http://fanbox by Brian Richards

And possibly for good reason, you see, it goes way back to the nineteenth century German doctor Anton Mesmer who practiced so-called animal magnetism and was so discredited that even today his name lives on through the English word mesmerise.

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 Go online today and you can read the comments from many Doctors that magnets have little or no effect on mammalian tissue but you don't have to dig too deep to find published evidence from numerous medical journals that clearly refutes these comments.

Magnets were used and studied by some of the great doctors of yesteryear including the 16th century doctor William Gilbert who was president of the Royal College of Physicians and personal physician to the queen.
 In it are some remarkable insights, like according to Dias, the "magnet reconciles husbands to their wives"! If only it were that easy, maybe that was the origin of the term "opposites attract"?

More recently with the advent of the MRI, the promising research being undertaken on strong magnetic fields for the treatment of depression and the research into static magnets to treat pain by neurologists at Vanderbilt Medical University throughout the 1990's, long held paradigms are slowly shifting.
 This is a common occurrence in medicine, omega-3 supplements and fish oil were mocked 4 decades ago as ridiculous, now it is established medical practice.
 Ignacio was a 19th century Hungarian obstetrician otherwise known as the "saviour of mothers" after he discovered why mothers giving birth attended to by doctors had 3 times the chance of dying than those by midwives.
 But what became of Dr Semmelweis and his discovery? Well he was effectively driven out of the medical profession and died in an asylum and it wasn't for another 50 years until washing hands between patients became standard clinical practice.

The legacy of Dr Semmelweis lives on in the Semmelweis Effect which is a metaphor for human behaviour characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms.
 This was at a time when conventional science taught that no bacterium could live in the stomach.
 The time-lag reflects, as Professor William Doe of the Australian National University comments, "how difficult it is to change medical paradigms because everyone has a vested interest in the status quo".
 Two of its biggest all-time earners had been the acid suppressing drugs cimetidine (Tagamet) and ranitidine (Zantac).
 The similarities between stomach ulcers and pain are striking if not magnified.
 Magnetic fields are a vector quantity and as such have both quantity and directional values.

In addition, magnetic fields are highly specific and unless the right type of field in the right dose envelopes the target tissue, then they cannot be effective.
 The rubberized flexible