• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Cell Phone Allergy?

rjh01 said:
One way to test this is to have say 10 people in the room, 5 of whom have their phone on, the others have their phone off (anyone who does not have one is given one and told not to look at it to see if it is on or off). If she can tell who has their phone on then you should take her seriously.

If you do this then the 10 people must not know what you are testing. The only person who knows which 5 people have their phone on or off is not in the room when the person who says they can tell is in the room. This makes it close to a double blind study.
Click to expand...

...which will then get handwaved as "oh, I got this so intense headache from a whole 5 phones that I didn't know which direction the pain comes from any more."

IIRC the way that was tested was, pretty much, send one person in whose phone may be on or off, and see if the "allergic" one can tell if it's on or off. ETA: Repeat until you have enough of a sample, obviously.
 
Hydrogen Cyanide said:
I just got a call today from someone who wants to come, but she claimed she had a cell phone allergy and could I ask everyone to turn off their cell phones.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a practical debunk. Tell her you've told everyone to turn their cell phones off. Tell everyone else to leave them on, but to tell her they're off.

Of course, if she figures it out, things could get ugly...

Dave
 
HansMustermann said:
Maybe so, but that's not an "allergy". I'm open to calling it interference, or bad chi, or resonance, or redefine it as ionizing radiation, or really whatever actually makes sense for vibrations or waves. But "allergy" is a very specific term, really.

Basically the beef I have with "EMW allergy" is that it's like saying that my foot is narcoleptic 'cause it fell asleep again. It makes for maybe a funny wisecrack, if told at the right moment and just right, but the scientific meaning of it is nil.
Click to expand...

Interference: No. There are no waveforms in the body in a suitable frequency window for interference.

Bad Chi: No. Explaining a hypothetical phenomena with another hypothetical phenomena is invalid.

Resonance: No. There are no viable resonators in the body in the relevant frequency windows (depite what a certain Roger Coghill tried to claim).

Ionizing radiation: No. That thakes place on an enturely different energy level. Radio waves are NOT ionizing.

You allergy remark: Agree. Technically it cannot be an allegy. 'Hypersensitivity' might be workable, but I expect it is all imaginary.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Interference: No. There are no waveforms in the body in a suitable frequency window for interference.

Bad Chi: No. Explaining a hypothetical phenomena with another hypothetical phenomena is invalid.

Resonance: No. There are no viable resonators in the body in the relevant frequency windows (depite what a certain Roger Coghill tried to claim).

Ionizing radiation: No. That thakes place on an enturely different energy level. Radio waves are NOT ionizing.
Click to expand...

Yes, well, I know all that. But, you know, I'm all for their using an explanation or term that's just stupid, instead of the current one which is completely f-ing stupid. Baby steps. I'm not asking them to go cold turkey on stupidity and jump back on the bandwagon when they get the jitters ;)
 
MRC_Hans said:
And complete nonsense.
Click to expand...
Indubitably.

It might, conceivably be frequency dependent, so that only certain frequency windows would trigger a response, but it must be dose dependent.

Hans
Click to expand...

Personally, I don't believe these people know what they think. They just KNOW it's the EMF. It's the same thinking as vaccines causing autism. The belief persists regardless of evidence or internal contradictions in the claims. By approaching it as a rational claim you lose focus on the self-contradictory nature of the claims. It used to be radar, power lines, microwave ovens, computer screens, now it's mobile phone and wifi. The claims move to whatever is NEW and scary and in the headlines. In fourty years + the anti-EMF folks still haven't produced a single person whose electrosensitivity allows them to tell if an electronic device is switched on or not under controlled conditions.
 
Back in the 70's/80's this got muddled up with limb regrowth and EMF frequencies curing/causing cancer by tapping into the ancient electromagnetic pathways within the body by which the action of every cell is centrally controlled :)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Body-Electric-Robert-O-Becker/dp/0688069711

Unfortunately, the man shut his lab down. It's kind of mad, but it get's quoted uncritically by believers.
 
HansMustermann said:
Yes, well, I know all that. But, you know, I'm all for their using an explanation or term that's just stupid, instead of the current one which is completely f-ing stupid. Baby steps. I'm not asking them to go cold turkey on stupidity and jump back on the bandwagon when they get the jitters ;)
Click to expand...
Well, that may work for you, but I''m an engineer. An electronic engineer, even. I can't even pretend to accept the just stupid explanations, because then it will be "An electronic engineer told me......." ... After which it will be considered gospel.

Strange that whenever people who are actually some sort of authority seem by some stretch of imagination to support some silly hypothesis, it makes it gospel, but all the times we turn them down flatly are just ignored, or ascribed to close mindedness or being bought by [US govt/big pharma/oil producers/NWO].

Selective trust fallacy, anybody? :rolleyes:

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Well, that may work for you, but I''m an engineer. An electronic engineer, even. I can't even pretend to accept the just stupid explanations, because then it will be "An electronic engineer told me......." ... After which it will be considered gospel.

<snip>
Click to expand...

Take note and learn people.

When an electronic engineer says something, it is gospel.

:D
 
I would just respond that I'm allergic to stupid and ask her not to show up.

Well, I wouldn't say it, but I would think it.
 
MRC_Hans said:
...
You allergy remark: Agree. Technically it cannot be an allegy. 'Hypersensitivity' might be workable, but I expect it is all imaginary.

Hans
Click to expand...

I kind of wondered why this woman did not freak when I told her about the radio interference problems in my neighborhood. Certain electronic things that require access to certain radio frequencies just do not work. I just lost wifi a few moments ago, but the router system does adjust better than cordless phones and baby monitors.

Also, I suffer from real allergies. I do break out in a rash if I touch nickel, and right now the ragweed and grasses are driving me nuts. I woke up in the middle of the night because my ears and the inside my throat were itching and I had to take a 4am Benadryl. After getting up this morning I sneezed several times while getting the coffee ready and taking my daytime antihistamine (which are $1/pill, and I really only use them in June and early July). I am hoping that my face does not swell up like it does every other year or so around late June and early July.

I suspect that this woman and the other hypochondriacs who claim to be allergic to cell phones have no idea what real allergies are. I sincerely doubt that being around cell phones has caused her face to get so puffy it was hard to see. Or get hospitalized like my dad when the swelling of his face threatened to suffocate him, his was an allergic reaction to penicillin.

Though it would be nice to have her meet the other woo who told me years ago that my allergies were psychosomatic and a few rounds of NAET (Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Techniques) would fix them right up. She also told me eye exercises would cure my astigmatism and myopia (I have the type that makes it that I had to wear weighted contact lenses, because my eye lens are shaped similarly to a football). Though that woo would probably believe in cell phone allergy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom