Does wifi really FRY your brain?
MARTINE RICHARD is unwell. So unwell that a French court ruled this week that she should receive a disability allowance to the tune of £588 a month.
In fact, she’s so ill she’s had to quit her job as a radio producer and move to a barn in the countryside as far away from civilisation as possible.
But the decision to award her benefits is a controversial landmark, with implications stretching far beyond France. not least because the ailment Martine claims to have isn’t recognised by medical science.
She says that for years she has suffered from dizziness, headaches and nausea as a result of electromagnetic signals interfering with her brain. In short, she is allergic to wifi.
as strange as this sounds, the belief that electrical devices cause health problems is far more common than you might think. It is termed electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). Sufferers claim their symptoms can be triggered by wifi hotspots, computers and mobile phones.
there’s just one problem. Dozens of studies have been done on people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields, but the results routinely come back the same: they think they are sensitive, but they aren’t.
When sufferers are told they are being exposed to electromagnetic fields, they do, indeed, experience the symptoms. But when the study is ‘blinded’ — when neither the researcher nor the participant knows whether this is happening — they can’t tell. this proves they are not actually sensitive at all.
NEVERTHELESS, the belief that something in modern technology is making us sick is pervasive. Only last month, noel Edmonds announced that ‘ electrosmog’ was more of a problem than Ebola or aids.
Wifi, according to noel, is ‘destroying our own natural electromagnetic fields’.
to stay healthy, he spends eight minutes a day lying on a £2,000 electric yoga mat that apparently ‘recalibrates all the blood cells’ and ‘readjusts the electromagnetism in your body’.
It’s easy to mock. But people experiencing vague and unpleasant symptoms and blaming them on technology is not new.
When domestic electricity was first introduced, there were reports of homeowners feeling faint and servants refusing to touch the light switches for fear it would make them sick. Similar concerns were raised when radios became widespread, with people worrying that the radio waves were passing through their bodies and causing various maladies.
the leaps we’ve witnessed in technology are so dramatic that it’s understandable such fears have arisen. If you don’t understand the science behind something, it’s easy to see it as sinister magic. and when change is fast and confusing, we naturally tend to see it as a threat.
Wifi is particularly emblematic of modern life. It represents a frenetic culture with which some can’t cope, and makes them feel their world is out of control.
Indeed, some psychologists have argued that those claiming to be allergic to wifi are similar to the hermits of ancient times — unable to cope with the societal pressures of modern life, they self-isolate and escape to live on their own, just like Martine richard.
Others say the great wifi scare is simply a result of the ‘nocebo effect’. It’s the flipside of the placebo effect — whereby people feel better despite being given an inactive pill, simply because they believe it’ll do them good.
So with the nocebo effect, people feel unwell — despite not being exposed to anything damaging — simply because they believe they’ll feel poorly.
In the absence of any evidence that electromagnetic hypersensitivity exists, it is inevitably considered a psychological condition. It falls into the category of somatoform disorder — physical symptoms with an underlying psychological cause.
BUT here’s the key point. For me, none of this invalidates what these people experience. I think Martine richard should be entitled to support from the state because what she experiences is clearly disabling.
I might disagree with her on the cause of the problem, but I don’t doubt she experiences it and that it’s real. It’s testament to the incredible power of the mind that it can have such a direct impact on the body.
What’s interesting, though, is that suggesting electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a psychological rather than a physical condition generates great hostility from sufferers. they feel this is insulting and suggests their problems are not real.
What a striking demonstration of the stigma that still surrounds mental health problems. People reject the idea that EHS is psychological because that would make it ‘ in their minds’ and, therefore, less valid.
Which, when you think about it, is horribly insulting to everyone whose life is blighted by mental health problems — and shows the prejudice they face every day.