Approximately one and a half percent of people experience discomfort and feel unwell when using mobile phones, wi-fi, being near cell towers. Some even abandon gadgets and move to radio silence zones. Such cases are being studied, but so far there is no reason to recognize this as a disease.
Radiation damage
In 2015, 39-year-old Frenchwoman Marin Richard sued the state for temporary disability benefits caused by electromagnetic hypersensitivity. This means a variety of painful symptoms, something like an allergy to radiation from gadgets, power lines and other radio sources. The woman complains of headache, fatigue, vomiting, heart palpitations.
The parents of a teenager from Canada said that the boy's migraines, insomnia, and vomiting were caused by exposure to wi-fi at school and demanded to turn it off. Last summer, the court dismissed their claim, finding no evidence that the symptoms were caused by electromagnetic interference.
Illness for no reason
The first mentions of electromagnetic hypersensitivity in scientific literature date back to the middle of the 20th century. In 2004, the World Health Organization held a seminar on this problem. Although the painful symptoms are recognized as real, it has not been proven that they are caused by electromagnetic radiation from gadgets and other weak radio sources.
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French experts reported about the same a year ago. After analyzing the scientific literature and consulting various experts, they concluded that there is no reliable data for the diagnosis of electromagnetic hypersensitivity. However, doctors were advised to pay attention to patient complaints.
Most scientists who deal with electromagnetic hypersensitivity associate it with the nocebo effect. This is when a person is asked if he is experiencing health problems near the tower, he begins to look for symptoms in himself and often finds. The problem is that there is no objective information about the impact of gadgets on well-being - everything that is known about this has been obtained through self-questioning of citizens.
In 2016, sociologist Mael Dieudonné from the Max-Weber Center (France) interviewed forty people, testing the relationship of nocebo with symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and concluded that the painful condition was real, manifested itself before people took part in the survey, but there are signs its psychological nature.
Most often, people who are hypersensitive to electromagnetic radiation complain of fatigue, headache, cognitive difficulties, memory loss, insomnia, rashes, pain in different parts of the body. They often suffer from depression, stress, anxiety.
Such people have other characteristics: for example, multiple sensitivity to chemicals - a condition that is also not considered a disease.
Dieudonne and his colleagues recently published the results of a study in which, using a questionnaire of patients, they compared the symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity and fibromyalgia - causeless muscle pain. They found a lot of similarity, but there were more mental disorders among those with fibromyalgia.
Source: Gruber MJ, Palmquist E., Nordin S. Characteristics of perceived electromagnetic hypersensitivity in the general population // Scandinavian journal of psychology. - 2018.
Percentage of study participants who reported the most common symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
Scientists from the University of Umeå (Sweden) analyzed data from surveys of about three and a half thousand people from the Westbotten Study of Environment and Hygiene. The symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity were noted by 91 participants. Mostly women 40-59 years old.
Only 18 percent experienced painful symptoms every day, 47.6 percent - no more than several times a month. On the other hand, most have been in a state of "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" for many years, trying - and successfully - to avoid sources of research. Only a few sought medical help.
A still from the 2017 film Generation Zapped, filmed in the USA. It tells about people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
Tatiana Pichugina