"Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com> writes:
> On Fri, 22 Oct 1999, Robert Owen wrote:
>
> > I consulted, Sherry, with several psychiatrist friends of mine who
> > told me to assure you that the transcranial magnetic medium is
> > indicated for SOME clinical groups and is being used to produce
> > frequently significant symptomatic reduction without excessive
> > reliance on psychotropic agents.
>
> Does anyone have a pointer to hard peer-reviewed studies on this?
> Is there a proposed mechanism of action?
There is a lot in medline and medical textbooks. The mechanism is plain induction, stimulating or inhibiting cortical neurons (exactly what happens depends a bit on neural connectivity and responsiveness, as well as the field geometry).
My guess is that the effect is similar to ECT, in that it stimulates the brain to produce more NGFs, or possibly that it kicks it out of bad attractor states.
> I'm generally *not* a fan of "magnetic" treatments since it seems
> to have gone off the deep end to the point where it sits right next
> to quartz crystals concentrating "good" cosmic energy.
After all, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging is based on finding the sacred frequencies of the spin-spirits so that they can sing about how the hidden things are... :-)
> However, it seems there "might" be a possible route through
> which high energy magnetic fields could moderate neural
> electrical flows. However this has to be a very "gross"
> effect on the brain.
Definitely. Take a look at the image at
http://www.biomag.helsinki.fi/tms/ - it is quite clear that the effect
is widespread. Quite nice move over to the contralateral hemisphere
across the corups callossum.
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