For two years now the British news media have been promoting the existence of a new medical condition, called electrosensitivity, or electromagnetic hypersensitivity. The story – or hypothesis – is that a wide range of symptoms are caused by acute exposure to electromagnetic signals, and that these symptoms are improved when the signal is removed.
The features of this condition include a range of problems which often end up being characterised by doctors as ‘medically unexplained symptoms’: tiredness, difficulty concentrating, headaches, nausea, bowel complaints, aches in the limbs, crawling sensations or pain in the skin, and more, for which no clear medical explanation is found. Such problems have existed since long before the appearance of ‘electrosensitivity’, and the absence of a clear cause is frustrating for both patients and doctors.
If these symptoms were caused by electromagnetic signals, then it should prove possible to study that, ideally in double-blind conditions. The media coverage invariably focuses on the scandal of how research into this area has been neglected: but in fact, dozens of double-blind studies have been performed. A typical experiment involves a mobile phone or wireless network device, hidden in a bag or box. Each subject – chosen from people who report that their symptoms are caused by electromagnetic signals – records their symptoms over time, without knowing if the phone is on or off.
There have now been thirty-seven1 such double-blind ‘provocation studies’ published in the academic literature, and they are almost all negative. Seven studies did find some statistically significant effect for electromagnetic signals: but for two of those, even the original authors have been unable to replicate the results; for the next three, the results seem to be statistical artefacts (they either use one-tailed t-tests, which assume that the effect can only be negative, and so lower the bar of proof either way; or they make multiple comparisons without accounting for that in the analysis); and for the final two, the positive results are mutually inconsistent (one shows worsened mood with provocation, and the other shows improved mood, which makes the one-tailed t-tests in other studies seem even less reasonable).
These studies test the very claim being repeatedly made in the media: that symptoms are brought on by exposure to a source of electromagnetic signals, and cease when the source is removed. Mostly they are ignored. A recent Panorama documentary on BBC 1, covering the possible dangers of wi-fi computer networks, went further. A large chunk of the programme was devoted to electrosensitivity, and the programme-makers followed someone into a lab at Essex University, where they had participated in a provocation study. We were told that this subject correctly identified when the signal was present or absent two thirds of the time, against a visual backdrop of laboratory equipment.
But this was anecdote, dressed up as data. The study is currently unpublished. We don’t know the protocol, or whether 2/3 for one subject would be statistically significant (there may have been only three exposures in total, for example). We don’t know the results of other subjects. But most crucially, there is no mention that this single selected subject – in a single unpublished study – produced a result that seems to conflict with a literature of thirty-seven studies which are completed, published and, overall, negative. Even if this whole Essex study was positive – which seems unlikely – that would still need to be put in context with the dozens of negative findings that exist already.
Why doesn’t the media ever mention this data? Perhaps they deliberately leave it out. Perhaps they never came across it, and are incompetent. Or perhaps they simply lifted their stories verbatim, from aggressive and well-coordinated lobbyists, who promote this new diagnosis and, in many cases, sell expensive equipment to sufferers.
There may also be a darker side. Electrosensitivity lobbyists are not simply silent on the provocation studies: many of them launch vicious attacks on anyone who dares to mention this data, saying they are insensitive, that they are attacking sufferers, and – crucially – that they are denying the reality of patients’ symptoms. Symptoms, of course, stand as real, regardless of their cause; and if anyone is inflicting harm, it may be those who obfuscate on the causes. It takes bravery, but we can only develop better treatments through better understanding.