The juxtaposition of the traditionally “woo” topic and the high impact journal is a bit mind-bending. Like reading a Nature article about crystals and auras or

The juxtaposition of the traditionally “woo” topic and the high impact journal is a bit mind-bending. Like reading a Nature article about crystals and auras or something. More seriously, those field strengths seem pretty damn low. 3mT is way lower than the fields you need to polarise spins for something like EPR. Taking Zeeman splitting as an example of a magnetic field interacting with a paramagnetic spin: that will have an effect on the order of like 10^-7 eV, which is minuscule. Particularly in a human-shaped heat bath at 310K where kT is 10^-2 eV. To put it another way: It’s surprising to me that a magnetic field would have significant biological effects at 3mT, yet cause no obvious acute effects in a high-field MRI at more than 3000 times that field strength (try taking 3000 times the therapeutic dose of aspirin, or a radiation therapy). I’m perplexed. Interesting! I’m happy this was posted.