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Electrical Noise Causing Physiological Stress?
el johnno writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting on possible physiological problems caused by so-called 'dirty electricity.' Poor power quality caused by electrical feedback and harmonics from consumer electronics are cited as a possible cause of various 'physiological stress' problems. While previous research in this area looked for connections between EM fields and cancer, some research is now looking into possible connections to fatigue, headaches, depression, and other symptoms. From the article: 'If electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people's bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to.'"
Now I know why I get headaches and feel generally lousy at work. I assumed my job sucked but now I know it's just bad electricity.
Does that mean we've got to don tin foil gowns now?
[blockquote]He began researching the topic when a neighbour expressed the belief that electricity was dangerous. In an act of desperation brought on by constant pain, he did something he initially thought was off-the-wall. He spent $1,000 on filters that, much like surge protectors on a computer, clean up fluctuations and surges in the electricity flowing in the wires around his home.[/blockquote] It never occured to him that it might be about $1,000 cheaper to turn off his electricity for a day or two and see how he felt?
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
'If electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people's bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to.'
It's a plot by the Edison company to bring back DC power!
Luckily I'm wearing my AFDB.
"'If electricity were flowing in a constant way, most people's bodies would likely adapt, but with all the interference from modern devices, the resulting fields are too variable for people to get used to.'"
Call this science? what a load of bollocks. This is what you get when you need to print a newspaper every day.
There are existing cases to show that bombarding individuals with various frequencies of sound can have adverse effect. In some tests, using sound-waves beyond the human range of hearing still induced many dementia-like effects over time.
This would probably be the opposite of the effect many try to achieve by adding "soothing" environmental sounds (like water from those little water fountain things)... unpleasant noise, even noise that doesn't consciously register, may cause behavioral, mood, or personality alterations.
I know that I find myself rather irritated when I hear the whine of a monitor or TV (bad capacitors). Many people can't hear the sound at all without it being pointed out, but it is something that drives me crazy. In the case of devices that have been ready to go due to caps, I myself may not hear anything but at times I could swear I *felt* the damn thing going...
It's psychosomatic. Our RF exposure is only marginally greater when close to devices such as WiFi hotspots because of the immense amount of background EMI from TV and Radio broadcasts, satellites, CB and business radios, power transformers and a million other things. A car produces vast amounts of EMI due to the 15,000v+ HT unit used for sparking. Electricity substations have similar effects. People with your 'condition' seem to be very selective in what seems to have an effect on them, generally only being made 'sick' by obvious and media-hyped sources of EM radiation. Going anywhere near an airport should be next to impossible for you thanks to the powerful radio systems used for communication and RADAR.
Just wondered - 50Hz in the UK, 60Hz in the US, probably other frequencies elsewhere. Voltages: much higher in the UK. Perhaps someone should do a study into whether the problem is worse at higher or lower frequencies - maybe, like with sound, some frequencies are euphonic and others not...??
:-)
Mind you, maybe it's just the annoying hum of transformers that's getting everyone down. I know I hate alarm clocks which hum - I once had to create an isolation platform out of an old face-cloth, a book and some cut squash-balls to minimise the annoying hum from an old alarm I had (whilst I was a very poor student). Mind you, I eventually sorted that problem out by blowing it up by connecting a 90wpc stereo amplifier to its speaker (don't ask - it was an experiment, ok?) and fried the lot
John
If electromagnetic fields at the sort of levels we have in our
enviroment really harmed people then as soon as a bolt of lightning
went off in a nearby storm all these "victims" should keel over and
die given the amount of EM power a single bolt puts out. But you
never hear someone saying "storms make me ill" (unless they got a direct
hit of course!). Far more trendy to make out they're some victim of
modern techno society so they can either kids themselves its someone
elses fault they're ill (and nothing to do with hypocondria or some
other mental condition) or so that they can jump on the compensation
bandwagon.
It's when the bill comes in that I get headaches and become depressed.
Our RF exposure is only marginally greater when close to devices such as WiFi hotspots because of the immense amount of background EMI from TV and Radio broadcasts, satellites, CB and business radios, power transformers and a million other things.
Not least of which is the Sun; Earth's number one source of electromagnetic waves in every frequency. What's important here is that unlike solar radiation, which is largely random noise, man made EM radiation is generally ordered and harmonic. Overwhelmingly, most RF signals come from time harmonic sources.
Our brains and bodies are chaotic systems. Ordered signals are bad for them. Apparently epilepsy is a sudden bought of order in the brain. It's entirely possible that some people, or in deed all people to a degree, are sensitive to any resonances in their body with time harmonic signals.
Engineers sometimes scoff that EM radiation is at such a low level that it cannot harm anyone. But engineers very often make the mistake of not accounting for resonance
May the Maths Be with you!
According to NewScientist, studies so far haven't found anyone claiming these symptoms who can correctly recognise when these things are turned on. In studies so far, people who claim they're sensitive to this end up showing symptoms when they're exposed to something that's just a LED in a box, and then don't show symptoms when they're in a room where the widget is hidden.
This gives two possibilities:
1) Your symptoms are psychosomatic. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but there's no physical link between EM radiation and your symptoms, so there's no physical solution possible.
2) You are an exception and genuinely *are* sensitive to EM radiation. In which case you should be contacting the various researchers into this, bcos you may be able to provide the evidence that so far is lacking. You can't guarantee that government would do anything about it, but you might get your symptoms recognised as a genuine medical condition.
I suggest you get your friends to help with experiments. A good initial test would be to have one of your friends turn his wireless network on or off when you come round, and keep notes of the state in a diary. When you come to the door, if you're sensitive then you should be able to notice the wireless network signal, so write down in your diary what you think its state is. Then you compare notes after a month or so. That'll give you some feedback about how your symptoms relate to things. Obviously this might be prone to interference from PCs or TVs on at the same time, but it's a start.
I'm not going to prejudge your specific case. All I can offer is the existing evidence, which says that so far no-one's been found who can do this. As a natural sceptic, I'd personally go with the evidence until someone shows otherwise, but we've got to give people every opportunity to disprove the existing evidence, otherwise it becomes faith-based not evidence-based, and we all know where that bullshit lands you.
Grab.
I don't normally bother replying to ACs, but I'll make an exception. The article lacks evidence, a hypothesis for causation, uses inaccurate analogies, uses pseudo-scientific terms ('clean' electricity?) and ignores the other massive sources of RF interference in the home such as cars driving past.
My mother considers herself allergic to electricity. From what I can tell, it's some kind of photosensitivity coupled with psychosomatic symptoms. She can't stand bright lights or anything that flickers; fluorescent lights or TVs. Anything where you get distinct images of your hand if you wave it in front of you; although I've never seen her test that way.
She's been blind on one eye since childhood. She first started getting symptoms (mostly nausea and fatigue) after a few months of working with the first PCs at her work, text editing on monochrome displays. She's never been diagnosed with any real, known medical condition.
She's currently afraid of about anything more high-tech than a stereo. Which is kind of annoying for me, because I believe she really has some kind of medical condition. Getting tired or getting headaches from working with a monitor with refresh rate less than 70hz is familiar to many of us. Reacting the same way to fluorescent lights isn't too far fetched.
Claiming that one can not only directly feel weak fast changing EM fields (light and IR heat excluded!) but no less then also feel the difference in their spectral distribution is just too much of a quackery!
OTOH, he may be honest but barking at wrong tree. When electric power is down, it is not surprising to feel a relief.
Now, there, I am probably not the only one who can say that prolonged exposure to various electric equipment produced, barely audible, sounds (especially high pitch, although hum too) make me feel some of the alleged symptoms. Right now, I hear quite loudly my and/or my coworkers CRT monitor(s) (high voltage transformer ferrite core - magnetostrictive material) and it gives me very unpleasent feeling in my neck. Similar goes for cooling fans hum. And, last but not least, most (cheap) capacitors' dielectrics are piezoelectric materials, so it may happen that some of the HF noise that came from mains "beats" with circuit-generated noise and result is sometimes in audible range.
In last century (give or take a half of century) the noise signature has changed greatly. We have not adapted to that. It seems that authorities (lawmakers) are not aware of magnitude of stress that is imposed on us by noise which is not high in loudness, but just constant and unpleasent/annoying.
Better understanding of the noise phenomenon, better design of electric (electronic) equipment and better health standards should make things bareable. Before anyone invests grands into mains filtering, they should consider good antiphones (both earplugs and earshells), better acoustic insulation for equipment suspected of producing noise and as much time spending outdoors, as far from "funny" sounds as possible.
"It is more than obvious now that we there is a serious problem with some people having a suceptability to certian frequencies and that those frequencies may not be the same for everyone affected."
So, since it's more than obvious (huh? What is "more" than obvious?) you should have no trouble providing the peer reviewed research.
The fact that you've assumed something is more than obvious, despite a dearth of supporting research, calls your motives into question.
"The fact that experiments may not show true correlation for specific frequencies does not disprove the problems."
Really? I thought that's exactly what they showed. Silly me.
How can we take you seriously when you dismiss the research you don't like and drawn a conclusion you do like (based on NO research) all in the same post.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
- If it were true you'd expect stronger fields to make a bigger effect than miniscule ones.
- Therefore driving past a 500,000 watt radio or TV transmitting antenna should cause much much much greater symptoms than a 0.0000001 watt emissions from "dirty power". No such effect.
- People that are exposed to high EM fields, such as airport workers, tower light replacers, cell site testers, plasma physicists, industrial RF welders, TV technicians, walkie-talkie testers, they should all be really sick. Like 100,000 time ssicker than the average Joe or Jane Doe. They're not.
- At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
- EM fields includes light, particularly sunlight. Sunlight hits you with almost 1,000 watts per square meter, many powers of ten greater than any other EM field, and most people think sunlight feels *good*, not bad.
Too many basic objections to this idea. Move on.Robert Heinlein wrote a novella titled "Waldo", which nailed this possibility sixty years ago. In the story, power transmission is by radio, a la Tesla. One of the keys of the story is a general rundown in the physical health and vitality of younger people due the the EM interference in synaptic communication. Widespread lethargy and weakness resulted from the saturation, but no one noticed but one doctor, Waldo's, who wore a lead-lined trenchcoat to shield himself. He was considered an eccentric.
Waldo himself was an MD patient so weak that he built himself a satellite to live in so that he could move about under his own power in microgravity. He also diagnosed the problem, created a solution, and rolled up some bucks, so there's Heinlein in a nutshell.
Heinlein wasn't trying to predict anything, but to hit a target at sixty years, now that's good.