Anyone Have access to The Journal Of Clinical Oncology?
October 29th, 2009
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As you may have recently read, there has been a “study” or rather meta-analysis (and apparently a very bad one) making the news recently about a review of studies on cell phones and cancer risk. It has now been published in the Los Angles Times and on Fox News – both of which should be ashamed of themselves. The ” Stud,” acknowledges that when 23 studies on cell phone usage and cancer risk are examined, there appears to be none. It then goes on to state that when the eight “highest quality” studies are looked at, there turns out to be a risk of cancer.
This methodology seems very suspect on the face of things, since no explicit problem is found with the rest of the studies, but it becomes even more suspect when it becomes clear that the ones seamed “highest quality” were almost exclusively done by one researcher – and a very fringe one at that, whose results have generally been rejected by most scientists and who has made a living scaremongering in the media over cell phone usage.
Clearly such a stacked deck of studies negates the very point of looking at multiple study data. Apparently this meta-analysis either decided not to bother with some of the other thousands of studies out there or simply did not care about them. In either case, the quality of this is deplorable.
I’m therefore asking for a little help here:
I’d like to write a letter to the Journal of Clinical Oncology about this and I’d like to write to the editorial section of other journals about this. I’d also like to see if I can get some professionals to write in about this. BUT, I’d rather not pay for the data and support this crap, but to really critique this I need the study in full.
So, if you happen to be at a university that subscribes to a scholarly journal database or otherwise have access to this, let me know.
This crap has really been getting out of hand recently. The rather untrustworthy “Environmental Working Group” has been cashing in on this crap recently with a lot of scary news stories and their stupid list of phones. The quality of the reporting on this has been deplorable and totally biased. There really needs to be more critical review of this BS.
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, inverse square, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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October 30th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Meta-analysis of junk studies are going to meaningless results. Without access to the article and a list of citations to see just what were the source studies we are handicapped. But based on the the fact that I have been following this nonsense closely for years, I would think that had there been thirteen good studies (13!), showing positive results, I would have known about at least some of them. Yet it is my recollection that I have yet to see one case controlled study that showed an effect that wasn’t rubbish ether because of design, or poor statistical analysis. I also don’t understand what they’re referring to as ‘blinding’ in these studies, as I have yet to see any blind studies done with cellphones.
It stinks, and we need to find out more for sure.
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October 30th, 2009 at 2:06 am
I can see the abstract via Pubmed, but don’t have fulltext access.
Unusual, and very irritating. Maybe it will become available when the text version is published.
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October 30th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
DV82XL said:
That’s an idea… they could set-up mobile-phone towers operating in the low megahertz radio frequency range and hand out a bunch of identical looking phones to nearby residents, some of which will operate in the megahertz (radio) band, others in the gigahertz (microwave) band.
If these phones were identical in appearance and all of them only worked locally, you’d have blinding for a large scale study. They could offer the locals free (or cheap) calls in exchange for participating, and keep track of usage in order to get an accurate estimate of exposure.
I assume nobody’s done anything like this?
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October 30th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
It seems pretty clear that the owner of this site is not up on current science. i don’t want to waste my time here as your readers
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October 30th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
http://emfbioeffects.org/
Excellent and rare info you cannot get anywhere else.
During 1955 biophysics researchers under contract with the U.S. Navy reported that in order to prevent deep-tissue burning, radiofrequency radiation exposures should not take place when an exposed individual is wearing or carrying any metal objects such as hair pins, metal implants, buckles, coins, or metal-framed eye glasses, “[a]s any of these objects may concentrate the field and cause burning.”
When considering tissue burning the researchers pointed out that radiation can be absorbed deeply and is actually greater in tissue such as muscle or the brain compared to the poorer absorption in the bone and fatty layers near a body surface. They also noted that radiofrequency energy exposure of arterially blocked tissue can result in serious tissue damage and cautioned against exposure of ischemic individuals, those suffering from any such arterial blockages, to radiofrequency radiation.
Even in normal, non-ischemic individuals, the body must compensate for the absorption of radiofrequency radiation through an increase in blood flow to carry away excess energy. However, for a given exposure, the compensation mechanism does not take effect immediately, but occurs over a period of minutes. These researchers reported that maximum increased blood flow, that is maximum compensation, took place only near the end of an exposure. Prior to that time the body was not fully coping, in the thermal sense, with the absorbed radiation. But in any event, they were considering compensation only in the thermal equilibrium context and emphatically indicated that microwave or radiofrequency radiation exposure should be avoided during pregnancy.
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October 30th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
david ehm said:
David Ehm said:
Gee Ehm, first you’re going to say nothing, and then you say something moronic that is completely out of context. No one has ever argued here that high levels of RF is harmless, but this is not high power. Please take your own advice and stop wasting our time here, you are an idiot with nothing of value to say trying to drive traffic to your site which is nothing but a collection of paranoid rubbish.
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October 30th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Brian-M said:
Uh… that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to do. First of all, even if you could do it, it would only demonstrate the difference in frequency (if any). Secondly, there would be enormous problems with getting that kind of technology to work. The low Mhz range is already cluttered and has very little bandwidth. Absolutely no way you could use any 3G or multimedia features on it. It would be very low bandwidth and noisy and that would make an obvious difference in QOS. Also, they could never leave the relatively small area where the service was provided.
Then there would be big issues with the size of the phone. An antenna for HF reception and transmission would be at least a few feet long to be resonant. This could be overcome by using a loop antenna or heavy inductive loading, but that would also mean the phone would be large physically and also need to be powerful to overcome the inherent inefficiency of an inductive loop antenna.
There have been double-blind studies on the acute effects of RF radiation, but not the chronic. I don’t see the need for it anyway. It’s an enviornmental effects study so it would not have as much of a placebo factor.
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October 30th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Yet this is what they seem to be claiming in the abstract to the study under discussion. I would very much like to see this paper, and I am doing my best to get a copy in hand.
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October 30th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
David Ehm said:
I know this already. Anyone who understands this stuff knows this. If you’re in a high field of RF radiation, then there can be RF burns associated with that and nobody will dispute this. Metal items can cause this to happen at lower levels than it would otherwise, because it is denser and more conductive than the human body is. When you stand in a powerful VHF field, most of that energy will pass through your body without doing anything. However, a metal object will work as a fairly descent antenna and will receive that energy more effectively. Therefore, it can heat up more than tissue alone will.
But this needs to be taken in context. The thermal effects are all but non-existent when you’re talking about a few watts or less. This information pertains to technicians who Would be working on mutli-kilowatt systems.
David Ehm said:
Funny, this topic has come up before many many times and nobody has disputed the potential thermal effects. This can’t be applied to low power devices because the amount of heat that something like a half a watt per kilogram can impart to tissue is minuscule – it’s well within the natural variations in human body temperature and even with poor circulation it would not be an issue.
Thermal damage only becomes an issue when the energy is enough to raise the temperature of tissue more than a few degrees. You can raise the temperature of tissue (temporarily) quite easily. Run your hands under warm water and the tissue in your hands is heated a bit. Drink hot coffee and your mouth and stomach become a bit warmer. It happens. It’s no big deal. You would get signifficantly less than this from any consumer-grade RF device.
David Ehm said:
Again, this is well known – the effects are not immediately apparent and that is why high power RF can be dangerous. yet even without good circulation, the minuscule effects from a cell phone would be well within the bounds of lymphatic fluid convection or even radiation from the body.
Oh damnit… I’m going to have to go look up the numbers and do the thermal calculations, aren’t I?
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October 30th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Okay… Lets say that a portion of your body is exposed to one quarter watt of rf energy. That’s a real lot, because even a two watt cell phone held next to your head would only expose you to a fraction of that since most of the energy radiates away from you or passes through you…
But okay… one quarter watt… about as much as you could reasonably expect ever to get to a region of your body from a consumer grade device…
That is 900 joules in one hour.
That is about 215 calories (thermal, not nutritional)
That is enough to heat 215 grams of water one degree Celsius.
So lets say this all goes into your brain. The human brain is about 80% water and has roughly the same thermal mass as water (actually a little bit more than water, so I’m being generous here) and is about 1.25-1.5 liters in volume. So.. if we assume that 100% of that energy is converted to heat with 100% effeciency and there is ZERO circulation, ZERO convection, ZERO radiation and ZERO conduction, the brain being 100% perfectly insulated, then this energy would be enough to raise the temperature by about .17 degrees Celsius or .3 degrees ferinheight.
You are not going to get a burn of any kind from that kind of change in temperature. It’s actually entirely normal for the core body temperature of a human to very from 97.9 all the way to 99.8 and even a temperature of 100 F does not mean you have a fever. So this is nothing, nothing to worry about at all.
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October 30th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
David Ehm said:
This is priceless; I nearly fell out of my chair.
As for this study nonsense, I’d be amazed if it passes statistical rigor. Keep us posted!
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October 31st, 2009 at 10:25 am
Excuse me, but perhaps I have a little bit of deja vu. It seems to me that on many occasions before on this site, there has been discussion about the fact that RF safety studies go all the way back to the 1950’s and earlier and that the navy extensively investigated the health concequences a long time back. I think there has also been discussion about the fact that high levels of RF radiation do indeed pose a danger due to the thermal effects and that this is mitigated by circulation but can still be a risk if it is high enough to heat tissue faster than the body can cool itself.
For some reason it seems to me like this was discussed at length – the thermal effects, the long history of biophysical research, the historical evidence from radar usage, the whole issue of dialectic heating.
It’s funny that I had that impression, because the poster “David Ehm” seems to think that the author is totally unaware of these topics and that the information is “Excellent and rare info you cannot get anywhere else.” I would have thought you could have gotten it on previous posts here, but what do I know?
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November 1st, 2009 at 2:04 am
Yeah, that has come up here on occasion.
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November 12th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Hi,
I got the article if you still want it and haven’t got it, drop me an email.
Best wishes,
Lantzelot
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November 12th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Lantzelot said:
Actually I now have a copy but thanks
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