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Electrosensitivity ("ES") takes many forms, and its origins are buried deep in the past. The following article explains the background and mechanism of interaction.
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Electronalgia, Electrosensitivity and the Horder Report |
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Almost every day now someone phones me with a problem to do with their electrical sensitivity. Today it was a concerned father, whose 29 year old daughter had retreated back home to Yorkshire from her London flat where she worked as a headhunter. He was aiming to buy some netting to drape over her land line phone, a pouch for her cellphone, and any advice he could get. "She cannot bear to bring the phone near her", he complained, "nor to watch TV, do the ironing with an electric iron, or many other jobs involving electrical apparatus. It started a year ago, with a few unconnected events like a fall. But now she has glandular fever as well as all this. She is completely incapacitated, heavy with Epstein Barr virus, and no one seems to know what to do about it". These symptoms are so typical of electrosensitivity - or ES as it has become known. In the quarterly magazine Allergy, the official journal of the charity called Allergy UK, Jane Yates described in more detail, a tale I have heard in more or less the same words for somke years now, how she discovered that her problem was ES: "On our seaside holiday I felt well for the first time in three years, but on my return home, as soon as we set foot back inside our house and turned the TV and the computer on, all my symptoms and ill health immediately returned!". "My symptoms for the past three years have been (and still are):" 1. An intense burning, tingling down my spine, most severe in my pelvic area (Just for your information I've had a laparoscopy and everything was found to be fine). 2. If I use a telephone the whole of my scalp burns and tingles intensely - in fact it hurts so much I won't use them now at all. (Just for info I've had an MRI brain scan and everything was normal). 3. I get regular waves of nausea, which I can link to turning on/watching TV or the computer - I won't touch a computer any more as this seems to be one of the worst things. 4. My eyes feel dry and burning - I now know this happens if I watch a TV or a computer screen. [Anne Silk, the well known optometrist has long connected "dry eye" with computer screen use]. 5. I actually wrote to you (Allergy) ages ago when I first became ill and mentioned that my throat glands swell daily and especially so when I used my computer. At the time I wondered if there was any latex anywhere but I've since had it confirmed that there isn't. My throat glands swell if I use anything electrical, even an iron and a vacuum cleaner. 6. I find artificial lighting is THE worst. If I go, which I rarely do now, into shops with lots of low hanging lights I immediately feel ill, my glands swell, my chest feels tight, and I feel very faint. - please don't even consider panic attacks. I know it's "allergy" based, because I felt exactly the same in a restaurant a few years ago (before this illness) when they'd served food wearing latex gloves and I hadn't checked. My blood pressure must have dropped because I felt faint and I went cold from head to foot. That is exactly how I feel when I sit under any artificial lighting now even at home (so please rule out panic attacks)". One might have believed that ES is a relatively new disorder. Read, then, what Dr Albert Abrams wrote in 1916, before radio, TV, computer screens, or probably even electric irons had become the common electrical appliances in our homes they now are. He coined the word electronalgia from the two ancient Greek words electron and algeia the latter meaning pain. "ELECTRONALGIA. The employment of this neologism by the writer [Abrams], was suggested by his investigations which prove the character of the pains experienced by so-called human barometers (rheumatics). It has always been suggested that electricity was the most significant factor in explanation of the peculiar behavior of many animals prior to a storm or other atmospheric disturbance." Reference has already been made to the author's ether theory [on page 223 of Abrams' book. In this Abrams argues that there is no such thing as ether, but simply the electric field, i.e. a space inhabited by mutually repulsive electrons, spreading out in space so as to be as far as possible from each other unless disturbed. This can of course only be a partial explanation, since there must also be some protons such as hydrogen somewhere]. "Coincident with the disruptive charge from a large induction coil, draughts, or saturation of the atmosphere with moisture, ionization (page 200 of his book) ensues and a structure previously implicated by disease (rheumatic joints, cicatricial tissues, etc.) becomes charged with positive electricity (stomach reflex employed in polarity determination). The normal structures do not take up the charge in question. "The charge of positive electricity may be withdrawn from the diseased structure for a variable period of time (minutes to hours) until it is neutralized by a negative charge (from a bar magnet). Investigations with colors demonstrated that VIOLET (negative dulling energy) would not only dissipate the positive charge (like the negative pole of a bar magnet), but would prevent the charge when next to the pathological structure. "In accordance with the foregoing, a violet material may be employed as a prophylactic in electronalgias. In investigating the polarity reaction of different violet materials it was found that cotton material frequently yielded a positive non-dulling energy owing to the presence of some special dyestuff. Thus the use of the latter would do no good. Violet silk or wool however can be used as a prophylactic". Why violet? All colours have specific radiation frequencies, and violet is at the upper extreme end of our visible spectrum, as far as possible from red, which is associated with heat, and presumably more likely to antagonise our inextricably linked heat/pain sensors. This idea, however is merely a mad speculation on my part. But was this man Abrams so mad? The ancient Greeks, who inspired so many of Abrams' "neologisms", used the violet-coloured amethyst crystal as a prophylactic against the pain of excessive alcohol, and the word amethyst hence comes from the Greek words for "without wine", methys being their word for wine. The modern Greek word krassi (mixture) comes because the ancients mixed their wine with water, and as every schoolboy knows alcohol will mix with water in any proportion. We also speak of methylated spirits from the same group, and a methyl group in chemistry (CH3) is a result of its association with alcohols. Alcohols, such as methanol (CH3OH) or ethanol (CH3CH2OH) all have methyl groups at the other end of the defining hydroxyl (alcohols may be considered as derivatives of hydrocarbons in which a hydroxyl group (OH) replaces a hydrogen). Those same ancient Greeks used the term cosmetic for an adornment which still persists in our unsuspecting use of the word cosmetics today. But in their time the meaning was that it kept one in tune with the cosmos or Universe, and hence kept "electronalgia" at bay. So ES has been recognised for over 2000 years, and it might be argued, so has Abrams idea of the electron universe. This same concept was appreciated by the poet William Blake, who recognised that the cry of a wounded hare in pain would be reflected across the entire universe, perhaps another example of electron interactions. We should have known that the artificially-created electricity of our modern age would bring pain with it, not simply from the philosophical recognition that every rose has its thorns, (or as Baruch Modan the renowned Israeli epidemiologist elegantly expressed the sentiment, "Nature rarely bestows a riskless benefit"), but because there had already been so many examples in the eighteenth century and before then of how electrical fields could make people writhe in agony. I don't only mean the hilarious tale of how, to amuse the bored and depressed King of France one joker had the idea of arranging in series a goodly number of Leyden Jars (the equivalent of our high voltage lines) and then getting six hundred innocent monks in a field to hold hands, the one at each end then grasping the Leyden terminals and thereby completing the circuit. The result, according to an eye witness was that at the moment of connection to this powerful electrical current, "The monks danced merrily, and the King laughed mightily". This issue of mankind's sensitivity to electric fields finds another more useful application in the mysterious talent of dowsing. On the Caribbean island of Nevis I first met in person the writer Christopher Bird. Years before that I had read several of his books, one of which "The Secret Life of Plants" even inspired a popular record album. Not so well known was another book by Bird on dowsing, called The Divining Hand, a truly epic monument of careful and illuminating research into the subject. I wish I had spent more time in the company of this great pioneer of subtle energies, now departed. Christopher Bird pulled together between one set of covers more information on dowsing than I have ever seen elsewhere. What emerges is a clear indication that we humankind can sense far more of the materials and energies about us than modern society would dream possible, given the opportunity of a clear ambience, freed from the radiations which encompass us all in industrialized societies today. He too refers to the actual pain experienced from electric fields, in this case the fields generated by subterranean aquifers. One need look no further than the episodes surrounding Lady Milbanke, the mother-in -law of Lord Byron, a rare lady who became interested in the dowsing arts. She was obviously obsessed with her scientific pursuits and discoveries. After her death Byron wrote acrimoniously that "she has at last gone to a place where she could no longer dowse". Had Byron's generation realised that they were being offered a new science which eventually would cure maladies over which the 18th century had no control, then Byron himself may not have died at the age of 36 from a chill. It was probably an influenza as sharp-acting as any SARS, caught in the insidious Greek rains of Missolonghi. in 1824, since the sub-microscopic virus dispatched the great man in just ten days. In 1772 while sojourning in southern France, Lady Milbanke, recounts Bird, heard the popular tale of a well having been discovered generations previously by a boy who cried out in pain each time he passed over water flowing underground. "This was held by myself", Lady Milbanke wrote, "and the family I was with in utter contempt and believed as much as the tradition that Saint Dunstan's head rolled to the spot where Durham Abbey was later to be built and dedicated to him". Subsequently Lady Milbanke sought the views of Charles Hutton, the editor of the Royal Society's scientific Transactions, whose scepticism was overcome by a successful demonstration of dowsing on his own lawn. He was thereby convinced of the reality of dowsing but irritated her Ladyship no end for failing to explain it. "I lament you can throw no light on this extraordinary circumstance, which has ever strongly excited my curiosity as to the cause of it, but hitherto I have met with none who have gone beyond a vague conjecture." A very sensible and well-informed physician imagined it might be occasioned by some singular effect of electricity on my frame, but could not satisfy himself of the certainty of his conjecture". Over two hundred years later my laboratory conducted a study of sixty people with myalgic encephalomyelitis and compared their ambient bedplace electric field strengths with an equal number of healthy controls. We measured the unperturbed alternating E-fields every 30 seconds for a continuous period during the whole night, using data loggers and probes traceable to NPL standards and built according to international Normes. The electric fields in the ME patients' bedrooms turned out to be almost twice as high as they should have been. Sadly neither the Royal Society nor any other peer-reviewed journal was prepared to publish the results. Of course these fields could easily be ascribed to the appliances and wiring in our homes. But the earliest outbreaks of what is now called ME (but which has had many previous names) mainly occurred in hostels or barracks. All three of the major recorded epidemics in London were reported right next to large and documented subterranean aquifers: at the Royal Free Hospital, the first real reported epidemic in the 1950s, where the epicentre was the nurses' hostel at Park Road, a large conduit carries what was originally the Fleet River from Hampstead Ponds down to Fleet Street and then into the river Thames. The next a few years later was at the Middlesex Hospital, again at the nurses hostel, right next to a major storm relief sewer. The third major ME outbreak was among the nurses at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. Their hostel, now converted into a library, was on the corner of Great Ormond Street and Lamb's Conduit Street, under which runs the large conduit via which his fresh water served the City and made Mr Lamb a great fortune. Any such conduit will create impressive electric fields when in surcharge, that is when the water occupies more than half the conduit cross section. In these conditions electrons are dislodged by frictional motion from hydrogen atoms which in water are constantly bonding and re-bonding with oxygen. These unpaired electrons, being unable to rejoin their associated atoms which have moved on downstream, form a powerful electric field in the space around the conduit, extending many metres from the pipeline. In one nutshell this explains both the ME outbreaks and the general phenomenon of dowsing, as well as the feeling of pain in the joints of arthritics before a storm. In this last example the underside of the stormcloud is heavy with positively charged ions, generated as it passes over dry terrain. Their influence even extends in front of the cloud as the ions build up, and the sensitive arthritics "feel it in their bones".. The earth below, separated by air acting as a good insulator, by contrast carries a net negative charge. Eventually the air can no longer keep the two opposite charges apart, and the ensuing flash of lightning represents the meeting of positive and negative charges. After the storm the negative balance is restored, and the air feels wonderful and fresh to breathe, now heavy with negatively charged ions. This is a clear indication that positive charges appear bad for living creatures whilst negative charges seem beneficial. Radio transmission works the same way as an underground aquifer, in that electrons are sent up and down the antenna, and not able to reverse direction quickly enough form a closed loop of energy and set off at the speed of light at right angles to the antenna plane in all directions. With increasing frequency the electric component dominates, so at radio frequencies and above we may expect to be exposed to an energy largely composed of radiated electric fields. But I moved on too fast. Back in the days of Abrams, little of all this was known, and the atmosphere was largely uncluttered with the radio traffic we feel today... Further information may be available from: SIF: Swedish Union of Clerical and technical employees in industry. Information concerning problems caused by hypersensitivity to electricity. Facts and advice are given in a 16pp A4 booklet available from posterservice@sif.se Their publication Hypersentitive in IT environments (November 1996) contains a wealth of information Several organisations now exist to help people claiming to suffer from extreme sensitivity to electromagnetic fields. These include FEB This is a Swedish based orgaisation run by Foreningen for El-och bildskarmsskadade, Box 151 26, 104 65 Stycockholm Sweden. Circuit Circuit is a UK home-based self-help group based at PO Box 1UZ, Newcastle on Tyne, NE99 1UZ, England and run by Ann Ermel (no website, but sends out an occasional newsletter). ESN ELECTRICAL SENSITIVITY NETWORK Midwest, PO Box 645 Elkhorn, Wisconsin 53121 have been conducting a questionnaire survey on electrosensitive people. The 2nd. Copenhagen Conference on Electrical Hypersensitivity proceedings (May 1995) are available from Dr. Bengt Knave Powerwatch have published a book on ES available from their website: Electrical Hypersensitivity (ES), a Modern Illness - by Alasdair and Jean Philips, now into its 4th edition (April 2003), uncovers the reality behind this debilitating condition. It includes chapters on what ES is, what triggers it, how it develops and affects people. It describes the known biology of ES and some of the theories that are being researched. Most importantly, there is a chapter on what to do if you have ES. The changes that are important to make, from reducing your exposure, using shielding materials in the home, complementary therapies that help your body cope better and lifestyle changes that will prevent your health from deteriorating. Remember once ES is initiated it does not go away of its own accord, it frequently continues to get worse, and can lead to the necessity of living in an electricity-free environment with all the limitations that involves, if it is not taken seriously and acted on early enough. The book has references (to convince the sceptics), information about support groups and websites of interest. If you want to convince someone else, including your GP, that what you are suffering is real and not "all in the mind", this is the book for you. The book only costs £9.00 (inc.UK p&p). |