ABSTRACT
According to The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine, our oldest extant medical text, magnetic stones (lodestones) applied to acupuncture points were used to relieve pain and other complaints 40 centuries ago. The Vedas, religious scriptures of the Hindus also believed to be several thousand years old, similarly allude to the therapeutic powers of ashmana and siktavati (instruments of stone). The Greeks referred to these as lapus-vivas (live-stones) and Hippocrates purportedly used them to cure sterility. Egyptian physicians ascribed a variety of benets to magnetic stones, as did early Buddhists. Tibetan monks still place bar magnets on the skull to improve the concentration and learning ability of novitiates in accordance with an age-old protocol.
