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Using Electricity to Heal

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jul 26, 2006 04:48 PM
from the frankenstein-approach-to-healing dept.
Biotech Science
ganjadude writes to tell us that while the idea of using electricity to heal wounds was first reported 150 years ago by Emil Du Bois-Reymond, modern scientists may have found a way to practically apply this idea. From the article: "The researchers grew layers of mouse cells and larger tissues, such as corneas, in the lab. After 'wounding' these tissues, they applied varying electric fields to them, and found they could accelerate or completely halt the healing process depending on the orientation and strength of the field."
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  • 1.21 gigawatts (Score:5, Funny)

    by lecithin (745575) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:49PM (#15787095)
    After 'wounding' these tissues, they applied varying electric fields to them, and found they could accelerate or
    completely halt the healing process depending on the orientation and strength of the field.

    "Hey Marty, lets start out with 1.21 gigawatts right about... Here."

    "Interesting. It looks like that stopped the healing process."

    "Hello... McFly?"

  • I'm shocked! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:52PM (#15787108)
    Shocked, I tell you!
    • while the idea of using electricity to heal wounds was first reported 150 years ago by Emil Du Bois-Reymond, modern scientists may have found a way to practically apply this idea.

      I hope this new method obviates the need for bolts in the neck.
  • Maybe those people (idots) who kept strapping magnets to themselves knew something after all. Although given the findings it seems equally likely that they were impairing the healing process. (yes, I know the article is about electricity, electro-magnetism people)
      • Blood keeps flowing though your hand, though.

      • Re:Magnets (Score:3, Interesting)

        by aditi (707829)
        ... "And since everything is relative, Wearing a magnet on your wrist makes it stationary in comparison to your wrist, thus wearing magnets is pointless. QED. "

        Actually, no. While it is true that the magnet is stationary w.r.t your wrist (or whichever part of your body), it is not stationary with respect to the moving ions that make up the electric current within the cells. The presence of the magnetic field will deflect the charges according to a force F = Charge * Field x Velocity. Charges coming i

          • The Mitochondria of the Cells (Energy Power house of the cells) are small DC motors and their efficiency goes up if their magnets are stronger.

            You had me going up to this point. How about the rest of you ?

            And shame on the people who moderated this "Interesting", apparently not even noticing anything odd with this passage:

            . Since 1799 it has been known that transmutation (fusion for you physics types) is done in living things. Chickens in Wales were found putting out more Calcium than they were eati

  • Now when we cut our fingers building computers, we can just electocute ourselfs with the power cables!

  • Power Insurance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:55PM (#15787124) Homepage Journal
    Once doctors are using guided electric fields to assist healing, how will corporations which spill uncontrolled electric fields among people deny that their fields affect human tissue? Or will they just claim credit for the healing "they've already been offering free for generations", and start tacking a medical charge on our bills?

    • Re:Power Insurance (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It figures that the bozos at New Scientist, by confusing "electric fields" with "electric currents", would prompt comments like this. EM radiation from wireless sources consists of orthogonal electric and magnetic fields which are as different from DC currents, physically speaking, as you could possibly imagine.

      This sort of journalism is exactly why I no longer subscribe to New Scientist. They don't appear to give a crap about the "science" part.
  • more gadgets!

  • How to get laid by New Age chicks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bermabloeme (990995) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:57PM (#15787146)
    This creates electric field patterns all over the body.

    A lot of the "New Age" folks say they can see a person's aura. A lot of these "New Age" folks are really hot girls! So, this is what you do: you grab this article and tell them that you believe, now. Let her just start talking about this stuff. Then, complain about some ailment that requires her "healing" touch. Lastly, ask to try it on her.

    Let things progress: touching , kissing, clothes off, etc...

    Enjoy!

  • The only problem with this is that now we need to put surgeries on the top floor of hospitals. Then there's the problem of having to wait for a lightning storm. Let's not even get into the extra staff you need to turn the big wheel and lift the operating table through the roof.

    I suppose we'll also see extra insurance needed for the wear and tear on the surgeon's voicebox when he yells, "Liiiiiife! Liiiiiiife DO YOU HEAR ME!? GIVE MY CREATION ........... LIIIIIIIIIIFE!!"

  • Old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by mnmn (145599) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:58PM (#15787151) Homepage
    Forget about 150 years, down in Texas they use electric chairs to fix up some really sick people.
    And psychiatric wards have been using it to fix up people who were sick in the head in the early half of the century.

    Even the police and mean old ladies use it to fix other people and pets. Them doctors are a little behind.
    • You laugh, but electroconvulsive therapy has gone a long way. It's now considered a reasonably safe and clinically proven [medem.com] treatment for certain disorders.
      • A friend of mine went through ECT a couple of years ago. I can't say that it helped his condition (but I can't say that it didn't either). What I will say is that it F*CKED his memory up. The entire roughly 4 month period he was getting ECT is gone--no memory at all of events that happened during that time, and his short-term memory is much, much worse than it used to be. I've heard similar stories from others.

        I have no doubt that ECT can create some positive outcomes, but the costs seems REALLY high to me.
  • On second thought, there are probably minors reading this, so I won't give the URL of the B&D web site I stumbled across last week.
  • A friend of mine (now deceased, rest his soul, he couldn't beat the cancer) had a treatment along these lines about a year ago to help heal some sort of lesions on his skin (may have been bed sores, I don't recall). It was a device that he'd put over the affected area and it applied voltage to the skin, adjustable by him. I'm not sure if it was for healing or pain control, but it worked. He showed it to me a couple times, when I put it on my hand it felt like a mild version of a 9-volt battery on the ton

    • Re:I don't think this is new (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I had electro-field treatment back in 1990 when I fractured my collar bone. Several months after the accident, the bone was still not knitting - hardly at all, anyway. Really disturbing to be able to bend my collar bone in the middle when doing things like, oh, sleeping or picking up a glass of water. Wrecked havoc on my posture, strength, and everything else in by back and nexk, too.

      I was told many things by many people as to why this happened and what to do about it (diet, immobilization impossibilities,

      • Re:I don't think this is new (Score:4, Informative)

        by budgenator (254554) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @06:15PM (#15787534) Journal
        Bone (Calcanous) has two differnt types of cells, osteoclasts which "eat bone" and osteoblasts which lay down new bone. The osteoclasts tend to meander, eating the one randomly, but the osteoblasts tend to follow electrical currents in the bone. The calcium salts in the bone give off electrical currents by the piezoelectric effect which causes the bone to grow in the direction that makes it the strongest for the stresses it normaly recieves.

  • forget that (Score:5, Funny)

    by npietraniec (519210) <npietranNO@SPAMresistive.net> on Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:59PM (#15787159) Homepage
    This guy discovered immortality with magnets.

    http://www.alexchiu.com/ [alexchiu.com]

    Damn, they even interviewed him on slashdot.

    http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/0 6/07/1421238&mode=nocomment [slashdot.org]

  • not really suprising.. if.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by josepha48 (13953) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:00PM (#15787169) Journal
    .. you have been to a physical therapist. My physical therapist used electricity on my shoulder to help it heal up some. I think she said it was supposed to stimulate something.. actually it just tingled and felt weird, but now I no longer have shoulder problems....
    • Absolutely. When used properly, the electrical stimulation can work wonders for various muscle maladies. This is hardly a new discovery. Feels a bit weird at first, but pretty damn good afterward. It's just a way of triggering the nerves repeatedly to stretch the muscle in ways that you can't yourself. But when the electrodes are misplaced oh so slightly it feels like the muscles are being ripped from the bone.
  • The genes may have been identified, but there are patents out on the pulsing of DC across wounds by placing electrodes both laterally and diametrically on opposite side of the wounds and by holding one electrode steady while moving the other around.

    I analysed a patent recently that dealt with this as part of a question in a preliminary round of interviews.

    I can't remember the patent number, but basically, if they try to patent the actual therapy, they are going to have problems because the patent I am descr

  • Awesome (Score:5, Informative)

    by BilZ0r (990457) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:04PM (#15787187) Homepage
    That's actually quite an awesome paper. It seems that when a wound is made, it makes a low resistance shunt across skin, which normally has a voltage difference across it. This stimulates wound healing activity. The current peaks at 10 microA cm-2 and persisted at 4-8 microA cm-2, with all the current vector pointing towards the wound center. This paper shows not only that that effect is easily demonstrated in vitro, but what are the molecular mediators of it, see the original article here [nature.com].

  • Have we learned nothing ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Culture (575650) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:05PM (#15787193)
    ... from history? If you read about Dr. Frankenstein, you will find that this medling in the unknown will lead to nothing but misery. I hope Bush veto's any work in this area.

  • Coming soon to an inbox near you... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Null Nihils (965047) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:09PM (#15787205) Journal
    While I am fascinated by genuine scientific research into such effects, and interested by the insights into cellular and genetic mechanics described in the article, I shiver to think of how news like this might reverberate across the large communities of pseudo-science loons and snake-oil salesmen that lurk in the dark corners of the Internet.

    " Electr1city curez, as seen |n New Scienti5t m4gazine. G3t electr|cal d3vice, cur3s all d1sease including ere
    Zap.

  • Already out there (Score:4, Informative)

    by bobllama (587614) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:14PM (#15787231)
    There's already a company that's commercializing this - http://www.biofisica.com/ [biofisica.com]. They have some pretty interesting information on their site for anyone interested in more detail. I'm not associated with them in anyway, just happened to see them present at an event once.

  • Sick of 'science' reporting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bananaendian (928499) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:18PM (#15787254) Homepage Journal
    No doubt this report will be hyped by the new-age weirdos that are always looking for miracles cures or reasons for paranoia. Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data? New Scientist no.1 Science Magazine, yeah right! - science isn't about wild speculation and hype - its about rigorous examination and critical thinking. I wouldn't be suprised ones other labs try to reproduce the effect it gets debunked.
    • Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data?

      So you think Nature (the journal TFA said it was published in) is some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscription? It is probably the most well known academic journal in existence, at least to the non-academic. And even if you a

  • Gotta say it. (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrShaggy (683273) <chrislightNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:21PM (#15787271) Homepage Journal
    'God-Damn-it Jim, I am a doctor not a generator'

  • Implementation or Understanding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by buckhead_buddy (186384) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @05:25PM (#15787290)
    I've heard stories about how the medical profession was so enamored with radioactive tools for healing. Xrays to look inside the body. The way radiation exposure could kill unwanted bacteria. The cool soothing greenish glow of radioactive clocks and other tools. They came up with implementations of using radiation before understanding what it was doing. Today, looking back at the lack of understanding seems crazy; we'd never do something like that again. Would we?

    Are we in fact going to do the same thing with electricity here? Are we really understanding why these mice are being cured or are we just satisfied to have a technique that appears to work? I don't mean to be cynical. Curing the impossible seems like a great thing. But will we be reading about how a quick emag arthritis treatment today resulted in the creation of Alzheimer's v2.0 tomorrow?

    IMHO, a workable implementation is great, but full understanding would be better.
    • I'd say we have a very poor understanding of 90% of the treatments out there. The reality is: if it works, it works. Theorists (like me) like to think that one day, the stuff on paper will matriculate into something tangible, but really, in the medical world at least, it's the other way around.
    • Are we really understanding why these mice are being cured or are we just satisfied to have a technique that appears to work?

      The key thing about this article is the depth to which they understand how the effect works. Not only is a specific mechanical effect explored (i.e. how much current, in what way) but how that mechanism effects the biology right down to the level of gene expression! This kind of top-to-bottom understanding is highly unusual. In direct opposition to your example when you have detaile

    • Re:Implementation or Understanding (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Vellmont (569020) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @06:19PM (#15787554)

      Are we in fact going to do the same thing with electricity here?

      I doubt it. The effects of radiation on the body 100 years ago was very poorly understood. Low voltage electrical currents by comparison are fairly benign. It's not like the use of electricity in the human body is new. Pacemakers have been around forever, there's been some trials of direct electrical stimulation of the brain to create artificial vision, and many parapalegics use direct muscle stimulation to stand up, etc (maybe even walk?).

      Also, the medical community itself has grown up. Years of animal testing is required for any kind of new treatment goes to limited human trials.

      That's not to say it's all perfect. You can't dismiss the danger that any new treatment is going to have unforseen side effects that don't show up in human trials. But I think comparing this new treatment to the early days of medicine where anything goes and there's poor understanding isn't terribly valid.
  • http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688001238/ [amazon.com]

    He was widely derided as a wacko. What has changed that makes this so new and wonderful now?

  • Research abstract from Nature (Score:3, Informative)

    by FleaPlus (6935) * on Wednesday July 26 2006, @06:58PM (#15787748) Homepage Journal
    For the curious, here's the research abstract [nature.com] from the publication in Nature:

    Electrical signals control wound healing through phosphatidylinositol-3-OH kinase-big gamma and PTEN

    Wound healing is essential for maintaining the integrity of multicellular organisms. In every species studied, disruption of an epithelial layer instantaneously generates endogenous electric fields, which have been proposed to be important in wound healing. The identity of signalling pathways that guide both cell migration to electric cues and electric-field-induced wound healing have not been elucidated at a genetic level. Here we show that electric fields, of a strength equal to those detected endogenously, direct cell migration during wound healing as a prime directional cue. Manipulation of endogenous wound electric fields affects wound healing in vivo. Electric stimulation triggers activation of Src and inositol-phospholipid signalling, which polarizes in the direction of cell migration. Notably, genetic disruption of phosphatidylinositol-3-OH kinase-gamma (PI(3)Kgamma) decreases electric-field-induced signalling and abolishes directed movements of healing epithelium in response to electric signals. Deletion of the tumour suppressor phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) enhances signalling and electrotactic responses. These data identify genes essential for electrical-signal-induced wound healing and show that PI(3)Kgamma and PTEN control electrotaxis.

  • Some interesting points. . . (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fantastic Lad (198284) on Wednesday July 26 2006, @11:34PM (#15788957)
    Yes, micro-current DC electricity can be used to affect the way cells function in the human body; they can signal cells to start or stop normal biological processes in healing and growth and a multitude of other functions. Robert O. Becker has written extensively [amazon.com] on his studies into this area. If you have not read his books, order one and read it. For under $5 dollars and shipping, (less than a movie and popcorn), what have you got to lose? His work is highly informed and challenges modern medicine in significant ways.

    Some notes of interest. . .

    Acupuncture works. Nobody contests this. --The theory is that by inserting a metal needle and setting it to lightly rotate, the needle cuts through the Earth's magnetic field creating a micro-current which then affects the body in a variety of different ways.

    Electromagnetic fields similarly are able to stimulate cells to react in similar ways; this is probably the basis of all concerns regarding Cell Phone radiation.

    How can EM fields affect humans? --It is understood by some that EM fields can be used to affect emotions and states of awareness. With specific application to the primary visual cortex, they can even be used to cause temporary blindness [scotsman.com]. (Read article half-way down.)

    The HAARP Array, supposedly used for research, is also suggested by some to be a means of mind-control; that is, beams of specific EM can be reflected from the sky onto terrestrial targets. The science is not contested, just the intent.

    In a world where the U.S. secret services admit to having run extensive (and fairly gruesome) mind-control experiments, where secrecy and paranoia run rampant through the government, where Israel is allowed to commit genocide in the Middle East without the media blinking an eye, and where Bush is allowed to build a police state, all to the drums of Christian-Cult Apocalypse insanity, the idea of population control through manipulation of EM fields is not so very far fetched, now is it?

    Disagree? Before responding, ask yourself in all honestly why you disagree and where the impulse stems from.


    -FL

    • No, no, no! If you want to do the redneck thing right, the correct quote is, "Hey guys! Hold my beer a moment while I show you something cool!"
      • jeeze man, get the vernacular right. A redneck would never say "a moment." The following would be more... appropriate:

        Hey'all! Hold mah beer, big Jim. I'm a-gunna show ya sumpin cool!

        • No, no, you're being far too verbose. The correct usage is:

          Hey y'all! Watch this!

          Should you ever hear such a statement, please be sure to run away as quickly as you can.
    • Sounds like megnet therapy would cause more harm than good. If red blood cells have iron in them, I can imagine megnets causing them to clot. Sounds bad...

      • Sounds like megnet therapy would cause more harm than good. If red blood cells have iron in them, I can imagine megnets causing them to clot. Sounds bad...

        The iron in blood is not large enough to have magnetic domains. If it were, you wouldn't just have to take off your watch when you got a MRI, you'd have to drain your blood, too. The only way wearing magnets would cause blood to clot would be if you wore spiky magnets that pokes holes in your skin, or maybe if they cut off your circulation. You have c

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