You Are About to Spend Real Money on a PEMF Device. The Spec Sheet Is Hiding Most of What You Need to Know.

If you've ever stood in front of two PEMF devices, looked at their numbers, and felt like you couldn't actually tell which one was better, you're not the problem. The numbers are the problem.

You might be a chiropractor pricing a clinic system, an equine therapist comparing high-intensity machines, or a buyer for a wellness practice. Whatever brought you here, you're spending real money on equipment that matters to real clients, and the industry isn't giving you the information you need.

That question is simple. When this coil sits on a body, what is the magnetic field actually doing? It's not just at one point. It's not just on average. It's across the whole surface of the coil, at every setting on the dial, with the actual unit you'll be paying for.

Almost no one publishes this kind of information. It's not because companies are hiding it. A product page doesn't have room for that level of detail, and most companies don't have the testing equipment to produce it in the first place.

What you're actually looking at on a typical spec sheet

Once you know what to watch for, the patterns repeat across the industry. Major brands, mid-tier clinical equipment, and DIY hobbyist gear all behave the same way. There are roughly four ways companies describe coil output, and each one leaves something important off the page.

A single peak Gauss number. “Up to 24,700 Gauss.” The number is real, but it doesn't tell you where on the coil that reading was taken, how the field falls off across the surface, or whether the peak sits at the center or off-center in a ring. It's the most that coil produces somewhere. It's not what it produces everywhere.

Stylized field-line illustrations. These are drawings of magnetic field lines arcing out of a coil, often with a body silhouette nearby. They're useful for teaching the underlying physics. They're not measurements. The field lines you see are the textbook field of an idealized coil, not the actual measured field of the product you're considering.

Three-point falloff curves. “500 Gauss at 1 inch, 300 Gauss at 2 inches, 100 Gauss at 3 inches.” This is genuinely better than a single number. But it only describes how the field weakens with vertical distance away from the coil face. It says nothing about how the field behaves across the surface plane: where on the coil the peak actually sits, how the field falls off horizontally as you move away from the peak, or whether coverage is symmetric across the face. Two different measurements, both useful, and the one buyers usually need most is the one almost no one publishes.

Refusing to publish a number at all. Some manufacturers take the position that Gauss alone is misleading, because what matters is the rate of change of the field rather than the peak magnitude. On that basis they treat their numbers as proprietary. The first half of that argument is correct. By Faraday's law, tissue responds to dB/dt, not to B. The second half doesn't follow. The right answer to “one number isn't enough” is “publish easy to understand data,” not “publish none.”

What real testing looks like

Gauss Labs publishes the full analysis reports for the example devices and accessories tested on the bench, and you can compare what those reports show against any spec sheet you're currently looking at.

The point isn't that Gauss Labs is testing every device on the market. It's that you can look at what a real test contains, then ask the manufacturer you're considering whether they can produce something equivalent. If they can, great. If they can't, that itself is data.

Where the strongest field actually sits

A pancake coil peaks at the center. A donut coil peaks in a ring offset from center. If you place a donut applicator over a small joint thinking the peak is at center, you're treating the joint with the weakest part of the field. A real measurement makes the difference obvious.

Where the field falls off, and whether the coverage is symmetric

Two coils with the same peak Gauss number can produce completely different effective treatment areas. The right way to see this is a mirrored profile that scans from one edge of the coil through the center to the other edge, with the 50 percent and 10 percent falloff thresholds drawn in. If the two halves of the curve don't match, you're looking at a directional coil. It's effectively a wand pointed in one direction, not an evenly covering disc.

What the pulse actually looks like

The manufacturer who said “Gauss alone is misleading” was right about one thing. Two devices with the same peak Gauss can deliver dramatically different stimulus, because the rise time of the pulse (how fast the field gets to that peak) determines what stimulates tissue. A 21,000 G pulse with a slow rise will induce less current than a 5,000 G pulse with a sharp edge. So you don't just want to see the peak. You want to see the waveform.

The plan: how to evaluate a PEMF device without getting lost in the marketing

If a manufacturer can answer those six cleanly, you're in good shape. If they can't, you have your answer about whether their numbers are something you can actually rely on.

See what real coil testing looks like

The fastest way to recalibrate your expectations is to look at a couple of complete reports and see what's in them: the heatmaps, the falloff profiles, the waveforms, the per-setting analysis, the honest tolerance disclosures. Once you've seen the format, every spec sheet you read afterward will look different.

You don't need to become an electromagnetics expert to buy a PEMF device. But you do need enough information to compare apples to apples. The reports above will show you what that information looks like. After that, the choice between any two devices on your shortlist gets a lot clearer.