DV82XL said:

More likely you are making this story up. Please show a reference.

DV82XL,

It looks like Electra under a different nym. Comment 49 is word for word the same as comment 38, only missing the 1st sentence.

        Tampa Bay Colocation said:

So if firefighters say they experienced negative symptoms such as migraine headaches, extreme fatigue, disorientation, slowed reaction time, memory loss, attention deficit amidst life threatening emergencies that they can attribute to onset when towers were activated, then they’re lying?

More likely you are making this story up. Please show a reference.

        MattB said:

I think that its really ignorant of people to dismiss electrosensitivity as a made up disease.

It would be ignorant if I didn’t know anything and dismissed it without knowledge. I’ve looked into it pretty thoroughly. Hence, I’m not ignorant at all.

Well, I don’t actually have any direct investments in the wireless industry nor am I employed by them.

As far as clinical tests go, this is actually a very easy one to do. There are a number of things that make it super easy to test. For one thing, people who claim to suffer from this condition say that they are effected directly by acute exposure to RF radiation – that’s great for an experiment, because it eliminates the need for a long term experiment for chronic exposure. People also claim that they are almost always made sick by it – again, this makes it easy because it’s an easy to report symptom.

So here is what we do:

Take a group of people who claim to have this condition and we put them in a series of rooms. Some of the rooms have an active transmitter in them and some don’t. We don’t tell them. They report which ones made them feel sick. We then take a look at the results and see if they were sick more often in the rooms where the transmitters were versus the “control” rooms.

Easy as pie. Simple experiment. Perfect for a freshman class on scientific methodology.

These tests have been done. You know what? Nobody has ever shown any person can detect the difference between the transmitters and the controls. People do not respond to radio emissions. It can be tested. It has been done.

two points here: First, I think you’d be surprised on this one. Very early in the use of tobacco increases in mouth cancer were observed. However, smoking was not something people did daily until the late 1800’s when cigarettes were mass produced. Before that, cigars were too expensive to smoke more than a few a month. The first credible scientific evidence that really showed a solid link was in the very early 1900’s, and full and indisputable scientific studies were there by the 1920’s.

Secondly: You can’t compare the effort necessary to find ***CHRONIC*** effects versus ***ACUTE*** effects. Chronic effects, by definition, take a long time to manifest and don’t show up all at once. You have to follow someone around for years and compile the results. Acute effects are a different animal. They show up HERE AND NOW and happen as soon as a stressor is present or very shortly after.

Since these effects are reputedly acute, we don’t need to wait. We can observe whether they happen here and now.

But not so open your brain falls out.

        SJ said:

It’s not good business to research this scientifically – the big money’s with the telecommunications industry, not with the so called quacks and weirdos,

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. There are few subjects like trumped up claims of RF field dangers to attract grant money and get attention for researchers. Not to even mention the potential litigation money it could mean.

No, anecdotal evidence is very bad! It’s misleading, it’s completely unreliable. It’s not even evidence.

The rise of modern medicine is entirely based on learning that anecdotal evidence is worthless. The birth of science based medicine occurred when we finally began to realize how worthless it is. The cornerstone of both science and medicine is the understanding that evidence needs to be of an empirical nature, with observations that remove human bias.

It is if you care about actually getting the facts and being accurate. To say science “doesn’t always get it right” is to completely misunderstand what science is. Science is not a collection of knowledge or a single test or experimental result. Science is a methodology, a way of making and interpenetrating data and a means of making sense of the world.

There is much we do not know or understand about how the brain and body work. Yet there is much we do understand. Saying that we don’t know everything is much different than saying we don’t know anything. We are learning more all the time. However, we don’t learn more or advance knowledge through anecdotal evidence or claims made by one person of their own experiences.

        SJ said:

We’re really very ignorant about the workings of the brain and body and the way that knowledge advances is through curiosity, an open minded attitude, a willingness to consider new ideas.

‘We’, are not SJ, but you are. I am willing to bet you any sum of money you are willing to wager that you cannot consistently pass a double-blind test in a shielded room, to detect a wifi signal, at common field strengths.

It’s not good business to research this scientifically – the big money’s with the telecommunications industry, not with the so called quacks and weirdos, which is one possible reason why one has to rely on anecdotal evidence – same with herbal medicine. Anecdotal evidence isn’t necessarily bad you know. It’s people saying how they feel, what they experience. You can always dismiss if you’re so inclined, but it’s a bit narrow minded, and you miss out on most knowledge. Scientific research isn’t the only way to know things, and doesn’t always get it right anyway.

We’re really very ignorant about the workings of the brain and body and the way that knowledge advances is through curiosity, an open minded attitude, a willingness to consider new ideas.

Yeah, I read a lot but I’ve been heavily involved in empirical skepticism and bad science stuff for years and picked stuff up along the way. A lot of it is the same stuff old reused and the same kind of things come up over and over.

What I mean especially is your note above about sources of scientific information. I think you are right, of course, that attention seeking individuals are not a good sign and I know you know a lot about peer review and science in the media and how facts get twisted. How are you so familiar with these things? From the way you talk about it, it seems like you’re an insider or an expert in science reporting.

Just how do you know so much?