Electromagnetic Man: Health and Hazard in the Electrical Environment

358 Pages·1989·50.79 MB·English

by  Cyril W. Smith

-
tYRIL SMITH & SIM N BEil
W.
—
(MAGNETIC
AN
HAZARD
HEALTH & IN
THE ELECTRICAL
0^
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
/
Digitized by the Internet Archive
2014
in
https://archive.org/details/electromagneticmOOsmit
ELECTROMAGNETIC MAN
This book is dedicated to all thosepioneers
in bioelectromagnetics, past, presentand
future, and especially to ProfessorHerbert
Frohlich, FRS, as wellas to our respective
wives, Eileen andPenny, without whose
patience andsupport it wouldnever have
been completed.
ELECTROMAGNETIC
MAN
Health and Hazard in the
Environment
Electrical
Cyril W.Smith and Simon Best
St. Martin's Press
New York
©
Cyril W. Smith and Simon Best 1989
©
Hilary Bacon, chapter 8, first section 1989
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
Firstpublished in the United States ofAmerica in 1989
Printed in Great Britain
ISBN 0-312-03730-9
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Cyril W.
Electromagnetic man.
—
1. Electromagnetic fields Health aspects.
—
2. Electric lines Health aspects. I. Best, Simon.
RA569.3.S65 1989 612'.01442 89-10687
ISBN 0-312-03730-9
Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction 1
1 History ofa phenomenon 8
2 Basic concepts: scientific fundamentals 18
3 The cosmic connection 35
4 Human biology and electromagnetic fields 53
5 Electromagnetic fields in medicine 67
6 Electrical sensitivity and allergy 85
7 Alternative medicine—the potential breakthrough 104
8 Electromagnetic environmental pollution 126
9 Chronic electromagnetic field exposure, health
risks and safety regulations 165
10 Beware military atwork 209
:
11 Old wisdom, new understanding 238
12 The last frontiers 258
Conclusion 270
Postscript 279
Glossary 290
References 298
Name index 331
Subject index 339
Acknowledgments
The publishers and authors wish to thank the following for permission
to reproduce copyright material:
Dr Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News and VDT
News in New York, for permission to make extensive use of material
appearing in both publications.
Dr Robert Becker and Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., of New York, for
permission to quote extensively from The Body Electric, by Dr Robert
Becker and Gary Selden, and published by William Morrow & Co.,
Inc., New York. Quotations pp. 216, 219, 228, reprinied by permission
©
of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright 1985 by Dr Robert Becker
and Gary Selden.
Hebrew Publishing Company, Brooklyn, New York, for permission to
quote from Biblical and Talmudic Medicine by John Preuss. Quotations
pp. 246, 247 reprinted by permission ofthe Publishers, Hebrew Publish-
©
ing Company, Copyright 1978. All rights reserved.
Central Independent Television, London, for permission to quote from
their documentary The Good, the Bad, and the Indefensible.
Foreword
by Professor Herbert Frohlich, FRS
The sensitivity of biosystems to electromagnetic fields has been known
for a long time. Only recently, however, has it been shown that the
laws ofphysics permit extraordinarily high sensitivities when biosystems
are activated through energy supply. Unlike machines and instruments,
however, the non-activated state does not exhibit a particular construc-
tion. It is the supply ofrandom energy (food) above a critical magnitude,
rather, which causes a highly organised mode of behaviour, usually in
the form of coherent electric oscillations. The transformation into this
activated state has features of a phase transition in that it is very sharp
in terms of the magnitude of the supplied energy — in contrast to the
case ofordinary systems where energy supply leads to heating.
In principle, such sharp transitions can, of course, lead to great sensi-
tivityto outside stimuli.
The structure of biosystems is, of course, very complex so that treat-
ment of a specific case requires far-reaching investigation. The recent
developments, mentioned above, do, however, indicate the possibility
of sensitivities which, before the discovery of coherent states, seemed
impossible.
Such sensitivities do, of course, give rise to difficulties in the reproduc-
tion of experiments and, in fact, a new subject, 'Deterministic Chaos',
has arisen to deal with this.
The present book does provide examples which in earlier years might
have been rejected as unphysical but which now give rise to the hope
of an understanding in terms of the recent developments which show
through examples how some systems starting from minutely different
situations can develop in vastly different ways.