What is the Impact of Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields on Living Organisms?

[ConsiderAllData]

How did you find PF?

Link through RT article about Lyme disease, and link to research on colloidal silver

I am a retired chemical engineer with broad interests in biology, plant science, and ecosystems. Your site attracted my attention initially by posting a research report from U of Calgary about cellular response to silver.

Further surfing into your forums found threads about essential oils and plant responses to low frequency electromagnetic fields. Good questions are essential to obtaining good answers, and I am always looking for sources that are exploring the good questions. Then I go back to the original sources for further study.

I immediately signed in because I wanted to pursue the article about plant response to low frequency energy. Becker has shown that humans respond to very low levels of electromagnetic fields in the 10 to 30Hz range, postulating that these frequencies were present in the cosmic background, and the life evolved under its influence, including the potential for such frequencies to direct organic synthesis, chiralty, and protein folding.

This is enough to convince me that such frequencies, or interference patterns yielding harmonics in this frequency, can and do have important impacts on living cells, and I hope to find further sources of information, research reports, by others studying this area.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Welcome to PF!

 

[berkeman]

Welcome to the PF.

This is enough to convince me that such frequencies, or interference patterns yielding harmonics in this frequency, can and do have important impacts on living cells, and I hope to find further sources of information, research reports, by others studying this area.

Finding good sources of quality information is a big part of what we help with here. We require that valid references be from peer-reviewed scientific journals or mainstream textbooks. You can read about the sources that we accept in the PF rules (see INFO at the top of the page).

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[ConsiderAllData]

I find it somewhat entertaining that you expect me to provide the sources of data that I came to this site hoping you could help me to locate. Both 'approved' sources and 'peer reviewed' articles are highly suspect in these days when politics trumps science, and oligopolies control research funding. However, to advance the debate, if we can get one started, I will provide some links to relevant sources:
1. For a good literature review, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ab/2014/198609/
2. For a good whitewash and misdirection hit job, here is a National Research Council Assessment of Possible Health Effects of Ground Wave Emergency Network, including 9 of 80 references to the work of S.M.Michaelson, with the only 3 references to ELF (<30Hz) effects all written by himself, a devoted researcher at U of Rochester funded by over $200million per year from the US government: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208983/
3. Another good literature review, which mostly confirms that research is focused on cell phone frequencies, and away from ELF frequencies shown to strongly affect biological systems is this one (open access and peer reviewed) : https://www.intechopen.com/books/electromagnetic-waves/electromagnetic-waves-and-human-health
The current safety guidelines for electromagnetic field exposure are set by the dosage rate needed to heat tissue, which is measurable, but ignores very low energy fields which have been shown to produce significant impacts on living organisms. Becker anesthetized a salamander using only an orthogonal magnetic field at about the same strength as the background Earth magnetic field at .5gauss. All the research we see being funded today is looking at fields at .3 to 3T, 100's or 1,000's of times stronger, and at frequencies in the megahertz range, where it seems much more likely that we will find the important frequency range to be less than 300Hz, and more likely the 10 to 30 Hz range. This misdirection of research effort is not likely to be an accident.