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Andy Smith 01:13 
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.

Andy Smith 01:31 
Welcome back to the PEMF podcast and today we're joined once again by one of the most respected voices in the PEMF world, the founder of MicroPulse and the creator of ICES devices, Bob Dennis. Bob has spent decades researching PEMF technology, even working with NASA. Bob, welcome back to the podcast.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:50 
Thanks for inviting me, I appreciate it.

Andy Smith 01:51 
In today's episode, we're diving even deeper into the physics and engineering side of PEMF. We'll be talking about frequency, carrier frequencies, waveform design, duty cycle, coil layout, structured water, Faraday's law, resonance, intensity, and much, much more. So it's gonna be a nice technical episode for the listeners. We'll also touch on electro smog, spark gap versus solid state devices, PEMF for hair and eye health, and some of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the industry. But first, what we like to do is we've got this new concept. Now we do a little bit of a quick fire question. So we ask you some questions, short, sharp answers, and then we take a deeper dive later on the episode, if that's okay?

Dr Bob Dennis 02:34 
Yep.

Andy Smith 02:35 
Cool, okay. So one PEMF myth people still believe?

Dr Bob Dennis 02:40 
I would say there's two. The first one is that PEMF just doesn't work, which is wrong. And I was one of those people, I didn't think it worked. So I tested it and well, and behold works just fine. The other one is this one, I hope this doesn't insult anyone that they can understand it and that they can reason their way through the science and prove that it works. And there's actually, it's not well understood enough to do that and we only understand about the first half of PEMF to really understand that you kind of need like a degree in electrical engineering or physics. No, I agree with that. It's not that simple. So people think it's like a simple way to explain it. And I've been looking for that for about 30 years and haven't found it. So if you hear a good one, a compelling, simple explanation, let me know. I'd love to know.

Andy Smith 03:38 
Is frequency overrated in PEMF?

Dr Bob Dennis 03:42 
It's, it's not the main thing. It's, it's an important thing. Um, and you gotta be kind of roughly in the right range. But I think when people start talking about like ultra specific frequencies to have specific, uh, sort of like therapeutic effects, I, I don't really believe that because I've been looking for decades and I haven't seen that. There is one exception, I think for brain and treatment type things, frequency matters, but it's not super precise. And if you think of the way your brain waves work, you just look at EEGs that varies over time and it varies between people. So you're not talking about one exact frequency fits all you're saying, okay, for a certain person and a certain state of awareness at certain range of frequencies is likely to induce a certain kind of brain activity, roughly. That's where I think it, it matters. So that, that's the sort of a simple thing of frequency. Yeah. The complicated part is the electrical engineering part, which is what you'd call an FFTF or a transform. And that would be the frequency components contained in each wave pulse. That's crucial, but that's, that's rocket science. And you know, you, you gotta kind of know some calculus to understand it.

Andy Smith 05:02 
Mm-hmm. Hertz or pulses per second?

Dr Bob Dennis 05:06 
Exactly what we were just talking about to an electrical engineer signals person hurts. Frequency is the first derivative of phase. And if you said anything other than that, you've got that question wrong on your final exam. So to electrical engineers who are not thinking about physiology or anything, they're thinking about sine waves and they're thinking about pure frequencies. Or a lot of things like computers, the pulse itself, how many pulses do you get per second in your processor. That's what they think of as frequency. That's a lot closer to what physiology looks at. There's many examples in physiology that that kind of frequency, it's important. But as I was saying, when you're talking about the device itself, how many pulses per second, there's really good evidence that there's different regimes in which PEMF works really well. Like Arthur Pila, a few decades ago, he got tremendously positive. Some of the best scientific literature out there, Arthur Pila, he passed away about a decade ago, but he was doing things in this sort of low thousand Burt's wave, like around two or three thousand. He was getting excellent effects on cancer. I think I do a completely different thing in sort of a up to one to 100 Burt's or pulses per second range, because I'm looking for different kinds of physiological effects. So I think PEMF is sort of like chemistry. Chemistry is really complicated and there's whole different subgroups of it. And I mean, how many different chemicals are there in the universe? Maybe 200 million? And how many different PEMF waveform combinations are there? It's more like a quadrillion. So yeah, you got to be looking. It's like, what are you trying to achieve with a certain kind of chemistry? Kind of look at it that way with PDNOP, it's like, well, what are you trying to achieve and what seems to have a biological effect in that reach?

Andy Smith 07:03 
That's all right. We'll take it. We'll take a deeper dive into these a little bit later on.

Dr Bob Dennis 07:07 
I'm sorry. Some of these things, it's hard to, it's hard to give a short answer because they're really, I'll try to be brief.

Andy Smith 07:13 
No worries. What's the most important part of PEMF waveform?

Dr Bob Dennis 07:19 
The rate at which it turns on and off.

Andy Smith 07:21 
Mm, good. What is the best PEMF waveform?

Dr Bob Dennis 07:25 
I believe a sharp waveform that's very narrow turns on, turns off right away. And then it's mostly off the rest of the time. So it's on and off for about 0.2% of the time. And that's off for the rest of the time. And that's for each pulse.

Andy Smith 07:42 
Yep. And a unipolar or bipolar waveform?

Dr Bob Dennis 07:46 
Super complicated question that I worked on for a few years in my PhD briefly. Oh, God, I don't, I don't know if a user would be able to tell much of a difference. I do think there's a difference in the way the physiology is working and no difference in the way that ions are being transported. So if you were trying to push ions in a certain direction, you'd want a unipolar. And if you were just trying to shake the ions back and forth with, there's good reasons to do that. If you're trying to get them to be detected on cell memory, you'd kind of want a unipolar. So, so like, I'm sorry, a bipolar was unipolar with drugs. So if you're trying to shake things back and forth, you'd kind of turn it positive, negative, negative, positive. If you want to push them, you keep pushing them the same way. So unipolar, I think that's probably as sure as that could be.

Andy Smith 08:36 
Mm-hmm. Are lower intensity devices underestimated?

Dr Bob Dennis 08:40 
Yes, yes, absolutely. I can go into as much detail on that as you want.

Andy Smith 08:47 
Yeah, that's fine. That's all we need for now. What one PEMF spec companies should publish, but rarely do?

Dr Bob Dennis 08:55 
The measured rate of change of turning on and turning off at the magnetic field, not the driver electronics, but how quickly is the magnet turning on and off.

Andy Smith 09:04 
And is that known as the slew-ray?

Dr Bob Dennis 09:08 
That's the slew rate, that's the first time derivative of Gauss, like how politically it turns off. And none of them, as far as I know, really say that. And when you test what they're doing, a lot of times they don't, they don't even know themselves.

Andy Smith 09:24 
Yeah. And the biggest mistake people make using PEMF?

Dr Bob Dennis 09:29 
My opinion is using it last. I did a big survey at one of Joe Mercola's meetings eight years ago or so. And it was really interesting. PEMF is like car keys. Okay. They're always in the last place you look. That's okay.

Andy Smith 09:44 
Yeah, it's a good point. And are you talking about when it comes to like, stacking it with other therapies?

Dr Bob Dennis 09:51 
Yeah, I, I did a huge survey of like 410 clinicians and, and the average. Thing number of things they tried before trying PEMF was 11 or 12 different things.

Andy Smith 10:03 
Yeah.

Dr Bob Dennis 10:03 
But I personally believe based on my scientific and personal experience, I think PEMF by itself is really great. And you should do that earlier rather than later when you're searching things. But also I think it's the single greatest synergistic adjunct thing you can do with anything else I've been told by all surgeons, chiropractors, nutritionists, functional medical people. When they add PEMF things almost uniformed work better.

Andy Smith 10:32 
Yeah. And it's a great point because I've been asked to do a lot of talking at the moment, speeches, that sort of thing on PEMF therapy. And one of the biggest points and one that people resonate with and want to hear about is, is actually using PEMF therapy before many other modalities. So use it, you know, people are going in oxygen chambers now. People are going using red light therapy. People are using saunas put PEMF therapy before that 10 minutes before it. And you see the benefits of those other therapies, you know, it's prepare the body, prepare the cells.

Dr Bob Dennis 11:01 
Absolutely. I mean, I, I had a hip replacement, for example, and, um, I used it just before the surgery and then after, and I've had relatives and friends and people who buy my, you know, technology now I've suggested they consider that. And people will say, yeah, you know, it really helped that they're like post-surgical recovery or really helped with, you know, uh, you know, doing a little bit before, because I think what's happening is it reduces inflammation, makes things respond better to whatever that thing is you're doing.

Andy Smith 11:36 
Okay, so let's go into the more technical questions. So we've done an episode recently with Brian Myers about frequencies. We really kind of wrapped the whole episode around frequency and we briefly touched on carrier frequencies. So for anyone who missed that episode, what exactly is a carrier frequency compared to the frequency a PEMF device says it's outputting?

Dr Bob Dennis 11:57 
Okay. So let me preface this. I really like. Cool guy. I think he's cool. We've talked a few times in the mail. Yeah. However, I'm from this really old generation of people where you could disagree with somebody and still get along with them. So brace yourselves for that. If you're, if you, if you haven't been acculturated to that. No, good. That's what we want. We want everyone's opinion on this one. Four or five decades ago, you could actually disagree with people and have a beer with them and everything's cool, right? So anyway, I, I, I disagree with them here on the concept or carrier frequencies. And I'm going to get a little bit technical. Well, I'll tell you, I'll answer your first question. What is a carrier frequency? A carrier frequency is something that's used in radio to hold another frequency. You, you add the two together. So if you're using an FM radio, very important to like all your wifi and everything also has like 4g, 3g, 5g, or so if that's the carrier frequency. Okay. So what you do is you, is you modulate the frequency. So what that means is you're adding your voice signal or whatever, your digital signals on top of this sine wave, that's at a carrier frequency. And the reason that works is that when you receive it with tuner receives it, you filter out all the other frequencies in the background and you're just looking at that carrier frequency. And then you basically, you subtract it, you what's called demodulate it. And then all you're left with is the exact signal that you want it. That's how FM radios work. That's how all of our stuff works. As far as I know, physiologically, that's not how the body looks. So what do I think carrier frequency is? Um, I think it's, I think it's something, you know, the way that PEMF works as a market is that people have to carve out a niche for themselves. So every few years, you're going to hear something that it's going to be quantum this or carrier frequency that or zero point energy, this, whatever. And I'm not saying that stuff's wrong. What I'm saying is that the people who are doing that very often don't know what they're talking about. Now, Brian, I think is in position to know more about this than most people based on his background, right? But, um, I've dealt with other people who are developing these systems. So about eight or eight or nine years ago, I had a guy approach me and I always tend to help people when they want to develop PEMF systems. Cause I want to raise the bar for everybody right now. It's really important. I want everybody to have. So, um, he wanted me to help him develop a carrier frequency based PEMF systems was probably a 2018, 2017 someone. And anyway, so it turns out that he didn't know what it was either, but he kind of felt like that would help him get into the market. So it started off as a marketing slant rather than I signed to the question. That was the people at the time, eight or nine years ago, getting into it. That seemed to be, Hey, here's a, here's a pseudo technical word that nobody's used. Let's throw that in there. And then, well, my PEMF has carrier frequencies, right? So I, you know, cause people are desperate to find a niche in the market. You know, it's like any other market, you know, what is your product offer that somebody else's doesn't he made it very clear to me that that's what he was doing. I'm not, I'm not guessing. He said, yeah, I need to get into this market. I need to, you know, separate myself from background. So I'm going to try to make it. And he called me up and he's like, will you help me make it work? And I said, yeah, sure. Of course I'll be, you know, helping a direct competitor, but see, I don't see people MP and I've worked as competitors. I see them as a bunch of people trying to find useful things. And if somebody is doing something different or would compete with me, but I can help them absolutely do it every time. So anyway, I worked on the sweater for like a year and a half and I did not see any test biological effects that I could test on either other living systems or myself. In fact, for me, it worked. They kind of caused a little bit more discomfort than it was helped. And there's a, there's a good reason for this, right? I don't think them, there's a few exceptions neurologically. And if you want to argue with me about that, if somebody we'd steer them happy to, but generally physiological, we don't use carrier frequencies because we're not radios. Okay. You're not a toaster. You're not a smartphone. You're a living organism. And carrier frequencies are not really something that they seem to use. We're we tend to use work the older kind of way to send signals, which is amplitude modulation, like am radio. It's how you talk and all this other stuff. So, um, it's, um, or it's closer to that. It's not exactly that. So here's the thing. Um, I tried it. I kept trying it. We tried different variations of it. I don't think it made things and better. So I have a two-pronged response to that. Okay. So having tried it myself, it really worked somebody to see if I could make it work. we were unable to make it better than just basic PNF, not carrier frequency based. And there's no physiologic reason to believe that it should. So it's not like I'm like, oh, this should work. And I just have to figure it out. I'm not there. I'm like, well, I don't see why it should work. And also when I tried it, I wasn't surprised. I didn't see an improvement. So for those two reasons, I don't have time to put a whole lot more effort into it. Now I could always be wrong. I mean, that's, that's happens a lot alarmingly frequently. I'm wrong. And that's okay if you're a scientist, you know, being wrong is like your first step to learning something new. And that's the key. You gotta, you gotta be really good about being wrong. You want to, you want to be wrong in such a way that it teaches you something that's really helpful. So, so anyway, that's, that's kind of how I feel about it. But there are two very clear negative aspects to a PEMF system that has a carrier frequency, right? One of them is that it will generate more electromagnetic energy that's putting through your body because you're putting energy in to generate the carrier frequency. So if the carrier frequency is about the same amplitude as the, as the pulse that you're adding to it, you could be adding a hundred or even up to 500 times more energy that you're putting into yourself just to sustain the carrier frequency to get that pulse there. So you're putting more energy in. And because it takes more energy, there's two problems, right? One of them is that you're exposing yourself to energy that I don't think does anything for you. And there's the literature on PEMF, you know, sine wave, you know, smooth carrier frequency, like waveforms don't seem to have much PEMF, physiologic biological effect. The other one is it makes the systems much larger. So it'd be really hard to make a portable system that had enough energy to meaningfully use a carrier frequency with PEMF pulse, which means that will look really high efficiency, ability, low weight, portable wearable systems would be harder to make batteries who are masked as long. So I don't, I don't see any advantage, but there are technical differences.

Andy Smith 19:14 
Yeah. Okay. No. So really I'll take from that, that really doing a carrier frequency is more of a engineering choice than a biological choice. It's more of something that you would add onto a product as, yeah, as you say, like a unique feature?

Dr Bob Dennis 19:29 
I would say it's more, it's not an engineering choice. It's not a medical choice. It's a marketing choice because it's like, you know, Hey, I saw a car in this really cool, pastel color. That's what I'm bringing to the market. It should get this different color. It's kind of like, you know, very superficial thing. I, the message I want to give is that I don't think it adds anything to the therapeutic value, but it definitely adds something to the complexity and the energy consumption and the energy radiation. Which, so, so I would say I don't see a benefit, but I do see potential. We're all X. Yeah.

Andy Smith 20:07 
No, good. And we talked in the quickfire round about the difference between Hertz and pulse per second, because again, that's something that Brian brought up in his episode, that there's a bit of confusion in the market. And is that how you describe, you prefer to describe it in Hertz? Do you think the industry confuses Hertz and pulses per second, you know, and carrier frequency when it's all kind of mixed into one?

Dr Bob Dennis 20:33 
Yeah. Well, so, so that's part of the problem is that there's certain confusion there and then people are always looking around as they should. People are looking around. Well, where's the truth? Well, where's the real deal versus marketing on? Okay. So I tend to try to be brutally honest because now first and foremost, I'm actually not a PE enough maker. I, I, on medical design, medical device, to center, I do things completely unrelated to be enough as, as actually, that's what I do, you know, professional consult advice, but I maintain the company, uh, micropulse so that I can provide that to people who want that. And I need it myself for my injuries. So, you know, so, so that kind of overshadows almost every question you're going to make is like, why are people talking about these things? So a lot of people talk about frequencies because, and they're going to do something to this. They have a spiritual belief in the importance of frequencies, perfectly valid. I'm not saying in me, maybe to pop that. Um, there is a frequency component to physiologic response. We talked about that and that's for sure. Right. But, um, as I described to my customers, we talk about the semi forum all the time is that I, I use technical precision when I'm just just talking about this because I don't want to be too loose about something and I explain it. And then somebody takes my exact words and brings in some kind of an expert. And then I get into some, you know, debate with somebody who's trying to undermine the credibility of my technology, what I'm working on by saying, well, you didn't use the word frequency precisely correctly, which is true. If you're talking to somebody with a PhD in electrical engineering signal analysis, I use different words talking to that person. And I would use to a physiologist or a person who just wants to use, right? So, so the precise definition of frequency is the first time derivative of phase. And if you don't know what that means, you'd need to be an electrical engineer and we could have that discussion, but I don't think it would fit in this podcast, but just think of frequency as like a, when you're talking, when you're talking about it precisely, you're talking about a smooth sine wave. And if you change its shape at all, or you add anything to it, then then you're combining frequencies, like a carrier frequencies, a smooth sine wave that carries your signal somewhere, then it gets decoded and that smooth sine wave gets canceled out. And then all that's left is your sick. But I think people get, I think people when they're buying PEMF, they fall into that, you know, what I think is the biggest misconception or the biggest misconception is that they can understand it. I can tell you, there's no living person on earth who understands all of PEMF from the electrical engineering side, all the way through physiology side. I can, I mean, I say that with 100% confidence because we don't even know, nowhere in the literature do we fully explain the physiologic side and how it responds to different frequency content. We just don't know that. We've got a pretty good handle on the electrical engineering side, but what really matters is how well does it work biologically? And so really the only way to tell, I think that that we can rely on is how do people respond? And if you talk to long time clinicians who've worked with thousands of people, you know, what's really working. So, so when people are digging into the words like frequency and, and, you know, pulses per second and everything, um, what matters the most is something that they can, that can help them to classify a PEMF device into certain types and there's high frequency and there's low frequency. So I think low frequency for orthopedic injuries, I think is more effective based on my own experiments. And what that means is something up to, you know, one, to maybe a hundred pulses per second. No, to an electrical engineer. That's exactly what I would say is pulses per seconds. And they know what I'm talking about to a, to a, to a, a person, a regular person using, I would say hurts or frequency, like, you know, it hurts. Why? Because that's kind of the common word that's used. It's, it lacks technical precision, but for, you know, for many good reasons, you know, I mean, in your science and anything else, drug discovery or anything else, if you're not precise in your weight, if you're the, if you're the scientist and you're not precise, then people will start blowing holes through your research because you're trying to use words there. easier to understand commonly, but I would say, you know, you know, people get too wrapped up with, well, exactly what's the frequency and exactly what's happening. But I don't, I don't believe that any person can, can think and reason and calculate their way through to what's going to work for them for PMO.

Andy Smith 25:53 
to labour that point because we, we talk about this quite a lot on this podcast and people come to us quite often and they want this like booklet of conditions versus what frequencies they need to use. So, you know, I want to use this frequency for this condition and, and you know, the reason we keep having these conversations is to, is to change the narrative as much as we can, because you've spoken before about waveform being way more important than the repetition rate. And is that something you still, oh yeah, every time I.

Dr Bob Dennis 26:21 
Now, no, no, the frequency has to be about right, you know, within plus minus 20% or something. So like you tend to have pretty good orthopedic effects if you're somewhere between five and 30 pluses per sec, per second, which to a common, you know, common speech, I'd just say hurts. And if you're in that range, that's great. And what's actually pretty good is to vary that. And some of my devices do that. They vary so that you don't get a monotonic signal because physiology does do one thing that we talked about last time very strongly. And that is that if your body gets a signal, a vision, hearing and internal neural activity, if it gets the same signal over and over again, physiologically, you interpret that as background and then you cancel it, you subtract it. So in order to actually get yourself to physiologically respond consistently, you need to change the signal a little bit. So it's kind of like the anti argument against all this precise frequency will do this precise thing. You're actually better doing it in a range, whether it's brain entrainment or something like the brain entrainment protocols that I put into some of my devices, they go on sort of like a ramp up and down over a frequency range so that you do not habituate because your body will habituate to a background signal and then just stop responding.

Andy Smith 27:53 
Yeah, no, good point. Let's take a bit of a dive into the waveform and the coils because, you know, the coils are a really important part of any good PEMF device. When I look back at when we developed the Celerate device, you know, if you compare the coils from our full body mat, big thick copper coils compared to the one we put into our controller, which is a much smaller targeted copper coil, the difference you get in a big coil is you tend to get a bigger magnetic field, but you get lower slew rates. You get, you know, differences in those coils compared to a smaller coil where you tend to get a much higher slew rate and get much stronger magnetic fields, that sort of thing. So, with the ICES device, that uses particularly a lot smaller coils compared to a lot of the device in the market. So, why did you go in that direction when you, you know, what was your thinking behind my nose?

Dr Bob Dennis 28:51 
Well, this kind of stems from when I was working with NASA on this and they hired me as a consultant and I was working on trying to build devices that would grow cells in zero-graph because they wanted to use them on the old space show, the mid-deck experiment markers where they do all that kind of exponent. And so we were finding, um, excuse me. So what we were finding was that, um, when we tuned the magnetic pulses a certain way, we were getting really big effects, even at the genetic level in terms of gene expression and everything. So it was no question that there was an effect there is quantitative. We were getting like upregulation and downregulation by orders of magnitude, depending, depending on that. But in order to achieve the waveforms and the amplitudes we wanted, which you intimated to that when we were describing the differences. Is you, you should think of PEMF as a tuned system and the tuning like of a tuba is different than the tuning of like a flute, right? Different things like think of organ pipes versus pan pipe or something. You, you know, the physical size of it matters and that has to do with conservation of energy as much as anything, because, you know, if you want to energize a volume of space with a magnetic field, if you're using a big coil and it's going to take a lot of energy, but the other problem with using a big coil, this is all electrical engineering, right? This it increases the inductance, which makes it harder to push current through there, which means your slew rates gotta be lower. So the huge mistake that people have been making throughout all of PEMF academic research is that they'll start with a small coil, but get a nice sharp thing and they don't pay attention to that because they're looking at frequency instead of first time derivative. They get a biological effect and I've seen this a visitor laps. Then they're like, okay, well, I'm going to get a million dollar grant. I'm going to replicate this experiment. They build a big coil so they can have a whole body effect on like an larger animal, but the PEMF effect goes away because what they, even though you're using 10 pulses per second, they've changed the shape of the waveform because of a tuning that you get between the coil, the coil has to be tuned to the driving sister. And if it's not tuned properly, we're not going to get the.

Andy Smith 31:26 
right ways and your, your devices have traditionally been localized devices, but we actually saw recently you've introduced a pad to the, to the range. Well, yeah. So what, what, what pushed you in that, in that direction? And, and do you see a reason to have a pad and market for that?

Dr Bob Dennis 31:44 
Well, yeah, they're still focal devices. They're smaller than like a whole body device, right? But so it's just really like four coils arranged in an array. So the idea there is that, okay, once again, this gets pretty technical, but the magnetic fields get flux lines, get pulled around in directions. We've tried different ways of arranging the coils. And I'm like our number one test guinea pig, right? Does it work on my broken back or my injuries as a firefighter or whatever? I've accumulated quite a lot of our severe physical beating in the last 60 years. And so I got plenty of places to test, right? And what we found was that some of the configurations were actually generating magnetic fields that were quite beneficial. So, you know, in terms of reducing pain or swelling. And people have been asking for them. And so our devices and those arrays, they're tuned together, so they'll still get the same waveform. It's just that I'm putting the coils, like here's two coils, right? I mean, I'd put them like this, one side's bumpy and one side's flat. So you're gonna have electrical flux lines going around them. It'll be almost like the shape of a donut going through the coils, right? But then if you have an array, you can put two next to that and you're kind of reverse them this way. And then you end up with this sort of box-shaped flux line configuration that you can measure. I'm not making it up. You can measure the magnetic flux using a magnetometer, which I have lots of those. But it has to be a high speed one. It can't be like at Amazon, it's gotta be something you hook onto in the solar scopage. And yeah, that has a therapeutic effect that I can certainly feel. I've done some experiments, done some on actually bison rats, and it works really well. But you gotta be careful so that you're not canceling the field. And you think of it as like an array of focal fields and not like whole body fee. I'm not trying to create a whole body field. What we're trying to do is create an array of focal fields, sort of like if you were putting multiple acupuncture pins into a person, right? That kind of thing. Very focused. But test it in third-party testing laboratories and definitely has positive effects, so.

Andy Smith 34:23 
And while we're on the coils and locations of the coils, something else we've seen is that the idea of stacking coils on top of each other. So what's the idea of stacking coils? Is that to increase intensity or is it something else?

Dr Bob Dennis 34:38 
It's, it's going to have a primarily an effect on intensity. So like if you take these two coils and you stack them together, which to do them together should be like smooth to smooth or bumpy to bumpy side, right? It'll act like a solenoid, what just any solenoid would in physics, tech spork, right, with a lot of coil, but getting more turns of wire, you think more magnetic flux going through. Um, it doesn't stack linearly. Like if I put an extra coil on there, usually it'd be about 60 or 65% more magnetic feel, but the other thing is, is that when you stack them, you're tending to align the flux lines more. So if you stack them into a longer and longer coil, um, you know, your flux and your magnetic flux lines around, you're more straightened out as they come out lean of the solenoid. That's what I'd measure anyway. And that that's what you find in a techs work kind of advanced on electromagnetism. And so like, I actually think that stacking them has an official effect on the depth of penetration of the field in a way that's not just an increase in intensity, but it's also a, uh, an improvement in the alignment coherence of the maker flux lines.

Andy Smith 35:53 
Okay. Yeah. No, it's interesting. We're seeing people advertising that in the market. And actually it was interesting what you said then about 60% increase and not 100% increase because what we see a lot of people doing is saying, right, we've got one applicator, 10 gauss and one applicator, 10 gauss. If you put them together, there'll be 20 gauss. So it's yeah, interesting what you're saying with the calculations again, it probably just shows a manufacturer that again, isn't really doing the testing, but it's just assuming that's what I would think. Yeah.

Dr Bob Dennis 36:23 
I mean, I can show you, I've got a, if you, if you're a super geek, I would show it to you right here. I'd put my, I'd turn the camera. There's my oscilloscope right there. I'd hook up my high speed Hall Effect sensor and I'd say, see, you can do that. You can, you know, as to 60, 65% increase, there's diminishing returns. It has to do with how solenoids really work in the real world. I mean, it has to do with the physics of solenoids, right? And the magnetic flux density has to do with coils per unit length, you know, turns of coil per unit length. But, you know, I'm not doubling the number to, to get a pure doubling. I'd have to put the same number of turns, but in the same length that nog kind of life fits, see. So it's, it's, it is real physics, right? And most people weren't really interested in that in high school or weren't really interested in that in college. That's fine. It can be pretty dry, right? But, but what you said, I think, Andy, I think what you said is absolutely right. It's that marketers get ahold of it and then want to tell a story. And, and it's okay. As long as they're not trying to defraud people, you know, but then they're not going to get the numbers right.

Andy Smith 37:35 
Yeah. And last time we spoke on the last episode, we took a bit of a dive into waveform shape, but we didn't touch on unipolar and bipolar, which we spoke about in the quick fire earlier. So, do you have one that you prefer in unipolar and bipolar and why?

Dr Bob Dennis 37:56 
Okay. So I do actually, I simply put, I prefer bipolar for almost all applications. And my reasoning for that is it's kind of actually based on some of my PhD research or where I was trying to use implantable muscle stimulators to maintain muscle mass. Uh, when you're nervous cut, you bet you want to keep the muscle active, you know, soft, neurodemic, and it turns out that a bipolar pulse is much more healthy for the muscle, especially if there's metallic contact from the arthrodes. Because if you have a unipolar pulse, you're always driving the electrodes one direction to the other, which means one of those electrodes is a cathode. One of them is an ano. One of them is going to chemically degrade and dissolve, and the other one's going to accumulate muddles, the anome, generally seems to be the one that solves the cathode's one that collects. And, and that generates metallic toxicity for direct contact electrodes, right? But it's also driving impulses. It's driving the ions in one direction. Now, what I think is happening, my scientific intuition based upon what I'm observing, but I haven't tested it directly because this is something that will get somebody a Nobel prize. If they can prove what I'm about to say, we're a Nobel prize and, and you can do this, go for it because I haven't figured out how to do it. But there's going to be, I think, our cell receptor. I think it's actually, I think it's likely to be a G protein, to be honest, to work to them. And it's going to detect the, it hasn't been detected yet, but there's all kinds of solid sensors that we detect as time goes on. You know, it's like, oh, wow, that's a, you know, voltage channel or something. What I think is happening because of the way that muscles and tendons and bones respond to walking and regular things, what you're really doing is you're squishing this interstitial fluid, which has ions in it back and forth across the surface of cells. And when you do that, the cells can detect that as activity. And that's why walking is so healthy for you is because your cells detect and respond to the fact that they're getting this sort of, you know, repetitive ions going back and forth across very similar to what happens bipolar. You turn on one polarity, the ions go one way, you turn it the other way, the ions go back. So there's no net flow of ions. There's just this oscillatory action. And that clearly has benefit physiologically. So I, I tend to think, you know, is there a place for unipore, much simpler circuits to build and just basically turn the magnet on and off. Bipolar is a lot harder because you got to reverse it to an on off, reverse it, turn on and off. But I think that bipolar is probably healthier for tissues. They expect to see that signal more.

Andy Smith 41:10 
And just for people listening, what's your most basic explanation of a bipolar and a unipolar wave?

Dr Bob Dennis 41:20 
So, so assume the wave normally would be at zero, right? You just say it's a zero because we're not, we're not having a bias on it. So either turns on or turns off. So like if I have coils here, right? And I turn them on and then turn them off. One of them is going to be like magnetic north. The other one would be magnetic self. Then I reverse it. And then when I turn them on again and off again, this one will be self and this one will be north. So you're just reversing the direction of the magnetic field. When you do the calculus after that, it turns out that that induces ions to flow in one direction or in the other direction. So by turning the field on and off, reversing it, turning it on and off again, reversing it, turning it on and off again, you're moving the ions one way, then back in the one way, then back, they're not moving far, but they're jiggling, you know, back and forth. And that's a perfectly good signal to have an ion moving back and forth across a receptor on a cell. Membrane is an excellent.

Andy Smith 42:29 
So it's effectively an alternating polarity for yeah, that's it

Dr Bob Dennis 42:32 
Guess where it is, it's exactly an alternating polarity. It starts with an electrical polarity that's turned into a magnetic, um, it's turned into a magnetic field. And then when the magnetic field gets into someplace that's got conductance, you know, like physiologic fluids goes back to alternating electric polarity.

Andy Smith 42:52 
And you also mentioned previously that you were cutting parts out of the waveform during testing. Oh yeah, absolutely. Were you referring to duty cycle there or is that something different?

Dr Bob Dennis 43:04 
I did look at duty cycle, which I think is important, which is for your viewers. Of course, duty cycle is how much of the time is it on versus how much of the time is it off? So if you look at a perfect square wave from a textbook, it's a hundred percent duty cycle because it's positive polarity for half and the negative polarity for half. And then that goes on and on. So that's a hundred percent duty cycle. So it's a hundred percent of the time you're paying the energy bill to energize the cohab, right? So, so what we'd like is the shortest duty cycle possible. It turns out that physiologically your nerves and your other electrophysiologic signals work that way. They're mostly off. They turn on for a short amount of time, but they're mostly off. And so if you look at cardiac muscle or skeletal muscle or signals that seem to work everywhere, they're on for a very brief period of time and they're mostly off. So first clue is that physio physiology will respond to short duty cycle questions, right? So when I was working with NASA back in 1996, I found square waves were super effective. But the question I had in my mind was, you know, compared to like a sine wave or a triangle wave, if you make the same amount of energy, which is the total area under the curve, that's calculus is called an integral. You'd understand this stuff a whole lot better if you happen to have an engineering degree, right? Physics degree, but you don't have to. So it turns out if you, if you're doing something all the time with the energy, that's like a hundred percent duty cycle and you want to really cut that down. And so I asked the question in 1996 at NASA, because they really wanted the square wave. And I was like, well, hold on a second, guys, do we really need this whole thing? So I just started turning it on and then off like a square wave, making on like half the time, then off half the time, then on the other direction, half the time, then off. So you can imagine a little square pulse going off. Then it goes on for a little time, then off for a while on the opposite direction, off over and over and over again. Right. Yeah, that seemed to have the same biological genetic effect. And so I took it to its logical conclusion. What happens if you only turn it on and you only turn it off? Well, if it's a perfect edge, then it's on zero percent of the time. Right. It's called a direct delta on actually is what the physicists call it in engineering. We'll call it a dolphin function. And it's it's it's just on long enough to be able to say it's on and then it's off. All right. And so turns out that's impractical because nothing has an infinite slew rate. So if your slew rate, your rate of turning the magnetic field on and off is not zero. That means you have a slope that's not infinite. So if your slope is an infinite and you want to achieve a certain amplitude, it has to be on for a certain amount of time. So why did was I spent about a decade figuring out what was the best slope for the biological effect and how long do I need to believe it up? And then, of course, the next pulse will be the opposite. It'll be the opposite player. Right. So when you do that, we grind through all the experiments and the math and everything. It turns out, I believe you can have the pulse on at the right slew rate. So it's a 10, 10 hertz cycle, roughly, you can have it on one fifth of one percent of the time. So I was able to remove ninety nine point eight. That's four hundred and ninety nine parts out of five hundred of the signal by just not having it turned on. If you just have it turned on and leave it on, do you get an effect like a solid magnet? As I kept producing that, I didn't see any reduction in biological response. So what I'm really looking at is just the turn on, then the turn off. It has to be, you know, energize a certain amount of time because you want the slew rate to be right. And that doesn't have to be precise either. But in the right range, you can be on, you can basically be ninety nine point eight percent more energy efficient and still get the same biological response. That's what I have seen. That was my experiments pointed at that. That basically started with my work at NASA and there were other people involved and they were testing it and they were getting the same results.

Andy Smith 47:28 
So when we was talking about the carrier frequency being more a marketing decision and not biological decision are we saying that do you cycle actually again. It still has the same biological effect but this is actually just making a product a bit more energy efficient if we play around with the cycle or does it have a.

Dr Bob Dennis 47:49 
Well, that's the thing, I think you can have longer duty cycles and have a perfectly good biological effect. The question, the thing is that for the entire time that your signal is on, you have to burn electricity, right? So that's extra magnetic energy you're putting into your body. Is that a problem or not? A lot of people will say, no, it's no problem. But if you want to leave that solenoid turned on, where it's kind of flat, plateaued, you know, that's extra energy. And that, you know, if you leave it on twice as long, it uses twice as much energy for each pulse, right? You're doubling the duty sample and you're draining the battery twice as fast. So if you want a battery powered system, you need twice as much battery.

Andy Smith 48:36 
No, good. Also, you mentioned the last episode, you spent a lot of time testing waveforms and even specialized equipment that could measure changes in cell culture. Do you still test PEMF devices in that way or are you using similar biological models?

Dr Bob Dennis 48:52 
I do not, um, I use, I use a model, I published it on plant seed germination because I was trying to ask the question, okay, is this a fundamental biological response to electromerases or is this something that's specific to animals? Or is it really specific to just mammals? That was kind of my question. So I started off and I ended up growing more than 7,000 bell pepper seeds. Why bell peppers? Because the seeds have a lot of 50% germination rate, which means if I'm doing something that's helping them, it's going to go up because it can go up from 50%. I'm doing something that's not so helpful. It's going to go down, right? So I wanted something that was about 50% of the time. You know, if you test it on other seeds that germinate maybe 5% of the time versus maybe 90% of the time, you don't have a lot of room in one direction. It's hard to get a nice balance. And it turns out that using PEMF, I really got a big insight into the fact that there's a fundamental biological mechanism that even plant seeds respond to and you can increase or decrease depending on how you apply PEMF the germination rate very consistently by 20 or 30%, which is huge in either direction. It's a multi-physics thing. So you know about hormesis, right? Where like an initial dose might, might have a negative effect, but then more as a positive effect turns out that measuring in on the effects on a plant seed, there's a triphasic inverse hormesis effect of PEMF. So initially it's actually kind of harmful. And then in a middle range, like the Goldilocks range you get, which is really huge, you get a lot of benefit in terms of germination, then too much is too much. So it's a lot like Goldilocks, you know, too hot or too cold and all. And you want to be right in the middle and the middle is a really wide range. It's easy to hit them.

Andy Smith 50:47 
Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about a little bit about intensity. Talking about biological effects, you've actually told people at times to turn the intensity down on devices, which sounds kind of counterintuitive to a lot of people. You know, you're seeing better results doing that. Why do you think that happens?

Dr Bob Dennis 51:05 
Actually, I think that the, so, so I think a PEMF is not forcing something. A lot of people think, oh, it's forcing a biological response. I actually think it's a signal. I think it's information, right? And, um, I have a lot of reasons to believe that that's true. I don't, I don't think it's forcing yourselves to do something like forcing gene expressions through some kind of manipulation. I don't think it's doing that. I think it's sending the signal. I actually think that PEMF is sending the signal of normal musculoskeletal activity. It's sending a single very similar to, yeah, you're walking around, you're moving, you're healthy. So then your body, those tissues go into a state of, yeah, it's like I'm walking around and I'm healthy and I'm active, you know, too much is too much. Not enough. It's not enough. And so like when you increase the intensity, it's sort of like, if I turned up the volume, would I be giving you any more information in our discussion? If it was like definitely allowed? No, I don't think so. And at some point it's, even if I say the same words, maybe it's the less information because, you know, we're talking about biological systems and, and below certain threshold, they can't really receive the signal. Certain pretty wide range, they're getting a signal and then extra energy is not necessarily helpful.

Andy Smith 52:42 
And a lot of people associate pain relief with deep and deep penetration with like extremely high intensity devices. Your devices are generally quite low intensity. But then again, a lot of your work that you do, a lot of your research is around pain. So why do you think lower intensity can often work better in that scenario?

Dr Bob Dennis 53:03 
Part of it is that higher intensity is something that it does seem to have a benefit for really acute injuries. Like if I really hurt myself, I took a really bad fall about two months ago. I just turned it way up, put it on, and I thought I was going to end up in the hospital. I was going up a flight of stairs. I'm an old guy, not very good balance. So I took a really nasty whack to my shin with a metal threshold plate. It's terrible. And I put the thing on high intensity for about an hour. No more pain. Everything looked like it was great. And it just put me right on course for healing. So once again, I think PEMF is really, my opinion is the greatest medical synergist, adjunct, even to PEMF. It's a great synergy to itself. So I think that a high intensity PEMF and a lower intensity PEMF strategy, they're actually act synergistically. I think when you really hurt yourself right away, you want a really powerful or if you have a really serious condition, a powerful signal will help because your body is a big system and it gets into where it's called states. It's an engineering term, like your body is a state machine. You're growing. You're getting healthier and stronger. Or the state of your body is death and decay, right? You're getting weakness. So you want your body as a whole system to be in the right state. So if you've got a really serious injury and that tissue is putting out a signal that's trying to change the state of the body, you want to quench that signal. So in that case, I do think high intensity is valuable. On the other hand, I think the best way for a long term is low intensity, long duration exposure. And I actually put this into the survey that I did with Joe Mercola's group about eight years ago or so. And I asked, do you think that high intensity is better or low intensity is better? Or do you use them synergistically and get a better response? And about two thirds of people were like, yeah, well, people who use them synergistically uniformly said, yeah, your response is better. If you used like a clinical high power, $50,000 system for a few weeks, a couple of times a week, plus you do daily low intensity, longer duration, this seems to give you the best outcome. I really, I really think so. So why don't I make high intensity PEMF devices? I'm just, it's just, I'm one person, you know, like I tell my students, there's only 40 hours in a day and 10 days in a week. Once you've worked all of that, you just can't work anymore. So, you know, the joke is, you know, there's, and I do a lot of other things and the market is saturated with some pretty good high power PEMF devices. I don't feel like I would add anything to that with a new product. What I do feel like I would add to is to say, consider the synergistic benefits of initial periodic, high intensity PEMF, follow up daily with low intensity PEMF. And I can actually tell you there are two manufacturers of very good quality, high power PEMF and do that themselves or themselves. They actually buy my devices and then they use their devices, which are, you know, much more powerful. And they say, this has the best overall effect, right? And why, you don't see them marketed that way. Why do you not see these big powerful PEMF companies selling the low power ones? Because I've kind of wrecked the market for them. I sell them for a few hundred bucks and I don't, I don't have to pay for a fricking mortar or pay for people. So, you know, I make enough money selling these to make it a viable business. And that's all, you know, I don't have Millman, I don't have, you know, you know, multi-level marketing schemes or anything like that. So the thing is that people who own these high power PEMF companies, they can't compete with a similar business model for the low intensity ones that I sell. And so they, very often their solution is to suggest to their customers, Hey, you ought to look at micro pulse and use them this way. You know, start off with the high intensity ones and no daily use of the lower intensity ones actually makes the results better than just one or the other. Yeah. I think that.

Andy Smith 57:31 
I think that aligns with my values and views on low versus high intensity in terms of, you know, most of the time people will use low intensity, use that at home. It's exactly the same way I use it. I use my lower intensity device every single day. But like you say, smash your knee into a bit of metal or something. Then that's when I tend to reach for the high intensity as well. You know, when I do something stupid, pick up an injury or just need that extra. Um, yeah, and you mentioned, uh, brands, you know, that have got those options and actually accelerated one of the ones now that we've got both low and high intensity. So we're kind of trying to tick both boxes and, and see if, see if that works selling them together, because we know that, like you say, the, you know, the synergistic effects of using both, both low and high makes sense. Um, talking about high intensity PEMF device, so generally there's, there's two approaches. There's, there's spark gap systems and there's solid solid state system. So, um, what's your best explanation of the difference between those two systems? And, and do you think one is better?

Dr Bob Dennis 58:36 
Mm hmm. Yeah, I have pretty strong tech opinions on this. So people sell spark gap PEMF as and I've seen it advertised as, you know, now with spark gap technology, well, spark gap technology was what Tesla was using 130 years ago because he did not have vacuum tubes and he did not have semiconductors. So what is the spark gap? So, you know, people think, oh, Tesla, it must be magic. It must be whatever. No, Tesla was a mathematician. Basically, if he'd had semiconductors, he'd have it all in on semiconductors. Right. Because there's so much more effective and quieter, you know, electro smog. So I know you wanted to discuss electromagnetic noise. Here's the problem with spark gap. It is basically banned in a lot of the world because it's so electromagnetically noisy. I mean, you can make a spark gap out of two nails, you know, and an on off sort of voltage source, right? It literally puts out electromagnetic noise like a like a like a spotlight, like a beacon. All right. And it's quite variable. It depends on, you know, usually adjusted with a wrench and two pointed like screws. And how close are they and when does the spark happen? So you end up with like a Tesla coil, which is a loosely coupled ultra magnetically bunch of coils and a voltage drives up on one till you get a spark and the discharges goes back down, drives back up again, get a spark. It's basically how it works. So you use the spark gap as as a sort of a relief point on on an oscillating circuit. So you're really using the spark gap to make the circuit oscillate. And you adjust the oscillation rate by adjusting the spark gap. It's very primitive. One hundred and thirty year old or forty year old technology. And so I think a lot of PEMF people are selling it as something that I don't think is accurate. And it's like, you know, there's nothing magical about it. It just happened to be during during the age of telegraph. It just happened to be the best way to make an oscillator. There's many better, much more electromagnetically clean ways to do it now.

Andy Smith 01:00:55 
Yeah. So do you think preferably if you're looking in a high intensity range, the solid state technology is what you would lean much more into?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:01:03 
I would personally if I were to and I've played with it. Yeah, sure However spark gap does have the advantage that it's a very simple way to make a very high power system So I'm not see the thing is I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying okay. Well as an engineer what works best, you know And that's hard to say because we don't really understand the physiology part with the biological part We don't really know what's best for the biology. So I think exploring all these things is valuable rights I'm not saying any of these things don't work. I'm saying just the opposite. I'm saying all of them seem to confer really significant biological benefits So if you're really sensitive to electromagnetic smog Type, you know noise I would stay away from spark gaps Because that's what they generate right on the other hand. It's a very inexpensive way to get a very strong wallow of you know magnetic field and But on the other hand, it's not going to be as clean or as precise as easily tunable as solid state where they have these you Know gated arrays you can you can do you know They use them for switching on and off like the electric trolleys and stuff like very high power You can use them for switching on and off, you know locomotive motors So he is virtually no limit to how much you can switch on and off Do you really want that much of a magnetic field? Some people would argue. Yes, you do I would say, you know, maybe it depends right? I think that if I had to choose between only High power PEMF and only low power I go with low power because I think it's safer and long long term It's more something a person can use in a healthy way for the long term. Yeah. Yeah, you know, so so yeah Spark gap has its place. I think You got to be careful with it and it has certain technical disadvantages Solid state is great It's not perfect.

Andy Smith 01:03:02 
And talking about electricity, we've mentioned that, and I think that's becoming a bigger conversation in the PEMF industry now. We've tested loads of those multi-therapy mats, so you mentioned it in the high intensity range, but actually also in the lower intensity range, you know, we're seeing these really poorly put together crystal mats and multi-therapy PEMF mats, we call them. And, you know, when we're doing the testing on them, we're seeing this huge electrical noise, dirty electricity coming off them. They're pretty much pulsing the frequency, the coming out of the wall rather than, you know, something a bit more harmonious. You know, do you think this is becoming a big issue in the industry now, even in the lower intensity systems?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:03:42 
Yeah, yeah, I do. And so when I built my system and I use my EMF, you know, EMI, electromagnetic interference detector, I kept tweaking the design so that I could detect any, any kind of electro smud. Like I even have a video on there on YouTube from 10 years ago where I went around and I tested and I showed, you know, you get anywhere near a wifi device and this thing shows you all kinds of noise, but can't detect anything on our devices. So here's the problem. In order for PEMF to work, you do need to have, you need to generate changing electromagnetic fields. Otherwise you're not doing it. It's like, you know, it's like, it's fundamental to the physics. That's what you're doing. You're radiating electromagnetic fields. So is that noise or is that helpful signal? So like I was telling you, I reduce as much of the energy as I possibly could down to the narrowest pulse and still have a biological effect. And I did that in such a way that there wasn't a lot of stray electrical switching going on, generating this superfluous, what I would call noise that people do, you know, I do believe there are people who are sensitive to that and very much so they suffer terribly. So, you know, um, this is my biggest argument against poorly designed, poorly tested devices and spark gap type use of technology, which I think is introducing too much noise. Um, this is one of the problems that a lot of people will make these devices and they don't test them. I've had several, probably about a half a dozen PEMF companies contact me and ask me to test their device for the like magnetic field so I could tell them what it's doing. And I said, Oh, you know, I would say, sure. Can I talk to your engineer or scientist? Well, it's just a marketing company. They don't have anybody who really understands any of the stuff. So I can't help them. So I literally have people will send me to come know devices that compete with me and the PEMF space and sure. I'll test them for them. I'll tell them what their device is doing. And so just the same way as you know, PEMF companies are not measuring and testing their slew rate, which is the most important thing to know. They're certainly not testing the electromagnetic noise their devices generate as well.

Andy Smith 01:06:09 
Yeah. Okay. So there's a couple of cool applications arising that some of them been around for a bit longer. Some of them are quite new. One of them you're working on. So what one application we're seeing is structured water in PEMF. So, you know, literally people putting water onto a PEMF device and, and, you know, claiming to structure the water for different claims they're making around health. You spoke before with Gerald Pollock, you know, how much truth do you think there is in structured water or is it just a real narrative in PEMF?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:06:42 
Well, you know, like so many things I started as a really strong skeptic here going, Oh, this is a BS. I don't believe, I don't believe a word of this. Of course, I turned out to be wrong as I often am. But the point is I'll start with an hypothesis and then I'll test it. And if the results are different from my opinion, you know, I change my opinion. Right. So I thought it was nonsense and I had enough people asking me, well, you know, we should try to make structure water with your device. So I was like, okay, well, let's try it. And I'll tell you what, if you start with good quality water, you know, you use our device and it only takes a couple of minutes, it tastes different. It just tastes different and has a, an effect on people. And I've done tests and other people have done tests where they'll have like two glasses of water and I'll just treat one. And then I'll have somebody come into the room, has no idea which one it is. And a hundred percent of the time they can say, oh, this one's different. You know, so is there a difference? Yes. What is that difference? I actually don't know. Um, I have some thoughts on what it might be. I think it's changed. I'll tell you what I think in a minute, but I will say that you could do a very simple water structure and protocol using my device or probably NMP, not device it's reasonable and, and get your water will be, will be different. And it's what some people, they think it's great. And then some people are like, Oh, they can't even drink it. Can be their favorite drinking water. We put it into a glass apply this for a minute or two. And they're like, Oh, something about this. I can't drink it anymore. So what I think is happening is that the PEMF, if the slew rates are steep enough, they're actually moving the ions around in the water. And that changes the way. Cause water, you know, always has ions in it. Unless you'd get laboratory gladiionine swahato, which you don't want to drink. I'll never, never drink though. Um, is that it, it changes the orientation, the hydration shells around this ions, and you can sense that when you drink the water, it's, it's moved. It has changed the relationship and the water, which is self ionic and, you know, and its relationship to the other ionized substances in the water. And so many people have tried this to say, Oh, it's the greatest thing. You know, it's got these great therapeutic benefits for them. And, um, I don't drink it. I don't like the taste of it. I don't, I don't personally get a, I don't personally feel that I get a benefit, but some people do. Uh, one of our really serve our super customer is really a great guy. Uh, he charged the water for everybody in his office. He was a computer guy, really nice guy. And he said, one of the people there drank so much that, you know, made him not feel well at all. And, and you know, this guy was a big consumer water. So, you know, I think there's an effect. I don't know if it's beneficial. Yeah, it's definitely doing something. And I think it has to do with the, the ion, the ionic, uh, organization of the water, cause it self-organizes into something that ionically is, is, is balanced. And then when you disrupt the structure, the water is different. So it might be more reactive, might be easier to absorb in some ways. The biological activity has definitely changed to me. It would be really interesting to water plants with structured water.

Andy Smith 01:10:17 
They're actually a good test.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:10:19 
It's a really good test. Yeah, you can do these experiments if you have a PEMF machine and good water.

Andy Smith 01:10:23 
During your testing of this, does it matter what material, the cup or the glass or?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:10:29 
I've done it with plastic and I've done it with like you like literally in the drinking water plastic bottles and glass has the same effect as far as I can tell.

Andy Smith 01:10:40 
We probably wouldn't do it in metal.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:10:43 
I'm doing a metal because the metal will ground out the magnetic field changes and I don't think it'll penetrate through so like a camp stove cup, the metal cup is probably not the thing that I would use. I would do it in whatever container at first that I wanna do the water, the effect on the water and then you could always transfer that into a metal, I suppose, I don't know how to test it. But to me it's really interesting and this is one of those things biologically, I don't know how well studied it is. I didn't really find anything in it and structured water immediately raises the red flag, you know, oh, this is a Charlotte and you know, this is a snake oil salesman kind of person. And I was a super skeptic, I'm like, how the heck could that affect, could there be an effect? But then I tried it and I was like, whoa, something going on here, boy, I was wrong, right? So your typical, you know, your nominal average academic researcher would just discount this out of hand and not waste their time on it. But there's something there.

Andy Smith 01:11:51 
And something that really excites me actually is one that you've been working with recently, you mentioned it on a last podcast you did, and it was working with the company exploring PEMF for hair growth. So, you know, we see, we see these red light caps and we see how red light therapy, photobiomodulation, laser, all that sort of thing is is dominating the kind of. Hair growth market, but I really think, personally, there's a huge application with PEMF and hair growth and, you know, it's really cool to see that, you know, in development at the moment is is a PEMF cap. So, do you think that's hair growth is underrated in PEMF and what are you finding with that?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:12:35 
Well, I would like to talk about this briefly at some length. So I was a skeptic. I'm like, you know, well, first of all, I'm 62 and look at my hair. It's like, it's not dye. This is just my hair. My wife had to cut it because it was all like Einstein last week. You know, I said, I kind of don't even think about it. So I don't know. I don't have the same lived experience as a person like my brother who lost most, most of his hair. You know, he's a year younger than, so, you know, something's going on, we don't know. It's not entirely genetic, but, uh, you know, it's ironic. And I think probably irritants, a lot of men, I just don't care about it. And here it is. I got this full head of hair, you know, for a 62 year old, I think this is a lot of dark hair, but I don't really know about it. However, I do know that the market for writ large, the whole market, like getting into the market or anything is ferocious and the amount of money that changes hands is huge because a lot of men have a real, and a lot of women too have real concern in my hair. So, so I've always thought I've always been, I would say, foolishly dismissive of this. I'm all like, well, you know, it's not as important as chronic pain or anything. Well, it's very important to some people. So I'm like, okay, I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand. However, if I'm going to do anything in this market, I'm going to do it with a maximum amount of integrity, because this market just simply does not need another, you know, Charlton, because, you know, like you say, there's great potential here, but how do you kill that potential? Well, you do it by trying to defraud people. And then people are like, oh, this is nonsense. Right. So over the years, I had been approached 38 times three, eight different companies had come to me and said, would you develop the PEMF hat for hair growth? And I said, well, you know, I'll be happy to talk to you about doing that. So it was a couple of two or three or four times a year, every year, for as long as I've been doing this. And, and, and I'd say, well, yeah, let me talk to your scientists or your staff, you know, engineers, and we'll roll up our sleeves and see if we can work together at some point that, you know, if, oh, no, we really, we really don't do science, we really don't do engineering, you know, we'd want to have you do that for us and I tell, I tell them, I don't know anything about this. You know, you got to bring something to the table and they're just a marketing group, right? Because they're, they've identified huge potential market, right? And, and they want someone to give them a solution. I'm like, well, I kind of don't have time. I'm really kind of busy and I know for, you know, I need to kind of stick to my knitting, as we say here and do the things I do well, because this is what people need, but I had several of these 38 people who were approached me over the years say, look, it doesn't even have to work, you know, we just want to use your credibility and just make an led flash and then we can sell it. Trust us. We can sell it. I even had a guy, I don't know if he told me this and I start, I had a guy offer me a Villa in Cancun. They were doing a, what do they call it? Medical tourism company down in Mexico and it was a whole community and they had like a hundred million dollars in investment and he was telling you this. He was very proud. He was like, yeah, we're going to do the whole thing. You know, like couples therapy and you know, erectile dysfunction and hair growth, super, super big. And he said, so if you are willing to do this for us, you know, we'll, we'll set you up for the rest of your life. You can have a Villa in Cancun in our community and that's what they were going to pay my consult, my, my compensation. And I, I talked to them seriously and they just weren't serious about making something that works. And they weren't going to put the resources into really figuring this out. And I said, well, we kind of need to talk to a dermatologist. And we need to, you know, we need, we really need to fund this. If you want something that's really going to work. And they said, well, we're not interested in that, but we'll, we'll set you up. And we'll, you know, and if you give us something that's credible enough that we can sell it here, that would be great. And they'll, you'll make millions of dollars. Right. And I was like, well, you know, I, you know, I like money. That's why I'm in business. I mean, you know, there's nothing wrong with big money. It's money's a good proxy for a person who works are, you know, you work hard, you make money. That's not always true. Don't, you know, that, you know, hold the hate back, but working hard and expect him to get paid for it, I think is, is very reasonable. So I turned them down. So that's 38 times. And then about two years ago, a company who I'm going to get nay, stem you sell and I'm naming them because they are doing this right. And they came to me and they asked me the same question. I told them, I said, look, you know, I've turned people down all the time. I really don't have time for this unless you can put me in touch with, you know, your technical staff and we can really make this work. And they did, they had an FDA guide to dermatologists and, you know, a person who was literally like, like me, a life scientist, a physiologist, actually. And we talked it all through and I decided, yeah, I'm going to help these people because they have already made the commitment to make something that works. And so I worked with them for about a year, not quite, maybe 10 months. And we, and I, and I made sure they were going to do this right. And so we had a quantitative, clinically used assessment of hair growth by dermatologists. Right. And so we, I designed a hat for them. So it's based on my technology. It's more what I gave them. It's more like a skull cap and leaper hat around it. And it's based on my approach to the technology. And so it could be battery power. You run on like a nine volt battery or something. And we used it and I was talking to their scientist and she was kind of a contrarian, kind of hard, really hard scientist to talk to even for me. I said, well, what did you think? And she goes, it was unreasonably effective. So I completely removed myself from their clinical testing and they did clinical testing for months and I didn't bias them at all. And so first feedback I got, I said, did you say unreasonably? She said, yeah, nothing ever has shown this positive of an effect. Like if you count hairs that are shedding during showers or they actually were using artificial intelligence, they're imaging scalp with these special cameras that dermatologists use that were measuring number of hair shafts in their diameter, everything. She goes, it just helped everything. She goes, it's unbelievable. And so I worked, it was really great. They showed me their data and I was completely removed from that, I was the bottle. This is really awesome. I said, yeah, we're really excited. And so I helped them develop this into a product. And I actually, I started once again as a skeptic and poo-pooing it and I was wrong again, but it was because I kept my powder dry, as we say here in the United States, keep your powder dry, reference to gun powder, ready to shoot when you can shoot at something. And then that's what this was. I kept my powder dry. I didn't work with any company that had low integrity. But when I found a company, actually they found me. I was delighted to work with them. And the results are really strong, I think. And I mean, do you mind if I specify the company in target room? No, sure. Yeah, yeah. It's Stimucil, S-T-I-M-U, capital S, capital I, capital L. Stimucil, and they're out of Europe. And people I talked to there, they're in Portugal, Spain, and is one of their important peoples in Istanbul. And the company's centered in the US. There's like a business headquarters here. But it's like a legit company and they did legitimate stuff before. And I asked them, so why are you asking me this? And then they showed me, they had done this very thorough search of the scientific literature. And it was very easy and natural for me to work with them. And we tried a few things and almost immediately we were getting very, very good effects. And then they turned it into what I think is just a fantastic product. And the thing is, it costs more than I would want it to. I kept saying, well, can you make it less expensive so people can use it? And they said, no, no, actually they're, they put a lot of work into this and they put a lot of money into development and they're using good quality stuff. And it really, really seems to work. That's what they tell me. Now I can't test it out of myself, right? That's the problem. I'm my biggest guinea pig. But like even the guy that I'm talking to who runs a company, he clearly has more hair now. He's been user for like a year. It's just, it's amazing. So anyway, yeah, I agree with you. It's got great potential. And if I have any credibility with your audience, then I would say, yeah, I put my technology to work in their product. And as far as all evidence goes, it's working really well.

Andy Smith 01:21:47 
Yeah, yeah. And just, you know, just from another personal standpoint, a personal experience, you know, I, 90% of my family have got bald heads. They, he runs in the family. And actually, when I was 20 years old, I started losing my hair. And up until 25, which is about 24, which is when I got sick and started using PEMF therapy, I'd lost quite a lot of my hair. My hairline had gone quite far back. And I did end up getting a hair transplant, but that was only from about six years ago, because more, because that's when I can afford to do it. So it was finance, finance reasons. But what I noticed was from about 25 onwards, my receding stopped. So if you see these pictures of me when I was in my 20s, you'll see that my hairline was quite receded. But it stopped going back. So when I went for the consultation, they said to me, you know, it's, you know, it's gone quite far back and it will, when you have a hair transplant, it will continue to go back and you'll end up, you know, people that have a hair transplant end up having two or three. And he said to me, you know, you're going to have to keep up with these injections and you're going to have to take these medications to make sure the hair's strong and the white sort of thing. And I said to him, I don't want any of that. You know, I'm a biohacker. I don't want to, I don't want to take unnecessary tablets and that sort of thing. And he said, well, you know, if you follow this protocol, I'll see you again in 10 years for your next hair transplant. If you don't follow these protocols, I'll see you again in two. And that was about six years ago. Now I had my hair transplant. And last time I went to see them, they said to me, you're definitely taking something because your hair's getting thicker. And, you know, for me, you know, I definitely blame it on the PEMF, you know, daily PEMF therapy is definitely helping. And it's an application that I've been screaming out for for ages and putting it into CAP, I think is such a great idea. So it's good to see that that is developing and moving forward, making it easy to use. And, you know, so it's a great step ahead. And coming back to development, you know, it's good to see the time for products is taken to come out, like, you know, proper development. And when we developed Celerate, I was mentioning it on the podcast, it took us six years from the design to a finished product. And, you know, do you think consumers sometimes underestimate the research, the testing and the engineering evolved when they're looking at pricing?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:24:18 
When I first started in doing this as a sort of direct to consumer business, people were like, well, should I buy one now or should I wait for the new one to come out? And I'm like, well, you know, I would, I would list that as the third biggest misconception because you were asking me about misconceptions in PDF. That's the third biggest misconception. I think it's the first biggest misconception that people have of the technology markets in general. What they don't understand is that the new next year's mile, well, that's been in development for five or 10 years. And very often it's at hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And I remember there was a, one example was on the early Apple laptops, they would have like LEDs, but, uh, Steve Jobs was just adamant. He's like, when an LED is turned off, you shouldn't be able to see it. Just when it turns off, it needs to fade away and go away. And they used to have those little white LEDs on the edges of the Apple laptops and they spent a hundred million dollars and nearly six years, I think it was just coming up with a way to make an LED that you could see when it was on, I would vanish when it was turned off. You couldn't see the outline of a turned off LED. It was like a hundred million dollars to solve that talk bubble problem. What I'm telling you is that, yeah, everybody thinks there's going to be some new great thing next year. And they absolutely do not understand that the ramp up time for any of these new technologies is, I would say a typical ramp up time for technology. It's about a decade from when they start working on it, pouring money into it to when they can actually bring it to market. But they they're doing, they do this with cars too. I mean, you get into a car, you know, this is a new model and you realize they just stamped different shape body panels. It's the same engine, the same everything, you know, it's not a new car. And they do this with aircraft, like military aircraft. The first 10 years they're testing a new military aircraft. It's all avionics for an older airplane because it takes so long to do this. And so like it took me 15 years to go from my work with NASA to putting that into a product. It could actually sell the people. And, and whenever people say, well, you know, are you going to come up with something new and better and a new way for something next year? I'm like, no, no. My advice to people is if you need PEMF now, get it now, don't wait for the newest model. It's going to have some incremental, you know, micro improvement next year because I don't do that. I, I, I will spend years developing a new product and I can put a new product out with meaningful physical and functional improvements, maybe every six or eight years.

Andy Smith 01:27:10 
Yeah. Yeah. And it's a, it's an interesting point. We talk about this before, you know, so many brands now are white labeling products and they're releasing new products every day. So it's kind of like, you know, big red flag for me, if somebody's selling hyperbaric chambers one day and then the next day they're selling red light devices and then they suddenly introduce a PEMF device, you know, you should, you should really consider that the fact that that's just a white labeled product from a mass production. Absolutely. That's absolutely true.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:27:35 
And I was at one of these big, uh, you know, alternative functional medicine meetings, and there were, there was like this sort of electro medicine section. And there were three competing PEMF companies and all three of them had exactly the same box, plastic box. They're all white labeled from Eastern Europe, probably made in Romania, actually. And, um, they just had a different faceplate on them for the company. And I literally stepped back. I should, I got to find this picture. I stepped back enough that you could see all three of them.

Andy Smith 01:28:07 
Heh heh.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:28:08 
And they were selling them as if they were different products and they were at exactly the same price point. They were exactly the same form factor, even the same plastic, you know, enclosure, the box they put them in. It's just they were labeled differently. So a lot of people don't realize they're buying white labeled Soviet era PEMF devices for Eastern Europe.

Andy Smith 01:28:30 
Yeah. And something we spoke about before, actually with your ICES device, and we've done an episode on this before, it was specifically on iHealth. And iHealth is a huge topic in your Flux forum. Why do you think so many people are experimenting with PEMF around iHealth specifically? And obviously your device is quite handy because it's almost like wearing it like two glasses.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:28:55 
The reason people experiment with it is that in many cases, you don't have a lot of options that can help you, like macular degeneration, things like that. And people are desperate. And it's the medical systems falling out. And then when you stumble on something like MyForum, you see people making, oh, make the crazy professor glasses, and people will literally get a set of readers, pop the lenses out, and then sewing thread tie. You can see this on MyForum, right? I'm sure you have, actually. And they're saying, oh, my goodness, this works really well. So people see it, and they get a little bit of hope. So I'm going to get a little dark for a moment, if you don't mind. We like dark. Dark, dark, dark. So let's talk about horses. Horses are really receptive to PE&F. The reason I made devices that could use very, very low power is that horses are hypersensitive to PE&F. And you've got to turn it way down. But there are equine acupuncturists, horse acupuncture specialists. And they tell me that bar PE&F, super ultra low PE&F works unbelievably well on horses. They just respond really well. But it's got to be the low power, because high powers, they're very irritating. They run away for a low power, they'll respond. And one of the things I tried to do research on about eight years ago was equine uveitis, which is an incurable inflammation of the eye for horses. And it, like 100% of the time, it leads to blindness, right? So I find the equine uveitis expert happens to be down the street from me in Raleigh, North Carolina, and at a university where I happen to have an academic appointment at the university. So I'm like a fully credentialed professor there. I'm like, hey, man, why don't we collaborate on this? And I think we can cure equine uveitis. And he was excited and I was excited and everything. And then he said, okay, great. Where's your funding? And I said, well, I don't have funding for it. Let's put it on a grant. Oh, no, no. He was like, he just got stone cold. He's like, I can't do anything unless you've got funding. So this is how academic research works. It's all about money. And I said, well, you know, I'm sure we could do one or two preliminary studies. And I mean, you don't have to do a full blown study. If you could just reverse a case or two of equine uveitis, you can say there is hope. Give us some money. We'll do a test. And he was like, no, no. If you don't have money already, I can't spend my time. He's like, you don't understand, Bob. And I'm like, hey, dude, I'm a professor. I fully understand. Let's like buck the system here for a couple of months. Pay for it out of, I'll pay for it out of my pocket. And he was adamant. He's like, no, no. He's like, go get NIH funding and come back. Yeah, it seems to.

Andy Smith 01:32:03 
money seems to be the big reason that PEMF is held back these days, you know, maybe there's not a huge amount of money from it, you know, in what the farmer industry can see and research. So it's a shame, but, you know, spreading the word on these podcasts is the best way. Just the last topic I wanted to touch on this episode is last time we briefly touched on the Flexner report, just for anyone who's unfamiliar, what exactly was it and what impact do you think it had on the development of PEMF?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:32:35 
Flexner was a non-scientist, non-clinician, uh, this is, this is in the early, very early 1900s, he was, I'm not quite sure what he was. I think he was one of the business buddies of Carnegie here in the US, you know, a steel guy, right? And, um, he, uh, hired Flexner and Prusa as Carnegie did hired him to go around and check all of the types of medicine, you know, chiropractic and allopathic medicine that we have now, we will take a pill kind of thing and electro, you know, um, electrocuticals and electro, electro medicine stuff, and to go through, and this person with no training, he wrote a report. You can look it up and get it from Wikipedia, actually, Flexner, F-L-E-X-M-E-R report, and it was published in 1910, I think, or 1910, I think, or maybe 1910. And it basically, um, calls out as quackery, all areas of medicine. And, and at the time, electro medicine was very popular. You could buy these ion, like these, uh, neon ion, electro tubes, or literally like glass, um, you know, tubes. And you, you can buy them now, these little orbs that have like, you know, lightning orbs, you touch them and the lightning goes to where your fingers switch to the left. They had these things and you were selling them as therapeutic devices. And I think they were probably helping a lot of people. But at the time, at the time, the, uh, Flexner report called this and several other areas of, you know, like mesmerism and other things called them out as pure quackery, and that was eventually turned into, through, I think Carnegie's influence turned into government policy, uh, like who could and who could not practice medicine. And so the Flexner report, in my opinion, put us a century behind where we should be in our understanding of electromagnetic therapy.

Andy Smith 01:34:54 
No, thank you for that. I just needed that explanation from the last episode. Bob, Dennis, we really appreciate the educational work you're doing with PEMF Therapy and we're kind of learning like we are on the podcast that we need to stand together and to help share the awareness of we kind of can't do it alone anymore. People ask us why we invite on what they would consider competitors onto the podcast. It's all about raising awareness and in this together. For anyone wanting to learn more, where can people find micro pulse devices and the Flux Health Forum as well?

Dr Bob Dennis 01:35:39 
Well, the easiest place to go is fluxhealth.co, not .com, .co, so it's F-L-U-X-H-E-A-L-T-H, .co. And you can warmly invite you to do so. Join our forum, speak up, ask me hard questions. I check the forum almost every day. I respond directly. I've already responded, I think, twice this morning. And you can read through, and we have users who have done extensive testing and work with MicroPulse devices and others. And as long as they're talking about other devices in a context that's helpful for people, they can talk about what a normal business person would consider to be a competitor. And I don't really consider these people to be competitors. I think the need for PEMF is like this ocean, is endless. And if you take a Dixie cup out of it, you're not gonna change the volume of the ocean. It's like, I do agree with you, we gotta stand together. And the main thing I think we want is to have a high integrity standard that we're not lying to anybody. And the second thing is, is a constructive dialogue. And if we compete, I want us to compete as a community and ideas. What works? What do you know? Why do you have a compelling case for what you're doing? And our ideas can compete. And I'm a very happy loser when it comes to somebody telling me something that I didn't know or it changes my mind. I'm not a sore loser. I'm like, oh wow, cool, I did not know that works. And I gave several examples came up, right? But that's the kind of approach that's gonna be very helpful, is that we're tiny little fish in this massive market of need. I don't look at the market as money. I look at it as how many people need be enough. And I would estimate it's about one out of three adults. And that's not my estimate, that's just the estimate of people who go through chronic pain in their life. And so if you just look at chronic pain, it's gonna be one out of three adults at some point in their life. So the market is huge and terribly, terribly underserved. And so the best thing that we can all do is work together to raise the integrity and the effectiveness of this technology and the visibility of it because the market is endless.

Andy Smith 01:38:15 
No, thanks. And to our listeners as well, you know, without people listening, we can't keep growing. We can't keep sharing this information. So thanks again for listening to today's episode. If you've enjoyed it, please do subscribe. Please leave us five-star reviews where you can on whatever platform you're listening to. It really does help us bring more amazing guests like Bob Dennis to share his knowledge with the audience. So again, Bob, thanks again for your time.

Dr Bob Dennis 01:38:40 
It's been very pleasant thank you.