Monday, March 31, 2008

Say what?

A top (?) cancer researcher suggests that cell phone use is more dangerous than cigarettes, as it may double the risk of brain cancer. Having relatives who've died of lung cancer, and not having relatives who've died of brain cancer, I was skeptical.

Turns out my skepticism was justified. Only about 13000 people die each year in our country from brain cancers and tumors, and over 160,000 people die each year from lung cancer--and this doesn't even count smoking-related deaths from emphysema, heart disease, and so on.

Plus, the relative risk for cell phones is 2.0 or less--generally in the "statistically insigificant" category. For smoking, it's about 40--clearly statistically significant.

I do believe that medical journals used to do a process called "peer review" to figure out "subtle" problems with methodology like this. Evidently that's no longer the case.

4 comments:

Johnny Roosh said...

BB,

Good points and yet I am concerned. I heard from a Doctor friend and client, who sent me the article regarding the doctor that is promoting this idea and he believes there may be merit.

The article does in fact say that the research is currently being peer-reviewed for a publication in a scientific journal.

I'm not saying that this is conclusive, just that I am watching closely to see where this goes.

He does make an interesting point if true: brain tumors typically take more than ten years to develop. As such, enough time has not lapsed since cell phones came into widespread use to in fact see if there is an issue.

In the mean time I have instructed my kids to use the home phone (which is a cell phone) only with a wired earbud headset to be safe.

As for me, I am using a headset as much as possible although my doctor even says to avoid bluetooth, which is at a different albeit higher frequency, but uses much less power.

I will send you the email.

Regards - Roosh

Bike Bubba said...

Just a wee little problem with the hypothesis; the "skin depth" of electromagnetic penetration into the skull at 900MHz or 1.8GHz is less than a millimeter. I'm at a loss to figure how any significant energy actually gets to the brain here. Where's the cause here?

Put another way, they've been doing research into electromagnetic cause & cure of tumors for a couple of decades now, and the net result is....they're still doing research and getting lots of funding dollars, but they have yet to find a statistically tenable cause or cure. (I've got the journal articles to prove it, too)

It could change, but at this point, it's looking an awful lot like a dead end. There are great reasons to use headsets and such--driving & so on--and great reasons to limit the use of any phone. It's going to take a lot of good work, though, to convince me that something real is going on here.

Johnny Roosh said...

Put another way, they've been doing research into electromagnetic cause & cure of tumors for a couple of decades now, and the net result is....they're still doing research and getting lots of funding dollars, but they have yet to find a statistically tenable cause or cure. (I've got the journal articles to prove it, too)

Hey, that sounds like another worldwide crisis we've blogged about ad nauseum doesn't it?

Bike Bubba said...

You got it. Add government to science, and you can have a nice green lawn.