Necessary Roughness

Drudge linked in red this article (link dead) from Yahoo News, which states that a new scientific report shows a link between wireless technology and autism.

In the first paragraph, the publisher (PressReleaseHelp) states that the study was published by “the peer-reviewed Australasian Journal of Clinical Environmental Medicine.” There is no Google hit for this association at the time of this post. No web site or anything. Others have tried to find the AJCEM but with the same results.

There is an Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine which publishes the ACNEM Journal (link dead), but there is no mention of the study anywhere on its public side.

The money paragraph reads thus:

The autistic children followed specific detoxification protocols in an environment that was mitigated with regard to sources of EMR including mobile phones and WiFi³. Heavy metal excretions were monitored from hair, urine and feces over periods ranging from several weeks to several months. The researchers found that with protocols administered in the mitigated environment, heavy metals were cleared from the children’s bodies in a pattern dependent on time and molecular weight. The heaviest metals, such as mercury and uranium, cleared last. In many of the children, the decrease in metals was concomitant with symptom amelioration.

Now, I earned a Chemical Engineering degree. I’ve maintained enough continuing education to keep a Professional Engineering license for the State of Ohio. I don’t have an active practice, so I’m not going to claim “mass transport god” or even “court jester” status. I do remember some things, though.

Basic mass transport explains that heavier metals will travel more slowly through porous media, e.g., cell walls. That’s no shock. Basic physics explains that metal particles can travel in an electromagnetic field. Also no shock, unless you crank up the voltage…

What is weird (by that I mean fails seventh-grade scientific method) is the claim that this behavior occurs “in an environment that was mitigated with regard to sources of EMR.” If you want to say that a behavior was mitigated by a condition, you have to perform a test before and after your mitigation. You have to predict with generally accepted science the result of the behavior before you run the test, so that your results aren’t biased.

How they mitigated also matters. Were these people stuck in a Faraday cage? Was there fields generated with a reverse polarity (and how did those poor kids stand still at the node for weeks and months?) Did they rip down all the power lines and study by sun and candlelight?

I’m assuming a lot, but the article needs to fill in those kinds of holes. That is the important part of the claim, and the execution of detoxification protocols on autistic children to study this claim is putting the cart miles ahead of the horse. Even if detoxification helped autistic children, that doesn’t prove EMR had anything to do with it.

Full disclosure: I have WiFi at the house along with cell phones, a microwave, and multiple other sources of electromagnetic radiation. The burden of proof is nevertheless not on us.