Cell Phones More Dangerous Than Smoking?
May 8th, 2009
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Yeah… perhaps not. In any case, tobacco seems to have become the latest thing to compare cell phones to. Given everyone knows that tobacco smoking can dramatically increase ones chances of cancer and other diseases and that this was not widely discussed before the 1950’s, it seems like a great way to scare people. Of course, it’s totally bunk because cell phone and other RF radiation has been studied to death and discussed for years, and exposure to UHF radiation sources goes back decades, but that has not stopped anyone.
Here’s a recent article from Into Mobile:
File this under “suspicious,” but when an award winning neurosurgeon is saying this, people do listen. According to cancer expert Dr. Vini Khurana, who did a study on the harmful effects of mobile phone use, mobile phones could become the number one killer of people, coming in ahead of smoking and asbestos.
Apparently, if a person has been using a mobile phone for more than 10 years their chances of getting brain cancer are doubled. He went on to add: “The incidence of malignant brain tumors and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.”
Sounds scary and I’m not sure what to think about it. Any thoughts?
[Via: smokeen]
Glad to see this was reported with some skepticism, and also that it had a link to the source, which had another link to the original source. This is not always the case, but when it is, it’s a good idea to follow them before taking this kind of thing seriously.
Here’s a clip from the original press release that got this most recent round of reports started:
SAN FRANCISCO, May 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Mobile phones could
kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, according to a study by a
neurosurgeon and award-winning cancer expert, and distributed by Awen
Grove. (http://www.mybiopro.com/awengrove).The study, by Dr. Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet
published of the health risks.Dr. Khurana warns that people should avoid using cell phones wherever
possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take
“immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health
ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana. He
believes that the three billion people in the world that now use the phones
worldwide are at risk and that their death and illness from cell phone use
could exceed the harm from smoking.The groundbreaking study draws on growing evidence that use for 10
years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. (To learn more go to
http://www.mybiopro.com/awengrove)
A “study” is supposed to mean that some actual substantive data has been published, either from experiments or from collection by a statistically controlled survey and that this data can be used to support a hypothesis. It seems that this is not the case. Just saying something is a “study” does not actually make it one, and having some comment made by an appointed “expert” does not count as a valid study. Whether or not there’s an actual study that ever will come out with the supporting data? We just have their word on it.
In this case the only “study” referenced is a claim that there is a study which exists but has not yet been published:
Professor Khurana is a neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the
past 16 years. He has published more than three dozen scientific papers and
reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put
the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research
is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.
This is stunningly improper! The point of peer review is to validate that the publication is at least scientifically credible enough to be published. Peer review is not a guarantee that the study is valid, but it does catch the especially bad ones. Making these statements without the study published or even approved really presents a big credibility problem. The entire purpose of peer review is defeated when you start using it as an afterthought and making wild claims before the study has even been put out. And of course, if it is rejected by the journal it is submitted to, the author can always turn around and look for journals with lower standards.
“I’m a neurologist, and I have lots of experience and I’ve seen lots of brain cancers caused by cell phones. I say that it doubles risk and I base this on my scientific experience,” is not a study and it should really be regarded as a red flag whenever there is a “study” mentioned but an actual citation of the study, or even the name of the study or journal it was published in is omitted. Another big red flag is the fact that they spend so much time in the press release talking about how great this “expert” is. A good scientific study stands for itself and does not require that the author’s reputed prestige be invoked as a reason for accepting the study’s conclusion.
Looking at the rest of the press release, things only get worse. It goes on to degrade to an entirely unprofessional and alarmist message that reads like a tabloid. The site Power Line Facts is cited as a source of information, despite clearly being a site of dubious character and alarmist, unsupported accusiations. However the one site which is cited repeatedly as a source of information is “MyBioPro,” a site which sells products that claim to protect people from the dangers of electromagnetic radiation. It is cited so many times and so conspicuously that it should be obvious to anyone that this release is little more than an attempt to get publicity for these products.
And the products in question? They range from the standard “radiation blocking” stickers and pendants, which violate the laws of physics, since the only way to block radiation is to completely shield the individual from the transmitter to the even more absurd. Despite pseudo-scientific language and claims that nanotechnology can allow for the device to somehow produce a canceling effect on the signals, this is entirely impossible. There are a number of devices which claim to somehow “cancel out” or “scramble” the radio signals from a cell phone (and yet somehow not impair it from working). The reality is that one can’t block a radio signal without a physical barrier between the transmitter and the area being shielded.
There is one way to theoretically cancel radio waves: using destructive interference with waves that are identical to the original radio waves but 180 degrees out of phase. The problem with this is that it would require an active system to create the waves ahead of time, somehow knowing exactly the amplitude and frequency of each oscillation it will intercept and perfectly synchronized to within picoseconds, such that the two signals meet at the correct place in space at the exact same time. Also, since the transmitter would not be in the exact same place as the original signal, this effect would only occur where their wave patterns intersect. Thus, it would also be limited to a very small spacial area where the effect would be observable. Essentially it would be a microwave interferometer. Real interferometers require extremely high tolerances and use adjustable phase delays to allow for unwanted signals to be cancled out. These “chips” clearly can’t do that.
Of course, there’s no reason to actually think you’d want or need to block or be shielded from the electromagnetic radiation given off by a low power device like a cell phone.
But there is another product that the site sells which is so wrong… or rather, not even wrong, that it is just insulting. Just take a look at this.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, Quackery, inverse square. 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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May 8th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
iH2O – The_Biggest_Farce_to_Date
It just beggars the imagination that anyone would be sucked in by this nonsense. Meanwhile we laugh at the stupidity of our grandparents for buying into radium-water as a cure all.
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May 9th, 2009 at 12:59 am
Apparently this guy is really a doctor as claimed and is in practice. It makes it all the more disturbing. An MD should know better, I’m sure he knows this is bull****. I guess it’s just for the money but one would think a doctor could make plenty without resorting to this. It really goes to show that even in legit medicine there are people who aren’t very honest.
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May 9th, 2009 at 3:05 am
Passing medical school might require brains and hard work, but it does not mean a person is always going to be honest or is somehow above scamming. Sadly there are doctors who are more than willing to dabble in quackery eventhough they have what it takes to make a good career in real medicine. It could be for a couple of reasons. It might be money: Sure, he probably makes good money but maybe he wants more. Even rich people will scam for a few more dollars. He might just want some more easy money. Also, a career in medicine does not normally get a person much special attention or fame or anything. He might just want to get some attention or be on TV or quoted in papers. People like that, and just being a doctor doesn’t change that. Anyway he’s a fraud now and considering he has shown how dishonest he can be, I would never trust him to do brain surgery on me and would advise others not to.
Assclown is a good way of describing it because he has made a fool out of himself and destroyed his credibility and his professional standing.
The bottom link thing to the Chernobyl radiation ->mountain water ->magic molecules ->new energizing technology just about made me vomit. Anyone who believes that is beyond hope!
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May 9th, 2009 at 3:17 am
Who knows? Sometimes people just get so obsessed with their own self-importance or their love for being praised or having a microphone stuck in front of them that they stop caring about anything else. Classic example would be Andrew Wakefield: Sure, he could have been a legitimate doctor and made a good and honest living. No, he lost his medical license in the UK and now is running some alternative clinic in the US. He’ll never have a real job in legitimate medicine again.
He is now the leader of a cult-like group who constantly praise him as a hero for telling the “truth” and being persecuted by the big bad drug companies and so on. He relishes it. He’s just a damn self-centered wana-be. It happens.
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May 9th, 2009 at 3:47 am
Q said:
Don’t forget that there is a carload of money to be made in these scams as well; more probably that these poor-to-average clinicians could make with a legitimate practice.
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May 9th, 2009 at 8:32 am
DV82XL said:
Yeah. These days, being a doctors generally aren’t rich, they’re just upper middle class. Most doctors have a nice house but not a mansion and they may drive a Lexus but not a Bentley.
Another thing: It’s a hell of a lot less work to just go lie to people on the internet than actually do real work that involves dealing with patients, being on call late at night or on weekends, having to take on the occasional frivolous malpractice suite and so on.
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May 10th, 2009 at 1:13 am
One of the recurring claims from the radiophobes, is that there has not yet been time for long-term studies to have been conducted, or that the question of cell phones and cancer is otherwise inadequately studied. In fact, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published the results of a massive study in Denmark that followed the cancer histories of 420,000 cell phone users over 13 years. The study, Cellular Telephones and Cancer—a Nationwide Cohort Study in Denmark (free PDF avalable) comes to this conclusion:
“Risk for these cancers … did not vary by duration of cellular telephone use, time since first subscription, age at first subscription, or type of cellular telephone (analogue or digital). Analysis of brain and nervous system tumors showed no statistically significant [standardized incidence ratios] for any subtype or anatomic location. The results of this investigation … do not support the hypothesis of an association between use of these telephones and tumors of the brain or salivary gland, leukemia, or any other cancers.”
Even in the harshest of animal studies, no evidence has been found to link cell phone radiation to health problems. Which is not surprising, given that no plausible hypothesis exists for how a cell phone could cause tissue damage in the first place.
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May 10th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
That iH2O idea looks pretty neat. They take one product (mountain spring water) which already has a huge markup compared to regular water, and claim to synthesize it in their special way so they can charge more. Imagine what kind of profit margin that would be…I guess it’s worth it to stop all that “electropollution” they talk about.
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May 11th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Of course iH2O can help, because the only cure for nocebo is placebo.
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May 11th, 2009 at 11:04 am
But don’t you get it? He’s in a LAB COAT. There’s no way he’s wrong!!
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May 11th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
I own a few labocats and I’ve been wrong (though not often) – I admit to that. I spell things incorrectly constantly. You can buy a labcoat online if you want or you can get them at some stores, such as uniform stores and such.
I find them actually quite useful, not only for looking like you have some idea what is going on, but for their original purpose that they were intended for. They’re good at keeping chemiclas and stuff off of you because they cover your clothes pretty well and they are made of a comfortable yet reasonably thick and tough fabric that stuff does not soak through readily.
I find them a good thing to wear when I’m using any kind of solvent or painting something or just doing something dirty that could get stuff on me. I think it has something to do with how the fabric is made, but they don’t stain easily. They’re just cotton, but stuff washes out easily. They’re all white so you can use bleach if there are any bad stains.
Also they have several good sized pockets in useful places.
They’re pretty cheap too.
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May 11th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
My experience at UC was that physics and engineering students were typically very good at logic and reason and that medical students were typically good at memorizing a lot of data quickly. I knew a lot of physics students who would routinely forget BASIC equations, but understood the principles and could re-derive them as needed on the fly.
What I gained from this is the realization that the doctors are not typically the most logical people. They are good at memorizing and assimilating a lot of information quickly and retaining it well. These are both good and useful skills, but they are NOT the same thing.
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May 12th, 2009 at 1:15 am
Doctors who treat patients in practice or a hospital might be excellent in that field, but medical research is a different animal and it is the domain of another kind of professional, research physicians and scientists who are not necessarily md’s. It is a different persuit and the expertise involved can be different.
Even in the harshest of animal studies, no evidence has been found to link cell phone radiation to health problems. Which is not surprising, given that no plausible hypothesis exists for how a cell phone could cause tissue damage in the first place.
I don’t know. I can’t really keep this straight because there seem to be so many reports all the time contradicting each other, but I am pretty sure some studies out there show an increase risk that is measurable. I think it is theorized that radio signals are capable of interfearing with the process of DNA copying in cell division.
I am not an expert, but if there were no hypothesis for how and zero evidence then I believe the whole issue would have been put to bed a long time ago and I’ve been hearing about this for practically my whole life so I feel there is probably reason or this would have gone away.
I don’t think the risk is huge, but if there is nothing there and nobody even has a reason there would be then this would have been closed long ago.
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May 12th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Celly said:
This whole thing started when some guy decided out of the thin air that his wife’s brain cancer was caused by her cellphone usage, and tried to sue. It was picked up by the press and whipped into a story where none existed.
This led to some fear in the general population and the appearance of several worthless products claiming to shield the user from radiation. The consumer protection apparatus in a few countries, looked at these things and decided they were frauds, leading to accusations that the telcos had leaned on the government to coverup the dangers.
Several badly designed studies were done, with very small sample-spaces, some of which showed positive results BELOW the error threshold, many which showed nothing. Several, like the infamous popcorn demonstration, were outright frauds. The media chose to report these without proper discussion which would have told people that there was nothing found.
A huge nationwide cohort study was done in Denmark that followed almost half a million subjects, and absolutely no indication of health issues related to cellphone use were found. This is a definitive study, because the number of subjects was so large, and it found nothing.
Furthermore, if you check the literature, from good peer reviewed sources you will see that indeed no plausible hypothesis exists for how a cell phone could cause tissue damage because the field strengths are so low. At any rate, we evolved in a sea of electromagnetic radiation several times stronger than that of a cellphone, so one has to wonder how we made it this far, if DNA transcription is so vulnerable.
This whole thing has no more validity than the belief that electric fans in a bedroom can kill you, a fear that is popular in the Far East.
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May 12th, 2009 at 2:00 am
^And therein lies the problem, Celly. People tend to believe whatever they are told regardless of supporting evidence. You hear the echoes and distortions for long enough and start to think that there must be “something to it.” You’ve committed the classic ad populum fallacy.
In any case, I completely agree with the argument that a lot of people in the medical fields are not the best “thinkers”, but rather just proficient at memorizing a lot of detailed information. I’m an engineering student and an abstract thinker, and I once had a trivial argument with my girlfriend’s older sister, who is in medical school. I had been driving down the highway with my girlfriend while her sister was following in another car. I had the cruise control on, but the other car did not. When we got to our destination, she accused me of driving “irregularly”, which was quite ironic. Point is, no amount of reasoning or explanation could convince this otherwise very smart individual that her manual control was more error-prone than my cruise control. While I admire medical doctors, I won’t take their advice on anything scientific.
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May 12th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Concern over RF safety and health effects goes back at least to the 1930’s-1940’s when some sailors in the Navy damn near cooked themselves by working on high power radar while it was on. That was when things started getting serious about the protective measures and determining what was a safe level to work on. In 70+ years of experience with UHF and microwave applications, including health studies done by Bell Labs and RCA many decades ago, we’ve only proven more and more that our models are correct. Nothing has really disputed them and they still stand.
There is a danger to RF exposure that we have known about for some time and it’s the only real proven danger: dialetric heating. A powerful rf field can heat the water in your cells just like a microwave oven and if it heats them enough, the cells will burst and this can destroy tissue. It can even happen before you feel any discomfort.
Note the following though: This can’t happen with low power devices like a cell phone which is <1 watt or even a cell tower if you’re any distance at all from it. You need a reasonably powerful transmitter before this even becomes a slight concern and you need to be right on top of it to be in danger. Yes, this is a real concern for people who work on this but not for anyone who is just using a phone or a wifi device etc.
There are levels of exposure which are regulated and enforced for any consumer device and also for the areas around antennas where the public might go. In the United States the regulations come down to the FCC and in Canada the standards go to Environmental and Workplace Health. Both the US and Canada have pretty similar standards and they both incorporate protocol and safety recommendations from the IEEE. The US and Canada are pretty typical of most countries, because some of the standards come from recommendations by international bodies like the IEEE.
In both cases, the standards are extremely conservative. I mean that the maximum allowable field strength and maximum allowable observed thermal effects are considerably lower than they probably really have to be. If you were exposed to five or maybe ten times the allowable field strength then you’d still have very little danger of any health concequences. You would probably have to be exposed to something like twenty o fifty times before you’d actually be in any danger at all. They tend to be very cautious in this area, and that may very well be a good thing just to have good margin for safety.
I’ve seen plenty of examples of someone exceeding the safety limits for rf exposure, but I’ve never actually seen anyone get injured by it or end up with any health concequences. I don’t mean to imply that is a good or safe thing to do, but it goes to show how broad the safety margins are.
That being said, there is the real health risk of me coming over and pounding the snot out of them for potentially getting as fine or getting a license pulled.
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May 12th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Celly said:
Here is a more graphic illustration of what is going on.
The pathetic thing is that this comic is merely reflecting a “news” story that was running at the time:
Britain is in the grip of a Wi-Fi revolution with offices, homes and classrooms going wireless – but there is concern the technology could carry health risks.(BBC)
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May 12th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Several months ago, someone linked to a graphic showing the entire EM spectrum. Everything above and below visible light was labled DANGEROUS DEADLY RADIATION (or similar). Does anyone know where I can wind that graphic?
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May 12th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Directed at Gordon: You act like you’re some kind of authority on this and we’re supposed to listen to you because everyone in the past was okay right? Do you stop to consider that the signals from today are much different. Electronics get more powerful every day and the signals pulse faster and carry much more and you can honestly compare it to signals from old radar in the 30s? It is not the same. Today the bandwidth is very high and the power high too.
Also, what kind of exposure do we get? Sure, at one time it might have been sailors, but they were at sea away from hurting anyone with radar and they were probably protected by their metal ships for sheilding. Look at today? Is it just a radar at the ship docks or airport? NO! It is everwhere. So everyone gets not just a touch of it but is exposed constantly more then they ever were before. We are bathed in it with no relief. That means our bodies never get a rest to repair the damage it does. You said yourself it can burst your cells. But our cells burst so much they never repair.
Yes, this is why cancer is higher but not only cancer. Look at us and see diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, obesity, autism, new kinds of flu and also bees are dying, frogs are dying. The earth is telling us something!
We do not need more study we need more axtion. The greedy profit hungry companies are suppressing what you admit we have known all along and that is the danger of cells destroyed and when you destroy cells you destroy the body and good health.
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May 12th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
@ BetterSafe
So you’re suggesting that cell phones cause obesity?!?
WTF?!?
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May 12th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
^Congrats, BetterSafe, you win the prestigious Dumbass of the Day Award. You’ll find your monetary prize in the middle lane of your local interstate highway.
Chuck P. said:
I don’t know about that one, but the XKCD version of the EM spectrum has a slice labeled “cell phone cancer waves”: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/electromagnetic_spectrum_small.png
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May 12th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I found it:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/electromagnetic%20spectrum/minerva2/Electromagnetic-Spectrum.jpg
“Deadly radiation which causes cancer and kills your children”
It looks like a broken link at first but click on “full size” and it’ll show up.
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May 12th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I wonder how many of the morons that fear RF radiation, routinely barbecued themselves into having a ‘nice healthy tan’ at the beach?
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May 12th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
DV82XL said:
But that radiation is OK because it’s “natural”
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May 12th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Yes, this is why cancer is higher but not only cancer. Look at us and see diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, obesity…
All of which you have to live long enough to contract. Not easy in the United States of say, a century ago, when the leading cause of death was infectious disease and the life expectancy was 47 years for females and 46 for males.
…autism…
Here’s a game for you. Study the DSM IV-TR definition of autism. Go through your High School yearbook and take a shot every time you come across someone who you’d call autistic. (Then start over with the students.)
…new kinds of flu…
Pssst. Influenza viruses constantly mutate. That’s why you need a flu shot every year.
and also bees are dying,
They do that sometimes. Fortunately, humans may have arrived at a solution to Gaia’s folly.
frogs are dying.
Or not.
The earth is telling us something!
Yes. It’s whispering to you, in dulcet tones… “Go stick your face in a honey badger hole… Go stick your face in a honey badger hole…”
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May 13th, 2009 at 2:14 am
BetterSafe said:
I am not even sure why I am responding to this, but here goes:
You clearly did not read what I said. The issue of RF safety is not new and it has been consistant all along. The first time anyone was really in danger from RF was in the 30’s and some sailors in the Navy (can’t remember if it was US or British) were injured by operating radar on battle ships and so on. This radar was one of the first applications of concentrated beams of high power radio waves at high frequencies.
Hence, this lead to the first standards for safety. The navy studied the issue and came up with some guidelines based on tissue absorption and dissipation of heat.
three quarters of a century later nobody has shown these standards to be false and today standards are even more conservative. But the effects are thermal and ONLY AT HIGH LEVELS.
By the way, there is nothing different about today’s radio signals that somehow make them worse. They contain more bandwidth and information transmitted, but how does that change anything?
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May 13th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Gordon, everything you said makes perfect sense and is reasonable but some people just don’t bother reading it or don’t bother putting any thought into it. It takes all kinds.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 3:56 am
I have a cell phone because it has basically become a necessity in the world we live in but I worry very much about the health concequences and therefore I try to use it less when I can and I use an earphone when I can. I also have put a radiation blocker chip on it but I hear those are not perfect. I don’t know but it’s still probably not 100% healthy.
It is something to worry about when you think in 20 years there might be so many brain tumors how will our med system deal with it?
Dont dismiss this. The head researcher for the phone companies said that it is proven to be very dangerous over time and like smoking it is a bad habit that ads up. Plus a lot of cancer doctors seem to think the same thing and other experts so just because they didn’t think back 50 years ago it was dangerous then don’t just presume it’s fine.
And also, yes it does cause headaches from the electromagnetic waves as the brain has brain waves and they can be interferaed with and that is what one of the problems is. Good harmonious brain waves help you stay calm and sleep too but radiation makes them go haywire like static on a TV. It is worse for some then for others. I know people who get sick if they stay close to a phone tower for more than a few minutes.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 8:57 am
GolferGirl, you didn’t read the post did you? (just skimming or reading the first few lines and the first line of a couple paragraphs does not count).
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