The technique of treating sick people with magnets might not seem ripe for Food and Drug Administration approval, given that its most famed practitioner and advocate, Franz Mesmer, saw his claims demolished by a scientific panel that included Ben Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier.
Of course, technology has evolved since the time of Mesmer, the charlatan who mesmerized 18th-century Paris. Magnetic therapy might be returning, though perhaps the single most crucial discovery making this possible came only decades after Mesmer when Michael Faraday found that a changing magnetic field can spawn electric currents.
Now Neuronetics, a private company in Malvern, Pa., is awaiting the FDA's verdict on completed, peer-reviewed studies of its magnet-based, depression-treatment system, which builds on advances ranging from Faraday's Law to modern neuroimaging studies. It's a ...
