Electrosensitivity "All in the mind"

[vbloke]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6914492.stm

Mobile phone masts are not responsible for the symptoms of ill health some blame them for, a major UK study says.

Dozens of people who believed the masts trigger symptoms such as anxiety, nausea and tiredness could not detect if signals were on or off in trials.
But when they thought the signal was on they reported more distress, suggesting the problem has a psychological basis.

[Araneus]

Well, duh.

Of course, the bleevers always have their excuse:

But Mast Sanity, a lobby group which believes masts are responsible for ill health said the results of the survey were skewed by the fact that 12 of the potentially most sensitive people had dropped out.

"History has shown that many now commonly accepted physical conditions were initially dismissed as psychological," said spokeswoman Yasmin Skelt.

"Isn't it time that the government woke up to the reality of electrosensitivity instead of attempting to persuade sufferers that it is all in their minds?"

In other words -- "damn the evidence, reality is how we say it is!".

[Dr B]

Great link......

[Cuddles]

Mast Sanity

I nominate this for most ironic name of the year.

[FarSideOfTheMoon]

Saw this on the news at lunchtime. They had a mad woman out on the street who had a copper mesh net thing over her head. The reporter wwas trying not to laugh as he interviewed her.

Complete madness - recommend trying to catch it on the news tonight, I think it was BBC.

[666]

... copper mesh net thing ...

Saw that. The woman looked like a bee-keeper.

[Araneus]

Reading some of the comments on other news sites it appears that there is a certain amount of confusion regarding what this study shows.

Most importantly, it does not prove anything about whether mobile phone masts are dangerous, i.e. have a negative impact on human health in the short or long terms. This is not a result that could be proven in a double-blind test, which only measures the ability to detect something, not whether it affects the body in other ways.

What it does demonstrate is that a large number of people (possibly all of them) who claim to be suffering symptoms from phone masts are not actually being affected by the EM radiation itself, but by the psychological belief that the radiation is harmful.

[Admin]

I agree Araneus.

It shows that those who think their health is being severely affected electromagnetic waves are most likely somatizers as they can't actually tell whether EM waves are present.

It doesn't say anything about the long term effects of EM waves (although there's no good reason to believe they're harmful).

So, those running around with aluminium foil beanies on their heads are mistaken.

This doesn't mean they don't suffer symptoms, just that EM waves don't cause them (!)

[Lord Muck oGentry]

Here is a link to the Mast Sanity site

http://www.mastsanity.org/

which links in turn to the study itself.

Can someone help me understand what point Mast Sanity is making ( or thinks it is making) when it complains about the withdrawal of the volunteers who fell ill? I am, frankly, puzzled.

[Admin]

Well, it's clearly not a professionally produced website. Actually, it looks like a blog.

I've only read the first few sentences and already there are crass spelling mistakes and an abundance of logical fallacies.

I've downloaded the full study and will have a look tomorrow and compare what's in the study to what this, obviously impartial , group/person has to say about it.

[Lord Muck oGentry]

You're a glutton for punishment, John. :-) Many thanks.

[Dr B]

As a side point - even magentic fields that can have biological effects - only exert those effects under very specific circumstances.

You can take a magnetic field known to elicit neuronal responses in the brain (not necessarily detectable by the person though) and 'play' it for short durations or alter its temporal parameters a bit and hey-presto - no neuronal effect.

Effects that do exist in more scientific literature (for magnetic fields not phone masts) - appear to occur under very specific conditions.

I would be interested to see if anyone has measured the response biases of these electrosensitive people across a range of tasks to see how generic the effect of suggestion is - or whether it is specific to certain beliefs. :-\

[Araneus]

Can someone help me understand what point Mast Sanity is making ( or thinks it is making) when it complains about the withdrawal of the volunteers who fell ill? I am, frankly, puzzled.

Certainly, their point is "We know that radio waves from masts cause symptoms, and any scientific study that claims otherwise must be critically flawed. Obviously in this case the flaw was that 12 people dropped out of the study, and we Just Know that these 12 people would have detected the radio waves if they had remained in the experiment."

It's just the standard woo-woo technique of looking for something -- anything -- which would allow them to continue with their beliefs (which in this case is totally unnecessary anyway, since the study did not test 100% of the population and it is perfectly possible that everybody in the world apart from this sample is electrosensitive).

[Lord Muck oGentry]

Certainly, their point is "We know that radio waves from masts cause symptoms, and any scientific study that claims otherwise must be critically flawed. Obviously in this case the flaw was that 12 people dropped out of the study, and we Just Know that these 12 people would have detected the radio waves if they had remained in the experiment."

That was my impression too. But I thought I'd better ask, just in case someone had seen something to the point amid the ranting. Getting far too charitable in my dotage...

[dalriada]