Magnet Therapy - What is it?

What exactly is magnetic therapy? The idea of ​​magnetic therapy goes way back in history with tales of Cleopatra* wearing magnetic stones on her forehead to avoid aging.

*It is believed that Cleopatra died of lead poisoning due to the excessive use of lead in make-up in the old days. So who knows: maybe she would have lived forever with the help of magnets if she didn't wear makeup 😉

Magnetic therapy was later put into practice and had a major boom in the 1770s when the German doctor Franz Anton Mesmer put a lot of effort into spreading the theory, and it is his books that still form the basis of much magnet therapy today.

There are different opinions about what magnets can do do, but common to all stories is that they set the blood in motion in a positive way, and then there are different versions of how to control the blood, etc. But we will not go into that here, as our focus is solely on the magnets and what you can scientifically prove. And the idea of ​​this post is only to illuminate the area, but apart from that we are fairly neutral about using magnets in therapy and healing. However, we can reveal that you can easily feel it in your hand when you take 2 magnets and place a magnet on either side of the hand - it spins quite a bit in the hand.

Course in magnet therapy

At Magnetz, however, we never settle for old legends and stories, even though it is easy to be blinded when you think that magnets are wonderful and the source of many good things. So we sent Jesper on a course in magnetic therapy at the beginning of 2022 to find out what it's all about and how we can better help our customers. Because even if we do not practice magnetic therapy or magnet healing ourselves, it is difficult not to be impressed by the stories we hear from our customers, where they use magnets in their practice to treat injuries etc. And here is a mixture of history and experiences from the course and from everyday life to help our customers find the right magnets.

The two types of magnets

There are roughly two types permanent magnets you should know about: Ferrite magnets and neodymium magnets.

Neodymium was only really invented/put into production in the 1980s. This means that Mesmer certainly used ferrite magnets in theory and practice. The ferrite magnets are somewhat weaker than neodymium and therefore much larger and heavier. And it makes neodymium easier to use because their strength is more than 10 times higher than ferrite. But it's not just the size that matters, which we'll get into below:

This you need to know about Gauss

Mesmer (and others who work with magnetic therapy) give up the strength in Gauss, which is a unit of measurement for magnets. But this is unfortunately another source of confusion. You can read much more about Gauss on Wikipedia. But the short story is that you can't be completely sure that when Mesmer described a need for 100 gauss, that it actually corresponds to 100 gauss magnets today.

Sorry. ... we know it will be pretzel; but hang in there - we will go to great lengths to give a good explanation.

Today we know that Gauss changes the further you get from the core of a magnet. This means that a flat magnet does not have as large a Gaussian span as a thick magnet. And therefore it is better to count on N values ​​that give a more accurate result for which magnets can be used. And not to hide it too far away behind further explanations, we have found that most people can use N45 magnets for magnet therapy and magnet healing.

So then Mesmer explained about a Gauss value of 100, unfortunately you can't just look for a magnet with 100 Gauss today, because it's not that simple (unfortunately). Gauss in the center of the magnet, Gauss on the surface and Gauss at a distance from the magnet are very different for the same magnet. And therefore you will only be able to find magnets today that are apparently much more powerful than the ones Mesmer used.

So what do you do?

Achieving true Gauss with your magnet

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Here's our best tip: Get an app for your phone that can measure Gauss. There are several on the market that work quite well (including the free versions), so we will not single out a particular Gauss app. But they can measure your magnets from different distances (and thus you can achieve the same gauss with different magnets).

And here comes the genius: take a piece of gauze or fabric and tie around your phone in several layers. This creates some distance between the magnet and the phone, and this will cause a fluctuation in the Gauss value. And the genius of this is precisely that you can find out how many layers of gauze or fabric you need to wrap around the place that needs magnetic therapy before you get the right Gauss.

In other words: the magnetism decreases with the distance, and in this way you can adjust the value just as you want.

So if you have to use a magnet in e.g. a knee bandage, just sew the same thickness of fabric on the inside between skin and magnet as you found out with the app (remember to count layers) and then the values ​​should match!

But there is still the easy version, and that is to use N45 magnets - these are our best-selling magnets for magnetic therapy and magnetic healing (try doing a search yourself on just these English terms if you want to know even more about magnet therapy).

Here are some of the magnets we have sold the most of (the small ones for therapy on people and the large ones for therapy on horses and large dogs):