PubMed

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #21

Scientists publish single case studies all the time. It’s totally science-worthy. You’ve heard loads of n=1 cases, many of them things like acquired savant syndrome where some dude is speared through the brain and suddenly becomes a math genius. These things are absolutely scientifically relevant.

Not all of science is RCTs.

This article doesn’t “prove” anything. It merely seeks to problematize EMF in connection with diabetes and glucose levels.

I’m not arguing whether or not the hypothesis is true. I’m arguing that the OP’s ridiculing of scientific journal articles as tabloid newspaper material is completely unfair.

Especially since the reason for his posting this ridicule is spurious; I think that he thinks that any other variable that could affect BGL levels militates against the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis. That’s a false dilemma, so he’s ridiculing the article, baselessly, for no good reason that doesn’t even serve the purpose I think he’s going for.

Laugh all you want. They laughed at nearly every hypothesis that turned out to be true. For over a decade they pilloried the Australian scientist who believed stomach ulcers and acid reflux could be caused by a gut bug. They even ridiculed him after he proved it by giving himself H Pylori. And yet now, in 2018, it’s accepted wisdom.

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” – Nicholas Klein, union leader.

(Cindy) #22

Reporting case study is an entirely different situation and isn’t really considered “science.” As in, you couldn’t say that just because one person had acquired savant syndrome from getting speared through the brain, that then, getting speared through the brain causes savant syndrome. It would be an isolated case that’s being reported, but there’s no science there. It’s not replicable, there’s no hypothesis that’s being tested, etc.

Now, maybe that 1 case study could lead to some scientific advancements, such as studying particular parts of the brain, but the case study itself…no, it’s not scientifically relevant. It could easily be a “one off” that is absolutely random.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #23

Allow me to qualify:

Some of the comments I’ve made above relate, in fact, to a 2009 article that I thought was simply the full text of the OP’s article – see here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15368370802072075?src=recsys

Having now read the full article that the OP posted about, my concern about it relates not to it being an n=1, but it being written by an “independent researcher.” That’s not to say that individuals can’t do science, but it’s problematic.

The 2009 article, however, includes a number of cases, however, and makes the same argument. And it’s written by a professor from what appears to be a university in Canada.

I am skeptical about these claims, to be sure. I haven’t done any further research but is there even a RCT on it? Having said that, I stand by my opposition to @Robert_Johnson’s ridiculing of it as “tabloid.” That’s hyperbolic to say the least.

(Todd Allen) #24

The quality of the observations in this paper are dubious. Here’s the Methods section in its entirety:

The subject has provided written consent to publish his non-identifying information in this case study.

No details of how the subject collected data or measured his radiation exposure during supposed periods of greater and lesser exposure. Considering no measurements of radiation exposure are provided in the article I assume no measurements were taken. All we appear to have is speculation that measured changes in glucose and body temperature are somehow related to unmeasured changes in radiation exposure over long periods of time during which no other possibilities are considered, controlled or accounted for.

The story provided doesn’t justify the conclusion which starts with:

The events reported have serious implications for the use of wireless technology and necessitates reevaluation of its near-ubiquitous presence, especially in medical facilities and hospitals.

I see this as roughly equivalent to publishing a report of an alien abduction while protecting the identity of the abductee and then claiming it necessitates reevaluating our military capacity to repel an alien invasion.

(Running from stupidity) #25

Reads the wrong paper, stands by conclusions. While lecturing about “science.”

How many posts before “science deniers” gets pulled out again? I mean, that’s not hyperbolic at all, to call most people on the forum science deniers.

(Consensus is Politics) #26

Again… pointing out the absurd by being absurd.

The reason for my absurdity is simply the absurdity in the article where no science is done. None. Then presented in a scientific journal. I am prepared to give PubMed the benefit of the doubt. I’ve never looked at it before. I could very well be missing info that just isn’t presented. Especially when (based on questions here) it may have a pay wall before seeing the entirety of it.

Back to my original beef. It’s not with this article directly, but with the doctor that points to this article as her proof that wireless (specifically WiFi) causes diabetes and cancer. Not contributed to, but causes it. It’s like saying having a telephone in your home causes cancer. If you looked at everyone who died of cancer in the last 40 years, how many of them had a telephone in their home?

Thanks for linking those items. I’ll look through them. I’m always interested in learning something new. That second one you provided however seems broken. I received a bad link error when I clicked on it.

(Consensus is Politics) #27

[edit: evidently I somehow linked to the wrong article. I was assuming it was the full article that my original post about PubMed was. But it wasn’t, but mybfollowing statement holds true for the article I did see]

When this is in the first paragraph, I’m not even sure I want to read the rest…

“By closely following plasma glucose levels in four Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics…”

Four? Not 40,000. Not 4,000. Not 400. Just four people??

Certainly there must be bigger studies on this seeing how prevalent “dirty electricity” is everywhere.

Then later in the article (as I skipped through it quickly to find out if they increased the study size, didn’t find it) I ran into something the made me do a double take. They were measuring “dirty electricity” in “GS-units”. :thinking: My BS meter was pegged. There is no such thing as GS-units in electronics. But, I always concede that maybe there is something I haven’t learned about in the 50 years I’ve been playing/hobbling/self educated/high school beginner and advanced/USAF AIRCRAFT weapons electronics repair/cox communications/Xerox Corp, even then, I know there are things I don’t know. (Ok, so I bragged a little. I don’t get to do that much :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:). So I looked it up. It’s a made up term. Someone is selling meters that detect variance in home wiring and they call this dirty electricity. The term they give this is GS.

It’s electrical noise. Every kid growing up in the 60’s through the 80’s should be familiar with it. Trying to run a slot car race track or a model train while dad is watching a football game on a VHF broadcast, especially in the lower channels where noise can really play havoc. We were scolded all the time. As was mom with her hair dryer basically making the TV a white noise generator for while she dried her hair.

Even with this much to discredit the work, I’ll still go back through it and give it a chance to prove something. Keeping in mind they have to big strikes against them. :thinking:

Damn. That didn’t take them long to hit strike three. I’m assuming these patients are testing their own blood, with their own meters. If that’s true then this entire article is useless. It’s based on roughly a 10% rise or drop in Blood glucose. There is a big problem with that. Most blood glucose meters (all of the ones I know of, granted not that many) have a tolerance of +/- 20%. That gives a margin of error of 20%. So the rise and fall of the readings they took are within the margin of error. In others words… no useful data. PERIOD. Trash. Tabloid news.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #28

If the article in the OP makes reference to a plausible mechanism by which the WIFI the patient was exposed to could have affected his blood sugar, then it would certainly be worth bearing in mind.

Here’s a suggestion: All of you with glucose monitors, get as far away from your WIFI router as you can, and then measure your glucose. Once you’ve done that, go stand next next to your router, and measure again, then again, say, 10 minutes, and again at 20 minutes. Report the results to me in a private message, and I will assemble them into a report. It still won’t be rigorous science, but it might be indicative of questions to research further.

(KM) #29

I don’t know why as a newbie I am involved in this discussion however

  1. The Author of the original article is not a Doctor but is written as ‘an independent researcher’
  2. PubMed is a very useful resource overall as a search platform for health-related scientific topics
  3. Case reports are informative but are considered a very low form of evidence for any conclusions and many reputable medical journals have stopped publishing case reports but they are still debatable amongst clinicians in terms of their usefulness
  4. RF nonionizing radiation and their biological effects is not an absolutely non-controversial topic although generally consensus is that its non-harmful in humans since we don’t have enough evidence to suggest otherwise
  5. It wouldn’t be completely far fetched in this big world to find an example of someone’s glucose metabolism to be hypersensitive to EMR in some aspects and therefore I wouldn’t complete say that original author is making lunatic claims. There is some experimental evidence to the same https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09553002.2018.1490039
(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #30

^^^^^^ Exactly what @ketomuslim1 says!

(Consensus is Politics) #31

I planned on doing this, and thought about it. In order to test this as accurately as possible I would need to make a faraday suit to wear around my house. Or perhaps build a faraday cage around my couch so I can at least watch Netflix while letting my BG normalize. The best I could come up with was making an aluminium suit to wear around the house. That ended that idea. Imagine the chafing :woozy_face:

(Consensus is Politics) #32

Thank you!! Very helpful indeed. Keeping in mind that there are pirate trolls, as well as trolling pirates, I read on with great interest, until I began to notice a trend. Statements made, based on studies that they indeed cited, that weren’t studies at all. I only looked at about the first 2/3’s of the cited studies, but that was plenty for me to see that those studies referred to other studies. That’s when I gave up on this idea of RF diabetes claim. It’s like claiming “I’ll bring the ALL THE DRINKS to the party, I’ll spare no expense and get plenty of the food stuff!” And I show up with cases of Perrier. Promise big, and show up with bottled water.

That’s this story in a nutshell I think. Bottled water when expecting champagne. Calling it tabloid news is just insulting isn’t it? To the tabloids anyway.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #33

Talk to your local electric company. They use them to work on the mains.