Can we harness quantum effects to create a new kind of healthcare?

If you have even a passing interest in your health, you can’t spend long on social media before the algorithm brings you into contact with the infamous Q-word. Are you in touch with your quantum energy fields? Could you benefit from a consultation with a quantum dietician?

A dismissive snort is fully justified. But all the woo around “quantum therapies” can make it hard to talk about science that is much more serious. In recent years, clinical research has suggested that exposure to light, as well as electric and magnetic fields, could help to treat everything from acne and hair loss to wounds and cancer. These therapies don’t necessarily involve quantum mechanics in any meaningful way. Still, there are hints from parallel experiments in test tubes that life might respond to electricity and magnetism via quantum effects – at least on some level. “We have something that works; we don’t really know why,” says Margaret Ahmad , a photobiologist at Sorbonne University in France who studies how electromagnetic fields affect living organisms. All this ties into an old debate about whether life is too warm, wet and messy for subtle and fragile quantum effects to have much bearing on biology. “Researchers have never been able to unambiguously prove or refute that,” says Clarice Aiello at the Quantum Biology Institute in California. “This is the crux of what we’re trying to do.” Because if quantum states can persist long enough in living cells to matter, that could give us a whole new approach to medicine that complements – and in some cases might sidestep – the use of drugs. To begin making sense of this tangled thicket of bona fide research, pseudoscience and wishful thinking, we first need to understand what quantum biology is. All matter and energy, whether in living cells or dead chemistry, is fundamentally quantum. At this level, what we tend to think of as particles behave more like smeared-out clouds of possible states described by a wave function, a mathematical formula that defines the odds of finding a particle in a particular state when it is observed and forced to “pick” just one way to be.

Key points

• A dismissive snort is fully justified.
• But all the woo around “quantum therapies” can make it hard to talk about science that is much more serious.
• In recent years, clinical research has suggested that exposure to light, as well as electric and magnetic fields, could help to treat everything from acne and hair loss to wounds and cancer.
• These therapies don’t necessarily involve quantum mechanics in any meaningful way.
• Still, there are hints from parallel experiments in test tubes that life might respond to electricity and magnetism via quantum effects – at least on some level.