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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/
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.
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.
You scoff, but nose blowing fatalities are the great, unspoken tragedy of our times.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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]
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