbs, and it's got all these different things. But what's happening here is PEMF has hit this critical point, which I think in terms of the awareness is starting to get out there. People are starting to understand it. They're starting to see the benefits. All of a sudden, people want to commercialize this thing and they're hearing all these benefits. Suddenly, they want their product to have PEMF and there's very cheap, nasty ways of putting PEMF into something. So we're sort of seeing that now. And we're seeing these mats flood in the market with different brands on them. It's all coming from, as far as I'm concerned, the same warehouse in China. They're being marketed very well, but they cut corners to put PEMF into their mat, as far as I can tell, as far as we can see from a technical mindset of how PEMF works. And we've just talked about how important the waveform is to get it correct and to get the frequencies correct to get the best biological response from the body. So now that we're seeing this PEMF being commercialized a lot heavier, we're starting to see these cheaper products flooding the market. And my worry is that these products are going to become so popular that they're in everybody's homes and then the results aren't really speaking for themselves. All of a sudden, then PEMF goes back under the rug. So, you know, it's up to us to kind of keep raising this awareness of PEMF and the good products out there to, you know, to get your hands on.

Dr Bob Dennis 57:48 
this is so important what you're saying. My, you know, a lot of people that I know are Chinese and they were telling me about, well, 20, 25 years ago, there was a huge surge of interest in PEMF in China. And that they were making these 20,000 US dollar cost products in China that were PEMF, but it was like exposed correctly as a big scam. And it really put a bad taste in everyone's mouth in China over these things. So they really, for about 10 or 15 years, really looked down on anything related to PEMF. You know, they took the, it's either all good or all bad kind of track there. And then for 10 or 15 years, you know, fortunately for us, we didn't have a whole lot of Chinese pirates taking everything they could out of every PEMF device and then just flooding the market with these pirated things that gave us a chance. So you, you're grouping me and a chance to get a foothold with something that's good that works, right? And now they seem to be, as you say, they seem to be coming back around to it. There's a lot of these that have been for decades coming out of Eastern Europe, these very crude ones. Like a lot of the, what they think are these new PEMF devices are, are based on really old technologies. Like my favorite one, knowing nothing about your technology, you know, I'm going to assume you guys are, are high integrity. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking to me cause you wouldn't want people to hear the truth. But one of the things that you see advertised a lot, especially about five or 10 years ago was they would advertise as new technology, you know, air gap technology, you know, we have a spark gap, right? Oh, that is about the noisiest way. I mean, that's basically illegal to do because of the amount of radio interference you get. That's pre vacuum tube, early Nikola Tesla, you know, age technology. There's nothing new or wonderful or secret about that. There's nothing precise about it. You know, if humidity changes, the gap degrades, the frequency changes, the waveform G, all these things. So it's highly imprecise, extremely inefficient, extremely noisy and extremely old. And yet I saw a flood of these devices back in 2017, 2018. I was at some meetings, there were like three different booths with, you could tell it was exactly the same device, just labeled differently. That was one of those types of devices. And there, there's like one company in Eastern Europe that just cranks these things out. White label, right? Nothing new about the technology. Now, on the other hand, do these things work? Do they help people? My guess is probably yes. You know, they probably are helpful. To a certain extent, they're, they're inefficient, right? So they have all the problems of that terrible inefficiency, noise, saturation, your body that you have. They're way overpriced. These things should cost virtually nothing. There's almost nothing in them. Just the power supply, you just be paying for copper, really. The coils of copper. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't say they don't work. They were, they're just bad in the sense of being overpriced and inefficient and potentially long term dangerous, but I don't have any proof of that. So it's just a potential thing that I would, I wouldn't do it.

Andy Smith 01:01:20 
So, talking about other products, let's talk about your product. The name of your product is Ices. I see. I see.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:01:30 
And that is that actually means something ices and some people think all it ices like cools and soothes pain. It's inductively coupled electrical stimulation I see yes because it is my technical belief at this time and subject to change but it's been pretty strong for the last 15 years or so that you have this waveform that's the right shape that inductively couples through the Faraday equation inductive coupling causing an electric field that souls can respond to and they tend to respond if you do it the right way they respond to these very beneficial ways and that's yeah that's why I call it ices like Micropulse is my company I see yes and yeah I can tell you this is one of the funny things I know I told you there was three companies that have reached out to me for help and the reason they did this was they're owned by people who actually own and use my device in preference to their twenty thirty forty fifty thousand dollar I know that at least three that have admitted to me yeah yours works so well you know but they don't want to market it.

Andy Smith 01:02:42 
Hmm

Dr Bob Dennis 01:02:42 
Right. So they see these take home daily use at home devices as extremely threatening. Because I mean, you know, if you could buy something for me for two orders of magnitude, you know, less money that has the same beneficial effect, you know, and I don't think they're exactly the same. And I think people benefit from using both of them. But you know, it's people use what works. And like that the two most popular PEMF systems in the United States, where their you know, their system is like the size of luggage, you know, it's got wheels on it, right? I know for a fact, because they have told me that what they and their their spouses use, their spouse and their kids and whatever is my system, because it works really well. But you know, they saw them for different applications, horses and different things. And you know, human whole, whole body effects and stuff. And it's a good product. You know, it works. I just I would say it's inefficient.

Andy Smith 01:03:42 
So I want to give you an analogy that you can tell me if this is, you know, completely off the beaten track. But somebody explained this to me before and it comes back to the waveform and trying to explain that the slew rate of the waveform or how it goes up is important. And you know, when we talk about a sinus wave that's quite a clean wave and even sometimes you've got the sawtooth, they described it to me as imagine you're in a car and you're driving at driving at a kind of consistent speed, you don't feel any of that. If you suddenly then accelerated to 30 miles an hour and then you decelerated and then you accelerated and you decelerated, think about what that would do to your body. You know, you can feel the force of the acceleration, the deceleration, acceleration, deceleration. This analogy kind of stuck with me to kind of explain to other people a little bit more about the importance of the waveform. Does that make sense? I know we're breaking that down really, really simply.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:04:44 
It does actually in the sense that the induced, so the change of the magnetic field, the rate at which you change it, it's the rate at which you're changing the magnetic field, not the strength of the magnetic field, it's the how quickly you're changing it will induce an electric field. And when you induce an electric field, so I'm going to get a little bit into the theory of what I think is going on here and why I think it's so biologically interesting. So you're inducing this electric field. An electric field exerts physical force on a charge. So anything that's got a positive charge or a negative charge, like, you know, all the proteins in your body and all these transmembrane things in your cells and stuff, they have these charges. And if you put an electrical field there, you're going to apply a force to them. So if it's floating free, you're going to accelerate it. If it's attached to something, you're going to bend it a little bit one way and then the other. So what I think is happening is that applying these fields, these magnetic pulses correctly, it literally jiggles these molecules in a way that is beneficial. It applies forces to these molecules that allows cells to take things in or get things out or it moves ions in your blood and your lymph that can then be detected by your cells as an important physiologic signal. Like I think that a lot of what's going on with PEMF is that it emulates normal activity. It causes ionic flow around and within cells and your cells detect this as activity. And this is sort of like saying, you know, getting up and walking around a little bit is a lot more healthy than lying in bed all day in the same way that moving these molecules around a little bit with PEMF is a lot more healthy than not. I think there's an analogy there. And yeah, you know, the thing that trips people up here is the weakness of our educational systems, our Anglophone educational systems, where this is a concept from calculus. This is why calculus is so important because it shows up in economics and engineering and everything. But the concept of, you know, the concept of total energy, which is an integral, that's calculus, right, rate of change of of energy, that's a derivative, that's calculus. And, you know, you can look at them as an area to your integral and a slope that your derivative. And, you know, I think that every college educated person should know this. OK, I'm a geek, I'm a nerd. I think I think this stuff is important. But I think it's really important for people if you want to have an intelligent discussion about these sorts of things, it's something you kind of you kind of need to know. And, you know, I try to simplify it as much as possible because the math gets really, really hairy. But, you know, it's like using your iPhone, you know, try calling up Apple and asking them the inner workings of an iPhone. They'll just hang up on you, you know, to maybe even turn off your phone. They, you know, why is it that people feel that they should know the inner workings of PEMF, you know, and it's largely because I think that people who have been selling PEMF, they want to they want to pull down a large price for what they're selling. So they want to convince people that they have all this secret science and information that they've built into it and that, yeah, you're smart enough to understand this. And so it's kind of like this. That's the scam part is is is giving people the confidence that they can understand these things really well. You don't have to understand electromagnetism to use an iPhone. You don't have to understand electromagnetism to use PEMF. But if you want to understand an iPhone or understand PEMF and you've got to do some homework, you know, it's it's it's it's not I'm not saying that people aren't smart. What I'm saying is there are some even the simplest concepts that you need to grasp are calculus. And most people, you know, naturally have an aversion to that kind of stuff. So it's not something you can easily understand. And as a result, it becomes subject to fraud. You have people selling somebody, oh, why sell this many gauss or I sell this much frequency or this special frequency. You know, you can if you're technically educated and you understand that there's something happening here, you know, something about science, you've done the homework. I spent 22 years in college.

Andy Smith 01:09:22 
Mm.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:09:23 
I paid the price to understand this. Okay. I tell him, he tell you, um, it was like, you know, and I really did a bunch of degrees to a bunch of different things. I was researcher there and everything, you know, but, but before I got my PhD, it was like 18 years, I think. So yeah, it's just, it's just, um, there's so much room for fraud. There's so much room for misunderstanding because these are extremely complicated things. Yeah. And, and, and the other part of it is we don't understand the biology. We only, even the extremely complicated things are only the first half of what you need to understand to understand PEMF. The second half is stuff we don't understand. And I personally believe there's at least two Nobel prizes baked into just getting a basic understanding of why of the actual mechanism that's happening.

Andy Smith 01:10:16 
Yeah, in this.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:10:17 
Exposure itself, so that's kind of that's kind of where I would leave it

Andy Smith 01:10:21 
So, just to wrap this one up then, this might be a difficult thing to do, but can you give a couple of things, if somebody wants a PEMF device for their home use and they don't want to do 20 years at college to understand the technology behind it, what are your top free thing or top couple of things maybe to look for in a PEMF device and maybe a couple of things to avoid in a PEMF device, is that?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:10:52 
That's a great that's that's a great question. And I'm not just saying that's a great question because I'm being interviewed. That's a really good question because people want stuff that works. Right. And it's sort of like, you know, why do you buy an Android device versus an iPhone versus something else? Part of it is personal preference, right? Part of it is your friends and your colleagues will tell you this is really, really great. Part of it is the features. And part of it is, you know, you don't the basic quality and you're willing to spend a certain amount of money. So it's a bunch of factors. I would say that you want to stick with a reputable company. The very first thing I would do is make sure that I've talked to people where they say, yeah, I bought this device from this company. They have great customer service. If it's not working, needs to be fixed. If I want to return it, they're cool about it. Right. Because, you know, right there. You know, we, you know, that that's like a real company. They're really trying to do something. So I've been in business with my PEMF stuff now. About 15 years, roughly 16 years. And we don't plan on going anywhere. You know, we don't we don't, you know, we just keep telling people we think is the truth. We just keep slowly persistently trying to improve the value that people get. So so I think that our sales are based largely on the integrity play. Right. I do I do that thing on YouTube that's so rare. Just tell people what you really think is true. Not try, you know, just and prove it where you can. Just there's not a lot of there really was none of that in PEMF 15 years ago. It was so low, low integrity. But just just dealing with a high integrity company, all of the technology stuff aside, because you could use, I would say, integrity is a proxy measure. The company integrity is a proxy measure of effectiveness. Like, is the device likely to be effective? Well, if this is a high integrity company that's been around for a few years. Yeah, it's likely to it's likely to be it's likely be effective. The next thing I would say is do they claim that there's the do they make a lot of does the company make a lot of claims? Like, oh, there's two thousand papers that support our device. If you really want to know, you've got to do some homework. You don't have to go to college, but ask them, you know, send me your research. Send me your your two most important scientific papers, right? Just send them to me. And I've done this a few times with companies and they're just, you know, they'll send you stuff that when you read and you have to actually read it and you read it and you're like, this is nonsense. You know, and I'm not saying at a high scientific standard. I'm saying it like it's just just even at a fairly low conversational standard things that have been sent to me were pretty low quality. Once again, this is using integrity as a proxy for does the PEMF system you're about to spend your hard earned money on, does it actually work? So that's what I'd recommend. Deal with it. Deal with a good company, good people who are trying to help you. Then the next thing is, you know, talk to your friends and colleagues. Does it really work? Right. And don't forget, people have this bias where if they just spent $40,000 on a PEMF, they really want to believe it works. So they'll tell you it does. The next thing I would do is, you know, borrow one for a while. Does it work for you? Our devices, on average, they seem to based on a clinician who used hundreds of these on people, and this is what he told me. Takes about 40 minutes for the average person to get relief of back pain using one of our devices, 40 minutes to get noticeable, significant reduction of back pain. Some people take longer, some people take less. But you know what? If you can borrow one from someone without paying money, you can prove it to yourself. Is this something I want to pay? It's like driving a car before you buy it, right? So that's that's what I would that's what I would recommend. If you really want to know more about the science, they can join. We have a forum that they can join. It's a flex health forum. And you can ask any scientific question you want, and I'll try to figure out what your background is and I'll give you an answer. And it'll either look like a calculus textbook or look like something I would explain to my grandmother. You know, depending on what you need to hear, you can ask me. And I always respond respond to 100 percent of questions. So, you know, flux health, one word. Dot CEO, not dot com. And they can get on our forum. And if you can find any other scientist or engineer who's willing to actually give you an answer about how well their devices work or how their devices work. A third thing I check is when a company reaches out to me, I'm all I always say, well, put me in touch with your scientific and technical staff. And about at least half of PEMF companies don't have a scientific or technical staff. They buy these things white label from China or Eastern Europe and they market them and then they market them. So they don't know how they work. So I wouldn't buy anything like that. If you can't talk to an engineer or a scientist at the company, I wouldn't spend money there. But that's the way I would do it. Because having an engineer or scientist on staff, that costs a lot. But they'll have 12 marketers, 12 salespeople on staff. Then these people get paid commission. They get paid to sell things, not to explain things. So those are the filters that I use.

Andy Smith 01:16:34 
Yeah, and I think what you just said there is really, really important because, you know, like I mentioned, a lot of the kind of PEMF companies that are coming out now are just very good at marketing and not so good at the technical side of things. And and, you know, maybe look at some of them companies that are only selling PEMF or maybe one other thing rather than, you know, ice baths, saunas, salt pipes, all these different things, you know, that they're just they're just adding PEMF into their collection, you know, as as as another way of making money. So thank you for wrapping that up, Bob. Where can people find you? If people if people want to ask you questions, you mentioned your forum, but is there any way, obviously, we'll let people leave messages under this podcast and we'll we'll get in contact with you. But any other way.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:17:21 
The best way is to reach me on the forum. I check the forum once or twice a day. I'm an active participant. We have really excellent community on our forum. We don't advocate any particular product. You guys are welcome to come and. Talk about yourself on the forum and and because we talk about PEMF in general, the people on my forum are pretty tuned into to, you know, identifying and excluding trolls who are just marketers who don't, you know, know anything about their products. But yeah, we just we just try to I just try to give truthful information. Other people on the forum. There's a few very, very knowledgeable people. I would say. One more thing about PEMF that that you just touched upon is that they tend to like add it to a lot of different devices. They're adding it as a feature to try to get people to buy things. But I would say PEMF is actually the best adjunct treatment. If I can say the T word legally, it's the best adjunct treatment that I know of. It seems to make everything else work better, including nutrition and exercise and chiropractic and everything seems to work better with PEMF because I think it suppresses some of this pathologic, you know, subclinical inflammation. So adding it to a product isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just, you know, you got to question their motivation. Are they actually trying to make their products better? That's a technical thing. Or are they just trying to make their products sell better? That's a marketing thing.

Andy Smith 01:18:55 
Yeah. The funny thing is when some of these guys, they break out their mat on their device and you've got PEMF at the bottom and then you've got all this stuff on top and you've got even heating mechanisms and all this sort, you know, it's, it's just gonna, it's just all going to get absorbed in, in, in that. Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:19:14 
Like how do you technically combine these things? It matters, like how you put them together and just the fact that it has lights and heating pads and crystals and PEMF in the product. Well, how are they combined? Are you really getting a synergistic effect? And basically does the physics even work? Like if you put your PEMF coils, like you say at the bottom, they're gonna be the least effective when they're furthest away from you. So yeah, it's a lot of low integrity stuff out there. And I think the trick for your listeners is to identify high integrity organizations, people.

Andy Smith 01:19:56 
Yeah.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:19:56 
And the the quality of the PEMF will just kind of ride along with that follow that yeah.

Andy Smith 01:20:02 
No, thank you so much, Dr. Robert Dennis. I mean, we could talk for hours and we probably have to get you back for another podcast because there's plenty of questions I haven't even covered. So we'll get you back for part two at some point. But thank you for so much for your time today. It's been incredible. And I think everyone in our audience has learned a lot. So just for our listeners, if you could leave us a five star review, if you could like the podcast, share it, then we can offer more guests like Dr. Robert Dennis. So thanks again for joining us today.