The Brain Cell Phone Injury Debate Goes Nowhere

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Researchers  have tried  for years to prove or disprove that cell phone use damages the brain. Long term exposure to handsets, some believe, must have side effects. Those cellular communications waves cannot help but fry some portion of the human head or at least cause some form of cancer or other disease in heavy users.

JAMA has published a new study of cellphone use. It says exactly nothing. As a matter of fact, the conclusion of the work is that :

In healthy participants and compared with no exposure, 50-minute cell phone exposure was associated with increased brain glucose metabolism in the region closest to the antenna. This finding is of unknown clinical significance.

The test was small and only included 47 “healthy” participants. The results might have been different if the people had been sick.

Researchers refuse to concede that any useful human activity could have only benign effects. Steak is bad for people. So is unwashed salad and food kept in plastic containers too long. It is dangerous to live too close to electrical wires. It may even be unsafe to drive electric cars. That will probably be the result of a new survey which will help wreck the car industry again.

The cell phone test regimen has now gone on for at least 15 years from the time that the first Motorola walkie-talkie handset came out. Scientists have found nothing, because there is probably nothing to find. That;s too bad. A lot of grant money is probably at stake

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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