I think Earthing cured my dysautonomia/POTS

[aaron_c]

@Hip Thank you for your work investigating earthing. Although I should know better by now, I continue to be amazed by the level of discourse at phoenixrising.

I am going through the threads on earthing (again) to see if I can find some thread of commonality that might determine who earthing works for.

One question particularly for you: You mentioned that microcurrents between 10 and 500 microamps more or less increased rat metabolism, but that microcurrents above 1000 microamps decreased it. Do the voltages that you theorize earthing would send through our bodies straddle those numbers in any ways? Put another way: If one reduces one's voltage from 2.7 volts to .2 volts (this from a youtube video on earthing) what kind of microamp current do you theorize would be flowing through our bodies? Can we know?

My apologies if I have not used the vocabulary correctly!

Thanks in advance.

 

[Hip]

@aaron_c

If you read this post, I mention I took electrical multimeter readings of 0.2 microamps AC flowing between my body and the earth when I was indoors. When I moved my body or limbs to within one foot or less of a power adaptor plug, I found that the current flowing went up to 1 microamp.

To put this in perspective, the current that flows in your body when you use a TENS machine is around 10,000 microamps.

There is nothing "natural" about earthing though, since this current that flows while you are earthed is due to the 50 to 60 Hz main electrical hum present in the house.

After an initial good effect, I slept badly while earthed, and I was in fact quite surprised how such a small current could so easily affect my sleep.

 

[student]

@Hip – thank you. That was impressive.
My Idea is simply to – interrupt the given – earthing conection for some time. - That means to technicaly swich on- and off (automatically) the given conection to the fuse were it is pluged in during the night. For this I would use the next electrical chanel.

In my electricity system (DE) it is possible to use the earth of the main line – and swich that one off. With a simple timer divice it should be possible to only influence half of the night- with an earthing-device. That means to intuitively work out – and find the best pauses needed. And shorten the hole process of the-conection-to-earthing also.

It did say you saw an influence. It is verry likely that positive affect was felt in Hips case. Than a second process of giving pauses and allowing the body pathways to care for any metabolite trash could be the answer.

I saw an LED device working an a very low puls – of 2.5 Hertz. With pulsing and longer pauses. You are saying that may be the very low current flow is a funtional description. How about using the earthing sleep device – just for a nip during the day. Or switch it on / off – every 20 min – or in shorter repetion circuts.

Student

ps. I am just learning about this. I have no personal practice.

I am not an electrician. Is there other questions involved – in this? Do I sepperate the line coming out from the bedroom. Can I take secondary precautions...

 

[Hip]

My Idea is simply to – interrupt the given – earthing conection for some time.

Worth trying.

Many earthing products that you buy commercially have what is called a resistor connected inline. A resistor limits the flow of electrical current, and so if for any reason your earth connection becomes live (at 230 or 120 volts mains), the resistor would block the current and prevent you from getting an electric shock.

The connection is like this:

EARTH ------------------wire------------------- RESISTOR -------------------wire------------------ YOUR BED

You need to find a resistor of around 50 thousands ohms (usually written as 50kΩ or 50k ohm). An ohm (symbol Ω) is a measure of the electrical resistance of the resistor. You can buy resistors for a few cents on ebay.

 

[cigana]

@ask2266 Thanks for starting this thread and giving so much info.
You mentioned that you started feeling better after you stopped salt, do you think that could be the reason? (I realise salt usually helps you but perhaps suddenly stopping after having taken it for so long caused some kind of change)...

 

[Seven7]

started feeling better after you stopped salt,

FYI, In my case, I stopped salt because it masked the blood pressure issue (it raised it but didn't take care of the OI symptoms) so I raise the BP with the midodrane instead this way the symptoms do get better.

 

[kawai54]

This is a great story! I realize it's from three years ago, but I hope I can still get answers. I'm so sick, I have no life left. I'd love to try an earthing sheet. I looked on Amazon and saw one by a company named Earthing. However, the reviews were not great. Many people said that the sheet simply lost its conductivity and stopped working after a few months. Also, they said that the customer service at the company was horrible.

Can you suggest one to try? What worked for you? I'm so grateful for this thread!

 

[thenakedsingularity]

ask2266, which earthing sheet did you buy? I can't seem to find that information on this thread.

 

[cwaage]

Hi there, ask2266! I have a dear friend who has dysautonomia and in doing a google search for a cure, I found your post here. I would like to as if you are still having good luck with the grounding and your dysautonomia. Thanks kindly!

Cameron...

 

[ask2266]

Hi. I used the earthing sheet from earthing.com. I recently had to stop using the sheet because I moved to a high rise, and when I used the sheet in that outlet I had some very negative reactions. I had read that you have to be careful of dirty electricity that is in the ground from all the grounding rods of different units and buildings. My dizziness at bedtime has returned, and my shoulder pain from a torn rotator cuff has come back, but the full POTS has not come back. I am going to start trying to go barefoot outside for 30 minutes per day to regain the stability. I am still trying to work out the adrenal fatigue issues. Better but not cured.

 

[mrmichaelfreedmen]

Hi. I used the earthing sheet from earthing.com. I recently had to stop using the sheet because I moved to a high rise, and when I used the sheet in that outlet I had some very negative reactions. I had read that you have to be careful of dirty electricity that is in the ground from all the grounding rods of different units and buildings. My dizziness at bedtime has returned, and my shoulder pain from a torn rotator cuff has come back, but the full POTS has not come back. I am going to start trying to go barefoot outside for 30 minutes per day to regain the stability. I am still trying to work out the adrenal fatigue issues. Better but not cured.

@ask2266

You can buy filters for dirty electricity, maybe @Hip can take a look and work out if the grounding point is also filtered. My unit is different brand and much cheaper then the one in url only spent $20. https://www.amazon.com/Greenwave-Dirty-Electricity-Filters-Starter/dp/B005FGR1K6

 

[Hip]

You can buy filters for dirty electricity, maybe @Hip can take a look and work out if the grounding point is also filtered.

According to one reviewer on that Amazon page, "the Greenwave filter is a capacitor between hot and neutral." That means the Greenwave filter works by routing (via the capacitor) any electrical noise on the main power line to the earth line, which I would think may put more electrical noise on the earth line, rather than less.

If you wanted to reduce earth line electrical noise, for around $1 on eBay you could buy a tiny electrical component called a choke, which just has two connections, and wire this choke inline with the cable that runs to your earthing sheet. A choke with a rating of anywhere from 10 mH to 100 mH should be fine. These will be around 1 cm in size; they will look something like this:

A choke (electrical component that can filter electrical noise)​

It may not be noise on the earth line that is the problem, though. If your new sleeping arrangements have placed your body within a foot or two of any mains power adaptors (like those used to charge smartphones), or close to mains powdered devices such as alarms clocks, radios (which will contain their own mains power adaptors, aka transformers), then the oscillating magnetic fields these power adaptors create in the region of one or two foot around them cause significant current flow in your body, if you are near to them.

Then once you earth your body, that current flow will run through the earth line, so then you will have quite a bit of current constantly flowing through you via the earth. I talked about this in an earlier post.

 

[outdamnspot]

It may not be noise on the earth line that is the problem, though. If your new sleeping arrangements have placed your body within a foot or two of any mains power adaptors (like those used to charge smartphones), or close to mains powdered devices such as alarms clocks, radios (which will contain their own mains power adaptors, aka transformers), then the oscillating magnetic fields these power adaptors create in the region of one or two foot around them cause significant current flow in your body, if you are near to them.

Then once you earth your body, that current flow will run through the earth line, so then you will have quite a bit of current constantly flowing through you via the earth. I talked about this in an earlier post.

Are there any other devices we need to be careful of? My sheet is plugged into a 4-socket powerboard that it shares with my laptop, a bedside lamp and my mini-stereo speakers. Two of these devices have two-pronged plugs, which I was told means they aren't grounded (the laptop is grounded). The powerboard lies on the floor next to where I sleep.

 

[outdamnspot]

One other thing I've been wondering is whether earthing could theoretically make other treatments more tolerable. A huge obstacle for me is either: a) nervous system *over*activation, or b) crashes from supplements, protocols, immune-stimulation etc.

If earthing normalizes cortisol and calms the CNS, then my hope was other things might be easier to address?

So far, I have just been trying out a wristband and feel worse in respects, but this seems to be normal from what I've read. My concern was more about whether the environment I am earthing in is appropriate.

 

[Hip]

Are there any other devices we need to be careful of?

I don't know for sure that mains transformers (power adaptors) are problematic in the context of earthing; in fact they could even be beneficial. But they do affect you.

When I used a current meter to check how much alternating current (AC) was following from my body down to earth, the amount of current went up whenever any part of my body was within a foot of a mains transformer. See the bottom of this post for more info.

Mains transformers generate an alternating magnetic field in their proximity, which in turn will induce a current to flow in any electrically conducting material, like metal or the human body.

For laptops, the mains transformer is usually not in the laptop itself, but is a separate power adaptor unit on the power lead, or sometimes built into the mains plug itself. The mini-stereo speakers probably have a power adaptor built into the mains plug (if it is a big bulky plug, that is). A standard bedside lamp will not contain any mains transformers / power adaptors, unless it uses low voltage bulbs.

 

[Hip]

If anyone wants a very cheap but effective method of earthing / grounding themselves while sleeping, this can be achieved by buying a small amount of silver conductive fabric (a 20 cm square sheet of this fabric should be enough, and will cost around $10), then cutting this sheet into an approximately 1.5 meter long, 3 cm wide strip that can be laid right across a single bed (for a double bed you need a longer strip), from the left side of the bed to the right side of the bed, such that when you sleep, your body makes contact with this conductive material. Then if you earth this conductive material, you earth your body.

 

[Jimbo39]

Fascinating thread!

So @Hip, you are theorizing that our bodies act as a conduit for electromagnetic radiation (coming from adaptors, etc,) if our bodies are grounded? If so grounding sheets are not really working in the way many people have us to believe and the "benifits" are obtained not from the "earth" but from micro currents coursing thro our bodies. This would explain why some people such as yourself react badly. Do you think it may be disrupting the homeostasis of your bio electrical system?

 

[Barry53]

Have any studies been done looking at people whose environment and lifestyles mean they remain naturally earthed most of the time anyway? If someone lives their life barefoot, in homes/huts which are probably naturally more electrically conductive than more "civilised" environments, it might be interesting to understand how differently it possibly affects their health. Could our health be adversely affected by our bodies often/usually being at a different electrical potential to our environment? Although it seems offbeat, it is not inconceivable. There are often circumstances where our body is at a very different potential to something very close, so the potential gradient can be very high - could this affect some aspects of our body's functioning? Intriguing.

 

[Hip]

So @Hip, you are theorizing that our bodies act as a conduit for electromagnetic radiation (coming from adaptors, etc,) if our bodies are grounded?

Yes, my hypothesis is that the effects (both good and bad) which you feel from earthing while asleep in your bed primarily come from tiny electrical currents that run rhythmically in and out of your body via the earth connection, driven by the influence on your body of the mains electric power supply wiring that you have in the floor, walls and ceiling of your bedroom. The rhythm of this current running in and out of your body through the earth connection will be equal to the mains power frequency of 50 or 60 Hz (ie, a rhythm 50 or 60 beats per second).

You can definitely measure a weak alternating current of microamp strength running from your body down the earth connection if you use an electrical multimeter; I did this myself. So there is no question that the current is there, constantly running in and out of your body through the earth connection to your body. And you can see on the multimeter that the earth current increases as you move close to an adaptor plug (because of the oscillating magnetic field that is created by the electrical transformer inside the adaptor plug).

My guess it that your heart beat's natural electrical voltage rhythm will also drive a weak current in and out of your body via the earth connection, but at a much slower rhythm of approximately 1 beat per second (normal heart rate), and at a much, much lower current level (I noted in this earlier post that the heart beat-driven earth current will be around 1000 times weaker than the mains power-driven earth current).

So I would think that for people inside a building with a mains power supply, this very weak heart beat earth current will be dwarfed by the much stronger effect from the mains electricity. This is why I think that in the home, the biological effects of earthing are likely mostly due to the mains power-driven earth current.



If you were far away from any mains power supply, and were well earthed (eg, bare feet on wet grass), then you would be experiencing a more natural earthing, because under these conditions, it would only be the electrical voltage rhythm of your heart beat that drives an alternating electric current in and out of your body via the earth connection (your wet feet).

Whether this natural earth connection might be better or worse than mains power-driven earthing, in terms of health effects, it is hard to say, because anyone buying a bed earthing sheet is going to primarily experience a mains power-driven earth current, in my analysis. So we don't really have any accounts of the effects of natural heart beat-driven earthing (unless someone who lives in an electricity-free forest hut can give us an account of their experience of earthing).

It would be hard to create a natural heart beat-driven earth connection in the home that was not affected by the mains power (although a Faraday cage completely enclosing your bed would probably work).

As I understand it, the way the main power in the wires in around your house create an electrical voltage in your body is mainly through capacitive coupling (meaning your body and the mains electric wires around your home automatically create what is known as a capacitor, which is an electrical system can transit an alternating electric voltage and current across a distance though the air; see this study). The further your body is from the mains electric wires, the weaker the capacitive coupling becomes, and thus the weaker the influence of the main power on your body (for the tech-savvy, a online capacitance calculator is here).

But I think you would have to be at a distance of perhaps hundreds of meters from the nearest mains electrical power point or wires in order to make the capacitive coupling so weak that the effects on your body become negligible.

 

[Jimbo39]

Have any studies been done looking at people whose environment and lifestyles mean they remain naturally earthed most of the time anyway? If someone lives their life barefoot, in homes/huts which are probably naturally more electrically conductive than more "civilised" environment

I don't know about studies but growing up in the Orient, I've been to places in the Phillippines and Micronesia where people do live in huts and go barefoot and seem healthier than westerners (diabeties is unheard of). Of course there can be a myriad of other reasons i.e. healthy food (especially fish and coconut), hard work, less stress, a tight knit social network, etc.