Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Phone May Rot Your Bones
Stoobalou writes "Researchers at the National University of Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina, looked at that strange breed — men who wear mobile phones on their hip. They discovered evidence to suggest that the proximity of the mobile phone caused a reduction in bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD) in the men who wore the phones over a 12-month period, compared to a control group that didn't."
I'm skeptical, but interested in this ... that would actually be fairly alarming. Though, you'd think cell-phone users would be breaking hips all over the place if that were the case. Certainly some people have their cell-phone in close proximity for an awful lot of hours in a day.
Though, it does make one think a tin-foil codpiece might be in order in case your junk is getting equally affected by the proximity. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Okay, but am I still okay to wear my smartphone jockstrap? Not as convenient as a belt clip I'll agree...
Wikipedia: N-rays (or N rays) are a hypothesized form of radiation, described by French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot, and initially confirmed by others, but subsequently found to be illusory.
... significant means "statistically significant" i.e. there was a correlation. "Significant" doesn't mean large, great, or disasterous. Too often mainstream press will pressure the reader into assuming it means something more than this.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Pants pocket: normal Belt clip/holster: doucher
As a Brazilian citizen, I can claim for sure that any Argentine finding is clearly bogus, just like their claim for being #1 in soccer.
Carry my phone in my pocket all the time. Have done for the last 10 years or so.
In the risks I run each day, the usage of a mobile phone comes very near the bottom of the list, near "lifting a piece of paper up while seated at my desk" and "blowing my nose".
It's actually NOT worth my time worrying about, because the worrying would do much more damage to my body than the phone ever would in normal usage.
Personally, until it approaches the risk of myself drinking about a litre of Coke a day (which I've done for years), I'm very unlikely to start worrying. And yes, Coke is incredibly "dangerous" - sugar, acid, calcium-leeching chemicals (in the Diet versions, I believe) and all sorts of problems. But when a sip of Coke is that dangerous, a mobile phone hardly figures in my reckoning.
whether or not it's true or false, any emitting device needs to be closely monitored and studied. We often hear of these kinds of reports but before we start band-wagon'ing this issue either for or against - let the peer community scientists do their due diligence and hash this out with peer reviews. A good scientist is always critical of their own work. If it's true, then we need to decide how to resolve it - if not, we can file it under a 'misdiagnosis of results.'
I mean, its not like its causing strange growths to appear on my thigh or to sterilize me.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Been wearing one on my hip every day for the past 4.5 years, and have noticed no problems. Anecdotal, I know. But I'm skeptical.
pockets then ? where will we need to shove our phones up in order to be safe of any downsides ?
Read radical news here
They need a control group that wears the phones but has transmitting functions turned off or the phone turned off all together. Perhaps the reported result is due to the mechanical abrasion of wearing the phone.
First time I read the title I thought it said "Mobile Phone May Rot Your Boner" I tend to carry my phone in the front pocket of my trousers, so it's no wonder that headline scared the crap outa me!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
To double the amount of time you get before hip replacement..
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
You scoff, but nose blowing fatalities are the great, unspoken tragedy of our times.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge than myself can comment on this topic:
Would it be:
1. possible
and
2. make a positive difference
to have some sort of shielding between phone and body? For example, shielding on the inside of pocket pants etc., that'd prevent the signals to go towards the body where we don't need them anyway?
What would you need and would it work?
Just did a quick search and it does appear that if, e.g., this is accurate, stressing bone causes them to increase in density.
Wearing a cellphone is restrictive on your range of movement, and you're more cautious about activities which could apply force to that area because you don't want to damage your expensive phone. Hence, the bone is less stressed, leading to less bone density.
Even if that isn't right, it still seems to me like the correct control for the experiment, if they want to say it's the radiation that's causing the bone loss, would be to have the control group wearing deactivated phones, not having them wearing no phone at all.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
+1 mod of too true and nods of very sad.
...how would you transport it?
I'm skeptical about this, but I have to agree that the thought has crossed my mind before. What if it really is harmful for my genitals (don't care about bones) to always have it there in close proximity? But apart from at the hip or in a pocket, I don't see any other practical way to carry it around. I know that if I put it in my laptop bag, I'll just forget it half the time, and I don't always have it with me...
when we wear something on our body it subtly shifts our weight distribution. and I'd imagine that having a phone on your hip also changes your posture to make accessing that phone easier and faster.
it doesn't seem like that's accounted for at all in the study.
the control group didn't use phones at all. so there's no control for whether it's the phone's radiation or the physical presence of the phone that causes the (very slight) degradation.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
No youngster wears a phone pouch on their hip anymore. Did they take the average age and de-calcification for the elderly into account?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's actually NOT worth my time worrying about, because the worrying would do much more damage to my body than the phone ever would in normal usage.
Ignorance is less stressful, indeed. There are many other more important issues to deal with, but why not keep the darn phone a tad farther from your bones anyway ? Just to be sure. Would you say it's that stressful to do that ?
Every time some data suggesting that wireless technology might be harmful to human health appears I see a bunch of geeks jumping in and screaming about how stupid that is. It looks almost irrational, almost like they wish it not to be harmful, even though they reckon it might be.
Screw that. One hip replacement is cheaper than two. I'll just stick to one pocket.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Researchers at the the National University of Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina"
Pier reviews or it didn't happen.
I've got my Droid on my hip, and while I haven't moved it, the holster suddenly feels rather heavy.
Sent from my CR-48
...but good for calling an ambulance; if you happen to break your de-mineralized hip bone
How much further away would you have to keep it, though, before the inconvenience of not being able to easily access it negated the minor risk of carrying it that way? I'm sure keeping my phone in my bag would negate some minor risks, but it would be a general annoyance every time I wanted to use it, even worse if it was ringing and I had to bug everyone around me until I could get to it and much worse if I wander off somewhere and forget I'm not carrying it. I don't carry mine on my hip anyway, just playing devil's advocate and pointing out that sometimes a minor risk is acceptable if it's a convenience.
IT workers wear phones. IT workers are traditionally heavily caffeinated, at least I am, so that's 100% of IT workers. Caffeine also has effects on bone loss. http://www.ajcn.org/content/74/5/694.short The problem is that if both of these things are true I should be so brittle that I can't walk without my bones crumbling under my own weight.
... by Louis Vuitton, the number one maker of man purses.
Where would you propose to keep the phone instead? Shirt pocket? If its a choice between an extremely small variation in bone density of my hips or the thing sitting right next to my heart, I think I would pick the hip every time, even if there is no evidence that I've seen that it will affect your heart.
Also, perhaps the reason geeks jump in defensively is because most of these articles sensationalize the issue. As another poster pointed out, on average the BMD of the phone wearing side was 0.3% lower than the non-phone wearing side and the BMC 1.3% lower. This is a minute difference, especially considering that normally you would expect to find a difference between the two sides. "May Rot Your Bones" is vastly overstating the implications of this study.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Also, I am super curious why there is no special mention of whoever he pulled (apparently 1/3rd of the study participants) from the Nuclear Medicine School.
In a study focussed on radiation adsorption, I would think the people who spend a considerable amount of time near a mix of X-Rays and MRI machines might be worth considering as a substantially unique group.
I've read through the thing (institutional login is a lovely thing) and have to agree. Sure they report some statistically significant values but the paper's short on information about the case and control group and probably underpowered to boot. There's also no mention of controlling for smoking or other environmental factors. Because the participants were recruited via word of mouth it could be that his case group has to wear their phones for a specific job and the controls do not. Either way it's irresponsible journalism to report on a study which is merely a pilot and lacks the statistical rigour to have anything worthwhile to report. I'm also skeptical about the use of the paired t-test, how were the participants matched?
Why oh why couldn't it melt fat instead?
No, it's not more stressful. But it's fucking annoying.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Of course the other aspect, diet is not mentioned, and it can have influence on your bone density.....nah let's jump on the cell phone is danger bandwagon!
In addition to inadequate controls galore for confounding causes, this once again fails to take into account two things -- confirmation bias (why would anybody even think of looking for something like this?) and physical mechanism. What part of skin depth and power do people not get? Exposing your skin to direct sunlight is far more dangerous than any cellphone hanging outside of your clothes at your hip.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Not ignorance - I honestly just don't care enough, having reviewed the evidence thoroughly in the days of "mobile phones will fry your brain", especially as I work in schools where we were deploying Wifi and the parents were protesting against a mobile phone mast being built nearby too.
My initial instinct when I first heard things like this years ago, fresh out of uni, as someone of a scientific mind? They were idiots. My conclusion then, after lots of personal research? They were idiots. My conclusion now? They're still idiots. My conclusion for the forseeable future? Almost certainly still idiots but I bet we do eventually find lots of things that "are affected" but in such minor ways that I'll spend more time worrying about whether I should blow my nose or not.
Science, observed recordings, and centuries of studies tell me that EM radiation in the frequencies and powers observed does nothing to my body that's even close to being measurably, statistically and practically significant or detrimental over the timescales discussed, and considered against any other number of reasonable factors that you could easily remove. The bacteria that live in my shoes pose orders of magnitude greater risk to my health every day.
And I'm not a phone junkie. I get one or two calls a day, about five minutes each, and rarely dial out (I have an office phone and a home phone, why bother using the mobile?). But the mobile stays on me, powered on, all day to fulfil its primary purpose - so I have something on my person that can make a phone call in an emergency. Just turning the damn thing off would be an infinitely better solution for myself (because I only care about outgoing calls) but it's just not worth the effort because the risk is so statistically insignificant. I'd be more worried about the extra weight on my hip, to be honest, and that's such a minor thing compared to my upper body weight.
If I put it anywhere else, I will lose it - I don't have shirt pockets and I'd end up leaving it in there, my trouser (pant) pockets also contain other "take everywhere" essentials - keys, money, cards (the invisible finger-grime on my cards is more a hazard to me, and the keys are a greater risk of causing me injury, especially if I just shove them in my pocket and then sit down). And the risk from the phone is so negligible as to not warrant changing a habit.
Some people REALLY have a problem estimating risk. That's their problem. Personally, my phone stays. Similarly, I see no reason to not live inside a ring-main wired house, as I do. All that electricity pumping around me all day, emitting EM for no reason! If I treat a hip-phone as a significant risk, I have to treat everything with that same risk or more in the same way too, and that would make my life infinitely more complicated to the point that it would be unlivable.
But I have a life. One with infinitely more risks (which are much more significant, likely and detrimental) than what a bit of EM might do to my hipbone over the course of my lifetime. Hell, technically I walk through EM fields dozens of times a day - they're called "Oyster readers" on the London Underground and/or shop theft detectors.
The point is - people who *KNOW* and calculate the risks are telling you that it's really not worth worrying about and hasn't been, for pretty much forever. Thus every scaremongering story about radiation, EM or how we're all going to hell if we don't believe is subject to criticism.
It's probably slightly less "damaging" to have my phone an inch away. But having it where it is is already so "undamaging" that I just don't care. It really makes that little difference that's it not worth worrying about.
mobile phone ruined my boner!
Yes, But if having it near you hip can cause hip bone shrinkage... Well, I'm not sure I'd want to keep it near my other bone.
Carrying a cellphone in a front jeans pocket every day gives me a lot more to worry about than loss of bone density.
Yawn, come back when there's something other than "may"
On the one hand we've got the whole of established physics (electromagnetic waves produced by cell phones aren't ionizing). On the other a bunch of self-interested scaremongers who only want to sell books/articles.
Yes, cell phones can heat you up a tiny amount but going outside in the sunshine or doing some exercise heats you up orders of magnitude more and they're both considered healthy by the exact same scaremongers.
No sig today...
Do you have any evidence that diet can affect the right hip differently than the left hip?
According to an abstract from the study to be published in the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, wearers of a mobile phone had "significantly lower right BMD at the trochanter and significantly lower right BMC at both trochanter and total hip".
None of these differences were found in non users, the study notes.
Non users had a higher BMC at the right femoral neck (at the top of the thigh). The right-left difference in femoral neck BMD of non users was marginally non-significant. In users, there was no femoral neck right-left difference of BMC at the femoral neck. Right-left asymmetries in femoral neck BMC were significantly different between both groups, the study notes.
Because radiation is radiation, right? Right. Sigh.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You see, the Scots wear kilts and keep their cellphones in their sporran.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The journal article on which TFA is based is embargoed behind Kluwer's academic firewall's and my school doesn't have a subscription to this one. So, I can't see the actual article. However, the comments from some of the people who *can* see the article are telling, to wit:
"Only by a stretch of imagination do you see a linear correlation in there. Look at figure 3 ... http://journals.lww.com/jcrani...
OMG!!..."
and......
"This is only a pilot-study, and should NOT be brought into the media before a larger and more rigorous study has been done. This study has very small sample groups, and they should have had a group with the cellphones at their waste, but turned off. It could be other things than the electromagnetic radiowaves, i.e. the weight of the phones, if there is an effect at all, which a larger study will clarify."
not to mention.....
"This is only a pilot-study, and should NOT be brought into the media before a larger and more rigorous study has been done. This study has very small sample groups, and they should have had a group with the cellphones at their waste, but turned off. It could be other things than the electromagnetic radiowaves, i.e. the weight of the phones, if there is an effect at all, which a larger study will clarify. "
and.....
"Also, the study doesn't say if the measurement and calculations were unblinded, and the sample groups were not randomized, and recruited by word of mouth locally. This is just the flaws without looking at the results. Again, please stop writing about pilot studies, unless you are giving it a critical evaluation."
as well as....
"Something is wrong with the user cited charts where the bone density declines on a range from zero to 80,000 hours.
Now at maybe 2000 hours exposure per year, that means 40 years exposure. How could they get that much data?
Chart labels must be wrong. "
followed up by....
"From the method section of the study:
'Men of the first group provided information about the
number of years they had used a mobile cell phone and the number
of hours per day that they carried the phone in the belt pouch. The
number of years of use and the product of years of use and hours per
day each year carrying the phones were used as rough estimates of
cumulative exposure.'
*****In other words*****
A small pilot study with questionable (or at least very simplistic) methods for estimating for cumulative exposure was conducted on a small and apparently undifferentiated sample and a statistically significant result was obtained.
As one of that "strange breed," I was initially concerned. Now, not so much...
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
"No difference in mean BMDs and BMCs between groups was found." So, they have their study and their control group. They looked at bone densities in their hips. The average hip density between both groups is statistically identical. But, in the right-handed cellphone user group, the right hip is 1.2% less dense than the left hip, while for the control group made up of mixed-handed people of a different age, the distribution is more even, but still not perfectly even. They conclude that cellphone radiation weakens bone mineralization. But according to the abstract, there was no difference in mineralization, it was just distributed differently.
And, n=24 is not high enough to call a 1.2% difference "statistically significant". That's just bogus. Anyways, my wife and I both lean to our left. And so do her parents and sisters. Not a lot, but about 1-2%. I'd be surprised if that didn't translate into an unevenness in our hip bone densities. We're all right handed, too. Now, I just complained about their low n, so I can't conclude anything from my anecdote...but maybe we favor the leg opposite our dominant hand? If you have more weight on it, you can more easily pivot to bring your right side forward to do something. And, they only studied people who wear a cellphone on their right hip. Isn't that going to be right handed people? Who quite possibly put more weight on their left hip? And if the control group had some left handed people in it, even if there was only 1 or 2, that would totally skew the averages.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
but only because I realized that I need to plug it in to charge.
I had to turn the vibrator ring off. I started feeling vibrations (sometimes muscle spasms) even when I didn't have my phone on me. Now if there was only some way to work that into some sort of autoeroticism product you could sell to the masses... that'd be some form of nirvana.
Not being a doctor, researcher or expert in EMF fields, I gotta ask: is there a plausible explanation for why this would be? It seems to me that there are a lot of researchers out there fishing for weird correlations with cell phone use, and if you look for statistical fish long enough you're going to find something that isn't really there. Without a plausible mechanism for messing with bone density, I'd be tempted to write this one off entirely until someone else confirms it. Especially since it's the first study of its type and is a relatively small group of subjects (n=24).
Recipe for science fail: conduct 30 studies looking for some type of harm done by a random controversial bogey man. Don't publish the 29 that fail to reject the null hypothesis. Publish the one that does.
Just looking at Table 1 in the PDF of the study you can see the sample of non-phone users to phone-users had a really weird makeup. The nonusers where older and heaver by significant margins: 47.1 years to 33.5 years and 85kg to 77kg. So non users were like 14 years older and 18 lbs heaver. Really wacked.
Why would you do a study on hips with such a skewed population? The attempt to account for this in the text, but I'm not buying it.
Also, the total number studies was 48 people (24 users, 24 non-users) so not a huge study.
Based on the populations used for the study, its my guess they had some data lying around on at least one of these groups which was probably collected differently from the data for the other group.
Hey I want to know as much as the next guy if this is for real, as I sometimes carry up to 3 cell phones (don't ask), but I'm seeing some flaws here that are just jumping out.
Joke post?
If you're concerned about radiation, it'll drop off at r^2.
So if you keep it 3 mm from your body (in your pocket), just put it on your desk 12 inches away from you and be over 9000 times safer.
Reading a bit more on how they did the study: 2/3 of the people in the study were faculty or personnel from a Medical Sciences school or Nuclear Medicine school. Again a strange choice for studying the effects of electromagnetic radiation given that these people probably get exposed to more of that than the average joe.
This was also not a before/after study. Meaning they don't have any measurements from the cell phone wearing group before they started wearing cell phones. Nor did they follow either group over time. Basically they just got 48 people, half who wore a cell, half who didn't and measured, 1 time (as far as I can tell) their Bone Mineral Density and Bone Mineral Content.
I guess it was hard for them to find young thing people that didn't wear cell phones, thus accounting for the skewed sample ages and weights?
Also note the following:
The cell phone wearing group had higher (read Better) or similar BMC and BMD for 9 out of the 12 measurements by my count.
not to mention those seven odd ends of month per year are followed by an odd (1) day. It could be the 2nd day of chronic exposure that gets you.
My friend flooded his house by blowing his nose and trying to flush the toilet paper down the toilet before jumping in the shower. 3.5 years later and he finally got a new toilet in there.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
Even if this turns out to be a reproducible phenomenon, it's not clear that EMF would be the cause. A potentially more likely cause would be that if you wear your cell phone on your hip, you are slightly less likely to be bumping that hip into things. Slight damage from bumps and falls are known to increase bone density, so protecting one hip would potentially result in reduced bone density in that hip. I'm not saying this is an extrememly likely scenario, but at least it represents a known causal effect.
Radiated energy has to be ionizing to have any effect on tissues?
On one hand, self-interested corporations who only want to sell cellphones, data plans, and accessories.... on the other hand, a group of disinterested observers made an empirical observation and submitted it to the scientific world for review....
THL phish sticks
Do people really put phones in pockets? That just seems weird. They'll get scratched up by keys and change, and you can accidentally dial people while moving or sitting.
Radiated energy has to be ionizing to have any effect on tissues?
Yeah, it has an effect. Thermally. If there's anything more, then the burden of proof lies on those making the claim.
On one hand, self-interested corporations who only want to sell cellphones, data plans, and accessories.... on the other hand, a group of disinterested observers made an empirical observation and submitted it to the scientific world for review....
On one hand hand you have the disinterested observers making up empirical observations . . . on the other hand you have the self-interested elite hiding the conspiracy that aliens visit the Earth. It's called not being gullible for any feelgood explanation of a given correlation.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
If you do the math, cell phone radiation is several orders of magnitude lower than what is needed to mess with an ionic bond. The photons just have way, way, way too little energy. Heck, when you compare the energy of the photons to the random motion of the particles, it is still orders of magnitude below their kinetic energy. The idea that Cell Phone radiation could interfere with the human body is really quite ridiculous. It is physically impossible it could cause cancer or really do anything else. Blue Light, on the other hand, is potentially dangerous (massively more energetic photons there) -- well, all light is much more energetic, but blue light actually is at the low end of having enough energy to start messing with some weak bonds, potentially.
I can believe this. Watching people blunder around while driving or walking around a grocery store with a mobile phone affixed to their heads, I've come to the conclusion that mobile phone proximity causes your brain to rot as well.
licet differant, aequabitur
I definitely get affected by mobile phone radiation, and it’s not psychosomatic. And when pain happens, then that’s usually a signal that something is not right. And there are too many other people who claim to be affected to simply dismiss it. And, we tend to describe very similar symptoms.
So how could it happen? Perhaps one of the mobile phone frequencies just happens to tune in to some molecule using electromagnetic absorption? That's my hypothesis.
But to claim that because it doesn’t happen to everyone, then it therefore doesn’t happen to anyone, is an absurd argument. Some people are allergic to certain substances while the rest of us are not. Why? Perhaps it’s because they have a higher level of some amino acid, or because they produce a slightly different protein from the rest of us. Who knows?
Now I’m not claiming that sensitivity to microwaves is an allergy. The point I’m making is that each and every body is subtly unique, such that some people will be affected while others are not.
The truth is that we don’t know enough yet. And the research that I have read about so far has been surprisingly unimaginative.
ex.
Do mobile phones heat water? No, wrong frequency. (Didn’t even need to test for that. Could have asked someone working with spectrometry.)
Do mobile phones cause cancer? No. (Okay, worth checking.)
So now let’s move on...
Do mobile phones “tune in” to molecules other than water? Ah... considering the vast multitude of different kinds of molecules... quite possibly.
How do I know it’s not psychosomatic for me?
1. When I first started to use a mobile phone I would put it in my pocket. After ½ hour my hips would ache. I didn’t know why. But sometimes my hips were fine with the mobile in my pocket, and I’d discover that it was off (for whatever reason). The correlation seemed to be 100%, despite me not thinking of mobiles as harmful (which is why I had no issue putting it in my pocket).
2. Whenever I talk for more than 10-15 minutes with the mobile to my ear, my ear aches behind the eardrum. For more than about 45 minutes, I get a particular headache that is unlike any other (eg. from dehydration, tiredness, sickness). I do not suffer these problems when I use a wired phone or hands free.
3. I’m a kung-fu man. I don’t get sick. I don’t get flu’s, ever. I have no allergies. I’m not a hypochondriac. But mobile phones...
So what about Bluetooth and WiFi? Well, personally I’m not affected by them. Perhaps Bluetooth is too weak, even at close range. Or perhaps it’s because their frequencies are different. I dunno.
Having said all that, I still find mobile phones so damned useful that I always carry one around (yes, in a “man bag”) and I write software for them (moving into Mono). As long as I keep my mobile away from my body, I’m fine.
In conclusion, what I’m saying is that just because you’re not affected, then that’s not to say that other people aren’t affected. (I've been flamed on slashdot before for my opinion on this, and expecting it again now.). I’m not suggesting that we should stop using mobile phones. But perhaps with greater understanding we could make them even safer and less painful.
Radiated energy has to be ionizing to have any effect on tissues?
Yes.
It's basic physics, known since Einstein.
No sig today...
My god, did he use bedsheets for that? Or did he use the entire roll? Inquiring minds want to know :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I don't keep anything in the same left side pocket as my phone. It's a Motorola RAZR so it folds shut. No accidental phonecalls. Also, no damage to the screen since it's closed when pocketed.
And even if it wasn't, I'd still carry it there. I'd pretty much rather lose my phone than ever carry it on the outside. I'm not 70 yet.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Why not a blind test? Instead of having two groups; users ans non-users, have three groups. non users, left hip and right hip. Every time a subject was tested he would not have his cell phone on and the technician would not know what group he was in. When the statistics were analyzed the doctor would not know which group was which; he would just be looking to see if there was a difference between the left and right. Only after the analysis was done would the groups be revealed. That would remove any possible bias.
I also agree that "statistically significant" may not be "medically significant".
And one final note; N=24? That seems like a very small study considering that only a total of 48 subjects were tested.
Indeed, the bone-destroying effects of Coke are likely to dwarf any bone-destroying effects of your cell phone; and if you're heedless enough of your health to drink a liter of soda a day, probably no health warnings at all matter to you. Odds are good that the extra 400 empty kcal a day of sugar is doing enough to usher you to an early grave that osteoporosis is not a big concern.
For those of us who'd like to maintain our health and enjoy life for an extended period of time, however, and would like to avoid the hip fractures that are common in the elderly, this news is quite interesting. It's incentive to not always carry my phone in the same place when it's on my person, and to leave it in my bag or otherwise at hand but not on me.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If you're referring to the photoelectric effect, that has nothing to do with ionizing radiation, since metals don't "ionize" (in that way).
But rods and cones are affected by non-ionizing light. More generally, heat also affects tissues, so any non-radiation that is converted to heat (down to microwaves) affects tissue. Even lower on the spectrum, non-thermal low frequency radio waves beamed at certain brain tissues can affect thought, perception, mood and emotion.
What this research is referring to involves how dissolved molecules, which become ionized by interactions with water molecules breaking components apart, might be affected by electromagnetic fields. Since ions are positive or negative, a positive or negative electric field, or a changing magnetic field (as in an electromagnetic field), may physically influence the movement. It's completely possible that a constant electromagnetic field might jiggle those ions enough to prevent or reduce the chemical coupling that would normally occur in, say, bone growth. Even a very weak field, it it were a resonant frequency, could do that.
Einstein was a physiologist?
UV-A is non-ionizing. It can contribute to skin cancer thru indirect DNA damage. UV-A creates highly reactive chemical intermediates, such as hydroxyl and oxygen radicals, which in turn can damage DNA.
Collagen fibers are damaged by UV-A.
You (and all the people who refuse to even consider the possibility) sounds a lot like the AGW-deniers who refuse to even consider it. It IS possible that there are biological processes, even minute ones, that are effected by radio waves. Maybe it is indirect, who knows. You don't know either way.
THL phish sticks
I've got my Droid on my hip, and while I haven't moved it, the holster suddenly feels rather heavy.
These aren't the Droid's you're looking for...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Uhm. If a light is intensive enough to break chemical bonds than it's IONIZING by definition.
Actually, the energetic particle or wave must be capable of knocking electrons off of atoms or molecules. This creates free radicals.
Breaking chemical bonds? Where did you get that?
The energy of the particle is defined by the frequency, not the amplitude. Intensity has nothing to do with it. IR, no matter how intense, is still IR and non-ionizing.
THL phish sticks
DOH! I didn't rtfa, as you can tell.
Do you have any evidence that diet can affect the right hip differently than the left hip?
It depends upon the structural polarity of the particular heifer from which you harvest the majority of your milk supply.
Bookmarking this comment. Thank you for being you.
correlation != causation
Placebo effect, perhaps? Just throwing that out there.
the burden of proof lies on those making the claim.
So you claim, but can you prove this?
By the way your last paragraph makes no sense, at least not to me.
Intensive means "with high enough frequency". Breaking chemical bonds usually results in formation of ions or radicals.
Though reactions like Cl + H2 come to mind which are catalyzed by visible light. And there are other cases where light can just be a trigger.
So you're right in general.