Bioelectromagnetics (BEMs) is the study of the effect of electromagnetic fields on biological systems.1 Though electromagnetic fields have sometimes been associated with potential for harm to the body, there are many BEM instruments and devices re-emerging in the 21st century, based on high voltage Tesla coils, that apparently bring beneficial health improvements to human organisms. The Tesla coil class of therapy devices constitute pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF) that deliver broadband, wide spectrum, nonthermal photons and electrons deep into biological tissue. Electromedicine or electromagnetic healing are the terms applied to such developments in the ELF, RF, IR, visible or UV band. With short term, non-contacting exposures of several minutes at a time, such high voltage Tesla PEMF devices may represent the ideal, noninvasive therapy of the future, accompanied by a surprising lack of harmful side effects.
Coils up to three feet in diameter were used for magnetically treating the body without contact, though ten to a hundred thousand volts were present “between the first and last turn.” Preferably, Tesla describes using spheres of brass covered with two inches of insulating wax for contacting the patient, while unpleasant shocks were prevented. Tesla concludes correctly that bodily “tissues are condensers” in the 1898 paper, which is the basic component (dielectric) for an equivalent circuit only recently developed for the human body.3 In fact, the relative permittivity for tissue at any frequency from ELF (10 Hz-100 Hz) through RF (10 kHz-100 MHz) exceeds most commercially available dielectrics on the market.4
This unique property of the human body indicates an inherent adaptation and perhaps innate compatibility toward the presence of high voltage electric fields, probably due to the high transmembrane potential already present in cellular tissue. Tesla also indicates that the after-effect from his coil treatment “was certainly beneficial” but that an hour exposure was too strong to be used frequently. This has been found to be still true today with Tesla coil therapy devices.