Did having her scalp zapped with electrical currents five times a week for four weeks restore Dunedin writer Lynley Hood’s sight? After more than a decade of being unable to read or write easily because of damage caused by glaucoma, Hood has no doubts the electrical stimulation she received in 2021 is the reason she can now see properly again.
“I’m on a mission to correct people when they say it’s a miracle – it’s obviously science,” says Hood, who is now happily carrying out research for books she once thought she would never be able to write.
She received the therapy as part of a placebo group in a University of Otago study looking at the treatment of chronic lower back pain. She’d be delighted if her experience leads to others also regaining their sight: “It’s really important that other people benefit from this.”
Not surprisingly, the study lead, University of Otago research fellow Dr Divya Adhia, takes a slightly more circumspect view. She agrees there is very likely a link between the electrical stimulation Hood received and the return of her eyesight. But exactly how it happened is far from clear.
“At the moment, we are really hitting in the dark. We don’t know what the mechanism is.”
She says there have been a few overseas studies suggesting a link between electrical stimulation and vision, “but the evidence is still very preliminary”. One possibility is that the electrical currents travelled through the skin on Hood’s scalp to her eye region and somehow affected her retina, but more research is needed.
Adhia and her colleagues are now collaborating with ophthalmologists to design a study to find out more. “We want to design a more robust study to help people specifically with visual problems.”
The initial study involved two groups of 20 people, all of whom had chronic lower back pain. The first group wore a special cap called a Starstim 32, made by Spanish company Neuroelectrics, which was used to electrically stimulate the parts of their brain associated with pain. They had five 30-minute sessions a week for four weeks.
The second group – which included Hood, who signed up while suffering chronic pain after fracturing her pelvis in an accident in 2020 – were the placebo group. They used a cap that looked and felt the same as the Starstim 32, but rather than stimulating their brain, it simply sent electrical currents through their scalps.
For Hood, it took a while to realise her sight was returning. The first clue came when she walked back into her house after spending time outside and had no trouble adjusting to the indoor light. Rather than being plunged into darkness for about 10 minutes, as she usually was, she could see perfectly well. “I thought, ‘Something’s happened.’”
Around the same time, she was at a cafe with a friend who noticed Hood was able to read the menu without any problem: “I just read it without thinking.”
The bioelectric century
Both Otago studies are part of a growing number around the world looking at how to manipulate the naturally occurring electrical fields in our bodies. As UK-based science writer Sally Adee points out in her new book, We Are Electric, these studies aren’t just focused on our brains. They look at all the different ways we can manipulate the body’s electrical fields to treat or cure diseases ranging from depression and wounds to broken bones, cancer and paralysis.
In fact, Adee believes this fast-growing field of medical research will make the 21st century the “bioelectric century” in the same way that the 19th century was the electric century.
“In 1800, the battery was invented, or at least the precursor to the battery,” she says. “By 1900, we had 50 new elements on the periodic table because of the electrolysis that helped us investigate these elements. We also had the telegraph and we had power lines.
“At the beginning of the 21st century, we had the first tools that let us actually study bioelectricity in a living organism and our insights are populating like wildfire. I really do think this is going to be the bioelectric century.”
To use the comparison by one of the many scientists Adee spoke to, we are now at the stage with bioelectricity that Galileo was at when he first started using the telescope. “As we know, a lot happened right after that.”
Adee’s interest in bioelectricity and what is called the electrome – the electric version of other “-omes”, such as the genome and the microbiome – began in 2011 when she was a writer and editor at New Scientist magazine. She’d managed to talk her way into a US military facility to try out a new electrical-stimulation device called a transcranial direct current stimulator (tDCS), which the army was developing to help people shoot more accurately.
It turned out that having a few milliamps from a 9-volt battery sent through her skull did make Adee much better at using an M4 close-combat rifle (modified to shoot CO2 cartridges rather than real bullets). She pretty much annihilated her on-screen opponents.
But even more remarkable, as far as she was concerned, was that the brain zapping quietened the annoying voices in her head, putting her into an unusual zen-like state that lasted for quite a few days.
“I felt like a bell jar had been placed over all the negative voices that had always been part of my mind’s elevator music. I really wished I could just go back and use that thing every couple of days to get rid of this inner voice.”
Sadly, a lack of commercially available tDCS devices meant she was unable to do that, but the experience ignited her interest in the role of the tiny batteries that exist in all our 40 trillion cells.
It all sounds a bit like science fiction, but in fact, we’ve been using electrical medical devices for decades. The best known are pacemakers, which are used to keep the heart beating at the right pace, and the tiny remote-controlled brain implants used to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
However, Adee says future developments will encompass not just electrical implants, but non-invasive wearable devices such as the Starstim 32, as well as drugs that either block or open our ion channels. These are the channels that control the movement of electrically charged ions in and out of our cells, changing their voltage in fundamental and essential ways.
Up to 20% of drugs already on the market affect ion channels – either blocking them or unblocking them to particular ions – though that is more by happy coincidence than design. Many were developed before we understood the importance of ion channels, including anaesthetics, anti-epileptics and a lot of heart drugs.
Adee is confident that now we are armed with better tools and a greater understanding about how bioelectricity works, we will develop more of these electroceuticals and other bioelectric treatments.
Cancer & wound healing
Research is already well under way into the use of electrical stimulation – both through brain implants as well as non-invasive devices such as the Starstim 32 – to treat drug-resistant depression. Deep brain stimulation seems to work better for some people with depression than others, but when it does work, the results are remarkable.
“These people get better and they stay better. If you find a particular electrical interface to these people’s type of depression, it sticks – they just get back on the bus.”
She is particularly excited about the potential of manipulating bioelectricity to treat both wounds and cancer. A lot of the research into both is still at the Petri-dish and lab-mice stage, and there’s no guarantee that what happens in the laboratory will translate into a real-life setting. “There are always unexpected differences between mice and people and between human cells in a dish and how they behave in a real-life person.” But she thinks the signs are looking good.
The science behind electricity and wound healing is based on the fact our bodies generate an electrical field at the site of a wound that attracts the helper and builder cells needed for healing. The theory is that amplifying that electric field would speed up healing.
“The US military has a big project to try to figure out how bioelectric signals contribute to wound healing and they’re looking at speeding up healing in big catastrophic wounds by a factor of two, which would be amazing.”
The actual mechanism needed to dial up wound healing is still to be determined, but Adee believes researchers are now zeroing in on it. “I think the next couple of years are going to be when we see whether we actually understand the electricity of wound healing well enough to manipulate it.”
Manipulating bioelectricity to treat cancer is slightly more controversial because it runs counter to our view of cancer as something that needs to be hunted down and completely eradicated through invasive and often aggressive treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Bioelectric cancer treatment is likely to involve essentially neutralising rather than removing the cancer cells to stop them from spreading and metastasising. The thinking behind this is that cancer cells have a completely different electrical signature from healthy cells, and changing this electrical signature could change their behaviour.
“A new idea that’s been bubbling up in the past five years or so is what if you could treat cancer like a chronic disease and keep the tumour but make sure it stays in one place? Most people who die of cancer die of the metastasis. They don’t die of a tumour, they die when the tumour grows throughout the body and infests everything, so stopping that happening could stop them from dying.”
Ethical issues
As with all new medical developments, advances in bioelectric medicine are likely to throw up difficult ethical considerations. Is it necessarily a good thing that we can use a relatively simple, non-invasive device like a tDCS to turn someone into a natural-born killer with a super-human ability to shoot accurately?
Adee says although few people are likely to want to become a crack shot, there’s already a growing appetite for using the devices to get an extra edge at work or to enhance the performance of professional athletes. That raises the question of whether we will eventually reach a stage where we all have to use them in order to stay competitive.
“The question is the same with all enhancements: at what point does it stop becoming an optional enhancement, but rather something you can no longer have a choice about using if you want a job?”
Electro quackery
The history of medicine is full of examples of quackery, the unscrupulous snake-oil merchants who prey on people’s insecurities and desperation. But as readers of Sally Adee’s We Are Electric will find, electro-quacks are a particularly inventive lot. After Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment with electricity (using a kite) in 1752, people started making wild claims for its ability to cure a wide range of illnesses, from infertility to weak ligaments, and they built the extraordinary apparatus needed to effect these miraculous cures.
Among the more imaginative was the electrically stimulating celestial bed invented by British medical electrician James Graham in 1781, which he guaranteed would cure sterility and impotence.It didn’t even involve the use of actual electricity but rather “electrical vapours”, but that didn’t stop Graham from charging £50 a night to sleep in the bed – about NZ$18,000 in today’s money.
At much the same time, there was a report that a couple who had experienced 10 years of infertility “regained hope through electricity, thanks to a few turns of the crank and some shocks in the appropriate parts”.
By the 1830s, well-heeled patients were taking “electric baths” at Guy’s Hospital in London to treat a range of vague illnesses.
In the early days, the use of electricity on animals was something of a spectator sport. Scientists held popular demonstrations showing how electricity could be used to reanimate dead animals.
In 1803, Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini did something similar with the body of a convicted murderer who had just been hanged. In a crowded room at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Aldini put two electrical wires into the dead man’s ears. The result was impressive: according to the Times newspaper, the dead man’s jaw began to quiver and “the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted and the left eye eventually opened” – making it look as if the corpse was winking.
Some scientists even used themselves as subjects, including influential 19th-century scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Among the 4000 experiments he did over four years in an attempt to understand animal electricity was one that involved putting a silver wire connected to a galvanic pile [battery] into his own rectum.
Similar experiments had already been done with large animals, causing involuntary faecal expulsions. The same happened to von Humboldt, but he was also able to report that he experienced painful abdominal cramps and “visual sensations”. When he forced the wire further into his anus, a bright light appeared before both his eyes.
As Adee observes, it was dedication beyond the call of scientific duty. “When I found this little anecdote at the bottom of a dusty old library, you should have seen my face. I was delighted.”
We Are Electric: The New Science of Our Body’s Electrome, by Sally Adee (A&U Canongate, $39.99)