Brisbane-based company develops range of ultra-powerful wearable magnets for pain relief and injury management.
Neuromagnetics Australia has released a new range of very powerful, wearable magnets designed specifically for chronic pain relief and injury management. Called a ‘Q Magnet’ (the ‘Q’ stands for quadrapolar and refers to the four magnets that are contained within the device), the new design improves upon a previous design originally developed in the US by Dr Robert Holcomb, who conducted many years of research into using magnetism for pain relief as Associate Professor of Neurology at Vanderbilt University.
Magnets for pain relief often get a ‘bad rap’, but extensive practical work conducted with over 2,000 patients, including many professional sportspeople, at the physiotherapy clinic run by Neuromagnetics founders James and Dianne Hermans, has shown that, for a magnet to be effective, two factors are critical: 1) specific placement of the magnet and 2) magnetic field intensity (or ‘magnetic field gradient’).
Most magnets on the market for pain relief are simple single (bipolar) magnets that just do not generate a sufficiently powerful* magnetic field, or one large enough to influence neural plasticity and desensitise the pain pathway. Also many of these magnets are sold without specific positioning instructions and so, in many cases, are not being placed in exactly the right spot to be effective in any case. The company has developed a range of different sizes and types of magnets to cope with the complexity of correct positioning to address the commonest types of pain.
“Unless you are using a magnetic device with an optimised design, with the right field characteristics, correctly placed so that the penetrating field envelops the target tissue, then magnetic therapy will simply have no effect”, explains physio and Neuromagnetics co-founder Dianne Hermans.
In developing the new magnets, the company has maximised the power and size of the magnetic field generated by changing the previous device’s layout, which resembled four small ‘watch battery’ type magnetic discs (fig. 1), to the new design where each magnetic pole is a ‘quarter pie slice’ shape (fig. 2), so the four poles occupy the entire device:
Q magnets use rare-earth Neodymium magnets, which are the strongest naturally occurring static magnets, and the new range also includes hexapolar (6 pole) and octapolar (8 pole) devices for different applications.
About Q Magnets Q magnets are manufactured in Brisbane, Australia by Neuromagnetics Australia Pty Ltd and are listed with the Therapeutic Goods Association as a Class I Medical Device for the temporary relief of pain ARTG 132324. Information on the science behind Q magnets and comprehensive information on the use of the devices can be found at qmagnets.com.
*power refers to the effectiveness of the quadrapolar magnet due to the steep field gradient it generates; it does not just refer to the absolute magnetic field strength of the device
