Cellphone Radiation Paranoia

May 12, 2006 10:04 AM

I like to carry my cellphone in a cargo pants pocket, on the outside of my body away from vital organs. I believe this is good for my health because the odds of microwaving my kidneys and intestines and all that other good stuff are reduced. Am I being crazy?
posted by clango to health & fitness (36 comments total)

Pretty much. The power put out is very low, and there's tons of ambient EM noise anyway. But, on the list of ways to be crazy, this is completely harmless, so, rock on.
posted by Shutter at 10:07 AM on May 12, 2006

Swedish Study Finds Cell Phone-Brain Tumor Link so maybe, maybe not. Couldn't hurt I guess.
posted by puke & cry at 10:16 AM on May 12, 2006

Here's a recent article with numbers.

In a world where Wi-fi Internet access points, cellphone towers, and who knows what is filling the world with RF, I somehow doubt moving your cellphone to one pocket or another will matter.
posted by y6y6y6 at 10:17 AM on May 12, 2006

well, theres a good and a bad, as far as i see:

good: if there actually is a significant relation to brain cancer (which, as far as i've seen, there is not), you're being proactive.

bad: now the radiation is closer to your balls. can you afford to send a kid to professor xavier's day care center?
posted by Mach5 at 10:17 AM on May 12, 2006

That cargo pants pocket is close to your reproductive organs, however. But, if you don't plan on using them, don't worry. If you do, still don't worry because I doubt you need to (I know I'm not worried). And if you want to worry, just go get the boys frozen.

Sorry to wreck your plans. :-S
posted by shepd at 10:18 AM on May 12, 2006

Being in a cargo pants pocket, the phone probably moves around more as you walk, and could be prone to more damage than if it was packed snuggly against your body.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:20 AM on May 12, 2006

I like to carry my cellphone in a cargo pants pocket, on the outside of my body away from vital organs.

As opposed to...where? Inside your body? In one of your hip pockets, so that by carrying it in a cargo pocket you're increasing your radiation protection by one whole layer of cloth?

I'll have to go with shutter and say "crazy, but harmless".
posted by LionIndex at 10:23 AM on May 12, 2006

Radiation intensity decreases sharply with distance, so don't worry about your balls. You might want to check this out, though. :-)
posted by Decani at 10:52 AM on May 12, 2006

Any danger they may pose is literally nothing compared to other environmental risks. Do it if it makes you feel better, but it's pointless.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:54 AM on May 12, 2006

My cell phone scares me as soon as I come home I immediately take it out of my pocket, or if i have a book bag I always leave it in there, I don't want Tom Green cancer
posted by matimer at 11:01 AM on May 12, 2006

Yay! I was hoping I was crazy. Maybe I can be a Coast to Coast AM guest now.
posted by clango at 11:12 AM on May 12, 2006

the sun causes cancer not cellphones. Have you ever heard of anybody gettin a "phone burn"?

Do you undertand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?
posted by Megafly at 11:18 AM on May 12, 2006

or, Am I being crazy?
posted by clango
Yes, unless you join some sort of class action suit, from which you will become crazy rich. Stranger things have happened. Go for it.
posted by tellurian at 11:20 AM on May 12, 2006

"Do you undertand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?"

Nope, but I'm curious.

I'm less worried about straight-up cancer than I am simple neurological scrambling from pumping electromagnetism through the electrical field which is my brain and body.
posted by clango at 12:28 PM on May 12, 2006

No one should be saying it definitely won't cause problems. For example.
posted by knave at 12:41 PM on May 12, 2006

(Obviously your phone is a weaker signal than the tower in that story, but there are plenty of curious links between high doses of EM radiation and disease. No one should be claiming that it's impossible, that's just not known at this point.)
posted by knave at 12:47 PM on May 12, 2006

Do you understand the difference between a transmitter and a receiver? When the phone is idle in your pocket, it's emitting nothing; it's a receiver. When you answer or make a call, it starts transmitting. That, of course, is the time you're holding it next to your brain.

I recommend not removing the phone from your cargo pocket when making and answering calls. I'd also like you to post some video of yourself using this method.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:23 PM on May 12, 2006

FWIW - at least it's hidden in a pocket somewhere.

So even if phones likely pose no danger, at least you don't look like those douchebags that wear their phones on belt holsters.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 1:38 PM on May 12, 2006

I'm less worried about straight-up cancer than I am simple neurological scrambling from pumping electromagnetism through the electrical field which is my brain and body.

So you think it's possible that a tiny cell phone with a weak battery will scramble your brain? You realize people are fine after MRI, right? You realize that the fields in an MRI are incomprehensibly greater than that of a cell phone's, right? There is nothing but fearmongering and ignorance in most of the answers here.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 1:55 PM on May 12, 2006

Do you understand the difference between a transmitter and a receiver? When the phone is idle in your pocket, it's emitting nothing; it's a receiver. When you answer or make a call, it starts transmitting. That, of course, is the time you're holding it next to your brain.

My understanding of cell phone technology is that this assertion is incorrect. Radiation is coming from the phone pretty much at all times, but is much greater when it is ringing and/or in use.

There's still radiation coming from it even in standby mode. Minor, but relevant backup statement. Another relevant backup statement.

"There's a possibility that we are damaging lymphocyte performance simply by having these phones on standby next to our bodies," he says. -- a more assertive quote.


Basically: Please have open discourse in AskMeFi. Please also make oversights and mistakes as any normal human may do. However, when doing so, please do not set your tone of voice such that you sound like a condescending authority, and are demeaning the person to whom you are replying and "correcting" despite being wrong yourself.
posted by twiggy at 2:33 PM on May 12, 2006

However, when doing so, please do not set your tone of voice such that you sound like a condescending authority, and are demeaning the person to whom you are replying and "correcting" despite being wrong yourself.
posted by twiggy 13 minutes ago

Yes, because nothing says "authority," "trustworthiness," and "neutrality" like a site selling bullshit products to solve a problem that may not even exist.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 2:51 PM on May 12, 2006

Optimus: Whether or not cancer is caused is irrelevant. Whether or not radiation comes from the cell phone in standby mode is relevant.

We don't know whether or not the radiation really causes problems -- but if it does, then it needs to be noted that there is radiation both when the phone is in use and when it is in standby mode.

It is incorrect to state that radiation is only emitted when a call is in progress.

The first site I linked was a .edu if that makes you feel any better. However, since you've made a reasonable argument about the authoritativeness of a source that has a sales agenda, how about a direct quote from the FDA, on a study that says there is not a link to cancer? Even their article says:

The FDA, noting that the low levels of RF energy in wireless phones in use or on standby are similar to that of a microwave oven

Whether or not the radiation causes cancer is up for debate.

Whether or not cell phones emit said radiation even in standby mode is pretty much an established fact.
posted by twiggy at 3:35 PM on May 12, 2006

We don't really need an open discourse when it involves intertaining the wrong answer. As a scientist, I don't have to listen to non-scientific gobbledygook and snake-oil selling fearmongering when it comes to matters that involve decerning whether the science says that cancer from microwave emission from cell phones is possible or not possible.

The only real interaction microwave emissions can have with your body is to heat up the water inside (since this is non-ionizing radiation, nor does it have the power to cause any bond formation/breakage between molecules). Now, your kidneys and intestine couldn't care less about this -- they do just fine at ~37°C and lie deep in your body, where there is a lot of water/mass to absorb whatever small change in temperature there might be. As a male past puberty, however, you might have noticed that your testicles decended from your body and now inhabit a their own sack outside the rest of the mass of your body. The reason they did that? Because human sperm doesn't like to live above ~34°C. So, if you are moving your cell phone closer to them and the cell phone happens to emitting enough energy that it can actually heat anything in your body up, it is worse off to warm your balls than your kidneys.

However, any cargo pants pockets I've ever seen would place the cell phone over your thigh/knee. I'm going to bet that you would get arthritis before anything that a cell phone, in peoples' worst fears can imagine, could cause and thus I'd bet you'd have to replace the knee before anything else happens.
posted by The Bishop of Turkey at 4:08 PM on May 12, 2006

Metafilter: warms your balls.

but seriously, the Bishop here is right. also the phone does emit short bursts of RF when it is in standby mode. how the heck else do you think the cellular network knows how to find the phone (i.e. what cell tower the phone is closest to) when its time to ring it?
posted by joeblough at 8:07 PM on May 12, 2006

I think what people are generally worried about is the radiation given off while the phone is in use not while it's idle.

So without making a judgment about the medical effects of cellphone radiation, it still seems rather pointless.
posted by delmoi at 10:36 PM on May 12, 2006

We don't know whether or not the radiation really causes problems -- but if it does, then it needs to be noted that there is radiation both when the phone is in use and when it is in standby mode.

Lightbulbs emit radiation. I don't think the amount of radiation put out by idle phones would be any different then that put out by a watch or a camera or a gameboy or whatever. Obviously any electronic gizmo is going to put out some EM as long as electricity is going through it, but when people say they're worried about "Cell Phone radiation" it's pretty clear they mean the stuff that comes out of the phone while you're talking.

And yeah, it's just microwaves, so why worry?
posted by delmoi at 10:41 PM on May 12, 2006

"... Am I being crazy?"
posted by clango to health (26 comments total) [+ add to favorites] [!]

Yes, you are.

Well, that's the considered answer of this commercially licensed radio engineer. I get this cell phone thing all the time, though, and while I do my bit to promote sanity, I look at it like UFO mania, and realize it's never going away, any more than UFO sightings are going to cease. But here's the real deal:

If the cell phone network could cause people any kind of health problems, we'd have known about it, big time, well before there even was a cell phone network, at least by 1965, and we wouldn't have built a cell network. The reason for that, is that by the mid '60's, AT&T had mostly constructed a nationwide network of high power microwave relay towers that were putting many times the amount of microwave energy that cell phones ever do into the brains of most of the North American city dwelling population, as a normal means of operation. There were dozens of these things in every metropolitan area, and any city with a building greater than 5 or 6 stories, probably had rooftop microwave dishes installed too. The transmitters for the biggest horns were basically huge magnetrons, with up to 50,000 watt output, and fed the big cast aluminum cavity horns which provided considerable gain. The net effect was that they were fairly effective at cooking pigeons that tried to roost on the towers or the horn antenna elements, by deep heating of the bird's bodies, as noted by previous posters upthread. But they were remarkably ineffective at inducing cancer, either in birds or people.

Hundreds of millions of Americans each got years and years of individual exposure, in the largest test of the health effects of microwave radiation on humans ever conducted. The one observable effect of this on the population at large? Phone calls became massively cheaper, and much clearer.

Seriously, if there were any danger to the radiation put out by cell phones, we'd have cooked your mother's brain, and sterilized your father, long ago...
posted by paulsc at 4:37 AM on May 13, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Well, if cellphone radiation really is like microwave radiation, I'm relieved. The *only* danger a microwave has ever proven to cause is a risk of cataracts with extended extreme exposure. Scientists have locked animals in large kilowatt microwave chambers and all that happens is they come out warm if they aren't exposed for days on end. The same experiment has been tried on humans, even the researcher herself used the chamber to warm herself up.

Yes, I'm serious.
posted by shepd at 8:56 AM on May 13, 2006

paulsc: Just to play devil's advocate here... You're saying "if it caused anything, we'd know by now"...

First of all: It's not the towers people are really talking about. You're kind of making a straw man argument here by changing to the towers from the phones. What people are really worried about is the RF radiation from the phones, not the towers.

Another interesting point of note:

I'm not by any means saying the cause for this is those old microwave cell towers, but: It's recently been written that Americans are much, much sicker than their English counterparts...

No cause has come from the study, but if we're just seeing now in May of 2006 that middle aged Americans are sick much more often than comparable aged Englishmen, who's to say we've done enough studies on health to assess any affects of the microwave towers that have been around so long?


At the end of the day, I'll repeat yet again that I have no idea whether we should be worried or not. However, I do think with relative certainty that definitive evidence either way is lacking.
posted by twiggy at 9:00 AM on May 13, 2006

You're kind of making a straw man argument here by changing to the towers from the phones. What people are really worried about is the RF radiation from the phones, not the towers.

If I throw a pea at you, and it doesn't kill you, it's safe to say that throwing a speck of dust at you also will not kill you.

Also, Britain has cell phones.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:05 AM on May 13, 2006

If I throw a pea at you, and it doesn't kill you, it's safe to say that throwing a speck of dust at you also will not kill you.

Not a fair comparison. Radio waves and radiation have not only different strengths, but different types and frequencies. These may be even more important in determining potential harm to human cells than strength. In fact they are almost undoubtedly more important.

Look at the difference between voltage and amperage in electricity, for example, and how they affect a human.

Also, Britain has cell phones.

I could be wrong on this, but so far as anything I have read:

Britain did not, however, have these old school crazy-ass high powered microwave towers. They adopted mobile phone technology much later than us, and didn't go through this first generation(s) of high powered microwave towers that we did.

Still - on that particular nitpick I was just playing devil's advocate because I don't like to see postulation stated as outright fact "because I'm an expert". I'm not out to say that that's why we're sicker than them. More to say "I respect that you're a radio engineer, but perhaps you haven't thought of X Y and Z because you are not also a doctor"...
posted by twiggy at 11:08 AM on May 13, 2006

Not a fair comparison. Radio waves and radiation have not only different strengths, but different types and frequencies. These may be even more important in determining potential harm to human cells than strength. In fact they are almost undoubtedly more important.

That's a fair critique. However, my point is that the power of a cell phone is miniscule, and that I do not know of any mechanism by which cell phone radiation could damage human cells in a significant way.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:29 AM on May 13, 2006

Actually, the pea and dust metaphor is fair as that is pretty much the difference between x-ray/gamma/UV radiation and microwave/RF. X-rays and gamma rays directly interact with molecules, ionizing them and forming free radicals and breaking bonds. Effectively, they punch through and rip the hell out of cells. UV light happens to have enough energy/the right wavelenght still to cause improper bond formation (from the standpoint of an organism) between nucleotides in DNA and this can lead to faulty repair of the DNA, mutations, and cancer. The way microwave energy works is to cause molecules that have a dipole (like water) to flip back and forth trying to align themselves to a changing EM field and this is movement converted to heat. That is it -- heat. Too much heat is bad, but it really doesn't matter what the source is. Microwaves do not have any interaction with molecules other than this because of their frequency/energy.

The energy/strength that x-rays, gamma rays, UV, microwaves, and radio have is directly related to their frequency -- in fact, that is what characterizes them as x-ray/gamma/UV/visible/microwave. And microwave radiation is less powerful than visible light, much less x-rays/gamma. Unless you are the Green Lantern, you've got nothing to worry about above the UV bands (provided you aren't standing in a microwave magnetron that boils you alive).

To say this is anything like voltage and amperage shows that you have no fucking idea of what the hell you are talking about. This is why you leave it to the experts.
posted by The Bishop of Turkey at 12:53 PM on May 13, 2006

To say this is anything like voltage and amperage shows that you have no fucking idea of what the hell you are talking about. This is why you leave it to the experts.

a) You don't have to be such a dick in your response. The person I responded to quite politely responded to me, so I don't think I said anything rude that merited such a response.

b) Explanation of voltage/amperage analogy: It actually makes sense, and I actually have an idea of what I'm talking about. The point of the analogy was that you can't just look one aspect of something to determine its harmfulness. In the case of electricity, you can't just look at voltage. With a Van Der Graaf generator, for example, you can generate a shitload of voltage but very little amperage -- this is safe for a person to mess around with and it's highly unlikely he or she will be seriously injured even if there's a screwup. High amperage, however, can easily kill a person.

c) If you're so incredibly sure of yourself "because you're an expert and everyone should just leave it to you", then why is there so much research going on in the field on both ends of the spectrum? Furthermore, why is most if not all of the research coming out saying "cell phones don't cause any health problems" funded by cell phone companies, but without a doubt ALL of those studies saying they do cause problems are not funded by cell phone companies?


Sorry. "I'm an expert so listen to me" isn't enough. It's still an issue that's up in the air and hasn't been 100% answered yet no matter how assertive you sound and no matter how much of a jerk you are in your condescending response about how I "have no fucking idea what the hell I'm talking about and should leave it to the experts".
posted by twiggy at 12:56 AM on May 14, 2006

twiggy, no snark intended, but really, with hundreds of millions of people around the world using cell systems daily, and microwave systems of far greater field strength capabilities having been in use now for nearly half a century, the evidence for the biological safety of microwave communication systems is way past just overwhelming.

The point of my story up thread was simply to demonstrate that microwave energy, even at intensities well beyond what any component of a cell system, including handsets can generate has been historically demonstrated, over decades, and over large population samples, to be nil. So, if there were somehow, some inexplicably obscure danger to be yet found in the use of cell phone systems, I guess we're agreed then it wouldn't be due to microwave emissions, right? Because the science for making that contention is settled, to the contrary, way past any "reasonable man" standard of proof.

So, if there is some obscure danger to using cellular handsets, yet hundreds of millions of people use them, worldwide, daily, and have now, for more than the 10 years that modern digital cellular systems have been deployed, where is the record of damages? Where are the ER rooms full of people with burned tissue, cancers of no other possible explanation, or deformed progeny? The fact is, with hundreds of millions of man hours of use per day being recorded, there's just no corresponding epidemic of linkable health problems showing up, worldwide.

At this point, because of the incredible growth and popularity worldwide of cell systems, if you are going to make a compelling case for heretofore unknown damages, you are going to have to light a fire under the investigators, since to be statistically significant, they are going to have find a minimum of thousands of identical, reproducible human damage cases to get any attention. Small numbers of cases just aren't going to tip the scales in population studies, for a technology already so widely adopted, and so far as I can find, there are no studies anywhere turning up thousands and thousands of people undeniably damaged by cell phone use.

Given the demonstrated broad, and even life saving benefits of cellular technology, the risk/benefit case is settled, for most of humanity, in about the same proportion as the dangers of UFO activities. But nobody is keeping you from making your case, so long as the rest of us aren't compelled to listen indefinitely to those of you with irrational fears, looking to "debate"... Or fund, through taxes, quasi-scientific "studies" looking for problems that just aren't there.

Put up 10,000 unequivocal damage cases, out of hundreds of millions of daily users, if you can, or accept the conventional wisdom that cell systems are "safe." I'm ready to believe in cell phone cancer and UFOs, if you've got the evidence...
posted by paulsc at 2:04 AM on May 14, 2006

I was a dick about it because I am tired of the "I don't care if you are an expert" sort of attitude. I have had to deal with too many people who think that their common sense trumps years of studying and knowledge of a subject.

And just like paulsc says, funded study does not equal valid science/threat. The reason so much money is poured into this area is because people are so scared by the word "radiation" and don't seem to be willing to learn what it really means.
posted by The Bishop of Turkey at 7:42 AM on May 14, 2006