Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill? How Electricity and Magnetism Affect Our Health

Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill?
How Electricity and Magnetism Affect Our Health,
by Brad Roth

Big News! This week Springer published my new book: Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill? How Electricity and Magnetism Affect Our Health. This book is different from Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology: it’s short (122 pages), uses no math, and is aimed at a general audience. Readers of this blog may find parts of the book familiar; over the last couple years I’ve written posts that served as first drafts of some sections. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction.

This book is about electric and magnetic fields, and their effect on your body. We will examine the use of magnets for pain relief, the risk of power line magnetic fields, the safety of cell phones, and the possibility that microwave weapons are responsible for the Havana syndrome. Many medical treatments are based on electromagnetism, including well established ones like heart pacemakers and neural prostheses, and more questionable ones such as bone healing, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, and transcranial direct current stimulation. Innumerable books and articles have been written about each of these topics; my goal in this book is to examine them together, to get the big picture.

This book is not a research monograph. It presents no original discoveries and makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Moreover, it omits numerous details and technicalities that experts often argue about. It does, however, try to offer an overall view of the field that is accurate.

My target readers are nonscientists: journalists, politicians, teachers, students, and anyone who has heard about electric and magnetic fields interacting with biological tissue and wants to learn more. I use no mathematics, avoid jargon, and employ abbreviations only when repeating the same mouthful of words over and over again becomes tedious. I tried my best to make the book understandable to a wide audience….

Sometimes the effect of electric and magnetic fields is controversial. For any debate, I have tried to present both sides. Nevertheless, readers will soon catch on that I’m a skeptic. Each chapter title is a question, of which my answer is usually “probably not” or “no.”

Here is the Table of Contents.

1. Introduction 
2. Can Magnets Cure All Your Ills? 
3. Can a 9-Volt Battery Make You Smarter? 
4. Do Power Lines Cause Cancer? 
5. Will Electrical Stimulation Help Your Aching Back? 
6. Is Your Cell Phone Killing You? 
7. Did 5G Cell Phone Radiation Cause Covid-19? 
8. Did Cuba Attack America with Microwaves? 
9. Is That Airport Security Scanner Dangerous? 
10. Conclusion

Although Russ Hobbie is not a coauthor on my new book, readers familiar with IPMB will see his influence on each page. In one of our last email exchanges before he passed away, I sent Russ an early draft of the book and he claimed to love it (that may have been Russ being kind, as he always was).

Enjoy!

Listen to me read the final chapter of Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jJLkBsU4V0

The Chain of Reason vs. the Chain of Thumbs

Bully for Brontosaurus,
by Stephen Jay Gould.

I have written previously in this blog about my admiration for evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and his essays published in his monthly column “This View of Life” in the magazine Natural History. Today, I focus on one of these essays, “The Chain of Reason vs. the Chain of Thumbs,” that is related to a topic in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. You can find this essay reprinted in Gould’s book Bully for Brontosaurus.

IPMB has a chapter on biomagnetism (the production of magnetic fields by the body) and a section on the possible effects if weak external electric and magnetic fields. Much nonsense has been written about using magnetic fields to treat diseases, including to relieve pain. When did all this silliness begin? Over two hundred years ago.

Gould’s essay describes the fascinating story of the Franz Mesmer, who operated a clinic in Paris in the seventeenth century to treat various illnesses using “animal magnetism.” Gould writes

Franz Anton Mesmer was a German physician who had acquired wealth through marriage to a well endowed widow; connections by assiduous cultivation;… and renown with a bizarre, if fascinating, theory of “animal magnetism” and its role in human health.

Mesmer, insofar as one can find coherence in his ideas at all, claimed that a single (and subtle) fluid pervaded the universe, uniting and connecting all bodies. We give different names to this fluid according to its various manifestations: gravity when we consider planets in their courses; electricity when we contemplate a thunderstorm; magnetism when we navigate by compass. The fluid also flows through organisms and may be called animal magnetism. Disease results from a blockage of this flow, and cure of disease requires a reestablishment of the flux and a restoration of equilibrium.

Cure of illness requires the aid of an “adept,” a person with unusually strong magnetism who can locate the “poles” of magnetic flow on the exterior of a human body and, by massaging these areas, break the blockage within and reestablish the normal flux…

Mesmer's treatments were quite dramatic.

Within a few minutes of mesmerizing, sensitive patients would fall into the characteristic “crisis” taken by Mesmer as proof of his method. Bodies would begin to shake, arms and legs move violently and involuntarily, teeth chatter loudly. Patients would grimace, groan, babble, scream, faint, and fall unconscious.

Gould then tells the story of a Royal Commission established in 1784 by French king Louis XVI to investigate Mesmer’s claims. The commission was headed by American Benjamin Franklin, and included chemist Antoine Lavoisier and medical doctor Joseph Guillotin.

In a clever series of experiments, designed mainly by Lavoisier and carried out at Franklin’s home in Passy, the commissioners made the necessary separations and achieved a result as clear as any in the history of debunking: crises are caused by suggestion; not a shred of evidence exists for any fluid, and animal magnetism, as a physical force, must be firmly rejected.

Gould was impressed by the quality of the commission’s work.

Never in history has such an extraordinary and luminous group been gathered together in the service of rational inquiry by the methods of experimental science. For this reason alone, the Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal (Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King to Examine Animal Magnetism) is a key document in the history of human reason. It should be rescued from its current obscurity, translated into all languages, and reprinted by organizations dedicated to the unmasking of quackery and the defense of rational thought.

Nowadays we see a lot of ridiculous claims that magnetic fields can alleviate pain and have other health effects. Julian Whitaker and Brenda Adderly, in their book The Pain Relief Breakthrough, assert that magnets can cure backaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, carpal tunnel syndrome, sports injuries, and more. Mexican surgeon Isaac Goiz Duran says that his “biomagnetic therapy” can cure diabetes, AIDS, cancer, and Covid-19. All these therapies are based on static magnetic fields, a type of 21st century animal magnetism.

I highly recommend all of Gould’s essays, including this one. Remember the efforts of Franklin, Lavoisier, and Guillotin before you start believing that static magnetic fields can improve your health.

The Body Electric

The Body Electric,
By Robert Becker and Gary Selden

Go to www.amazon.com and look up the best selling book in the category “biophysics.” You’ll often find #1 is The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, by Robert Becker and Gary Selden. (Selden helped with the writing, but the book tells Becker’s story.) The purpose of today’s post is to explain why this book is awful.

1. Let’s begin with Becker’s views on nerve conduction (page 86).

“According to the theory, an impulse should travel with equal ease in either direction along the nerve fiber. If the nerve is stimulated in the middle, an impulse should travel in both directions to opposite ends. Instead, impulses travel only in one direction; in experiments they can be made to travel ‘upstream,’ but only with great difficulty. This may not seem like such a big deal, but it is very significant. Something seems to polarize the nerve.”

I stimulated many nerves as a graduate student, back in the days when I did experiments. Action potentials propagate just fine in either direction. I had no difficulty making one travel upstream.

2. Becker didn’t understand why nerves, which fire all-or-none action potentials, can produce smooth, coordinated muscle movements (page 87).

“In addition, impulses always have the same magnitude and speed. This may not seem like such a big thing either, but think about it. It means the nerve can carry only one message, like the digital computer’s 1 or 0… The motor activities we take for granted—getting out of a chair and walking across the room, picking up a cup and drinking coffee, and so on—require integration of all the muscles and sensory organs working smoothly together to produce coordinated movements that we don’t even have to think about. No one has ever explained how the simple code of impulses can do all that.”

A muscle contains many motor units. Each motor unit is controlled by a single motor neuron. If you want a muscle to contract with a small force, you activate one motor unit. If you want a muscle to contract more forcefully, you activate many motor units. Motor unit recruitment, plus changes in nerve firing rate, explains the smooth operation of muscles. 

3. Becker didn’t believe that nerves worked using ionic currents, meaning the movement of ions like sodium, potassium, and chloride dissolved in the salt water that makes up our tissues (page 92).

“At that earlier time, there had been only two known modes of current conduction, ionic and metallic. Metallic conduction can be visualized as a cloud of electrons moving along the surface of metal, usually a wire. It can be automatically excluded from living creatures because no one has ever found any wires in them. Ionic current is conducted in solutions by the movement of ions—atoms or molecules charged by having more or fewer than the number of electrons needed to balance their protons’ positive charges. Since ions are much bigger than electrons, they move more laboriously through the conducting medium, and ionic currents die out after short distances. They work fine across the thin membrane of the nerve fiber, but it would be impossible to sustain an ionic current down the length of even the shortest nerve.”

Regular readers of this blog will recall my post about Baker, Hodgkin and Shaw’s experiment in which they squeezed the axoplasm out of a squid nerve axon and replaced it with salt water. The nerve worked just fine. 

Some individual molecules work by transfer of electrons (for instance, the electron transport chain in mitochondria), but currents flowing through tissue are produced by ions. Ionic currents don’t “die out” after short distances.
 

4. Instead of ionic conduction, Becker believed that nerves conducted electricity by semiconduction (page 94).

“I postulated a primitive, analog-coded information system that was closely related to the nerves but not necessarily located in the nerve fibers themselves. I theorized that this system used semiconducting direct currents and that, either alone or in concert with the nerve impulse system, it regulated growth, healing, and perhaps other basic processes.”

Later, he performed measurements of the Hall effect (a voltage induced by current flowing in a magnetic field) and wrote (page 102):

“The experiment demonstrated unequivocally that there was a real electric current flowing along the salamander’s foreleg, and it virtually proved that the current was semiconducting. In fact, the half-dozen tests I’d performed supported every point of my hypothesis.”

Scientists have made semiconductors based on biological ideas: organic semiconductors and semiconductors based on synthetic biology. But there’s no evidence that semiconductors play a role in our normal physiology. Our bodies are basically all salt water. Ionic conduction is the way currents flow through our tissue.
 

5. Becker declared he had discovered the mechanism of acupuncture (page 234).

“The acupuncture meridians, I suggested, were electrical conductors that carried an injury message to the brain, which responded by sending back the appropriate level of direct current to stimulate healing in the troubled area…. If the lines and points [corresponding to acupuncture meridians] really were conductors and amplifiers, the skin above them would show specific electrical differences compared to the surrounding skin.”

Acupuncture is based on pseudoscience; No anatomical structures such as “meridians” exist, and the vital force “qi” has never been observed. Listen to Harriet Hall describe acupuncture. Read what Edzard Ernst says.

6. Becker asserted that static magnetic fields could act as an anesthetic (page 238).

“A strong enough magnetic field oriented at right angles to a current magnetically ‘clamped it’, stopping the flow [of current]. By placing frogs and salamanders between the poles of an electromagnet so that the back-to-front current in their heads was perpendicular to the magnetic lines of force, we could anesthetize the animals just as well as we could with chemicals.”

Such neurological effects are not caused by static magnetic fields. Patients have undergone magnetic resonance imaging in static magnetic fields far larger than what Becker used, and no one has been anesthetized, regardless of the orientation of their head. Using magnets for pain has been discredited.

7. Becker thought that the cells forming the myelin sheaths surrounding myelinated nerve axons carried their own electric current that could have biological effects (page 239).

“Electron microscope work has shown that the cytoplasm of all Schwann cells is linked together through holes in the adjacent membranes, forming a syncytium that could provide the uninterrupted pathway needed by the current.”

The Schwann cells make up the myelin sheath. Myelin consists of layers of fat with little cytoplasm between the layers. Its purpose is to insulate a nerve between openings called nodes of Ranvier. There is no evidence myelin carries significant current, but even if it did carry current along a nerve through the myelin, it would be interrupted ever millimeter or so by a node. 
 

8. Becker believed that magnetoencephalography confirmed his claim that DC current existed in the brain (page 241)

“The MEG research so far seems to be establishing that every electrical evoked potential is accompanied by a magnetic evoked potential. This would mean that the evoked potentials and the EEG of which they’re a part reflect true electrical activity, not some artifact of nerve impulses being discharged in unison, as was earlier theorized. Some of the MEG’s components could come from such additive nerve impulses, but other aspects of it clearly indicate direct currents in the brain.”

DC currents in the brain are uncommon, and primarily associated with brain injury or migraines. Researchers in biomagnetism interpret their results as arising from additive nerve impulses, discharged in unison.

9. Becker promoted the idea that extrasensory perception was a result of DC or extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fields (page 267).

“At this time the DC perineural system [myelin sheaths around nerves] and its electromagnetic fields provide the only theory of parapsychology that’s amenable to direct experiment. And it yields hypotheses for almost all such phenomena except precognition. Telepathy may be transmission and reception via a biologically programmed channel of ELF vibrations in the perineural system’s electromagnetic field.”

What can I say? I don’t believe in extrasensory perception.
 

10. Becker suggested electromagnetic effects could explain psychokinesis, such as spoon-bending by pure thought (page 269).

“Once we admit the idea of this kind of influence, then the same kind of willed action of biofields on the electromagnetic structure of inanimate matter becomes a possibility. This encompasses all forms of psychokinesis, from metal-bending experiments in which trickery has been excluded to more rigidly controlled tests with interferometers, strain gauges, and random number generators.”

I don’t believe in psychokinesis either.  Neither did James Randi, who died just a year ago.

11. Becker claimed that weak magnetic fields could affect cognitive ability in humans (page 276).

“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 [0.0005 to 0.0011 tesla], 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 five 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 reaction slowed down.”

Many reviews of the biological effects of magnetic fields conclude there are no such effects.
 

12. Becker championed the idea that 60-Hz, power line magnetic fields could cause cancer. But he went even further, saying the such “electropollution” could threaten human existence (page 327).

“Everyone worries about nuclear weapons as the most serious threat to our survival. Their danger is indeed immediate and overwhelming. In the long run, however, I believe the ultimate weapon is manipulation of our electromagnetic environment, because it’s imperceptibility subtle and strikes at the core of life itself. We’re dealing here with the most important scientific discovery ever—the nature of life. Even if we survive the chemical and atomic threats to our existence, there’s a strong possibility that increasing electropollution could set in motion irreversible changes leading to our extinction before we’re even aware of them.” 

The “electropollution” Becker speaks of is weak electric and magnetic fields, such as produced by power lines. Power line magnetic fields are safe, and earlier claims that they are not have been shown to be false (see my previous post). “Electropollution” is closer to an imaginary threat than an existential one.

What do I make of all this? Becker’s book is full of nonsense. Moreover, I know little about some of the topics in the book, such as regeneration, bone growth, and injury currents. There could well be more mistakes than just those I’ve caught.

Becker died almost twelve years ago. Am I beating a dead horse? No. According to Google Scholar, The Body Electric has been cited more than 1000 times in the scientific literature (twice as many times as Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology), including over 25 times in 2021 already. It’s cited by the supporters of the worst kind of alternative medicine foolishness. The 5G opponents quote him. The power lines and cancer folks quote him. The magnets for pain promoters quote him.

You might wonder: am I upset just because The Body Electric gets more sales and citations than IPMB? Well, maybe that’s part of it. But I believe debunking Becker’s book is a public service. People need to learn real science.

My favorite story in The Body Electric is the time a bigwig physiologist visited Becker’s lab, and told him outright that his results were “artifact, all artifact” (page 106). Thereafter, Becker and his colleagues referred to this fellow derisively as “Artifact Man” and held him up as a symbol for dogmatism. I love Artifact Man.

Chapter 1 sums up Becker’s view of medicine with a defense of “faith healing, magic healing, psychic healing, and spontaneous healing” (page 25). He goes on to say (page 29) 

“The more I consider the origins of medicine, the more I’m convinced that all true physicians seek the same thing. The gulf between folk therapy and our own stainless-steel version is illusory. Western medicine springs from the same roots and, in the final analysis, acts through the same little-understood forces as its country cousins. Our doctors ignore this kinship at their—and worse, their patients’—peril. All worthwhile medical research and every medicine man’s intuition is part of the same quest for knowledge of the same elusive healing energy.”

No, No, No. The origins of medicine should be science. The gulf between folk therapy and modern medicine is wide and must get wider. Our doctors ignore science at their—and worse, their patients’—peril.

Okay, I’m done now. I realize this post is more of a rant than is usual for me. Sorry about that, but there’s something about The Body Electric that really gets my goat.

Can Induced Electric Fields Explain Biological Effects of Power-Line Magnetic Fields?

Sometimes proponents of pseudoscience embrace nonsense, but other times they propose plausible-sounding ideas that are wrong because the numbers don’t add up. For example, suppose you are discussing with your friend about the biological effects of power-line magnetic fields. Your friend might say something like this:

“You keep claiming that magnetic fields don’t have any biological effects. But suppose it’s not the magnetic field itself, but the electric field induced by the changing magnetic field that causes the effect. We know an electric field can stimulate nerves. Perhaps power-line effects operate like transcranial magnetic stimulation, by inducing electric fields.”

Well, there’s nothing absurd about this hypothesis. Transcranial magnetic stimulation does work by creating electric fields in the body via electromagnetic induction, and these electric fields can stimulate nerves. The qualitative idea is reasonable. But does it work quantitatively? If you do the calculation, the answer is no. The electric field induced by a power line is less than the endogenous electric field associated with the electrocardiogram. You don’t have to perform a difficult, detailed calculation to show this. A back-of-the-envelope estimation suffices. Below is a new homework problem showing you how to make such an estimate.

Section 9.10

Problem 36 ½. Estimate the electric field induced in the body by a power-line magnetic field, and compare it to the endogenous electric field in the body associated with the electrocardiogram.

(a) Use Eq. 8.25 to estimate the induced electric field, E. The magnetic field in the vicinity of a power line can be as strong as 5 μT (Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields, 1997, Page 32), and it oscillates at 60 Hz. The radius, a, of the current loop in our body is difficult to estimate, but take it as fairly large (say, half a meter) to ensure you do not underestimate the induced electric field.

(b) Estimate the endogenous electric field in the torso from the electrocardiogram, using Figures 7.19 and 7.23.

(c) Compare the electric fields found in parts (a) and (b). Which is larger? Explain how an induced electric field could have an effect if it is smaller than the electric fields already existing in the body.

Let’s go through the solution to this new problem. First, part (a). The amplitude of the magnetic field is 0.000005 T. The field oscillates with a period of 1/60 Hz, or about 0.017 s. The peak rate of change will occur during only a fraction of this period, and a reasonable approximation is to divide the period by 2π, so the time over which the magnetic field changes is 0.0027 s. Thus, the rate of change dB/dt is 0.000005 T/0.0027 s, or about 0.002 T/s. Now use Eq. 8.25, E = a/2 dB/dt (ignore the minus sign in the equation, which merely indicates the phase), with a = 0.5 m, to get E = 0.0005 V/m.

Now part (b). Figure 7.23 indicates that the QRS complex in the electrocardiogram has a magnitude of about ΔV = 0.001 V (one millivolt). Figure 7.19 shows that the distance between leads is on the order of Δr = 0.5 m. The magnitude of the electric field is approximately ΔV/Δr = 0.002 V/m.

In part (c) you compare the electric field induced by a power line, 0.0005 V/m, to the electric field in the body caused by the electrocardiogram, 0.002 V/m. The field produced by the ECG is four times larger. So, how can the induced electric field have a biological effect if we are constantly exposed to larger electric fields produced by our own body? I don’t know. It seems to me that would be difficult.

Hart and Gandhi (1998)
Phys. Med. Biol.,
43:3083–3099.

But wait! Our calculation in part (b) is really rough. Perhaps we should do a more detailed calculation. Rodney Hart and Om Gandhi did just that (“Comparison of cardiac-induced endogenous fields and power frequency induced exogenous fields in an anatomical model of the human body,”  Physics in Medicine & Biology, Volume 43, Pages 3083–3099, 1998). They found that during the QRS complex the endogenous electric field varied throughout the body, but it is usually larger than what we estimated. It’s giant in the heart itself, about 3 V/m. All through the torso it’s more than ten times what we found; for instance, in the intestines it’s 0.04 V/m. Even in the brain the field strength (0.014 V/m) is seven times larger than our estimate (0.002 V/m).

Moreover, the heart isn’t the only source of endogenous fields (although it’s the strongest). The brain, peripheral nerves, skeletal muscle, and the gut all produce electric fields. In addition, our calculation of the induced electric field is evaluated at the edge of the body, where the current loop is largest. Deeper within the torso, the field will be less. Finally, our value of 5 μT is extreme. Magnetic fields associated with power lines are usually about one tenth of this. In other words, in all our estimates we took values that favor the induced electric field over the endogenous electric field, and the endogenous electric field is still four times larger.

What do we conclude? The qualitative mechanism proposed by your friend is not ridiculous, but it doesn’t work when you do the calculation. The induced electric field would be swamped by the endogenous electric field.

The moral of the story is that proposed mechanisms must work both qualitatively and quantitatively. Doing the math is not an optional step to refine your hypothesis and make it more precise. You have to do at least an approximate calculation to decide if your idea is reasonable. That’s why Russ Hobbie and I emphasize solving toy problems and estimation in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. Without estimating how big effects are, you may go around saying things that sound reasonable but just aren’t true.

tDCS Peripheral Nerve Stimulation: A Neglected Mode of Action?

In the November 13, 2020 episode of Shark Tank (Season 12, Episode 5), two earnest entrepreneurs, Ken and Allyson, try to persuade five investors, the “sharks,” to buy into their company. The entrepreneurs sell LIFTiD, a device that applies a small steady current to the forehead. Ken said it’s supposed to improve “productivity, focus, and performance.” Allyson claimed it’s a “smarter way to get a… boost of energy.”

The device is based on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). In 2009 I published an editorial in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology to accompany a paper appearing in the same issue by Pedro Miranda and his colleagues (Clin. Neurophysiol., Volume 120, Pages 1183–1187, 2009), in which they calculated the electric field in the brain caused by a 1 mA current applied to the scalp. I wrote

Although Miranda et al.’s paper is useful and enlightening, one crucial issue is not addressed: the mechanism of tDCS. In other words, how does the electric field interact with the neurons to modulate their excitability? Miranda et al. calculate a current density in the brain on the order of 0.01 mA/cm², which corresponds to an electric field of about 0.3 V/m (a magnitude that is consistent with other studies (Wagner et al., 2007)). Such a small electric field should polarize a neuron only slightly. Hause’s model of a single neuron predicts that a 10 V/m electric field would induce a transmembrane potential of 6–8 mV (Hause, 1975), implying that the 0.3 V/m electric field during tDCS should produce a transmembrane potential of less than 1 mV. Can such a small polarization significantly influence neuron excitability? If so, how? These questions perplex me, yet answers are essential for understanding tDCS. Detailed models of the cortical geometry and brain heterogeneities may be necessary to address this issue (Silva et al., 2008), but ultimately the response of the neuron (or network of neurons) to the electric field must be included in the model in order to unravel the mechanism. Moreover, because the effect of tDCS can last for up to an hour after the current turns off (Nitsche et al., 2008), the mechanism is likely to be more complicated than just neural polarization.

van Boekholdt et al. (2021)

My participation in the field of transcranial direct current stimulation started and ended with writing this editorial. However, I still follow the literature, and was was fascinated by a recent article by Luuk van Boekholdt and his coworkers in Molecular Psychiatry (Volume 26, Pages 456–461, 2021). Their abstract says

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive neuromodulation method widely used by neuroscientists and clinicians for research and therapeutic purposes. tDCS is currently under investigation as a treatment for a range of psychiatric disorders. Despite its popularity, a full understanding of tDCS’s underlying neurophysiological mechanisms is still lacking. tDCS creates a weak electric field in the cerebral cortex which is generally assumed to cause the observed effects. Interestingly, as tDCS is applied directly on the skin, localized peripheral nerve endings are exposed to much higher electric field strengths than the underlying cortices. Yet, the potential contribution of peripheral mechanisms in causing tDCS’s effects has never been systemically investigated. We hypothesize that tDCS induces arousal and vigilance through peripheral mechanisms. We suggest that this may involve peripherally-evoked activation of the ascending reticular activating system, in which norepinephrine is distributed throughout the brain by the locus coeruleus. Finally, we provide suggestions to improve tDCS experimental design beyond the standard sham control, such as topical anesthetics to block peripheral nerves and active controls to stimulate non-target areas. Broad adoption of these measures in all tDCS experiments could help disambiguate peripheral from true transcranial tDCS mechanisms.

When the sharks tried the LIFTiD device, they each could feel a tingling shock on their scalp. If van Boekholdt et al.’s suggestion is correct, the titillation and annoyance caused by that shock might be responsible for the effects associated with tDCS. In that case, the method would work even if you could somehow make the skull a perfect insulator, so no current whatsoever could enter the brain. I like how van Boekholdt suggests specific, simple experiments that could test their hypothesis.

If you’re trying to buy a device to improve brain performance, you might not care if it works by directly stimulating the brain or just by exciting peripheral nerves. In fact, you might be able to save money by hiring someone to poke you in the back every few seconds. Do whatever it takes to focus your attention.

None of the sharks invested in LIFTiD. My favorite shark, Mark Cuban, claimed the entrepreneurs “tried to sell science without using science.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

LIFTiD Neurostimulation Personal Brain Stimulator; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFzihXprRUM

Currents of Fear: In Which Power Lines Are Suspected of Causing Cancer

Voodoo Science,
by Robert Park

These days—when so many people believe crazy conspiracy theories, refuse life-saving vaccines, promote alternative medicine, fret about perceived 5G cell phone hazards, and postulate implausible microwave weapons to explain the Havana Syndrome—we need to understand better how science interacts with society. In particular, we should examine past controversies to see what we can learn. In this post, I review the power line/cancer debate of the 1980s and 90s. I remember it well, because it raged during my graduate school days. The dispute centered on the physics Russ Hobbie and I describe in Chapter 9 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. 

To tell this tale, I’ve selected excerpts from Robert Park’s book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. The story has important lessons for today. Enjoy!

Currents of Fear: In Which Power Lines Are Suspected of Causing Cancer

In 1979, an unemployed epidemiologist named Nancy Wertheimer obtained the addresses of childhood leukemia patients in Denver and drove about the city looking for some common environmental factor that might be responsible. What she noticed was that many of the homes of victims seemed to be near power transformers. Could it be that fields from the electric power distribution system were linked to leukemia? She teamed up with a physicist named Ed Leeper, who devised a “wiring code” based on the size and proximity of power lines to estimate the strength of the magnetic fields. Together they eventually produced a paper relating childhood leukemia to the fields from power lines…

In June of 1989, The New Yorker carried a new three-part series of highly sensational articles by Paul Brodeur… on the hazards of power-line fields…. The series reached an affluent, educated, environmentally concerned audience. Suddenly, Brodeur was everywhere: the Today show on NBC, Nightline on ABC, This Morning on CBS, and, of course, Larry King Live on CNN. In the fall, Brodeur published the New Yorker series as a book with the lurid title Currents of Death. A new generation of environmental activists, led by mothers who feared for their children’s lives, demanded government action…

By [1995], sixteen years had passed since Nancy Wertheimer took her historic drive around Denver. An entire industry had grown up around the power-line controversy. Armies of epidemiologists conducted ever larger studies; activists organized campaigns to relocate power lines away from schools; the courts were clogged with damage suits; a half dozen newsletters were devoted to reporting on EMF [electromagnetic fields]; a brisk business had developed in measuring 60 Hz magnetic fields in homes and workplaces; fraudulent devices of every sort were being marketed to protect against EMF; and, of course, Paul Brodeur’s books were selling well…

It was into this climate that the Stevens Report was released by the National Academy of Sciences in 1996 with it unanimous conclusion that “the current body of evidence does not show that exposure to these fields presents a human health hazard.”… The chair of the review panel, Charles Stevens, a distinguished neurobiologist with the Salk Institute, [explained] the difficulty of trying to identify weak environmental hazards. Scientists had labored for seventeen years to evaluate the hazards of power-line fields; they had conducted epidemiological studies, laboratory research, and computational analysis. “Our committee evaluated over five hundred studies,” Stevens said, “and in the end all we can say is that the evidence doesn’t point to these fields as being a health risk…”

On July 2, 1997, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) finally announced the results of its exhaustive epidemiological study, “Residential Exposure to Magnetic Fields and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Children”… It was the most unimpeachable epidemiological study of the connection between power lines and cancer yet undertaken. Every conceivable source of investigator bias was eliminated. There were 638 children under age fifteen with acute lymphoblastic leukemia enrolled in the study along with 620 carefully matched controls, ensuring reliable statistics. All measurements were double blind… [The study] concluded that any link between acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children and magnetic fields is too weak to detect or to be concerned about. But the most surprising result had to do with the proximity of power lines to the homes of leukemia victims: the study found no association at all. The supposed association between proximity to power lines and childhood leukemia, which had kept the controversy alive all these years, was spurious—just an artifact of the statistical analysis. As is so often the case with voodoo science, with every improved study the effect had gotten smaller. Now, after eighteen years, it was gone completely.

 

Power Line Fears, https://www.retroreport.org/video/power-line-fears

 

Science-Based Medicine

Why is my field—bioelectromagnetics—so prone to pseudoscience? I don’t know. But I do know that we need to be more skeptical about alternative medical treatments. That’s why I’m a fan of the website sciencebasedmedicine.org.

Science-Based Medicine is dedicated to evaluating medical treatments and products of interest to the public in a scientific light, and promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in health care. Online information about alternative medicine is overwhelmingly credulous and uncritical, and even mainstream media and some medical schools have bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.

We provide a much needed “alternative” perspective—the scientific perspective.

Good science is the best and only way to determine which treatments and products are truly safe and effective. That idea is already formalized in a movement known as evidence-based medicine (EBM). EBM is a vital and positive influence on the practice of medicine, but it has limitations and problems in practice: it often overemphasizes the value of evidence from clinical trials alone, with some unintended consequences, such as taxpayer dollars spent on “more research” of questionable value. The idea of SBM is not to compete with EBM, but a call to enhance it with a broader view: to answer the question “what works?” we must give more importance to our cumulative scientific knowledge from all relevant disciplines.

To me, this means that medical claims must not violate the laws of physics. Some do. For instance, magnetic therapy suggests that permanent magnets can prevent many diseases. Powerline (60 Hz) magnetic fields are said to cause cancer. A few people claim to be hypersensitive to weak electromagnetic fields. Many people believe that electromagnetic radiation associated with cell phones is dangerous. This belief has increased recently with the development of 5G technology. Somehow (and this is really weird), doubts about covid-19 vaccines became mixed up with these 5G concerns.

Yet, bioelectromagnetics has enormous potential for medical applications: cardiac pacing and defibrillation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, functional electrical stimulation, deep brain stimulation, and prostheses such as cochlear implants.

How do we separate the wheat from the chaff? It’s not easy. Reading Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology is a good place to start. Many of these readers would benefit from a short course about science-based medicine. Does such a course exist? Yes! Harriet Hall (the SkepDoc, who I discussed previously in this blog) has recorded a series of ten videos about science-based medicine. She debunks much of the nonsense out there. Below, I link to the videos. Your homework assignment is to watch them.

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we must base medicine on science.

 

Lecture 1: Science-based medicine versus evidence-based medicine

 

Lecture 2: Complimentary and alternative medicine

 

 

Lecture 3: Chiropractic

 

Lecture 4: Acupuncture

 

 

Lecture 5: Homeopathy

 

 

Lecture 6: Naturopathy

 

 

Lecture 7: Energy medicine

 

 

Lecture 8: Miscellaneous

 

 

Lecture 9: Pitfalls in research

 

 

Lecture 10: The media and politics

An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and their Families at Overseas Embassies

“An Assessment of Illness in
U.S. Government Employees and
their Families at Overseas Embassies”
(2020) The National Academies Press.

Recently, a National Academies report examined the illness of staff at overseas embassies.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. “An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and their Families at Overseas Embassies.” Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 

The summary of the report begins

In late 2016, U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana, Cuba, began to report the development of an unusual set of symptoms and clinical signs. For some of these patients, their case began with the sudden onset of a loud noise, perceived to have directional features, and accompanied by pain in one or both ears or across a broad region of the head, and in some cases, a sensation of head pressure or vibration, dizziness, followed in some cases by tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties. Other personnel attached to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China, reported similar symptoms and signs to varying degrees, beginning in the following year. As of June 2020, many of these personnel continue to suffer from these and/or other health problems. Multiple hypotheses and mechanisms have been proposed to explain these clinical cases, but evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven, and the circumstances remain unclear. The Department of State (DOS), as part of its effort to inform government employees more effectively about health risks at posts abroad, ascertain potential causes of the illnesses, and determine best medical practices for screening, prevention, and treatment for both short and long-term health problems, asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) to provide independent, expert guidance.

Then, under the heading of “Plausible Mechanisms,” the summary states

The committee found the unusual presentation of acute, directional or location-specific early phase signs, symptoms and observations reported by DOS employees to be consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.

I’m reluctant to disagree with a report from the National Academies. I wasn’t a member of the committee, I wasn’t consulted by them, and I haven’t analyzed the data myself. Moreover, I’m disturbed by the recent tendency of political leaders to ignore science (for example, on the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change), so I hesitate to reject a review by some of the nation’s top scientists and medical doctors. Nevertheless, I don’t find this report convincing. As I’ve written before in this blog, I’m skeptical that radio-frequency or microwave radiation can explain these effects.

The report states that

Low-level RF exposures typically deposit energy below the threshold for significant heating (often called “nonthermal” effects), while high-level RF exposures can provide enough energy for significant heating (“thermal” effects) or even burns, and for stimulation of nervous and muscle tissues (“shock” effects)... While much of the general public discussion on RF biological effects has focused on cancer, there is a growing amount of data demonstrating a variety of non-cancer effects as well, in addition to those associated with thermal heating.

The absence of certain observed phenomena can also help to constrain potential RF source characteristics. For example, the absence of reporting of a heating sensation or internal thermal damage may exclude certain types of high-level RF energy.

Microwaves affect the body if they’re strong enough to heat tissue (like in a microwave oven). But low-level radio-frequency and microwave effects are less well established (to put it politely). I don’t think there is a growing amount of reliable data demonstrating effects from RF electromagnetic radiation. The same issue arises when discussing the safety of cellular phone radiation (I fear this report will be used by some to support dubious claims of 5G hazards). The report twice cites studies by Martin Pall. As I said previously in this blog “Pall’s central hypothesis is that cell phone radiation affects calcium ion channels, which if true could trigger a cascade of biological effects…. I don’t agree with Pall’s claims.” Neither do Ken Foster and John Moulder (both cited frequently in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology), who wrote that

Despite some level of public controversy and an ongoing stream of reports of highly variable quality of biological effects of RF energy... health agencies consistently conclude that there are no proven hazards from exposure to RF fields within current exposure limits.

The National Academies report emphasizes the Frey effect, in which pulsed electromagnetic radiation causes slight local heating, resulting in tiny transient changes in pressure that can be sensed by the inner ear. In a previous post, I wrote

I am no expert on thermoelastic effects, but it seems plausible that they could be responsible for the perception of sound by embassy workers in Cuba. By modifying the shape and frequency of the microwave pulses, you might even induce sounds more distinct than vague clicks. However, I don’t know how you get from little noises to brain damage and cognitive dysfunction. My brain isn’t damaged by listening to clicky sounds.

The most ridiculous paragraph in the report relates transcranial magnetic stimulation—a technique I worked on while at the National Institutes of Health—to the Frey effect.

If a Frey-like effect can be induced on central nervous system tissue responsible for space and motion information processing, it likely would induce similarly idiosyncratic responses. More general neuropsychiatric effects from electromagnetic stimuli are well-known and are being used increasingly to treat psychiatric and neurologic disorders. In 2008, the Food and DrugAdministration (FDA) approved transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to treat major depression in adults who do not respond to antidepressant medications... Ten years later, the FDA approved office-based TMS as a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)... and portable TMS to treat migraine.

Magnetic stimulation uses large (about 1 Tesla) magnetic fields, and works at low frequencies (1–10 kHz, which are the frequencies that nerves operate at, and are well below the microwave range). Much higher frequencies are unlikely to activate nerves, and such strong magnetic fields will have tell-tale signs. For instance, one way to demonstrate the power of TMS is to place a quarter at the center of a coil and deliver a single pulse. The quarter shoots up into the air, sometimes denting a ceiling tile (I admit, this wasn’t the safest parlor trick I’ve ever witnessed). TMS only activates the brain when the coil is held within a few centimeters of the head. Trying to generate magnetic stimulation remotely would require Herculean magnetic fields that would certainly be noticed (anything metallic would start flying around and heating up). The reason the Frey effect works with weak fields is the extreme sensitivity of the human ear for detecting minuscule pressure oscillations. If the authors of the report think citing transcranial magnetic stimulation is appropriate as evidence to support the plausibility of a Frey-like effect, then they don’t understand the basic physics of how electric and magnetic fields interact with the body.

My view is much closer to that expressed in the article “Havana Syndrome Skepticism” by Robert Bartholomew, which was published in eSkeptic, the email newsletter of the Skeptics Society.

The Frey effect is named after Allan Frey, a pioneer in radiation research. But there are many problems with the explanation. It is highly speculative, and none of the panel members appeared to be experts on the biological impact of microwaves and the Frey effect. Someone who is a specialist on the effect, University of Pennsylvania bioengineer Kenneth Foster, is critical of the report, observing that there is no evidence that the Frey effect can cause injuries. Furthermore, the effect requires a tremendous amount of energy to create a sound that is barely audible... Foster should know, in 1974, he and Edward Finch were the first scientists to describe the mechanism involved in the effect while working at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Maryland...

Foster views any link between his eponymous effect and Havana Syndrome as pure fantasy. “It is just a totally incredible explanation for what happened to these diplomats…. It’s just not possible. The idea that someone could beam huge amounts of microwave energy at people and not have it be obvious defies credibility...” The former head of the Electromagnetics division of the Environmental Protection Agency, Ric Tell, also views the microwave link as science fiction. Tell spent decades working on standards for safe exposure to electromagnetic radiation, including microwaves. “If a guy is standing in front of a high-powered radio antenna — and it’s got to be high, really high — then he could experience his body getting warmer,” Tell said. “But to cause brain-tissue damage, you would have to impart enough energy to heat it up to the point where it’s cooking. I don’t know how you could do that, especially if you were trying to transmit through a wall. It’s just not plausible,” he said.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon, I don’t believe the National Academies report. I don’t agree that directed radio-frequency or microwave energy is the most likely explanation for the “Havana Syndrome.” I don’t have a better explanation, but I don’t accept theirs. It’s not consistent with what we know about how electromagnetic fields interact with biological tissue.

Tests for Human Perception of 60 Hz Moderate Strength Magnetic Fields

The first page of “Tests for Human Perception
of 60 Hz Moderate Strength Magnetic Fields,”
by Tucker and Schmitt (IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng.
25:509-518, 1978).

In Chapter 9 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I discuss possible effects of weak external electric and magnetic fields on the body. In a footnote, we write

Foster (1996) reviewed many of the laboratory studies and described cases where subtle cues meant the observers were not making truly “blind” observations. Though not directly relevant to the issue under discussion here, a classic study by Tucker and Schmitt (1978) at the University of Minnesota is worth noting. They were seeking to detect possible human perception of 60-Hz magnetic fields. There appeared to be an effect. For 5 years they kept providing better and better isolation of the subject from subtle auditory clues. With their final isolation chamber, none of the 200 subjects could reliably perceive whether the field was on or off. Had they been less thorough and persistent, they would have reported a positive effect that does not exist.

In this blog, I like to revisit articles that we cite in IPMB.

Robert Tucker and Otto Schmitt (1978) “Tests for Human Perception of 60 Hz Moderate Strength Magnetic Fields.” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Volume 25, Pages 509-518.

The abstract of their paper states

After preliminary experiments that pointed out the extreme cleverness with which perceptive individuals unintentionally used subtle auxiliary clues to develop impressive records of apparent magnetic field detection, we developed a heavy, tightly sealed subject chamber to provide extreme isolation against such false detection. A large number of individuals were tested in this isolation system with computer randomized sequences of 150 trials to determine whether they could detect when they were, and when they were not, in a moderate (7.5-15 gauss rms) alternating magnetic field, or could learn to detect such fields by biofeedback training. In a total of over 30,000 trials on more than 200 persons, no significantly perceptive individuals were found, and the group performance was compatible, at the 0.5 probability level, with the hypothesis that no real perception occurred.

The Tucker-Schmitt study illustrates how observing small effects can be a challenge. Their lesson is valuable, because many weak-field experiments are subject to systematic errors that provide an illusion of a positive result. Near the start of their article, Tucker and Schmitt write

We quickly learned that some individuals are incredibly skillful at sensing auxiliary non-magnetic clues, such as coil hum associated with field, so that some “super perceivers” were found who seemed to sense the fields with a statistical probability as much as 10^–30 against happening by chance. A vigorous campaign had then to be launched technically to prevent the subject from sensing “false” clues while leaving him completely free to exert any real magnetic perceptiveness he might have.

Few authors are as forthright as Tucker and Schmitt when recounting early, unsuccessful experiments. Yet, their tale shows how experimental scientists work.

Early experiments, in which an operator visible to the test subject controlled manually, according to a random number table, whether a field was to be applied or not, alerted us to the necessity for careful isolation of the test subject from unintentional clues from which he could consciously, or subconsciously, deduce the state of coil excitation. No poker face is good enough to hide, statistically, knowledge of a true answer, and even such feeble clues as changes in building light, hums, vibrations and relay clatter are converted into low but significant statistical biases.

IPMB doesn’t teach experimental methods, but all scientists must understand the difference between systematic and random errors. Uncertainty from random errors is suppressed by taking additional data, but eliminating systematic errors may require you to redesign your experiment.

In a first round of efforts to prevent utilization of such clues, the control was moved to a remote room and soon given over to a small computer. A “fake” air-core coil system, remotely located but matched in current drain and phase angle to the real large coil system was introduced as a load in the no-field cases. An acoustically padded cabinet was introduced to house the experimental subject, to isolate him from sound and vibration. Efforts were also made to silence the coils by clamping them every few centimeters with plastic ties and by supporting them on air pocket packing material. We tried using masking sound and vibrations, but soon realized that this might also mask real perception of magnetic fields.

Designing experiments is fun; you get to build stuff in a machine shop! I imagine Tucker and Schmitt didn’t expect they would have this much fun. Their initial efforts being insufficient, they constructed an elaborate cabinet to perform their experiments in.

This cabinet was fabricated with four layers of 2 in plywood, full contact epoxy glued and surface coated into a monolithic structure with interleaved corners and fillet corner reinforcement to make a very rigid heavy structure weighing, in total, about 300 kg. The structure was made without ferrous metal fastening and only a few slender brass screws were used. The door was of similar epoxyed 4-ply construction but faced with a thin bonded melamine plastic sheet. The door was hung on two multi-tongue bakelite hinges with thin brass pins. The door seals against a thin, closed-cell foam-rubber gasket, and is pressure sealed with over a metric ton of force by pumping a mild vacuum inside the chamber of means of a remote acoustically silenced hose-connected large vacuum-cleaner blower. The subject received fresh air through a small acoustic filter inlet leak that also assures sufficient air flow to cool the blower. The chosen “cabin altitude” at about 2500 ft above ambient presented no serious health hazard and was fail-safe protected.

An experimental scientist must be persistent. I remember learning that lesson as a graduate student when I tried for weeks to measure the magnetic field of a single nerve axon. I scrutinized every part of the experiment and fixed every problem I could find, but I still couldn’t measure an action current. Finally, I realized the coaxial cable connecting the nerve to the stimulator was defective. It was a rookie mistake, but I was tenacious and ultimately figured it out. Tucker and Schmitt personify tenacity.

As still more isolation seemed necessary to guarantee practically complete exclusion of auxiliary acoustic and mechanical clues, an extreme effort was made to improve, even further, the already good isolation. The cabinet was now hung by aircraft “Bungee” shock cord running through the ceiling to roof timbers. The cabinet was prevented from swinging as a pendulum by four small non-load-bearing lightly inflated automotive type inner tubes placed between the floor and the cabinet base. Coils already compliantly mounted to isolate intercoil force vibration were very firmly reclamped to discourage intracoil “buzzing.” The cabinet was draped inside with sound absorbing material and the chair for the subject shock-mounted with respect to the cabinet floor. The final experiments, in which minimal perception was found, were done with this system.

Once Tucker and Schmitt heroically eliminated even the most subtle cues about the presence of a magnetic field, subjects could no longer detect whether or not a magnetic field was present. People can’t perceive 60-Hz, 0.0015-T magnetic fields.

Russ and I relegate this tale to a footnote, but it’s an important lesson when analyzing the effects of weak electric and magnetic fields. Small systematic errors abound in these experiments, both when studying humans and when recording from cells in a dish. Experimentalists must ruthlessly design controls that can compensate for or eliminate confounding effects. The better the experimentalist, the more doggedly they root out systematic errors. One reason the literature on the biological effects of weak fields is so mixed may be that few experimentalists take the time to eradicate all sources of error.

Tucker and Schmitt’s experiment is a lesson for us all.

Bob Park’s What’s New has been Restored!

Screenshot of the What's New website,
whatsnewbobpark.com.

From 1983–2006, physicist Bob Park was the director of public information in the Washington D. C. office of the American Physical Society. During this time, he wrote the delightful weekly column What’s New. When I was in graduate school, every Friday I’d look forward to a new post.

For years What’s New disappeared from the internet, but recently it’s been restored (at least partially) from internet archives. You can find it at http://whatsnewbobpark.com. [Note added October 9, 2020: the link no longer works properly. However, here is one that does: https://web.archive.org/web/20140124195058/http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/archives.html] If you click on “About Bob” you’ll see:

Robert L. (Bob) Park is professor of physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. For twenty years, research into the properties of crystal surfaces occupied most of his waking hours, but in 1983 he was recruited by astrophysicist Willie Fowler (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics later that year) to open a Washington Office of the American Physical Society. Bob initiated a weekly report of happenings in Washington that were important to science, and with the development of the internet, the weekly report evolved into the news/editorial column What’s New. For the next twenty years he divided his time between the University and the Washington Office. In 2003 he returned to the University full time. With the support of the Department of Physics of the University of Maryland, he continues to write the occasionally controversial What’s New, which has developed a following that extends beyond physics.

Dr. Park has also written two books based on his Washington experience:

Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford, 2000)

Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton, 2008)

In What’s New, Park would return to certain topics again and again; for example, cell phones and cancer, creationism, climate change, and cold fusion. Often he would debunk alternative medicine, such as homeopathy, biomagnetic therapy, and therapeutic touch. Readers of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology will enjoy how he applied physics reasoning to medicine. Below are excerpts from 2011, so you can sample Park’s writing style. 

Friday, June 10, 2011

1. ET TU TARA? “PIERCING THE FOG AROUND CELLPHONES AND CANCER.” The WELL blog by Tara Parker-Pope was the top story in Tuesdays NYT Health Section. Her story is not wrong, but its told in the wrong context. Science is a search for cause and effect, not an epidemiologic majority. To settle the question, WHO invited 31 experts to spend a week in Lyon, the culinary capital of France, strategically located between the two best wine regions. Meanwhile, much had been made of a study showing that the brain is “activated” by microwave radiation. Of course, it is. The effect of microwaves on the human brain, as on cold pizza, is to cause chemical bonds to vibrate, which we sense as heat. Unlike cold pizza, however, the human brain resists being heated. Deep within the brain, the hypothalamus, the thing below the thalamus, senses any increase in blood temperature. It calls on blood vessels in the heated area to expand, and increases the heart rate. The fresh blood is a coolant, but incidentally, also increases the rate of metabolism. “Microwaves have activated the brain,” the human observers shouted. The shout was heard in Lyon. Amidst the clinking of glasses, the vote of the expert panel tipped from “no effect” to “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” What could it matter? No one is going to stop using cell phones anyway. Does anyone care? One enormously powerful group cares, the tort industry.

Friday, August 19, 2011

1. HOMEOPATHY: THE DILUTION LIMIT AND THE CULTURE OF CREDULITY. Based in France, Boiron, a huge multinational maker of homeopathic-remedies, is suing an Italian blogger, Samuele Riva, for saying oscillococcinum, the companys featured flu medication, has no active ingredient. Congratulations Sam, I gave up trying to get Boiron to sue me, years ago but the Center for Inquiry, of which I’m a member, is pleading with Boiron to sue us. “Anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum,” is listed as the active ingredient by the company. Its prepared at a concentration of 200CK HPUS from the liver of the Barbary duck. The 200CK means the solution has been diluted 1 part in 100, shaken, and repeated sequentially 200 times. HPUS means the medication is listed in the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States, and prepared according to 1938 federal guidelines. Its a national disgrace that the antiquated law sanctioning homeopathy, introduced by Sen. Royal Copeland, himself a homeopathist, is still be on the books. The dilution claim is totally meaningless. Somewhere around the 30th of the 200 sequential dilutions, the dilution limit of Earth would be reached, with the entire Earth becoming the solute. That is, the possibility of even one molecule of the duck-liver extract remaining in the solution beyond that point would be negligible. Long before the 200th dilution, the dilution limit of the entire visible universe would have been reached. This is all quite meaningless. Astronomers put the number of atoms in the visible universe at about 10 to the 80th power. It would take many universes to get to a dilution of 200 C.

Friday, September 16, 2011

1. WI-FI REFUGE: UNITED STATES NATIONAL RADIO QUIET ZONE. A 34,000 km² rectangle of land straddling the border of Virginia and West Virginia surrounds The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope. The site was chosen partly because the Allegheny Mountains block the horizontal propagation of radio signals, but mostly because Robert C Byrd (D-WV) was one powerful US Senator. Radio transmission in the zone is either limited or banned outright. In addition to radio astronomers, the quiet zone has also attracted a colony of people who say they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS). They certainly suffer from something, but EHS is not medically recognized in the US. In a BBC News interview last week I suggested that the appropriate treatment for a non-ailment such as EHS would be homeopathic medicine.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

2. CELL PHONEYS: BRAIN CANCER LINK IS REJECTED AGAIN. Ten years ago, a brilliant Danish epidemiological study found no link between mobile phone use and brain cancer (JNCI 2001, 93: 203-7). A decadal reexamination by Denmarks Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, released last week, again found no link. The object of the new study was to look for any evidence of latent cancer that had not yet shown up in 2001; none was found. In a 2001 JNCI editorial I pointed out that none would be expected, since microwave radiation is non-ionizing, Park, Robert L, JNCI 2001, 93: 166-167. Can we now put the damned cell-phone/cancer scare behind us?

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

2. CANCER AND CAUSALITY: EINSTEIN DIDNT HAVE A CELL-PHONE. Of the worlds 7 billion people, an incredible 5 billion have cell phones (mobiles in most countries). The safe use of mobiles is therefore a global health concern. The response of the World Health Organization was to conduct a huge epidemiologic study aimed at demonstrating a link between cell-phone radiation and brain cancer. The effort was seriously misguided no such link exists. The study served only to raise widespread public alarm over a nonexistent hazard. Epidemiology, which is the study of health patterns in populations; is important, but its not a substitute for science. Science is the organization of knowledge into testable laws and theories. It has been known for more than 100 years that electromagnetic radiation at frequencies below the ultraviolet is non-ionizing, and thus cannot create the mutant strands of DNA that constitute incipient cancers. In 1905, Einsteins miracle year, he theorized that electromagnetic radiation consists of discrete units of energy, now called photons, which are equal in energy to the frequency multiplied by Planck’s constant. It marked the origin of wave-particle duality and earned Einstein his 1921 Physics Nobel Prize. His theory is verified every time a cell phone works.

I miss Bob Park. We still need him. His mantle has been taken up by people like the Skep Doc Harriet Hall. We must expose quackery and embrace evidence-based science and medicine.

What’s New was hosted by a University of Maryland website. At the bottom of the page was the disclaimer:

Opinions are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.

Bob Park is featured in the video 

“You Don't Have to Be a Scientist to Spot 

the Fraudulent Science that Swirls Around Us (2000)” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAFUpB5cQOs

 Part 1 of Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science
featuring Bob Park (you can find the other six parts on YouTube).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgK9vNJFDj4&list=PL5C8D41EB69CB1096&index=2&t=197s