Just for kicks, on your next visit to your family doctor, drop the phrase "magnetic therapy" and watch his or her reaction.

If your favorite doc is programmed the way the vast majority of practicing physicians are these days, chances are excellent you'll hear sounds reminiscent of the days when doctors officially lost their esteem for the medicinal value of leeches.

Trouble with that is, leeches have regained some status in medicine these days.

Not so magnetism. At least for routine use in healing. Magnetism's role in medicine is restricted, but nonetheless huge as the foundational technology of the familiar MRI scan, easily one of the most powerful diagnostic tools ever put into the modern medicine chest.

But magnets as legitimate alternatives in therapy, though they've surely come a long way just in the past 20 years, have mountains of psychological baggage to climb before they'll be attractive to your average health-care provider, much less HMO.

The reasons, unlike magnetism itself, are easy to see. Since the days of Aristotle, who believed in the therapeutic benefits of natural magnets, the unscrupulous have seized every opportunity to sell magnetism as a magic potion to the sick and desperate. Their ranks swelled into a sea of quackery early this century (see advertisement) that today envelops the globe. Officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration charge that the nation's billion-dollar magnetic therapy industry is so shot through with charlatanry that the FDA is backed against a wall in its efforts to protect consumers from hordes of magnet hucksters claiming cures from everything from cancer to canine impotence.

Some scientists find this sorry state of affairs extremely frustrating. They say the greed of a few fast-buck artists, who display no qualms about making baseless, even dangerous claims about their various magnetic widgets, is making it doubly hard for promising new discoveries about medically applied magnetism to break into the mainstream.

One such scientist is Prof. Betty Sisken, a researcher at the University of Kentucky. Sisken has spent 25 years investigating the links between nerve regeneration and magnetic fields. She's demonstrated that the recovery of damaged nerves can be speeded up dramatically by exposure to pulsed, low-power magnetic fields.

As a former president of the Society for Bioelectromagnetics Research, Sisken closely follows developments in magnetic therapy research. She says that legitimate research is hampered not only by quacks but by scientists who simply refuse to accept the idea that magnetic fields have any biological efficacy whatsoever.

"Biologists say they don't have a good explanation for a mechanism of action, therefore there's no use in pursuing this," she told Research in Review. "Frankly, if pharmacologists had waited to find out exactly what the mechanism of action is for all the drugs they make, we wouldn't even have aspirin."

Her frustration is echoed by her BEM colleague Ben Greenebaum of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Greenebaum edits the Journal of the Bioelectromagnetics Society.

"I believe the majority of scientists would say 'what are (BEM researchers) wasting their time for? It can't happen, so let's not worry about it."

As Sisken suggested, skeptics have perennially based their arguments largely on a lack of evidence for a biological mechanism that could somehow be acted upon by magnetism to cause an effect, Greenebaum said. Outside of some good evidence that migratory animals use internal "compasses" that link to the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, most animals don't have obvious appendages, organs or cellular apparatuses adapted to use magnetism in any discernible way.

Thus, with no clear way to form plausible explanations grounded in physiology for how magnetism might trigger responses in a live creature, scientists have been slow to endorse BEM research as worthwhile. As a consequence, funding for such research is hard to come by, Greenebaum said.

But that's changing, if gradually. Progress in the clinical uses of magnet-based therapies is gaining momentum each year. Today, there are FDA-approved magnetic therapies available for use in a variety of treatments from healing broken bones to osteoarthritis. One technique invented 15 years ago, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been described as "one of the hottest research tools in neuroscience." The procedure, which directs tiny magnetic pulses at discrete regions of the brain, shows promise in treating conditions such as epilepsy and depression.

Such good news is opening doors, if slowly, to federal research dollars, mostly from the NIH Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This year, the center made its first substantial BEM research awards, outside pilot studies, primarily to groups working at the University of Virginia and Emory University.

Still, compared to so many areas of neurological research, the funding outlook for BEM research looks stark, says Greenebaum.

"You have to be a pretty brave soul to get into BEM research these days, " he said. "But there's still a pool of expertise out there and some interesting stuff is going on around the edges. This may turn up something interesting sooner or later. I sure hope so."

He's encouraged by what he's heard about the recent work of Tom Houpt and Jim Smith at FSU. "This high-field work needs to be pursued, because it could give us some clues as to what may be happening at lower levels."

Perhaps mainstream science will then begin to better appreciate things it may never fully understand, and refine its vigilance against the eternal forces of fraud.