Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: pat soto on 18/09/2008 10:30:26
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pat soto asked the Naked Scientists:
Hi, my name is Pat and I worked for a company who decided to install cameras and listening devices.
I now know that part of the listening device was used as a radio frequency, it was turned up so high that I could actually hear a pencil writing.
My problem is that I have metal in my head, between the ears and stapled to my palate at the top of the spine bone. When they installed this, I was not able to think and I always felt sick as soon as I started working. One time I stayed late and they actually turned up the frequency to the point I was shaking so bad and I obtained blisters on my ear drum, I damned near passed out.
They tried to tell me it was a virus, but I know better. What is the long term repercussions of being in a transmittal area with metal in my head?
Sincerely,
Pat Soto
What do you think?
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You didn't imagine it at all. Be careful, or you might reach your threshold of exposure and develop full-blown electrosensitivity, like I did.
German Doctors Unite on RF Health Effects:
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20050722_bamberg.asp
Electrical Sensitivity & Hypersensitivity:
http://www.ei-resource.org/illness-information/related-conditions/electrical-sensitivity-&-hypersensitivity/
When my symptoms became especially severe, I had actually ruptured my ear drum - the doctor found blood in my left ear.
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"but I know better"
Then why ask?
Electrosensitivity is speculative at best.
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Electrosensitivity is speculative at best.
There certainly seem to be a rising number of people who claim to suffer from electrosensitivity, but I worry that a number of these have been convinced that this is the cause of their illness, when, in fact, it isn't. That's not to say these people aren't ill - the symptoms are, and illness is, real. I worry that, a;though there may be true electrosensitives around, the research is clouded by people who have convinced themselves that they are electrosensitive due to what they have read online or been told by others. This could be one reason why all of the reliable research shows that EM radiation is not related to timing or severity of symptoms, and that cognitive behavioural therapy is the most effective treatment. What if 90% of 'electrosensitives' have psychosomatic symptoms - the research would show that electrosensitivity doesn't exist. Sadly, there's a lot of propoganda on the internet, and it's very easy to convince yourself of something like this - doctors see it all the time in people who come in certain, absolutely certain that they have an ailment they have read about, or seen on tv.
Many people seem to lack the critical thinking skills required to tell propaganda apart from fact, and propagandists are very skilled. This should be part of all school syllabi, surely?
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Either everybody is electrosensitive or nobody is surely. We all have the same chemistry and biology. To single some out would be a bit like saying some people wouldn't feel anything if exposed to extreme heat whereas others do.
Any test I have ever read about concludes that it is all in the mind.
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Bored chemist, I don't think it's right to attack a person's observations without first investigating them. And although it is true some people may be psychosomatic with regard to electrosensitivities, it is not very scientific to say they are imagining these symptoms without first investigating it further and testing them. I believe that the vast majority of those who claim to be electrosensitive actually are, though I would have been skeptical, too, had I not measured my exposures and proven my symptoms correlated to my exposures myself.
It wasn't that long ago that those who suffered from syphilis were thought to be 'insane'. It took years before this was proven, and I believe that is the route electrosensitivity will take. People like me will be attacked until science proves otherwise, and though I'm used to it by now, the person who posted this may not be.
Pumblechoo, you are wrong in saying we are all chemically and biologically the same. Take those with Alzheimer's. Research is showing that they have increased levels of magnetic iron oxide (magnetite) in their brains. Are their brains desperately trying to find direction in the presence of all these electromagnetic fields generated by wireless devices? And please note that this accumulation is higher in females...
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=36220
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The question I asked still stands no matter what you say about ad hom attacks.
How does pat soto know better?
"It wasn't that long ago that those who suffered from syphilis were thought to be 'insane'. "
since syphilis can (and if untreated often does) affect the brain it makes perfect sense that many syphilitics were insane. What's the problem?
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""There’s been a lot of angst in the UK recently about possible health effects of mobile phone masts, and let’s face it, most of us at some time have wondered whether they really are safe. A major new study by scientists at the University of Essex has found that mobile phone masts are not the cause for the short-term symptoms that some people experience when near them.
However, the study did find that many of the sufferers reported feeling ill when they were told the signal was on (whether it was or not) , which tends to suggest that there may be a psychological cause for the symptoms experienced. ""
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/07/25/study-clears-mobile-phone-masts-in-the-short-term/
Double blind tests conducted by Kings College, London found that so called electronsensitive people couldn't tell whether a phone next to the head was radiating normally, plain carrier or not at all.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7546/886
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"It wasn't that long ago that those who suffered from syphilis were thought to be 'insane'. "
since syphilis can (and if untreated often does) affect the brain it makes perfect sense that many syphilitics were insane. What's the problem?
Psychosomatic illness is an illness that has no basis in medical reality - it's 100% imagined. Insanity in syphilis and in electrosensitivity, if that's what you wish to call it, does have a biological/medical basis.
Pumblechook, for every study that you claim shows no effects, I can point you to several that do show effects. Are we selectively choosing here what we want to believe since we are so in love with this technology? And imagine the implications, if this ever were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this new scientific fact would have on all other technologies in use today that we have grown to accept as safe and rely on. Don't you think there might be financial reasons for not alerting the public? Not only would these industries collapse, but lawsuits would come out of every corner of the earth which would cause further economic ruin to these industries.
Also, it is possible to design studies in such a way as to achieve the desired result by reviewing past studies. For example, if I'm trying to prove that exposure to cell phones causes acne, and I have seen other studies indicate that 1 minute on a cell phone for 8 weeks does not cause acne, but 15 minutes per day on a cell phone for 8 weeks does, well then all I need to do is to make sure I keep the study as close to that one minute exposure as possible, so that I can say, "Well, there you go! Cell phones have not been proven to cause acne!" And the best part is I'm even (sort of) telling the truth!
The perfect example of this is how most of the studies done thus far on 'regular cell phone users' define 'regular users' as someone who uses his or her cell phone a ridiculously small amount of time per week - something like 5 minutes of cell phone use per day - nothing close to the amount of time most people today are using these devices. Many people today don't even own landlines - their cell phones are their primary phone.
What's more, in order for something to be accepted as scientific "proof", studies need to be replicated, and this is something that the cell phone industry has mastered. If a certain study does show some biological effect, the next study will be designed in such a way as to prevent it from being duplicated, so that the argument can be more about differences between the two studies, rather than the findings of either. And if they won't even admit the link between cell phones and brain tumors, where do you think I'll stand with regards to proving my electrosensitivities are caused by the masts themselves?
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I looked at both of the links you posted, and I find this significant...
“[The finding] was made possible by eliminating 12 of the most sensitive electrosenstive volunteers who had become too ill to continue the study,” fumed Mast Sanity.
“Even a child can see that by eliminating 12 of the original 56 electrosensitive volunteers - over 20% of the group - that the study integrity has been completely breached. Interestingly, the official press release does not mention this fact.”
And where is the logic here?...
"Results Headache severity increased during exposure and decreased immediately afterwards. However, no strong evidence was found of any difference between the conditions in terms of symptom severity."
I guess the word 'strong' is the active word here, huh?
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I use my mobile phone for an average of no more than 5 minutes per day, anyone else?
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I have chronic Lyme, which I attribute to wireless technology. I was bitten in 1989, suffered difficult symptoms in the early 90's (though I could still half function), but by the mid 90's, my immune system began its collapse - and by 2000, my immune system was pretty much finished.
Here is an excerpt from a book by Dr. Robert O. Becker. He passed away this year, but he is my favorite author and is known as the 'father of electromedicine'. He used to work on bone and tissue regeneration using electric current...
The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker, M.D. - (pages 276-278)
Subliminal Stress
After Howard Friedman, Charlie Bachman, and I had found evidence that "abnormal natural" fields from solar magnetic storms were effecting the human mind as reflected in psychiatric hospital admissions, we decided the time had come for direct experiments with people. We exposed volunteers to magnetic fields placed so the lines of force passed through the brain from ear to ear, cutting across the brainstem-frontal current. The fields were 5 to 11 gauss, not much compared with the 3,000 gauss needed to put a salamander to sleep, but ten to twenty times earth's background and well above the level of most magnetic storms. We measured their influence on a standard test of reaction time - having subjects press a button as fast as possible in response to a red light. Steady fields produced no effect, but when we modulated the field with a slow pulse of a cycle every 5 seconds (one of the delta wave frequencies we'd observed in salamander brains during a change from one level of consciousness to another), people's reactions slowed down. We found no changes in the EEG or the front-to-back voltage from fields up to 100 gauss, but these indicators reflect major alterations in awareness, so we didn't expect them to shift.
We were excited, eagerly planning experiments that would tell us more, when we came upon a frightening Russian report. Yuri Kholodov had administered steady magnetic fields of 100 and 200 gauss to rabbits and found areas of cell death in their brains during autopsy. Although his fields were ten times as strong as ours, we stopped all human experiments immediately.
Friedman decided to duplicate Kholodov's experiment with a more detailed analysis of the brain tissue. He made the slides and sent them to an expert on rabbit brain diseases, but coded them so no one knew which were which until later.
The report showed that all the animals had been infected with a brain parasite that was peculiar to rabbits and common throughout the world. However, in half the animals the protozoa had been under control by the immune system, whereas the other half they'd routed the defenders and destroyed parts of their brain. The expert suggested that we must have done something to undermine resistance of the rabbits in the experimental group. The code confirmed that most of the brain damage had occurred in animals subjected to the magnetic fields. Later, Friedman did biochemical tests on another series of rabbits and found that the fields were causing a generalized stress reactions marked by large amounts of cortisone in the bloodstream. This is the response called forth by a prolonged stress, like a disease, that isn't an immediate threat to life, as opposed to the fight-or-flight response generated by adrenaline.
Soon thereafter, Friedman measured cortisone levels in monkeys exposed to a 200-gauss magnetic fields for four hours a day. They showed the stress response for six days, but it then subsided, suggesting adaptation to the field. Such seeming tolerance of continued stress is illusory, however. In his pioneering lifework on stress, Dr. Hans Selye has clearly drawn the invariable pattern: Initially, the stress activates the hormonal and/or immune systems to a higher-than-normal level, enabling the animal to escape danger or combat disease. If the stress continues, hormone levels and immune activity gradually decline to normal. If you stop your experiment at this point, you're apparently justified in saying, "The animal has adapted; the stress is doing it no harm." Nevertheless, if the stressful condition persists, hormone and immune levels decline further, well below normal. In medical terms, stress decompensation has set in, and the animal is now more susceptible to other stressors, including malignant growth and infectious disease.
In the mid-1970's, two Russian groups found stress hormones released in rats exposed to microwaves, even if they were irradiated only briefly by minute amounts of energy. Other Eastern European work found the same reaction to 50-hertz electric fields. Several Russian and Polish groups have since established that after prolonged exposure the activation of the stress system changes to a depression of it in the familiar pattern, indicating exhaustion of the adrenal cortex. There has even been one report of hemorrhage and cell damage in the adrenal cortex from a month's exposure to a 50-hertz, 130-gauss magnetic field.
Soviet biophysicist N. A. Udintsev has systematically studied the effects of one ELF magnetic field (200 gauss at 50hz) on the endocrine system. In addition to the "slow" stress response we've been discussing, he found activation of the "fast" fight-or-flight hormones centering on adrenaline from the adrenal medulla. This response was triggered in rats by just one day in Udinstev's field, and hormone levels didn't return to normal for one or two weeks. Udinstev also documented an insulin insufficiency and rise in blood sugar from the same field.
One aspect of the syndrome was very puzzling. When undergoing these hormonal changes, an animal would normally be aware that its body was under attack, yet, as far as we could tell, the rabbits were not. They showed no outward signs of fear, agitation, or illness. Most humans certainly wouldn't be able to detect a 100-gauss magnetic field, at least not consciously. Only several years after Friedman's work did anyone find out how this was happening.
In 1976 a group under J. J. Noval at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Pensacola, Florida, found the slow stress response in rats from very weak electric fields, as low as five thousandths of a volt per centimeter. They discovered that when such fields vibrated in the ELF range, they increased levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brainstem, apparently in a way that activated a distress signal subliminally, without the animal's becoming aware of it. The scariest part was that the fields Noval used were well within the background levels of a typical office, with its overhead lighting, typewriters, computers, and other equipment. Workers in such an environment are exposed to electric fields between a hundredth and a tenth of a volt per centimeter and magnetic fields between a hundredth and a tenth of a gauss.
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A lot of your ideas seem based on the sugestion that the studies are run by the 'phone companies.
Rather more of them are funded by the governments or insurance companies which pick up the bill for treating any problems. They do not have a vested interest in maintaining the problem (if there is one).
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A lot of your ideas seem based on the sugestion that the studies are run by the 'phone companies.
Rather more of them are funded by the governments or insurance companies which pick up the bill for treating any problems. They do not have a vested interest in maintaining the problem (if there is one).
Show me these studies that are funded by the government and insurance companies, and not the cell phone industry or power industry itself. What I've been finding is that the cell phone industry/power industry itself funds the vast majority of any of the studies that have been done, and when someone outside industry funding does find evidence, they pay with their careers.
An Interview With Louis Slesin:
http://www.instituteforinquiry.org/inquiries/slesin_html.php
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Are you suggesting such as Kings College, London and other respected universities or research organisations fiddle their results?
Some studies have been funded by groups who have worries about safety such as the Police Federation.
It is the anti brigade who mis-quote well conducted stidies or fund half-baked studies or just make them up. Some of these people are complete nutters like Tim Rifat who is linked to an organisation which will sell you magic crystals to protect you from the dangerous waves and even offers an alien abduction rescue service for only £600 a year.
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Are you suggesting such as Kings College, London and other respected universities or research organisations fiddle their results?
Hmmm? I don't know? - I take it that would that be a no-no on here to question anyone with a reputation of 'respect'? - or more accurately, just questioning anything on this forum seems to be a no-no.
And again, where are these studies that have not been funded by industry itself?
Have you heard about Dr. George Carlo? He was hired by industry to do studies on the risks of cell phones, and when his findings didn't match industry's expectations of 'no effects', they tried to discredit him...
http://www.emf-health.com/blog/2006/01/dr-george-carlo-radio-interview-your.html
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just questioning anything on this forum seems to be a no-no.
Never a problem, here. What you will be picked up on is when you start to try to discredit the totality of the Science community because they don't agree with every new idea without some of their own very strong questioning.
Remember that loony who 'questioned' the safety of the triple jab for infants? The panic which he caused is still having adverse effects on the health of all our younger population. Should we all have listened to him or not?
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If I could get away from the arguments and back to an earlier comment you made:
Psychosomatic illness is an illness that has no basis in medical reality - it's 100% imagined.
Not correct. The symptoms are real, but the cause is psychological. This means (in this case) that people who believe they are electrosensitive would be suffering real symptoms, but that the cause wouldn't be EM radiation. I'm not saying this is the case in your situation, it just seems to be the case in most of the research patients.
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Lots of studies have not beed funded by the industy. Many have been Home Office funded.
From the Police Federation...
In 2003, the Home Office commissioned a £5 million health monitoring study to look into Scientists claims that Airwave could be harmful to a users health. A number of reports have been conducted into the health effects of Airwave though most research has proved inconclusive or is still to be completed:
There are currently two strands of research being conducted and both are supported by the Police Federation: The first by Imperial College, London, is monitoring more than 100,000 police officers to ascertain whether there are short and, or long-term effects on health. The research is due for completion in 2018.
The research has also studied 150 officers to determine whether Airwave signals have any effect on the wellbeing of users. The research has involved the measuring of officer brain function, whilst wearing Airwave headsets, and so far there appears to be no detrimental health effects.
The second research project is being conducted by Kings College, London. This research is aimed more specifically at short term effects.
We will communicate any conclusions or findings as and when we have them.
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Another from Sweden...
Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Centre for Public Health Sciences, Linköping, Sweden. ulf.flodin@lio.se
OBJECTIVES: In most previous provocation studies subjects suffering from "electric hypersensitivity" have not been able to determine correctly whether or not they have been subjected to a sham or true provocation to magnetic or electric fields. However, an often-discussed weakness is that most of the earlier provocation studies have been performed in a laboratory situation, often with simulated fields, which may not be representative of conditions prevailing in the homes or workplaces of the patients. Criticism has also been put forth about neglect of the long latency period of symptoms. Therefore, a provocation study was performed in the homes or workplaces of the patients, where we also studied the symptoms and on-off answer 24 hours after the exposure. METHODS: Fifteen subjects selected as having fast and distinct reactions from electric equipment were provoked on 4 occasions: mainly 2 true and 2 sham provocations. The intervals between exposure were a few or more days in order to provide the subjects with an opportunity to recover before the next provocation. A control group of healthy subjects with normal hearing and vision verified that the provocations were performed in a blind manner. RESULTS: The patients suffering from "electric hypersensitivity" were no better than the control group in deciding whether or not they were exposed to electric and magnetic fields. CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to electric and magnetic fields per se does not seem to be a sufficient cause of the symptoms experienced by this patient group.
But Sweden also seems to be a nation with a very actice (dare I say somewhat loony) electrosensitivity group.
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I do think it is a bit like my wife who suffers for panic attacks and doesn't like travelling by any means of transport let alone a plane. She fears she will feel ill and surprise surprise if you pander too and put off going anywhere when she eventually does go anywhere she does feel ill. My technique is to be cruel to be kind.. Tell her she is going to XYZ and she will be fine. 10 minutes down the road she is fine!
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Sophia, 2 years ago I was told I was in menopause. This was around the same time my 10 ongoing symptoms turned into 1000, and my doctors were fine calling menopause at 41 'normal' - even though no 50 yo woman I noticed was psyching out, sweating, shaking, shivering, losing weight as rapidly as I was - and I was looking around at that to be sure.
If I had not questioned scientific fact back then - which, according to my doctors at the time, assured me that menopause at 41 was normal and that what I was experiencing was indeed 'normal' menopause, I would still be harboring high levels of Lyme, babesiosis, bartonella, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and even typhus - and apparently the last two can be especially deadly after the age of 40. So I now have a habit of questioning pretty much everything, except maybe such things like gravity, the earth's being round, etc..., and I've never once regretted it, even when I'm proven wrong - since it did save my life once already. And since I believe EMF/RF to be the cause of these ongoing infections, that is why I persist.
BenV, I know what psychosomatic illness is - the symptoms are real to the patient, but no physical/biological evidence supports their symptoms, so in that sense it is psychological 100% - but thanks. I probably should have been more clear with that.
Pumblechook, what exactly are these Airwave signals that the police use? Are these radar guns or something else? I live in the U.S. and am not familiar with these.
And I'd like to emphasize that, females are more sensitive to these frequencies than males are. How many female officers were included in these studies? If it was less than 100% of the participants, and the studies show 'no effects', it truthfully hasn't even proven 'no effect' on males, let alone females.
Also, what about the Bioinitiative Report below? I haven't counted the references, but I believe it is a compilation of something like 2000 studies which do indeed show biological effects, some within seconds of exposure.
http://www.bioinitiative.org/report/index.htm
And one other key point to remember here is that the longer the issue remains unresolved as to whether or not these frequencies have biological effects, the more difficult it will be to recognize differences between the "exposed" and the "controls" because both groups will have received heavy doses of radiation over their lifetime and will have already begun the studies with damage to their cells.
That is what really scares me.
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A list of studies which showed bioeffects, for those who are skeptical...
http://www.marinproject.org/studies.html