Which are the best PEMF Machines?

1. Is It Even a True PEMF Device?

It may seem obvious, but just because a device, especially a PEMF mat system, describes itself as using PEMF, how do know if it’s not just a fake — not much different from lying on top of a heated blanket?

Unfortunately, from this incredibly positive technology, a darker side has also emerged. Riding a wave of bio-hacking and post-pandemic health awareness, there’s been an explosion of new devices (there are now well over 100 “PEMF” manufacturers), especially Chinese crystal beds and frequency-based wearables, many of which don’t even use true PEMF!

These include dozens of small “manufacturers” mostly claiming to sell PEMF mats. They’re mostly made in China and Eastern Europe and generally of very poor quality. They generally have clever marketing and the Chinese mats especially are usually re-branded by small U.S. startup companies.

They often sell through Amazon or online catalog shops, especially in the USA, UK and Australia. With slick websites, “independent reviewers” and exuberant social media influencers, many make wildly exaggerated claims about their technology, how it works, where they came from, the expertise of their creators, how they were “invented” and their supposed health benefits.

Some of the most prominent new brands make the most amateurish mistakes in describing how PEMF works and don’t even reveal what waveform, frequencies and type of coils they use, or even their intensities (all of which is vital to evaluating their likely effects). Unfortunately, the average buyer has no way of cutting through all this disinformation without doing their own extensive research.

Often the original Chinese devices, prior to re-branding and re-designing to Western tastes, are available on the Chinese marketplace, Alibaba, for a small fraction of the re-branded price. The precious “gemstones” touted in most of these mats, besides weighing a lot (they’re not portable unless you’re a weightlifter), use nothing more than rough bulk amethyst and tourmaline which would cost a few pounds or dollars wholesale. And there’s no research to indicate that they, or the heating elements that warm them up, do anything beneficial for the human body.

As we explain below, true PEMF systems, especially those with hybrid functions, have incredible potential to become the future of wellness technology. But at the other end of the spectrum are a flood of cheaply made “hybrid” systems at grossly inflated prices, where almost nothing is what it seems. The flood started around 10 years ago and shows no sign of stopping. There are so many of these brand names now, with new ones appearing every few months, that it’s impossible to keep track of them.

The American brands manufactured in China typically describe themselves as PEMF and Far InfraRed mat systems but simply use heated “gemstones” (mostly low-grade quartz crystals). Most of them are made by a handful of generic factories in China, then re-branded by sales outlets who are mostly based in the USA. Despite their slick online marketing, most of these companies show shockingly low levels of understanding of how PEMF and other energy medicine technologies actually work.

Among the most typical claims made for this type of mat, this taken from one of the highest-profile companies, are:

” Experience deep penetrating far infrared heat, made with Amethyst, Tourmaline, Obsidian, Jade and Quartz that produce the ideal infrared heat with wavelengths of at least 5-14 um for that deep penetrating heat. ” [There is no evidence that crystals produce heat or FIR fields and the only heat source appears to be an electric heater. Have you ever wondering why (knowledgeable) health professionals advise you not to use a heated blanket?]

” Along with the benefits of the energy from the crystal when heated crystals can create negative ions for additional benefits. The PRO mats also produce double the negative ions compared to other sizes. ” [There is no proof that crystals produce negative ions. If they did, you’d know about it very quickly through the dark layer of atmospheric dirt particles that would rapidly cover these mats].

” Experience red light therapy with 60x 660nm lights on the mat for those additional healthy waves during your mat session. ” [There are certainly benefits to be gained from using Red (660nm) and infraRed (800nm upwards) LED and especially low level laser light panels; we own several. However, to have any real biological effect, they need to be far stronger than you get from large, cheap, weak diodes thinly spread across a full-body mat area. The real deal devices have small densely packed diodes focused behind carefully designed collimated or partially-collimated lenses, embedded in their own metal casings with their own power supplies. By the way, they only work on bare skin so you need to be semi-naked to benefit from them].

” Its key feature is the programmable multi-wave PEMF feature allowing you to set the PEMF wave type (square or sine wave), frequency (1-30Hz), intensity (up to 3000 milli-gauss) and more. This allows you to choose virtually almost any type of PEMF signal to perfectly suit your needs. ” [Our manufacturer tested several of this type of system using an oscilloscope and found that almost none of them have built-in frequency generators. Their conclusion was that all they did was to pass through the unfiltered frequencies from the incoming mains current (60Hz in North America and 50Hz in Europe). Their conclusion was that the user is literally lying on a cloud of electrosmog].

Another prominent Chinese re-brander, selling PEMF mats without crystals, says that they’re capable of generating all possible types of waveform, with frequencies ranging from 20Hz to 21,050Hz and intensities up to 1,013 gauss (elsewhere on their website it says up to 6,000 gauss!). It also cheerfully states that it’s designed for continuous use while asleep at night. Great, while many of us try to shield ourselves from emf’s during sleep, these systems give you the chance to barbecue yourself all night long!

This type of marketing, let alone the way many of these systems are constructed, creates considerable confusion among prospective users and gives PEMF a bad name. On top of that, if you really want to buy a Chinese crystal pseudo PEMF machine, there’s no need to pay US$2,000 to $3,000 — you can find exactly the same systems, without the brand logos on them, direct from the original Chinese factories through the Alibaba.com portal (China’s answer to Amazon). Prices there can be as low as $250, or even $150 if you order 100 systems at a time. That’s quite a profit margin!

2. Intensities

The irony with PEMF intensities is that in some ways it’s the most important factor, but usually in the opposite way to what many companies claim!

PEMF machines are often defined as low, medium and high intensity, but from our perspective, in terms of health effects and user safety, there are just two types:

• Low intensity (those with an upper limit of around 300 microTesla or 3 Gauss) such as Bemer and Swiss Bionic.

• Medium-high to ultra-high intensity: from 10 gauss (1,000 microTesla) to tens of thouands of gauss (millions of microTesla).

We’ve owned some of the best-known high intensity systems (including some that go beyond 5,000 Gauss or 500,000 microTesla) and they’ve been useful in the short term for treating localised issues such as major fractures.

Whether it’s worth a home user spending £5,000 to £20,000 on a high-intensity machine intended primarily for a few weeks of fracture treatments is a very different matter.

Small medium-intensity local devices (supplying hundreds of gauss) can be just as effective and some cost less than 10% or even 1% of these prices. You can’t (unless you believe some distributors’ claims) use them to boost general health and well being, as you would with a whole-body PEMF mat, but they do work for something as simple and temporary as a bone fracture. So why would you pay ten to 100 times more than you need to for something you only need to use for a couple of months, and which is in any case best avoided for whole-body use?

Even the local applicators in our low-intensity systems can dramatically help with severe localised issues; they just take a bit longer, while giving you extra assurance that they won’t do any harm. Given that we and our customers are using them for a combination of long-term whole-body health maintenance and sometimes localised issues, we consider low-intensity mat-based systems to be by far the most appropriate, and ultimately, the most cost-effective. At the same time as being designed to suit almost all users, they’re also intended to last for many years.

We deliberately avoid supplying high-intensity systems to home users, and especially the high-intensity whole-body mats appearing from China since around 2015 (a good example is a widely promoted PEMF mat sold for home use with minimum intensities of over 5,000 gauss).

The long-term consequences of regularly using high-intensity PEMF are largely unknown. However, it’s reasonable to assume that in many cases they could be damaging. The logic here is that, in our experience, a high-intensity machine, especially a whole-body mat, can have serious effects on the user’s Autonomic Nervous System.

That means that the individual becomes more vulnerable to chronic stress and anxiety, with knock-on effects for several major body systems, which in turn would affect their overall health and quality of life. And in a population where vast numbers of people suffer from autonomic nervous system dysfunction, the potential for long-term harm is obvious, even if it doesn’t appear in the first few months of use. This is the very opposite of a preventative health technology!

When choosing a home-use PEMF device, remember one principle: Nature Rules. Some high-quality research has shown that cells respond preferentially to very low field intensities and frequencies.

This “biological window” is similar to the parameters found in Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, the same fields that we evolved with. Earth’s magnetic field measures just 25 to 65 microTesla (0.25 to 0.65 gauss).

A telling recent trend, which you could look out for in choosing a machine, is that many of the newest entrants into the market have stopped disclosing what intensities their systems use. Given that this is one of the most important parameters in a PEMF machine, we suggest that you move along quickly if you come across a PEMF website that doesn’t specify its PEMF field intensities, especially the minimum level you can reduce that intensity to.

What our clients have taught us

Many, many people subjectively prefer even lower intensities (0.5 to 25 microTesla, or 0.005 to 0.25 gauss, is the most popular range on our systems, and it’s what we generally recommend for most people in daily sessions). Some people even feel uncomfortable above the lower end of that.

This might sound impossible in that theoretically we’re all bathed in Earth’s magnetic field. However, most of us live our whole lives in buildings that are insulated from it, and for most of us our relationship with natural energy fields has been massively disturbed by our constant exposure to electrosmog.

Our technology-based society explains much of this. While electro-magnetic sensitivity (ES) and hyper sensitivity (EHS) is still not widely talked about, it’s clear that huge numbers of people are now (consciously or unconsciously) affected by it in varying degrees, and this is expected to rise sharply in the years ahead.

Don’t even go near a high-intensity machine if you think you’re starting to become emf-sensitive! You really don’t want it to get worse (sometimes permanently)! Early-stage symptoms include broken sleep, constant anxiety, chronic fatigue, regular brain fog, forgetfulness, daily headaches, prickly skin, dizziness or heart arrhythmias. In the later stages, the individual may only feel comfortable living in a rural location, with very little exposure to wi-fi, mobiles and other wireless technologies, even an off-grid house without any mains electricity.

Even those who cope well with peak levels on the low-intensity systems find they can be too much for daily use. We regularly get a few clients who ignore our advice and crank up our systems to their maximum, twice a day. Those that tolerate this feel great at first. Like daily amphetamine use, they get an artificial burst of energy and an (addictive) high. Until they feel hyper-reactive and stressed-out a few months later and call us for advice.

It’s just like drinking 10 cups of coffee a day. It may make you extra alert and the extra energy can be addictive, but you will also become jittery and more vulnerable to major stress when major life events inevitably happen. It may be worth it once in a while but in daily use, there’s a price to pay, and in the long term, this may be much more serious than getting jittery!

Consider what this means. The essence of health and well being lies in balance and homeostasis. Any truly effective therapy should improve your stress levels and stress response.

Low-level, manageable stress is normal, motivating and life-enriching. The opposite is uncontrolled, major stress, which can leave you constantly anxious, reactive and sleep-deprived. This is extremely destructive, to relationships, work and overall well being. And it can be a key factor in the start of serious diseases: read our in-depth analysis of the effects of major stress on the human body.

How your body handles stress depends on the state of your Autonomic Nervous System, a state we can easily assess by measuring Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Some of the more predatory cowboys in the PEMF industry describe HRV measurement as a “gimmick” and it certainly forms an inconvenient truth about how our bodies actually work: read our in-depth analysis of HRV and its relevance to PEMF machines.

If a technology has the potential to leave your central nervous system messed up, and that leaves you far more vulnerable to the mental and physiological effects of major stress, what do you think that means for your long-term health and equilibrium?

This is a major problem at the heart of the PEMF industry and anyone who glosses over it is either ignorant or dishonest.

On the full-body mats of our main systems (the route we take to helping the central nervous system, heart rate variability and all the body’s other major systems), the maximum intensity is still only around 50 microTesla (0.5 gauss), rising to 300 microTesla (3 gauss), with the Spot applicator. And especially on the mat, we actually recommend far lower levels than even that for daily use!

Higher intensities can be useful

It’s true that most low-intensity systems also have higher-intensity (not high-intensity) applicators for localised pain relief and tissue repair. But the peak on these is still only 100-300 microTesla (3 gauss, which is still low-intensity), and that’s quite enough for most issues.

We don’t even recommend the daily use of these low levels for chronic health issues — we make a clear distinction between their use with acute localised conditions and chronic systemic issues. Meanwhile many high-intensity systems peak at over a million microTesla.

The most honest high-intensity manufacturers (Pulsed Energy Technologies is a good example) acknowledge that both low- and high-intensity PEMF devices have a role, and can even complement each other (high for the specialist clinic, low for home users).

In clinics

High-intensity PEMF systems have a legitimate place in specialist clinics (such as for catastrophic bone fractures and severe drug-resistant depression). Treatment is usually given in-clinic by a skilled practitioner with enough training and experience to carefully screen patients to avoid exacerbations. Sessions are usually every few days, or weekly, for a limited period of time, and the main focus is on localised healing.

For other types of clinic, low intensity is a much better match, and exacerbations are very unlikely. We’ve supplied low-intensity systems to almost every imaginable type of therapist and clinic, and the overwhelming feedback is that they provide a valuable boost to the results those therapists see from their core therapy.

No doubt much of this is due to the fact that most complementary therapies seek to reduce stress and calm the autonomic nervous system (just as a low-intensity PEMF mat does).

Like a Sledge Hammer to Crack a Nut

Those recommending high-intensity PEMF devices for home use say you should buy as much power as you can afford, then dial it down to the minimum when needed. Their argument is that you can’t dial up the intensity on a low-intensity system but you can dial it down on a high-intensity system.

These claims are grossly misleading, for several reasons:

• It’s Unnecessary

The more-is-better approach may sound appealing at first until you realise that even when you do dial them down, the minimum intensities on high-intensity systems are from thousands of microTesla (hundreds of gauss) to hundreds of thousands of microTesla (thousands of gauss)!

Distributors of high-intensity systems often use comparative intensity charts showing gauss/microTesla values almost like the 0-to-60 mph rating for cars. Despite the fact that our bodies are infinitely more complex than cars, it’s the same mechanistic argument: more power equals more acceleration. If that kind of thinking were true of the human body, then eating as much food as possible ought to lead to better nutrition and health (rather than obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer).

In fact the claim that “Higher Intensity Is Better” has very little scientific foundation, even when applied to the area where it should be strongest: tissue repair.

Consider what NASA scientists said in their description of their own research equipment (and ask yourself whether you trust their opinion or that of sales outlets and even sales-hungry doctors who insist on the opposite):

” All of the prior attempts to use electromagnetic therapy have used high levels of electromagnetism, usually 50 gauss or more… Some of the attempts have used pulsed waves, but such pulsed waves have been either on-off pulses or sinusoidal waves. No one, prior to this invention, has found the key to electromagnetic regeneration of mammalian tissue. To be successful in tissue regeneration, the electromagnetic force may be a square wave (Fourier curve) time varying electromagnetic wave at a level of from approximately 0.05 to 0.5 gauss, a much lower level than previously contemplated by anyone. “ (Dr. Thomas J. Goodwin, NASA Johnson Space Centre, pub. Space Life Sciences, August 15, 2005).

• It Ignores Principles of Bio-physics and Energy Medicine

Claiming that only the highest intensities will induce any signficant cellular change, also flouts the most basic principles of bio-physics and energy medicine. Any experienced energy medicine therapist, or bio-physicist, will tell you that the very weak fields found in Nature are quite sufficient to create, through resonance, a chain of effects throughout living tissues, and weaker fields are often more effective than stronger fields. (This is also very evident with static magnet therapy mattresses where very strong magnetic fields are necessary to overcome the fact that the body quickly stops reacting positively due to their crude lack of field variation).

Treating delicate biological processes, where tiny cellular voltage changes have a measurable effect, with fields that are 100 to 10,000 times stronger than a field that is already effective is equivalent to pharmaceutical over-dosing. While it may produce strong short-term results, it can quickly cause its own problems.

When used for regular whole-body treatments, high-intensity systems are more than enough to trigger bad reactions in the autonomic nervous system, which then cascade on to other body systems, with unknown long-term effects.

• It’s Irresponsible

Encouraging home users to regularly use a modality that could damage their well being is not what you expect from a responsible, experienced therapist. Low intensities may sometimes take longer to have an effect but they’re much more relaxing, much less irritating, far less likely to cause any lasting exacerbation. “First do no harm.”

We’ve encountered people who suffered a sharp decline in their health lasting from days to years from as little as one treatment on a high-intensity system. This is not the fault of these systems; it’s the fault of the people promoting or applying them.

A recent example was a couple who nearly purchased one of our systems. They changed their minds after speaking to a self-styled PEMF guru, who persuaded them that our systems were too weak and that they’d get better results from a much higher intensity system. After some shallow training, and a few days of frequent use, they both became very unwell, until they had to seek medical treatment and one was admitted to hospital. They fully recovered, but were not very happy!

Another example is with devices sold for use while sleeping, a use we don’t agree with anyway, even with a low-intensity PEMF mat. What the best-known device of this type uses is a small coil applicator. Being tiny, it has to put out a powerful field to reach the entire body. Our immediate reaction after using it a few nights in a row was waking up energized but feeling wired — a vaguely pleasant but also unpleasant state. Your body is at its most vulnerable and does most of its automatic healing while you’re asleep; feeling wired is the exact opposite of how you should be feeling in the morning.

Another example of just how far things have gone with high-intensity home-use systems is a type of mat system that we call the PEMF Toaster. Sold in the form of two ultra high-intensity PEMF mats for above and below, your body becomes the slice of bread inside the toaster. With thousands of gauss from below and thousands of gauss from above, your body should be thoroughly cooked on both sides!

So why are the wrong types of system being sold for the wrong uses to the wrong types of user? They’re mostly sold by online catalogue shops, claiming to be objective, “independent” advisers. Just like mail-order catalogues, the core of their business is striking deals with small manufacturers who are desperate for market share and happy to give the catalogues very large profit margins.

The catalogues bulk up with cheap, poorly-made brands at different price points (so that they can claim to be independent suppliers with a range so extensive that they have something for everyone). Yet most of their money comes from a few expensive high-intensity systems (like the toasters). They then employ generic, non-therapist sales people who generally promote their most profitable systems: ” buy as much intensity as you can afford …”

Intensity Conclusions

We have nothing against high-intensity, especially local-applicator, PEMF machines in themselves, when used for the right applications, usually treating local areas of the body. In our experience, they can be appropriate for weekly treatments in specialist clinics, under the care of specialist physicians or highly-trained therapists, who know what to look for in terms of serious side effects.

Our only warning is over their sale to home users, general clinics, gyms and spas. We especially disagree with their sale for daily use in the home, often in total disregard for the user’s state of health or mind. This needs to be explained far more honestly and responsibly. With low-intensity systems, we very rarely encounter any problems (and even then we usually have strategies to deal with them).

We’ve watched low-intensity PEMF mat-based systems improve the health and quality of life of countless clients. This type of PEMF is one of the safest, most effective and well researched modalities in the entire field of complementary medicine and preventive health care. There’s no need to over-dose!