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10-Year Cell Phone / Cancer Study Is Inconclusive
crimeandpunishment writes "A major international (retrospective) study into cell phones and cancer, which took 10 years and surveyed almost 13,000 people, is finally complete — and it's inconclusive. The lead researcher said, 'There are indications of a possible increase. We're not sure that it is correct. It could be due to bias, but the indications are sufficiently strong ... to be concerned.' The study, conducted by the World Health Organization and partially funded by the cellphone industry, looked at the possible link between cell phone use and two types of brain cancer. It will be published this week."
And some stress could certainly be caused by cellphone usage. Not that I'm disagreing with you. Creating fair studies that takes into effect all independent variables is hard.
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Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible."
People with UNDIAGNOSED very early stage brain cancer might have problems functioning in society, equals less likelihood of cell phone ownership. Not implausible at all.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The problem with "stress" is that it is hard to define. For some people, yes, cell phones could cause stress, for others such as me cell phones probably reduce stress by keeping me connected. If something major happens I'm easily notified via cell phone or can notify others. What causes stress for some people might not cause stress for others. For example I tend to get stressed out when things don't arrive quickly, mailed test scores for standardized tests used to stress me out much more than the test generally did because there was uncertainty and delayed consequences. So while some people might be stressed out because of constant access to information there are others who stress out a lot more because of lack of information.
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Actually, it kind of does. If you have a null hypothesis "there is no link between cellphone use and brain cancer" then an inconclusive result would fail to disprove the null hypothesis and therefore affirm it. This is based on choosing a null hypothesis that is based on the sensible default position, which in this study is fine as long as you're the kind of person who is willing/capable of understanding that we are constantly bathed in all sorts of EM radiation of which cellphones only play a small part and that the default position from a conventional understanding of physics is that they're likely to be harmless.
It's also based on the idea that, for a risk factor for cancer(s) significant enough to be worth worrying about, we would expect to see an obvious and conclusive result. For instance, when testing the null hypothesis "there is no like between smoking and lung cancer", the observed data would overwhelmingly reject the null hypothesis. The reality is that there's all sorts of things that people think cause cancer, and many of them may do (e.g. drinking hot drinks regularly is linked with oral cancer) but most of the risk factors aren't significant to be worth worrying about.
I mean that if cell phones cause cancer, you would expect the rate of cancer to raise along with the use of cell phones. Instead, cancer rates have fallen or stayed the same for 20 years.
It could still be a general drop in cancer rates, but a specific rise in the rates for people who use cellphones (in certain conditions, given that pretty much everyone uses them these days?). Looking at simple numbers like that is inconclusive