According to believers, Magnetic therapy accelerates the natural healing process, provides natural pain relief, arthritis pain relief and improves sleep without any adverse side effects.
It's one of those divisive alternative healing options- skeptics says it's a load of malarkey, others including celebrities like golfer Justin Leonard claim it works. And research has some positive things to say about it as well.
If you're looking for the straight info and research, here are some good links to explore:
1. The FeelGoodStore has a database of magnetic therapy research, frequently asked questions, etc. at http://www.feelgoodstore.com/Products/Magnetics/MagneticLearningCenter.aspx
2. Therion research is a respected company in alternative medicine that takes a skeptical scientific eye to their own products and developing them. As a result more than 85% of their customers experience relief from discomfort- probably as interesting, they said
"Before we decided to start marketing, we needed to research what was already available... At first, we were confused by the results... Interviews with patients showed that while 40% were helped, as many as 20% reported that their pain actually got worse. The rest felt no difference. 12 years of research told us that something was wrong with those numbers. We were stunned. Our investigation revealed that people were using products that contained magnets that were so weak they had no therapeutic value at all. Other people were using products that had their magnets installed backwards, which has been proven to increase pain and inflammation. We knew we could do better."
Check out their magnetic therapy learning center at http://www.therionresearch.com/learning_center_articles.html
3. For perhaps the least biased information, try Intelihealth: http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/8513/34968/358833.html?d=dmtContent#evidence
But I caution you not to misinterpret 'unproven uses' as 'disproven uses'. Just because the research hasn't been done yet doesn't mean magnets can't fix it.
4. Another good research resource is to go directly to Entrez Pubmed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed. PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s.
You can read the abstracts for free. The trick though is finding the right search keywords.
5. Finally, I've started a blog on the topic, so check there for more reading.
