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how relevant is EMF to ME/CFS?

Messages
70
not really sure how relevant this is but I can guess that it probably affects a lot of us and could be a cause for some.
the entire video is worth the watch. extremely well researched and informative on the effects that smart phones, meters, towers, tablets, wi-fi, etc. are having on our health.

hope this helps some of you -

 

keenly

Senior Member
Messages
814
Location
UK
VERY relevant. Non native EMF cause calcium to flood into the cell. You can not get well in an environment with nnemf. 5G is rolling out now. All should be researching it and trying to stop this roll out.
 

Chris

Senior Member
Messages
845
Location
Victoria, BC
I have not watched the video--too long!--but firmly believe that RF/EMF caused my own onset of ME. It had a slow, gradual onset some 4 months after moving into a cell phone (etc) tower masquerading as a high-rise apartment building, the highest point in downtown Victoria, BC, where I had just moved. That was in December 2006. There is now a substantial literature on this: check out several essays by Martin Pall, retired Prof of biological medicine at Washington State U, and author of a once influential book "Explaining Unexplained Diseases," including CFS. Paul Heroux of McGill has also published several articles on this stuff, without focusing on ME. Martha Herbert, a top ASD doctor at Harvard, has, with Cindy Sage, written a major two part essay, first published in BioInitiative 2012, freely available on the net, then published in a respected journal, tracing the extensive parallels between known problems in kids with ASD and known effects of RF/EMF. I am going to write to Naviaux, for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration, to point out that when he gives a list of possible triggers of the Cell Danger Response, he never mentions this stuff.
 

Chris

Senior Member
Messages
845
Location
Victoria, BC
@Wishful--you are welcome to value Quackwatch over the work of such as Martin Blank ("Overpowered"), Martin Pall, Devra Davis ("Disconnect", "The Secret History of the War against Cancer") and the literally hundreds of scientists who have written to bodies like the WHO (which, incidentally, calls RF from cell phones a "possible" carcinogen, which ranks it with lead and asbestos, I believe). I will go with the scientists and my own experience, thanks.
 

Wishful

Senior Member
Messages
5,684
Location
Alberta
I note that quackwatch is non-profit, while you are countering with scientists who do make money from publishing scare books, which is a bit of a conflict of interest (truth or money?). Also, even with all the research done, The WHO can't go beyond 'possible carcinogen', and that in limited situations (microwave emitter held right against head). The possible risk is highly dependent on intensity (and duration) and most people greatly overestimate intensity levels from emitters. Power does drop with the square of the distance. Cellphones and wifi receivers require very small signals to receive data; levels that are too low for any (peer reviewed) scientific explanation for biological effects. Pressing a cell phone against your head for many hours a day (basis of the claims for causing brain cancer) is quite different from power levels from a distant cell tower or whatever.

Not that I expect to convince true believers. I just wanted to point out that just because someone made a video or book (receiving fame and profit) that shows that something is really scary does not mean that it is scientifically correct. Watch the video if you like, but you might also consider checking peer-reviewed sources to verify any claims before you spend thousands of dollars on anti-emf gear or decide on a career of blowing up 5G towers...or drive yourselves sick from fear of nothing.
 

sb4

Senior Member
Messages
1,654
Location
United Kingdom
Quackwatch will also be biased however. I suspect it has a strong bais towards the mainstream positions on things. There are hundreds of studies suggesting harmful effects of nnEMF. Many of these are very recent studies. There are also hunderds of studies saying that nnEMFs have no effect. I do not think it is settled science at all, which seems to be the mainstream position on this.
 

Wishful

Senior Member
Messages
5,684
Location
Alberta
I don't feel that quackwatch is biased towards mainstream positions; it's just that the mainstream position is likely to be the one that averages the peer-reviewed evidence. I'd likely accept five good peer-reviewed papers on a position rather than five hundred non-peer-reviewed papers claiming the opposite, especially when the claiming the opposite is more profitable.

I agree that the mainstream position is 'we don't know yet'. However, I do put considerable weight on the fact that with all the money and effort spent to date on EMF radiation on health, they have not managed to show a clear causal relationship between EMFs and medical problems, except possibly is a few specific situations that don't apply to general exposure to EMFs. I discount the studies that aren't peer-reviewed. If their experiments showing scary results were well-designed, why weren't the papers peer-reviewed and duplicated? I feel that if there was a strong causal link (living near a cell tower caused people to grow multiple heads or whatever) it shouldn't be that hard to prove a link.
 

sb4

Senior Member
Messages
1,654
Location
United Kingdom
Obviously Im no expert in this but I am suspicious of peer reviews in the sense that I should imagine that the peers who review these things got to be in the peer position by agreeing with and contributing mainstream theory.

If, say, you came out with a paper that said a lot of what we know about water is wrong and this paper contains evidence that an older poo pooed theory is right; who would your peers be if the paper did get reviewed? I should imagine it would be the big names in water research, all of which would have gotten there by contributing to mainstream theory and have probably critiqued rival theory in the past. There would be obvious massive bias there. The same goes for peer reviewing papers that are in line with the peers theories.

I haven't looked into it at all so if peer reviews aren't like this I would be interested in what methods they use to guard against this bias.

Another thing I will say is that there are various variables that could effect results and lead to confusion. Someone on a differnet forum made a good case for amplitude modulated frequencies being the problematic ones. You also have the problem of if you set up experiments to mimick a phone call such that you get a bunch of 1s and 0s transmitted in random fashion vs continous, etc.
 

Wishful

Senior Member
Messages
5,684
Location
Alberta
My understanding of the peer-reviewing process is that the people who understand the science involved and how to do an experiment properly (with experience with how mistakes can be made in such experiments) check to see if the experiment was done properly, with suitable controls, quality checks, statistical analyses, etc. Hopefully they then point out the flaws (if any) and give an opinion about whether they feel that the results and conclusions are valid, or if the experiments need modification.

Outside of this discussion, but I don't see why the supposed biological effects AM should be significantly different from other forms of modulation. All EM signals can be viewed as EM energy at different frequencies and magnitudes. I think the claim might be one of those 'partial knowledge' hypotheses where the person knows enough to use some terminology, but not enough to really understand what he's talking about. You'd need to know the mechanism of coupling EM energy to biological systems to know whether the characteristics of the signal (spread of frequencies, magnitude of specific frequencies, etc) make a difference, and as far as I know, we don't have that for low power EM signals.
 

sb4

Senior Member
Messages
1,654
Location
United Kingdom
My understanding of the peer-reviewing process is that the people who understand the science involved and how to do an experiment properly

Right but who are these people? All people have biases. I suspect that these people will be chosen based on how knowledgeable they are based on the current mainstream understanding on their chosen area and also probably if the have a number of experiments under their belt or some other indication that they are good at checking for design faults.

I think the claim might be one of those 'partial knowledge' hypotheses where the person knows enough to use some terminology, but not enough to really understand what he's talking about.

Yeah I understand you being doubtful as I just kind of threw that out there with no link or anything but my intention was to say that there could be a number of variables that are causing different results. As for why AM would effect the body differently to FM I am not smart enough to answer that although I definitely think the body could "notice" the difference.

Also I bring up this guy because he is very intelligent. Lots of people have opinions and half baked knowledge on things, myself included but this guy is very smart when it comes to science and health. If you want I can dig up the posts in question.
 

perchance dreamer

Senior Member
Messages
1,691
I've always been a bit uneasy about the possible effects of near-constant exposure to wireless technology. I wonder if all the physical effects are fully known.
 

Wishful

Senior Member
Messages
5,684
Location
Alberta
If it's not too much trouble, sure, post or PM me the link. Just curious. I can't see why there could be a difference in effects.

Is it possible there are health effects from low level EM radiation? Well, it is possible. Is it likely that it will be significant compared to other things we'ere exposed to every day? Less likely (according to basic physics and the lack of strong evidence so far). There isn't anything magical about artificially-generated EM energy.
 

Chris

Senior Member
Messages
845
Location
Victoria, BC
I am not going to try to convert or even convince, but there are some strange assumptions in places here. One is that the writers I mentioned are making money--I can assure you that compared to the money in the hands of the cell and cable and other involved companies they are dirt poor. Another assumption is the value of "peer review"'; there have been at least two deliberately nonsensical papers submitted with the deliberate intention of showing up the weakness of this--both got published. Peer review can be used to squash new ideas--you may recall that both Ian Lipkin and Ron Davis had grant applications turned down by reviewers. The infamous "Pace" study was published in The Lancet, a premier British journal, and was of course peer reviewed. You can Google Martin Blank, Columbia University, where you will find an account of his life (alas, he died recently) and a list of his relevant publications (he had two Ph.Ds, by the way. And you can Google or YouTube Devra Davis, who by the way shared in Al Gore's Nobel Prize.

Martin Pall and Paul Heroux of McGill have both published detailed accounts of just how EMF can affect biological tissue at well below heating levels.

I recommend Blank's "Overpowered" as an excellent, short, not too technical overview of the field; it includes a neat taking down of the big Interphone study that shows how easy it is to rig the results of a trial. The fact is that the companies making huge money out of all this stuff are using the same tactics that have been honed by Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Big Pharma. But maybe some still believe that nicotine is not addictive, that Global Warming is a fiction, and that we should all be on more drugs.
 
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used_to_race

Senior Member
Messages
193
Location
Southern California
The radiated power from all these groundstations and satellites is infinitesimally low compared to the energy coming through the atmosphere from the sun. There's no evidence this could be real. If there was appreciable energy being broadcast by WiFi, cell towers, comm satellites, etc, then this startup would actually have worked.
 

JES

Senior Member
Messages
1,320
Peer review indeed isn't a guarantee that a nonsense paper won't get published. However, just because there are issues with peer review, it doesn't mean it's still not the best evaluation form we have. It's a bit the same like with what Churchill said about democracy, democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.

IMO it's perfectly valid reasoning to not hold non-peer-reviewed ideas to the same scientific standard as peer-reviewed work. If we accept non-peer-reviewed stuff, then homeopathy, faith healers, astrology etc. are all just as valid. The list is endless.
 

HowToEscape?

Senior Member
Messages
626
Hm. If all EMR is that bad, then humans and indeed all mammals who live at high altitudes should have gone extinct. The Sun is a thermonuclear EMR blaster, so powerful that it will cook and burn light skin in under an hour, even at Earth's surface. That's from UV of course, but the sun also gives off IR and its neighbor, microwaves. We are shielded from some but not all of that massive output by a miles-thick blanket of air.
The Sun does not give off only specific types of EMR, it produces everything from long-wave radio to X rays. It also makes gamma rays at the core, but those do not make it to the Sun's surface. How a photon of EMR from the Sun or cosmic radiation differs from one made by equipment constructed from materials found in nature is entirely beyond my simple little mind.
 

sb4

Senior Member
Messages
1,654
Location
United Kingdom
@Wishful and all others interested here is the thread speculating on 2G. Basically just ignore everyone elses comments apart from user Travis. I had it bookmarked on where he answers my question but you should go to the page before to see the full discussion and also the pages after.

Be interesting to here some other takes/rebuttals on it.
 

Moof

Senior Member
Messages
778
Location
UK
Being exposed to high levels of EMF in cities, or very low levels in remote places with no mains electricity or mobile signal, makes absolutely zero difference to me.

EDIT: I could make a case that EMF has significantly improved my ME, since my illness started at a severe level in a place with low exposure and before mobile phones existed, and has got significantly better as exposure to EMF has increased. I won't, because it's ridiculous, but you could read the evidence that way if you wanted to!
 
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