Left-sided Cancer: Blame your bed and TV? (2010)
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Anyone have a link to the actual paper? I want to see the field strength readings they took above mattresses in real urban environments. If this were true then there would be an absolute epidemic of cancer within 1/2 mile of TV transmitters, where the field strength might actually be meaningful.
Aside from that, this article/paper goes to tortuous lengths to avoid the most obvious difference between Japan and the west (especially US): Diet.
I’m not going to bother doing antenna math to check their hypothesis, but that’s idiotic. We’re all sleeping on inner coil mattresses, all experiencing the same background EMF, and all have the same coil size and geometry so that, what, we get a bright node of a standing wave hovering over our beds in the same place?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ll have heard this month, unless my visiting family starts talking politics.
> 75 centimeters above the mattress in the middle of our bodies.
It’s amazing to me how little people know how difficult it is to get studies done and how expensive they actually are. And if the study has no profit outcome, you can make that 10 times as hard.
Foam mattress manufacturers?
People likely sleep on the side that causes least muscular tension in their body.
People tend to have a pelvis that is turned slightly to the left (something referred to as the "left aic, right bc pattern") this due to a combination of factors stemming from internal asymmetry, like the liver giving support to the diaphragm on one side, which effects how we use our muscles to breathe. With time many of our movement patterns become slightly asymmetric to make breathing more efficient.
This asymmetry is likely the main contributing factor in the dominance of right side sleeping.
They also annoyingly skip over whether or not Japanese commonly sleep on their sides, because I suspect that could have a larger affect than any miniscule electromagnetic standing waves on some springs. If you've ever slept on a futon, you will know they are far less squishy, they are plenty comfortable, but do not deform as much, so you are more likely to end up sleeping on your back.
Sleeping on your side could cause increased compression of soft tissue due to less equally distributed weight, especially on the hips and arms, which affects blood circulation, which can cause tissue damage, which can cause cancer (especially when the damage is chronic).
... but that's just a tiny seed of a theory, there are so many co factors with cancer, and comparing accross entirely different cultures it's basically impossible to tell anything from some correlation. Another huge area that massively affects cancer and pretty much all disease is diet, and the common western diet is far from healthy compared to Asian diets.
and UV imaging of drivers faces commonly reveals
large difference in UV skin damage on the driver side
Auto glass blocks a significant amount of UV radiation, and one certainly doesn't see people walking around with lopsided facial tans.
It seems to me that for a significant amount of UV light to reach the side of a driver's face:
- the sun would have to be rather low in the sky (at which point a significant portion of UV radiation is blocked by atmospheric scattering anyway)
- the window would have to be rolled down
- the car would need to be traveling in a specific heading (if the sun is low in the western sky, the driver would need to be traveling north in order to have significant exposure)
Anecdotally, I just don't see many people driving with their arms hanging out of the window, or even with the windows down any more. Cars are all sealed up and climate-controlled these days.
Also anecdotally, I don't see people walking around with lopsided tans, although I realize we're talking about small differences here.
Also worth noting that auto glass blocks a significant portion of UV rays.
From the article:
Stranger still, melanoma most commonly
affects the hip, thighs and trunk, which
are areas of the body protected from the
sun.
I'm no doctor, but I wondered if metastasis via the lymphatic system might be a possible explanation. From my utterly cursory search, I get the impression that the lymphatic network is a common route of metastasis, but while it might spread melanoma from the arm to the trunk (and perhaps preferentially to the same side), it seems to go the wrong way to be the vector from there to the hips and thighs. There's also the question of whether a melanoma that has spread to the lymph nodes is still counted as an instance of melanoma, and the most I can say about that is that one paper I skimmed seemed to be using the term in that manner.
It seems the proposed mechanism is completely testable. How much stronger are RF signals just above a bed than in free air?
I would have thought that if these cancers were more likely due to higher strength RF fields, there would be a very strong correlation between distance to transmission tower and cancer incidence. RF power drops off with the inverse square of distance - there's only so much an antenna (intentional or otherwise) can do to increase power density. You'd expect a similar effect from living a bit closer to the transmitter. Did they ever study that?
Edit: I found a paper by the original author. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730314/
It looks like nonsense. They're making a very broad correlation between cancer incidences and the number of FM transmitters, and then deciding that it must be the cause. There's no actual evidence that mattresses amplify radio signals and no measurement of power density. They also seemingly attribute lung cancer incidence to the same cause - despite the very well documented rise of smoking in the mid to late 20th century. There's some real gems in the conclusion:
> "the main conclusion is that the melanoma epidemic is a result of the modern man-made environment that forces us to live and sleep in invisible but still unhealthy electromagnetic smog."
> "stand up to the strong economic interests that rather want us to continue buying expensive spring beds, "
> "One is to make an enquiry among still smoking and still healthy elderly (80+) about their use of metal spring mattresses to compare that with standard beds among lung cancer patients."
I wonder if the author smokes and doesn't want to quit?
Here is an example:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trucker-accumulates-skin-damage...
Stranger still, melanoma most commonly
affects the hip, thighs and trunk, which
are areas of the body protected from the
sun.
Also, given the colder climate, how many Swedish drivers drive with their bare arms hanging out of the window?
The article says damage is caused by UVB (not UVA which is blocked by glass)
Edit: I am wrong! UVB is blocked by glass
Unlikely. However, that observation is consistent with the idea that a moderate/healthy amount of sunlight damages just enough of your DNA/tissues to trigger repair pathways that ultimately protect against cancer.
The blog fails to answer the most basic question: do right-side sleepers with a metal bedframe aligned with a radio tower have a higher incidence of left-side cancers that can explain the general population discrepancy?
So if anyone can find a survey of cancer rates in MRI technologists, that would be helpful. Twenty seconds of Google exhausted my patience.
And The typical MRI worker is not commonly in the magnet room during scanning; therefore she is only occasionally exposed to gradient or radiofrequency fields.
Plus, there are several regulations regarding exposure to fields from MRIs.
So this is comparing apples to bumblebees as far as health risks go.
The goal of the MRI machine is to make the patient's body emit radio waves, which are then measured. Obviously there is some RF going on! (This corresponds to a spatial Fourier transform etc.)
And while it might not seem "often" to you, it's worth considering that the RF levels in the room are enough that we care about tissue heating and sparks on nonmagnetic conductors. This is many thousands of times stronger than a TV signal. There are many cases where the patients require "assistance", which is used in roughly the same sense that cats require assistance in taking a shower. Then there are spectrometrists and so forth — not every MRI is like the one you get as an outpatient with a broken leg.
While most of the workers are well shielded from the room, but people have to be extra careful to not microwave heat your patient to much (usually +1C hotter). But don't worry too much, there's a SAR limit on it.
Most of the RF components, equipment, including our phones, are all strictly regulated by SAR (specific absorption rate). Each of them might be safe, but if you are having too many of them around you can be a problem (?).
UV radiation is non-ionizing and causes cancer. End of debate.
But RF doesn't do any cool stuff like that. The only interesting bit is that some cellular structures may be of comparable size to the wavelength. But the conductivity of tissue — even myelinated neurons — is poor. Attempts to generate non-thermal microwave effects by literally putting stuff in microwaves has mostly failed, so we are left with this mesoscale hoodoo.
Sounds like too many combined inference leaps to me.
Snopes has a solid write up on how badly that author fucked it up. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coil-mattresses-cause-canc...
You might wonder how a magnifying glass can ignite paper, why a satellite dish on the side of a house is a dish, how a solar cooker works, why a radio telescope works, or how a roof can turn trickles of rain water into a powerful stream coming out of a drain, all of them unpowered, all of them not needing powered amplifying to have an effect.
> "despite having no similarity in form"
When you get into bed, your weight curves the bed springs with you at the centre of a dish-shape. Is that not a similarity in form? If you want to go down that route, this image of bed pressure points[1] shows the most weight and curvature around the hips and thighs, areas the article claims are most affected by melanoma, and less curvature around the legs, neck, head.
I am not making the claim that this is connected or significant, I am wondering how you can think that bedsprings don't curve around a person?
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1f/fd/bb/1ffdbbfebfd1f54804b9...