English DJ Claims Wi-Fi Allergy

path0$ writes "British Ex-DJ Steve Miller claims that his Wi-Fi allergy is making his life one big misery , forcing him to live in an iron-clad home far from any neighbors. According to the article, more and more people are suffering from an allergy like his. The only positive side to this is that at least Miller didn't think of suing anybody yet, like these people did, who claim to suffer from the same condition and were mentioned in a Slashdot article in 2008."

Comments

Re:Crazy people

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if he has a microwave in his place...

or even a bluetooth adapter somewhere.

Easy to test

[Eisenstein]

Put him into a room. Randomly switch on and off a WiFi-net and ask him to tell if it is on or off. If he manages to get more than 50 % right there might be something to it. He would also be the first person to manage this in years and years of testing.

Re:Easy to test

[halligas]

Add in a placebo of a "WiFi blocker" in pill form and see if it helps him.

Re:Easy to test

[Reziac]

This comment following TFA says it all:
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The problem with this claim is that WiFi uses the 2.4 gigahertz frequency spectrum along with Bluetooth phones, cordless home phones, and just about any other consumer wireless device. If he really had an 'allergy' like that, he wouldn't have been able to leave his house for the past 15 years. He should try to promote himself a different way than this.

- Dr. Black, Los Angeles, CA, 24/7/2009 14:30
=====

Not to mention that cosmic radiation doesn't conveniently omit some portion of the EM spectrum. Has he ever been outdoors??

There have always been people who claim that some particular class of witchcraft is making their lives hell. In days of yore it was the evil eye; during the hippie era it was Bad Vibes; today it's some portion of the EM spectrum, because that's the Newly Widespread Thing That We Know Is There But Can't See, So It Must Be Causing Our Ills.

Crank these people's tinfoil hats one notch tighter, and they'll claim it's thoughtwaves from aliens instead. Oh wait, we've already had that one!!

Re:Easy to test

[Yvanhoe]

It has been done with other electro-sensitive subjects : the sight of a fake cellphone gives them headaches. All the symptoms usually listed are those of psychosomatic diseases. But MPs are never the wisest and the "precaution principle" keeps popping up. Apparently it is admitted that a medical study can prove the existence of a risk but not disprove its existence. Which is a real problem.

He can probably earn $1M bucks if legit...

[nweaver]

He should contact the James Randi foundation for their 1M prize for paranormal proof, as they might very well consider "WiFi sensitivity" paranormal behavior.

What about Microwave Ovens?

[slifox]

Microwave ovens tend to have a lot of emissions in the 2.4GHz band, the same frequencies that most Wi-Fi uses.

If he were really allergic to Wi-Fi, wouldn't he have an extreme allergic reaction to microwave ovens too?

Re:What about Microwave Ovens?

[timholman]

If he were really allergic to Wi-Fi, wouldn't he have an extreme allergic reaction to microwave ovens too?

Absolutely. Yet if he does use a microwave oven, and you were to point this out to him, he would quickly declare that the WiFi transmissions must have some additional quality that makes them "bad" as compared to microwave oven radiation.

You must always keep in mind that you are dealing with people suffering from a psychological disorder. Logical arguments means nothing to them; they'll simply ignore what you're saying, or rationalize their behavior in one way or another. I've heard that some drugs for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder can be helpful in extreme cases, but these people are completely convinced that their ailments have physical causes, and will reject any suggestion that "it's all in your head".

Re:Crazy people

[canajin56]

Yes, they've tested it many times. No correlation found. The way they tested it was easy. They wheeled a scary looking device covered in antennas, and the people reacted in pain whenever the green light came on. The only trouble is, it was a big inert piece of metal. The only electronics in it were, well, the LED to show it was "on". Meanwhile, under the dropped ceiling there was an actual massive wifi antenna that would randomly blanket the room in "evil radiation", and they were completely unaware. In other words, they only react to wifi at all if they "know" it's there, even when it isn't.

Re:Close Mindedness

[skrolle2]

Electrohypersensitivity is nothing new, and people claiming to have it is also nothing new. In Sweden there's been a lot of research on the subject since there's been a lot of cases of it over the last 15 years. There's no evidence for it, noone has been able to show it exists in a controlled experiment, and the science of its proponents have been thoroughly debunked.

The guy from TFA is undeniably sick and needs help, but shielding him from wifi is not the solution to his problem.

EMF sensitivity

[mike449]

As a kid, I could actually hear some EM quite distinctly. It was only the stronger pulse-like stuff, like arcing transformer a hundred meters away, or lightning strikes within about 2km. I can still hear lightning strikes that are fairly close as a faint crack in my head, a second or so before the thunder, but this ability seem to be diminishing as I age.
Of course, there is no frickin way anybody can feel 100mW of 2.4GHz radiation from any distance, and not feel 1kW (although shielded, but leaking a lot more than 100mW) microwave oven.

Found a corroborating study on the net

[mattr]

FWIW take a look at this study (http://www.aehf.com/articles/em_sensitive.html) which shows after weeding out people who are affected by fake situations, that this is a real health issue. An M.D. is involved in the paper. After weeding out people who got faked out by placebos and "active challenges", they got 100% positive, 0% negative. (I just briefly flipped through the paper so read it more carefully please.)

Re:Found a corroborating study on the net

[Cytotoxic]

Thanks for the link. This is a very interesting article.

The experimental design of selecting for "true responders" before proceeding with double-blinded tests is interesting. After reading through, it seems that their may be some bias on the part of the experimenters, as they express belief that those responding to placebo could be suffering delayed reaction to previous challenges. They also report delayed responses that included lapsing into depression and unconciousness for hours or days. This seems highly unlikely. If EMF exposure was really causing these people to fall unconscious for days they would never be awake.

Also, they don't seem to have ever heard of a Faraday cage. They tested in the dark because some were sensitive to the florescent lighting, but a simple wire mesh should eliminate that possibility. I also wonder about their test equipment. As described the equipment is sitting right in front of the subject, so it seems that they might be able to ascertain if the emitter is on by means other than EMF sensitivity. There doesn't seem to be any reason not to have the subject acoustically and visually isolated from all test equipment.

I didn't put more than a couple of minutes of thought into it, but it is odd to me that a list of authors from a wide variety of institutes of higher learning would come up with an experimental design that was easy to question. Perhaps I'm misreading something. When I used to do medical research, I noticed that the medical doctors and particularly the behavioral sciences people were not very good at experimental design, so maybe their panel is full of those types. The "not good at experimental design" means that they allowed their biases to enter the results way too easily. Because the tenor of the article is that the authors believe that not only the 16% of patients they measured as sensitive to EMF, but as much as 75% of those claiming EMF sensitivity are in fact EMF sensitive, I would suggest that they may have strong biases that are affecting their design and interpretation.

This is just a hunch based on a brief reading though. Hey, for Slashdot that counts as informed expert opinion! If I was a researcher in this field, I would try to reproduce their results while correcting possible deficiencies in the experimental design. It should be easy to get a Science or Nature article out of this with strong enough results. If this high hit rate (16%) is really true, similar results should have shown up in any study of reasonable size. The fact that it hasn't is another reason to be skeptical of their methodology.

Power supply sounds

[Bruce Perens]

TVs all used the horizontal sweep frequency, around 14 KHz, to drive their flyback transformers. That's gone. But now we have switching power supplies, which can make noise too. Just not all the same frequency.

I used to be able to hear graphics being drawn on my PC. The power supply would ring. I don't think I can hear that high any longer.

Re:Crazy people

[Hojima]

TFA claims that he has electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which apparently affects 2% of the population. For those of you who are too lazy to google, here you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity

Re:Crazy people

[luder]

Agreed. There was a case on my university that I found very interesting.

We have access points (AP) distributed all around the campus, meaning we get wireless connectivity pretty much everywhere. One particular AP was located inside a small room used by janitors, adjacent to an interior garden. Being inside a room, it was safe from the weather and would still provide coverage for the area.

However, one day, one of the janitors complained she was getting headaches, and claimed that the AP was the culprit. The network managers, skeptical of it, decided to test her theory and switched off it's radio interface, not telling her anything about it. Although the AP stopped emitting radio waves, the status LED and Ethernet LED still blinked constantly. For the common person, not familiar with network devices, that is enough to assume the access point is working as usual.

Unsurprisingly, the headaches didn't go away and the whining continued. Despite the technical expertise and scientific knowledge of the network staff, the school directors decided to ignore all of the advisory they provided and sided with the janitor, ordering for the AP to be moved out of the janitor's room.

Now, the funny thing is that they moved the access point around two meters from the original position, so that it was on the other side of the wall, enclosed on an opaque, weather resistant box. Radio interface was brought up and then, mysteriously, the headaches went away...

Re:Crazy people

[AuMatar]

It depends- will you be dancing solo or with a partner? While solo dancing should be a dry affair, with a partner you absolutely want her to get the wetness effect. The wetter the better. So for dancing the two work together perfectly. In fact, I'll make a package deal- buy a 3 foot cable pair and a crystal, and I'll throw in the crystal, all for a mere $4000. You cannot pass up this deal.