Can electricity cure our ills?

Writer Ambrose Bierce wrote in his The Devil’s Dictionary that electricity is “the power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else.” Bierce was not wrong in his definition of the charge that kickstarts interaction between the bodies that possess it. Hence, sparks sometimes fly — metaphorically speaking — between two people.

Humans are not free of this electric charge; they are continuously affected by the electricity that exists between the atmosphere and the earth. They absorb and expel it, thus producing a continuous coming and going of electrons basic to the functioning of the different biological processes. Our nervous impulses are conditioned by subatomic electrical particles that travel through the neurons and flow through each of our cells.

This might make it sound like humans are robots whose movements are due to the power of a closed circuit. But nothing could be further from the truth, because our bioelectricity originates from the cellular sensitivity of our bodies, and this sensitivity is the basis of our muscular control as well as our heart rate. Rather than a complex machine-like mechanism, we are talking about an organic process that transmits its impulses through a bioelectrical network known scientifically as the electrome.

These and other things are discussed by the science writer Sally Adee in her book We Are Electric. The book prompts the question whether this electrome is the key to cure hitherto incurable diseases. Sally Adee proposes intervening in the body’s bioelectrical process, but in order to interact with our own bioelectrical process, we must first become familiar with it and understand the complete circuit that keeps our cells in communication.

These things also come to mind when reading the memoirs of Argentine writer Martín Caparrós, which start by explaining how he ended up in a wheelchair “with a silly fall on a bicycle” in Paris, in August 2021. The fall caused the big toe of his right foot to fall asleep. Then his legs started to give way. That’s where the medical specialists came in.

“It was an insidious and varied journey: its moments of pessimism always lessened by various forms of hope, by new ideas of causes that could be treated, by expectations of a solution,” he writes. In the end, a puncture of his bulbo-rachidian fluid revealed he had ALS.

Research is being carried out in this regard, applying electromagnetic signals to nerve cells when they wear out or die, and can no longer send messages to the muscles, thereby turning the pain into something chronic. In a 2021 study, “statistically significant improvements in peak and mean pain scores” were found when electromagnetic signals were applied to people affected by a disease that seems to be the work of the devil himself.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition