Every cell in your body carries an internal electrical charge that is slightly different from the surrounding fluid. That difference of a few thousandth's of a volt between the inside and outside of a cell is the difference between life and death, sickness and health, memory and blankness, love and despair.
Despite not knowing exactly how this vital, vulnerable balancing act works, we are saturating our bodies with increasing amounts of high and low energy electromagnetic radiation daily.
The body has, we believe, an amazing capacity to regulate its internal electrical distribution within a considerable range of environmental field strengths and frequencies. We think. But we aren't exactly sure.
We have noted that the incidence of cancer and other systemic diseases such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder in children and adults, AIDs, and others have increased at the same rate as electromagnetic energy has pervaded our living and working environments. Are these coincidences or correlated events?
The tiny difference in the electrical charge across the cell membrane must be maintained actively and precisely in a living body. Without the difference that the cells maintain against what is called the potential gradient, life is impossible. Yet we continue to add to the amount of cyclical voltage fluctuations and artificial magenetic fields that the cell must deal with.
Let's look in more detail at this process.
Biological voltage differences are maintained by differences in the concentration of ions in the fluids inside and outside the cell. (The body has trillions of cells) Ions are atoms which have lost or gained an electron. An electron has a negative charge, so an atom that has gained an electron has a slightly more negative charge than its counterpart with the normal number. Living cells are very sensitive to these differences, and have some amazing methods for keeping the charges in the range necessary for life, for communicating nerve signals, for acquiring and using sugar, for building bones, etc.
We know for sure that living tissue in an alternating electrical field, or any magnetic field, is going to be effected at these extremely sensitive boundary mechanisms that keep the cell charge in the correct relationship to its surrounding fluid. What we don't know, and haven't pursued research on, is what exactly these effects are.
According to Robert Becker (whom we have encountered before), research in these areas was stifled by a dominant model of health of the cell in electrical fields that depended upon a measurable increase in the temperature of the cell in response to the electromagnetic radiation. As he put it, we treated the cell as a plastic bag of minestrone soup, and wanted to see the soup cook in the bag before we considered radaiation harmful. That model produced military and industrial limits on the amount of ionizing radiation (Microwaves, gamma waves, etc) that workers and soldiers could be exposed to.
The model has improved slightly in the last 50 years, but not enough. Results from various labs in the 80s and 90s began to indicate there were other mechanisms than mere heating involved in patterns of illness associated with high levels of exposure to electromagnetic radiation.
In effect, Becker asserts that it is not the heat generated in the minestrone soup by the radiation that is the issue of concern at this point. We need to be concerned with the fact that the bag itself is effected by much lower energy fields, and even if the soup isn't heated, the bag's ability to function as a container, and an interface to the rest of the world, is very much affected by the existence of even low energy, low frequency radiation.
I am looking at the sodium and potassium ion transfer mechanisms of the cell as a point of vulnerability in organisms exposed to alternating current /or magnetic fields.
Please see this animation for a clear picture of the cell process, if you skipped the link above.
In my next post I will look at some of the arguments against concern about environmental electromagnetic radiation as a health issue.
Posts
