- Reaction score
- 13,478
When assessing what is 'safe', 'normal', 'dangerous' etc., please be very careful to refer only to primary sources of peer-reviewed, mainstream scientific studies that are relevant to your situation.
There is an industry built around selling test meters, shielding products etc that ranges from probably-valid-but-maybe-not-very-relevant, to outright quackery and fraud. Being generous, I would say that the industry tends to be out of step with the few reliable, relevant studies that exist. For example, some guidelines from 'EMF practitioners' and safe/unsafe bands marked on test meters are chosen to reflect an 'ideological' approach rather than an evidence-based one. A cynic would observe that the more people whose homes fall into the 'dangerous' band on their gadget, the more shielding products they can sell.
For example, to me as an electrical engineer, classifying >25V/m as 'high-risk' is pretty extreme, but I have the advantage of working with these numbers and units in the real world. I know what 25V/m is like; I could create it accurately in the lab, I could design, build and calibrate an instrument of my own to measure it. As an equivalent example, if I proposed that a turkey weighing 60 kilograms would take 5 minutes to cook, you would tend to distrust my views on cookery because, like most people, you probably have a good general idea about turkeys and ovens; but I fear that is how some of these figures on EM safety read to the engineer.
I cannot stress too highly, when judging the relevance of information on this particular subject, avoid opinions, mine or anyone else's, and take care when assessing the recommendations of anyone who sells 'medical' gadgets. Use proper studies from mainstream science, as their academic rigour is likely to make them infinitely more valuable than a lot of what you will read on the internet.
There is an industry built around selling test meters, shielding products etc that ranges from probably-valid-but-maybe-not-very-relevant, to outright quackery and fraud. Being generous, I would say that the industry tends to be out of step with the few reliable, relevant studies that exist. For example, some guidelines from 'EMF practitioners' and safe/unsafe bands marked on test meters are chosen to reflect an 'ideological' approach rather than an evidence-based one. A cynic would observe that the more people whose homes fall into the 'dangerous' band on their gadget, the more shielding products they can sell.
For example, to me as an electrical engineer, classifying >25V/m as 'high-risk' is pretty extreme, but I have the advantage of working with these numbers and units in the real world. I know what 25V/m is like; I could create it accurately in the lab, I could design, build and calibrate an instrument of my own to measure it. As an equivalent example, if I proposed that a turkey weighing 60 kilograms would take 5 minutes to cook, you would tend to distrust my views on cookery because, like most people, you probably have a good general idea about turkeys and ovens; but I fear that is how some of these figures on EM safety read to the engineer.
I cannot stress too highly, when judging the relevance of information on this particular subject, avoid opinions, mine or anyone else's, and take care when assessing the recommendations of anyone who sells 'medical' gadgets. Use proper studies from mainstream science, as their academic rigour is likely to make them infinitely more valuable than a lot of what you will read on the internet.
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