doodlekid said:
If it causes cancer is hard to say. A lot of things cause cancer. Though there is no hair on my head willing to believe it's harmless. Maybe if the density of cell towers were a little less it could be.
Why is this your de facto belief? Better safe than sorry? A reasonable tact I suppose, but it's a leap for me from being cautious to BELIEVING something is dangerous when there is no hard evidence to suggest it is so.
I did not watch the entire video you linked - I turned it off after 26 mins when I realized she was veiling anecdotes, cherrypicking and misrepresenting studies. She was also cautious in her wording, to her credit, employing phrases like "
may be damaging", "we
think that
possibly..."
The bit I watched was inconclusive, and used graphics and images in highly suggestive but scientifically irrelevant ways. The suggestibility of showing red and orange traces of emf radiation measured on the head of an adult holding a cell phone to their ear is verging on irresponsible. We know they emit radiation, we know we can measure it, the question is whether the quantity, and as she points out the nature (pulsing, information bearing), of the radiation is harmful. Showing a graphic of a test in dangerously suggestive colours with no context whatsoever to an audience of intelligent people is insulting at best and irresponsible at worst. That was just one of many...
Then she cites a study in which they demonstrate that EMF radiation "inhibits the formation and differentiation of neural stem cells during embryonic development in the hippocampus" of mice, without going in to critical details like dose, frequency, pulsing etc. In other words, she conveniently trots out a study to underscore her point that says (in likely high dose) EMF radiation CAN be harmful, which is tantamount to saying and about as conclusive as asserting, in context: HEAT CAN BURN. We already know that in high enough quantities, EMF radiation and RF radiation CAN be harmful. The question is whether the quantity and nature and proximity of use is detrimental with theses devices. Correlating studies that irradiate mice (with unspecified quantities of unspecified em frequencies) with cell phone use, without even bothering with the formality of comparison, is misleading, manipulative and irresponsible.
This is the danger with this type of thing in my opinion: Phds and academics standing in front of audiences and posting on youtube speeches that are highly conjectural, anecdotal, manipulative and quite frankly dishonest (posting pics of her colleague, and his family, who died from brain cancer last year after having had it 16 yrs previous: she posts a pic of him presumably post surgery, then reads the preface he wrote to her book about cell phone radiation, correlating his brain cancer to his cell phone use, but never saying directly that anyone believes, or that it was proved conclusively, that his cell phone use led to a recurrence of brain tumours sixteen years after a pre cell-phone first bout with cancer. Misrepresentative and dishonest. And anecdotal - with all her credentials, she should know better.)
Anyway, I had to turn it off after 26 mins because I found her insinuations and correlations, and yes, manipulations, irritating.
For the record, I am not saying any of these things are not harmful. But I tend to side with the credible research that's out there that indicates it is not, over all the viral, bandwagonning conjecture that it is actually deleterious. For the record also, I mostly text and use facetime almost exclusively when I can, actually speaking with the phone to my head maybe 20 mins a week at most.
Better safe than sorry. Though I do keep my cell phone in my front pocket, but I already have a kid.
Cheers,
JBArk
