When alternative health and wellness products suddenly become popular in the marketplace, we often tend to think that they “came out of nowhere.” Sometimes, the products or practices are not actually new, but have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years in other parts of the world outside of North America.

Such is the case with magnetic healing. The practice of using magnets to alleviate pain in the body, sometimes also known as “magnotherapy” or “magnetotherapy” can actually be formally traced back to the 1500s. An Alchemist and physician named Paracelsus theorized that magnets must have the ability to draw diseases from the body since they have the ability to attract iron.

In eighteenth century Paris, a man named Mesmer (from whom the term “mesmerize” is derived) claimed to have cured a mentally ill woman with steel magnets. He also coined the term “animal magnetism” which drew much interest at the time from Benjamin Franklin and King of France, Louis XVI, but was soon after debunked by Thomas Jefferson.

The twentieth century saw the development of stronger magnets such as ferrite (ceramic); and with that, resurgence in the interest of magnetic healing possibilities. Today, the magnetic therapy market is a $300 million industry in the United States, and the popularity of magnetic therapy for achieving back pain relief and other types of back pain treatment continues to grow.

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