Mother Blames Wi-Fi Allergy For Daughter's Suicide (telegraph.co.uk) 503
An anonymous reader sends news that a UK woman named Debra Fry has begun a campaign to raise awareness for "electro-hypersensitivity" (EHS) after the suicide of her daughter, Jenny, earlier this year. Fry says her daughter was allergic to Wi-Fi, and blames Jenny's school for not removing wireless routers and other networking equipment. A 2005 report from the World Health Organization said, "EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem." School officials were firm in declining to remove the equipment without solid evidence supporting Fry's claims. A public health official said, "The overall scientific evidence does not support the suggestion that such exposure causes acute symptoms or that some people are able to detect radiofrequency fields. Nevertheless effective treatments need to be found for these symptoms."
Where did I see this?.... Better Call Saul (Score:3, Informative)
Funny how reality and fiction sometimes intersect, seems like a tragic episode of Better Call Saul, where Jimmy's brother has electromagnetic hypersensitivity.. Is this even such a thing.. .curious
Re:Where did I see this?.... Better Call Saul (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this even such a thing.. .curious
Hypochondria is a real illness recognized in the DSM-IV. As far as anyone has ever proven scientifically, "EHS" is a fancy term with absolutely no real evidence. More or less like people who claim wind power makes them sick, it seems to come and go based on whether the victim believes the device is present and turned on. Which is very much like hypochondria...
Unfortunately, tell people their disease is mental, not physical and they are insulted and rage. When in fact mental diseases are real and certainly FEEL real to the person suffering from them. I find it far more likely that our brain can suffer from "idea viruses" that it takes far too seriously, than somehow our body is reacting to radio waves, when those same waves are, and have always been, present from our favorite daystar (and to a much lesser degree, all the other daystars shining at us).
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The National Radio Quiet Zone in WV is to protect the Green Bank radio telescope, and has nothing to do with Nonexistent WiFi Allergy Syndrome.
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Henry Rollins' character goes off on a rant about omnipresent consumer electronics and their fields causing all their health problems in Johnny Mnemonic from 1995.
In the world of Johnny Mnemonic, they have wetware (which is pretty much the whole point), so his rant actually made sense. There’s a difference between our current situation and the one in which these electronic devices are physically embedded into the brain.
Who needed help here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad story, a mothers crazy notions about what was causing her daughters illness, leads daughter to assume its true. Kids trust their parents about these things. There is very little difference between a real medical condition and one you believe you are having. The school though, should have looked into getting both of them psychological help.
Re:Who needed help here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who needed help here? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not a school's responsibility to provide or obtain medical or psychiatric help for parents.
Re:Who needed help here? (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree. In loco parentis [wikipedia.org] allows a school to consider the well-being of the student in a role normally reserved for a parent or other guardian. If a school considers a student's home life to be dangerous, they can intervene with a number of methods, some of which may include medical, psychological, or emotional treatment of a parent.
But I'm guessing that your implied distaste of the "nanny state" will lead you to ignore any actual facts presented, and you would rather this girl die due to a shitty home life than the state act in any way at all.
In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Daughter kills herself, mother wants to blame everyone but herself.
If the mother really believed in the condition, why wasn't she home schooling the daughter after the school refused to remove the equipment on a whim? Also, what the hell did they do about their neighbours etc and why did the daughter have a mobile phone?! Did the creators of the 802.11 spec magically choose the single frequency that affected this girl, among all the billions of others?
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Funny)
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Homeopathy beat you to it.
It's modeled after homeopathy, but for electromagnetic waves. Basically, I was talking about putting bottle of water next to a radio tuned to static for an hour. I'll be rich!
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Funny)
Since this therapy is building up a resistance to electromagnetism, you can call it Ohmeopathy.
My agent should be contacting you shortly to discuss my royalty fee structure. Thank you.
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Since this therapy is building up a resistance to electromagnetism, you can call it Ohmeopathy.
My agent should be contacting you shortly to discuss my royalty fee structure. Thank you.
You can have 1/1000th of a cent for every dollar I make. It's ok though, it still remembers being a dollar so it's worth just as much.
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Home schooling in the United Kingdom is way and I mean *WAY* more difficult that in the USA. If you are not a qualified teacher you are onto a no hopper to begin with because you will have to be inspected by Ofsted and you will fail otherwise. By the time you get to secondary school level meet the curriculum requirements is nigh on impossible for home schooling.
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Sorry, that sounds convincing since we're a nation of whipped puppies, but its not true. You don't have to follow the national curriculum - https://www.gov.uk/home-educat... [www.gov.uk] (and I'm fairly sure you don't have to be inspected by Ofsted).
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I mean, they are on different bands. If you think the idea of a wifi allergy is realistic, it wouldn't necessarily extend to all radiation- she's not allergic to 3G, obviously. People who have these nonsense allergies are experiencing real symptoms, they just aren't caused physically by the wifi (or whatever).
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800MHz-2000MHz is not very different from 2400MHz.
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Not sure why you say that. We're reasonably certain that these so-called Wi-fi "allergies" are completely bogus. However, if they were real, the most likely cause would be a feedback loop of neurons amplifying a signal, in which the length of some portion of that loop was of the right length to tune a particular frequency. So if a Wi-Fi allergy could actually exist, then it almost certainly would be frequency-sensitive. But again, Wi-Fi allergy claims consistently fail to stand up to testing, making th
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> We're reasonably certain that these so-called Wi-fi "allergies" are completely bogus.
No, we are sure that they are not related to wifi or radio. The symptoms experienced by these people are completely real. If you put them in a room that they believe has active wifi, they will experience symptoms. Put them in a room that they believe does not have active wifi, they will not experience symptoms. Some of the symptoms you can verify the existence of materially. But of course, it has nothing to do wi
I have the opposite problem (Score:5, Funny)
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That's odd. When my WiFi goes down, everyone else seems to get happier.
Re:I have the opposite problem (Score:5, Funny)
Whenever my WiFi goes down I feel sad and depressed.
Yeah, you need to save some porn to your hard drive to get you through those times.
Re:I have the opposite problem (Score:5, Interesting)
You joke, I know, but perhaps this is really some social situation that nobody knows about, some kind of cyberbullying that she was exposed to that gave her such emotional anxiety that it produced physical symptoms.
The "wifi" connection could have been that the bullying was most intense where the people doing the bullying were together and had good network connectivity, which turned out to be at school.
Perhaps mom was never aware of it or daughter never was able to consciously face it, and once the anxiety and pain could be transferred to blaming the wifi signals, the daughter and the mom made that their focus and whatever was the real cause got buried or forgotten.
Obviously this is just a guess, but there has to be some other explanation besides EMF.
Re:I have the opposite problem (Score:5, Funny)
Last night, I thought my wife was asleep and I went about upgrading our router's firmware. Turns out she was watching Hulu. I can confirm that my wife also suffers from a Lack-of-Wifi allergy. No WiFi made her really cranky. I think it's contagious too because the longer the router was down (I encountered difficulties bringing it back up after the firmware upgrade), the crankier I got as well. All of the symptoms went away once the router worked again and the WiFi came back on.
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You don't have redundant network infrastructure? What kind of a monster are you?
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I know, right? My only non-redundant point of failure is the DSL modem, and I have a couple of cold standbys configured.
I kind of wish I was kidding about that, honestly.
Denial (Score:2)
No, it has to be the Wi-Fi. It couldn't possibly have been the fact that the mother was a psychotic idiot who made her daughters life a living hell.
wifi allergy? (Score:3)
are wifi allergies this decades morgellans?
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i dont know what those are.
Tin hat (Score:2)
Sadly, this mother should have had invested in a tin hat. She should have also removed all cellular phones form the house, wrapped it in a Faraday cage, and removed any televisions, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, computers, really anything with an inductor. In addition I would suggest that she consider joining an Amish community. I won't argue with her that large amounts of electro-magnetic energy can not affect the brain. However to call it an allergy, where the body attacks itself due to an external ir
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That one causes skin cancer.
Convenient blame bandwagon (Score:2)
Despite there being no supporting evidence, this seems to be a favourite thing to blame at the moment. And while it's easy to disregard this as nonsense we have a woman who is clearly upset over losing her daughter. Perhaps there is not a shred of scientific evidence over WiFi being a cause but there was obviously something very real causing her daughter distress and she would be better campaigning for _that_ to be properly investigated.
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Yeah, this looks to be an emerging circle-jerk not unlike those found amongst the vaccine and chemtrails nutters.
Cell phone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet the article says she texted friends. A cell phone is much more powerful than wifi...
Sad. But probably not caused by wifi.
I blame bad genes... (Score:2)
Because the daughter obviously has precedent of mental illness in her immediate family.
Familiar story for my family, alas. (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone in my extended family had severe bipolar disorder which included hallucinations. As she became better medicated, she tried her best to grasp the difference between reality and what was going on in her bastard brain. Know what didn't help, though? Her mother upholding the belief that she had some sort of mystical connection to spirits. I couldn't give a fuck whether people have woowoo beliefs, but surely even someone engaged in woowoo understands that it is possible to be mentally ill, and for any hallucinations to be completely and merely the product of a faulty brain? God damn fucking "I want to believe" wins out every time, though, doesn't it?
Anyway, this wonderful person died by suicide last year. It wasn't BECAUSE of the above, as suicide is a complex fucking thing and it's extremely rare that one person's action/inaction is to blame for what is essentially a fatal symptom of an illness. But it didn't help.
Satanic Panic all over again (Score:2)
Am I the only one flashing back to Pat Pulling and the whole "Dungeons & Dragons is evil and causes suicide" bullshit? When Pat Pulling's claims of D&D suicides was researched it was found that in most of the cases she cited, no death occurred, and in some cases, they were fictional people.
In fact, of the actual suicides that could be identified, there was a far closer correlation between having parents who were religious wingnuts any reasonable person would rather die than live with than with playi
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When Pat Pulling's claims of D&D suicides was researched it was found that in most of the cases she cited, no death occurred, and in some cases, they were fictional people.
In
I can concur, playing D&D does result in the death of many fictitious people
Re:Satanic Panic all over again (Score:5, Funny)
Everybody knows that the wifi protocol was defined in RFC-666. They'll tell you that RFC stands for 'request for comment,' but we know it stands for 'Refuse the Father and Christ.'
Use this handy chart to decode what YOUR kids are REALLY saying:
Don't even get me started on Monster Energy drinks [google.ca].
802.11D (Score:2)
There is/was an 802.11D. The D doesn't appear to refer to Death.
Everyone's an MD on the internet! (Score:2)
> "I did some research and found how dangerous Wi-Fi could be"
No no no no no no...
Mother not wanting to admit that she failed (Score:5, Insightful)
This article all but proves that wi-fi or some supposed wi-fi allergy had nothing to do with this. From the article:
"Jenny’s mother, Debra Fry, said her daughter suffered with tiredness, headaches and bladder problems as a direct result of wireless internet connections at Chipping Norton School. "
All three of those symptoms are also well-known symptoms of depression: the tiredness caused by the loss of energy and changes in sleep from the depression itself, and the headaches and bladder problems probably caused by malnutrition due to changes in diet caused by depression. I'm honestly surprised the article didn't interview a psychiatrist about this, because I can guarantee any psychiatrist worth their title would tell them that all of these things are signs of depression and that the mother should have gotten help right away.
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
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No real doctor would say "wi-fi allergy" in a non-derisive tone.
The correct term for that is "quack".
Re:Mother not wanting to admit that she failed (Score:5, Interesting)
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
Speaking as a parent with 3 kids on anti-depressants now, I'd guess the latter. For our first kid, that "mental illness" thing was a huge hump to get over. Not just for us either. My son just did not want to accept it (he can get like that). He thought it made him "crazy". I finally convinced him to go on meds as a practical matter. Depression has been shown to have a self-feeding effect. Bad episodes can alter your brain to make recurrence more likely. But once we'd gotten over that hump, it wasn't such a big deal with his siblings. So at least his turmoil perhaps helped make the transition easier for them. In my youngest's case, perhaps saved her life.
There's a lot of shame for families involved too, because it tends to run in families. I'm probably only talking about it openly because it appears to be my wife's side of the family with the history of it, rather than mine. You probably won't hear her talking about it this openly.
I went to a funeral of a friend who was suffering and committed suicide this past summer. My group of his friends didn't know about his problems at all, and his friends and family who did were all church people, and were trying to help him "pray it away". What really broke my heart was his note to them apologizing for not being good enough to do so. But they rationalized this was God's Will somehow. (I'm a believer myself, but if God sends you a boat, you don't stay praying, you get on the damn boat. This town is full of doctors who would have helped him in a minute).
So I'm not surprised at all that someone would refuse to admit their kid had depression, and even perhaps in extreme cases transfer all their shame and anger onto some other third party.
What's truly sad is that it doesn't have to be that way at all. So many people die and/or lose loved ones needlessly. Bipolar or Depression is usually just a brain chemical imbalance. Finding the right meds isn't always trivial, but it tends to be effective if you can stay on them. You just have to manage it carefully, kinda like having diabetes.
Re:Mother not wanting to admit that she failed (Score:5, Interesting)
It really is a shame that we stigmatize mental illness and disorders like we do. If someone has a physical ailment like diabetes, nobody (apart form a few wackos who are safely ignored) would think there's something wrong with the person taking insulin or modifying their diet. However, if someone has a mental disorder, they are told to "just get over it" as if they woke up one day and said to themselves "Hey, I think I'll be depressed today."
When my son was diagnosed with Autism (not a mental illness, but gets grouped in there in many people's minds), my parents had a hard time accepting it. They still insist that he'll "grow out of it." What upset them even more was when I said that I was sure that I was autistic as well (just not diagnosed). They acted as though me being autistic was a bad judgement on their parenting. As if I was saying "Well, I'm autistic because you were horrible parents." If anything, I think it means they were better parents because they were dealing with something without knowing what it was and I still turned out pretty good. My wife and I have access to a lot more resources for my son than my parents had with me.
We're not going to be able to properly deal with mental illness and disorders until we stop stigmatizing people for having them.
General overall skeptic here. (Score:2)
Consider a little town in Texas who's name I cannot recall (talking population in the hundreds). A wireless carrier decided this was a strategic place to build a tower. The townspeople made quite a row about believing it would impact their health. All the same, the tower went up. Upon completion, a percent of the town's population "fell very ill". This quickly proceeded to become a substantial percentage of the town's population. A lawsuit was prepared.H
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Consider a little town in Texas who's name I cannot recall (talking population in the hundreds).
It was probably South Africa [mybroadband.co.za], although it wouldn't surprise me if there were multiple examples of this.
See "Why Some People Think Total Nonsense..." (Score:3)
Linked here to be self-referential:
http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Bottom line, some people are stupid enough that they need to be reminded to breathe on a regular basis.
--Paul
Treatment (Score:3)
>Nevertheless effective treatments need to be found for these symptoms.
Zoloft.
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"They" did a study.
You're going to have to work harder than that.
There are a lot of strange allergies out there! (Score:4, Informative)
For example, every time I see or hear Donald Trump, or hear about his standing in polls, I experience waves of nausea, get headaches, become irritable, and have troubles thinking anything other than 'dark' thoughts.
I know a lot of people who have the same allergic reaction, and I think it's only fair that we make the US a Donald Trump free zone, to end this sort of suffering.
Re:Sensible then not (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is we need better treatments for mental illnesses. Seeing hallucinations for instance, you can easily say "Well its not there". But the person still needs treatments.
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If you really need a treatment, how about a nice backhand slap to the face?
Only if you take off your watch first!
Re:Sensible then not (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, symptoms can be perfectly real while the diagnosis can be at fault - were the fluorescent bulbs in particular parts of the school cycling at a slightly odd frequency causing her to feel ill rather than being affected by wifi? Same symptoms, different diagnosis.
Someone may be dying of cancer while blaming the devil for their illness - the problem is real and still needs to be treated, while the diagnosis is bollocks.
Re:Sensible then not (Score:5, Interesting)
You mention flickering fluorescent bulbs, but there's another fairly common cause of some of these symptoms you should check out if you ever come across a case like this; high-pitched whines from malfunctioning electronic devices.
I've both had exposure to this myself (via a crappy power transformer for a router) and come across others suffering from the same issue. Symptoms can include headaches, nausea, dizziness, sleep-loss and, if the exposure goes on for a prolonged period, long-term tinnitus. People's hearing ranges vary, so many people will be unaffected, but children and teenagers are particularly sensitive (though in some cases, as with me, adults remain capable of hearing these noises well into their 30s and 40s).
It's exactly the same as the theory behind those teenager-repelling "sonic stinger" devices that some shops and malls have deployed (whose use I personally think should be classed as a criminal assault). The sound causes pain to those susceptible to it, while others are oblivious. Most cases I've come across of malfunctioning devices or power-supplies are less immediately noticeable than a sonic stinger, but if you are susceptible, they are impossible to miss over time.
The good news is that in most cases, once the device has been identified, a quick power-supply swap usually eliminates the problem.
I'm not saying that this issue is the cause here, but I am of the view that when you hear reports of "Wi-Fi allergies", this is one of the first things you should check for. A lot of Wi-Fi routers, included ISP-supplied ones, ship with cheap and nasty power supplies that are highly prone to this (one batch of Virgin Media routers here in the UK made the news over this issue a few years back).
Of course, I've also come across people who were claiming to have Wi-Fi allergies who were clearly mentally ill rather than suffering from an external stimulus - there are generally clues in their wider behaviour.
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There was a study done about this, (multiple ones, double blind studies, etc) that showed no corrolation between wi-fi signals and the ill feeling. only thing that changed was an LED on a wireless router in the room with them.
It showed that for the vast majority of "sufferers" it was entirely psychosomatic. I'm not sure how people would treat that. I suppose you could give them "pills" to help deal with it. where the pills are sugar pills. I'm pretty sure the placebo effect would work wonders on these
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No, he's saying they did not respond to actual EM emissions - beyond those of the LED.
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My wife complained when I got one of those "high frequency" pest prevention devices to help with a mouse problem.
She said that it gave her headaches.
I had left it on the counter and hadn't plugged it in yet.
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SIT DOWN AND STUDY!
If you would like more information on my bold new treatments, please send away for this free brochure, entitled, "You can either calm down, or I can pop you in the mouth again." Thank you.
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People are legitimately having symptoms, you can try to treat the symptoms even if its psychosomatic
The Nocebo effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Perhaps the submitter was thinking along the lines of lithium.
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>WHACK Stop being a simplistic asshole!
Did it work?
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"effective treatments need to be found for these symptoms."
What do they do for other hypochondriacs?
Stick them in hospitals full of sick people so that they can migrate to paranoia.
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No its specifically an allergy to packet routed network systems only. They also have to be in the range of 2.4GZ or 5Gz.
The 0.8 - 1.9GZ range used my mobile carriers obviously aren't going to have any effect. Now we definitely need to avoid anything in the 430,000GZ-750,000GZ range which are obviously lethal dosages (visible light spectrum)
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Well, I'm allergic to IP V6 packets on WiFi only.
(Unfortunately, I feel I need to mention that's a joke, due to the deafening sound of whooshing here of late.)
Re:Hypocrisy much? (Score:4, Funny)
Well at least you've got a few years -> eternity to figure out a solution before you run into any real life issues.
Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling? When it's done you show them that they did no better than random and thus aren't allergic. Then they feel they're not being treated as an idiot, yet also feel that they've been tested for it and shown not to have it - even if they choose to believe that such an allergy can exist. Even if this only gets a fraction of these people to stop complaining, it's a win, right?
Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point, they've ignored all scientific evidence. Testing them won't change their minds. Nothing will.
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That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted by the medical community by dint of having a test for it.
Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Insightful)
"That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted ..."
Priests have no problem with such a deception.
Knowing vs unknowing falsehood (Score:4, Insightful)
"That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted ..."
Priests have no problem with such a deception.
There's a huge difference between being deliberately deceptive, and spreading a belief that you yourself devoutly believe in, that happens to also be false.
And if you seriously believe that more than a tiny fraction of priests don't believe in the religion they preach (to the extent that it would be fair to call them deliberately deceptive) then you're an idiot, and probably waaaay too angry at the world in general.
Dan Aris
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This, right here.
To be honest, there is research [wikipedia.org] into alleged sensitivity to RF/EM Radiation, and there are credible studies which suggest that even if there is no definitive physical link, the symptoms are quite real [who.int] (now whether or not it's psychosomatic, or something with an actual physical cause? That's another argument entirely. However, neither finding invalidates the symptoms in such a case.)
In either case, standard wifi isn't powerful enough to do much, especially when compared to high-tension power
Re: Should've used protection. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well how would we go about treating them with dignity? We would have to give in to their unreasonable demands to turn off the wifi, would we not?
While there may be some evidence supporting these beliefs, I don't think it justifies any action as there is little / no proof that exposure to a typical wifi network causes acute harm, nor that a typical wifi network would be any less harmful then all the other nearby uses of radio that would be out of the schools control.
To me it seems like the best way to tackle
Re: Should've used protection. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling? When it's done you show them that they did no better than random and thus aren't allergic. Then they feel they're not being treated as an idiot, yet also feel that they've been tested for it and shown not to have it - even if they choose to believe that such an allergy can exist. Even if this only gets a fraction of these people to stop complaining, it's a win, right?
This has already been done in multiple studies. People claiming allergy/sensitivity to WiFi, or nearby mobile network transmitters, have in experiments only had symptoms when they believed the transmitter was on, regardless of when the transmitter was actually on (source [wikipedia.org]).
But, the human mind is good at rationalizing away such results if you already are convinced. You have a similar situation with a lot of people even here on Slashdot claiming they can easily hear the difference between lossless music formats and a quality 320 kbps lossy codec encoding, when all the double blind tests shows otherwise.
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This is a false premise. You don't need to be able to "sense" something for it to be happening or to be harmful to you. Like cosmic rays or x-rays, lead in the environment, etc. This often proposed test would only test if they could sense it, not that it is happening. Maybe some people are "more sensitive" than others anyway.
What would it acomplish? (Score:3)
That is a logical and well thought out test. It is completely rational. And it would be completely useless in dealing with irrational and illogical crackpots.
Sure, the child could have been tested and that would have shown a complete lack of hypersensitivity to WiFi. But that isn't the answer that the parents wanted and was not one they would accept. They would have always come up with reasons that the test "failed". Perhaps by limiting exposure to short time segments with segments of no WiFi between them
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Those lots of people should point out that the cell phone the girl used put out far more radiation at the ranges it is (in the pocket, hands, or against the head) than any wifi router.
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Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling?
That would suck for the people who are actually trying to use the Wi-Fi.
They would then come up with some sort of bullshit explanation for why they failed the test. Like "Oh, the damage in the body takes awhile to build up and manifest itself. Wi-Fi is on, but she feels fine? She hasn't been exposed to it long enough to have a noticeable effect. Wi-Fi is off, but she is still feeling unwell? Of course, she hasn't had time to make a full recovery yet."
These are arguments and mindsets that do not have rationality behind them, so rational arguments trying to convince them are unlikely to work. People who believe in Wi-Fi sickness hold onto it, and that belief is more akin to a religious fervor. If you try to shoot holes in their arguments, they will repeatedly move the goalposts. Now that the child is dead, there's no way, no way at all to test her "electrical sensitivity," so the parents will always be able to hold onto that. There will be no convincing.
It's been well over a decade since Andrew Wakefield's study on Thimerosal and Autism was roundly debunked, and it was the only study to ever show any link to vaccines. Yet the vaccines == autism belief is alive and well. Expect ESD to not go away any time soon, even though it's easier to test and debunk.
Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a buddy who is an old-school radio ham, the kind who builds his own equipment and needs a huge tower to work the low frequencies that the service started out with a century ago.
Whenever he moves to the edge of a new town, his modus operandi is the same: he puts up the tower first, leaving all his gear crated.
After several weeks of complaints rolling in about impotence and dead pets, he invites the neighbors over to show them the crated, unpowered rig. Then he hams away in peace.
There is a similar story from the early Fifties of a town which handled the startup of its new water fluoridation plant in the same way.
Re:Should've used protection. (Score:5, Funny)
After several weeks of complaints rolling in about impotence and dead pets, he invites the neighbors over to show them the crated, unpowered rig. Then he hams away in peace.
Well clearly then the problem isn't that there's power going through it. The metal structure itself acts as an antenna, so it's the tower, powered or unpowered, that is at fault there.
I'm just surprised your friend hasn't run into that objection yet.
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An most towers have a (long) pyramidal shape. Everyone nows that pyramids concentrate cosmic energies!
They also attract mummies but that's another story.
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An most towers have a (long) pyramidal shape. Everyone nows that pyramids concentrate cosmic energies!
They also attract mummies but that's another story.
I think only the enclosed ones do, because that gives the mummies someplace to hide. You don't see mummies with an open metal girder structure, but it still has problems with electricity and other energies being drawn in.
But really, living mummies occur when there are real dead bodies buried in a pyramid, and the cosmic energies are gathered and focused by the pyramids into the bodies to reanimate them. If you never put dead people in there in the first place, you won't have mummies.
Geez, you idiots really
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It may not help like you think it would. [howtogeek.com]
CPS (Score:5, Interesting)
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Grieving parents will often look for a reason, no matter how unlikely. It's not crazy to try to prevent others from having the same situation.
So we have cyber bullying, wifi sensitivity and a host of other causes that need to be addressed for the sake of our children.
No one wants to admit that their child was depressed and they couldn't think of a way to handle the problem other than taking their own life.
Re: CPS (Score:5, Insightful)
This lady was trying to get the network equipment removed long before her daughter's suicide. I'm sure the root cause was all the bullying she received for having a crazy ass mother.
Re:CPS (Score:5, Insightful)
The kid had Crazy Parents Syndrome (CPS) and so she killed herself. See, it's a real medical condition because I gave it a TLA.
It's very likely what the daughter was actually suffering from was depression. The symptoms that the kooky mom attributed to WiFi were actually symptoms of depression. This isn't a case of blaming the WiFi after the suicide, it was blaming the WiFi all along for the daughter's depression symptoms. Instead of treating the depression, the mom went in the opposite direction and convinced the daughter her symptoms were due to external forces and focused energy on a futile battle with the school, thus exacerbating the depression and driving her to suicide. So most likely if the mom had been a responsible, non-idiotic parent and had taken the daughter to a psychologist for therapy rather than blaming WiFi, the daughter would still be alive. Therefore it is the mom's fault.
Re:CPS (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing about supposed EHS, is that every single symptom they describe has been associated with psychomatic conditions. In other words, ordinary stress is enough to cause all of them. And more interesting is that practically everybody who claims to have EHS believes in all of the worst of practically every conspiracy theory that you can imagine.
In other words, believing that the boogeyman is always out to get you is likely stressful and very taxing long term, but since in the mind of a conspiracy theorist everything they do is perfectly normal, they likely look for something to blame it on since they themselves can't face the fact that they're hurting themselves. Electromagnetism is thus their first choice.
Unfortunately, there never will be a cure for this, or even any treatment for that matter. If you try to talk them out of believing in Alex Jones, they'll just think you're one of "them" (i.e. Illuminati, NWO, Bilderberg group, government, or any other imagined threat) and are trying to control their mind. Likewise, they'll invariably believe that any anti-stress medication given to them is a mind control pill, and will refuse treatment.
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