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Comment by txmachinery | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and do you know the difference between science and conjecture? Practice and theory?

Done any research into people who are medically hyper-sensitive, sometimes at the milliwatt level, to RF energy?

Is it possible that the cumulative effects of compounded milliwatts could potentially have harmful effects, that have yet to be sufficiently studied or understood?

Maybe.

I'm not at all suggesting there is a massive conspiracy to do whatever to everyone by deploying 5G or Wifi or whatever else. But I am saying that "move fast and break things" is an irresponsible modus operandi when the things might be us.

The race for faster and make more money does NOT have a good history of safety for us, nor the planet. Proceed with caution, and value those who doubt. What have you got to lose? Your Netflix buffering 2 seconds faster?

And you think I'm crazy?

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research into people who are medically hyper-sensitive

There has been research - these people don't exist.

https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-hea...

> research into people who are medically hyper-sensitive

> There has been research - these people don't exist.

OTOH, RF reception through dental fillings or bridgework is a bit more plausible.

Or they do, are rare, and haven't yet been reliably identified: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31640707/

The fact that the "new name" (IEI) seems to ignore/discredit the primary claims of the sufferers at the outset, and that a multi-billion (trillion?) dollar industry would somewhat prefer these people don't exist, I remain skeptical of recent studies. (A view no doubt also biased by personal experience.)

That older studies show the effect, and newer ones don't isn't a smoking gun, but it is a cause for skepticism.

At least, one thing almost all studies agree on is "more research is required".

Your link does not support that - whilst it admits the possibility that the effects "must be very weak or affect only few individuals" it does not suggest that "more research is required", and suggests that other environmental factors or the nocebo effect is to blame. I read the last sentence of the conclusion as suggesting that researchers stop wasting their time with false reports due to poor experimental setup.

You have the need for scepticism round the wrong way. Scepticism is needed when dealing with claims that some humans can detect radio frequencies, despite no single human that has been tested being able to demonstrate such a skill, and no proposed mechanism for how this should be possible.

As I explained, most of the research indicating positive results is old (meaning before the 70's). Though there were some in the 90's (eg, William Rea et al. https://eloverkanslig.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/William... )

But set that aside that for a moment. Consider that it's well-established that EMF can and does affect human tissue, and it's also well-established that some humans are extraordinarily sensitive and susceptible to harm from tiny doses of just about anything you can name (versus "normal" people who aren't).

Therefore, I have no idea why ordinarily intelligent people will readily believe EMF/RF hypersensitivity to be completely impossible.

For often-overlooked background in EMF research and health effects, here is a comprehensive list of 2300 (pre-70's) studies: https://www.emfanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Naval...

You might also consider US NTP's study on cellphone radiation.

My mother claimed to be sensitive to WiFi and feel sick when it’s on. She would often power it off and claim she felt better. My sister lived with her at the time and when I visited, complained she could not use the Internet most of the time. So I hid the station ID but left it on. Told mom the WiFi is off on the router.

Guess what? She stopped complaining about feeling it or feeling sick from it. I don’t know if she eventually found out it was on the whole time (from my sister), but she now uses WiFi herself and has even asked me to help fix it when it was down.

Perhaps some people are just sensitive to SSID broadcasting? ;)

I can well understand this being true. Without discounting it, I've also had roughly equivalent, but opposite experiences, with flight mode and sleep.

> Is it possible that the cumulative effects of compounded milliwatts could potentially have harmful effects, that have yet to be sufficiently studied or understood?

Yes. It's possible but isn't the general understanding that it's extremely unlikely?

Many, many things are possible but some criteria has to be applied to decide which ones we can spend time on investigating. Werewolf research is currently massively underfunded for good reason.

Yes, I would generally agree. But I think it's fine, and justified to investigate the (many) claims of EMF sensitivity. People having a seizure because they walked past someone eating peanuts may have seemed insane when it first came about, and while I have no idea of the history, it's easy to imagine that nut may have been cracked only finally by someone crazy enough to hypothesize such a thing. I have a friend who will die if their partner kisses them after drinking a glass of milk - the human body can at times decide to do extremely counterproductive things based on things ordinarily considered "safe".

(I love the werewolf research line, definitely stealing that for when I'm on the other side of this argument.)

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