Why Nocebo is Wrong

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sailplane

Why Nocebo is Wrong

If you check what nocebo means, from Wikipedia :

"The nocebo effect is when a negative expectation of a phenomenon causes it to have a more negative effect than it otherwise would."
"For example, when a patient anticipates a side effect of a treatment, he/she can suffer them even if the medication provided is an inert substance.[1] "
"It has been shown that, due to the nocebo effect, warning patients about side effects of drugs can contribute to the causation of such effects, whether the drug is real or not.[11][12] "

So, if indeed EHS was caused by a nocebo effect, then the only symptoms anybody would ever be able to complain about would be something they expected and have heard of, from others, or in the media.

If Nocebo is to be the explanation, some credible studies that completely unexpected symptoms can arise out of a completely unexpected cause, which I have not yet found.

Otherwise, Nocebo is just a cover for anything you can't explain..

You may as well go to the doctor and say doc my leg hurts.. Oh, it's just Nocebo, because we x-rayed your leg and found nothing.. except they don't do that, because they felt themselves that you can have pain without any apparent diagnosis!!.. No diagnosis, yet pain.. and yet, not nocebo??..

There are millions of people in pain which cannot be diagnosed.. And they keep going for test after test, and try to find out why. Does the doctor tell them they have nocebo?

Karl

Re: Why Nocebo is Wrong

This post was updated on .

sailplane wrote

Otherwise, Nocebo is just a cover for anything you can't explain..

^ I would vouch for this. Both of my parents are MDs, and they have such a malleable and self-serving definition of the placebo effect that it would have to be omnipotent and omni-malevolent.

sailplane wrote

So, if indeed EHS was caused by a nocebo effect, then the only symptoms anybody would ever be able to complain about would be something they expected and have heard of, from others, or in the media.

Bingo.

The things that led me to suspect ES predate my reading about it by 7-9 years (independently verifiable), so the placebo effect would have to be a magical force that can go backward in time.

Besides, there's never been a placebo controlled measurement of ES as far as I can tell. Every study I've seen has used ineffective shielding, so the subjects were never removed from exposure in the first place. Take a close look at citation #4 from the Wikipedia page on electromagnetic hypersensitivity (Regel et al. 2006, which you can get at sci-hub.cc):

- They have a one side open "shield," which is an oxymoron.
- They have multiple conductors running through the aforementioned "shield," but no mention of filtration (See "penetrations" below.)
- They have a keyboard, LCD display and mouse inside the "shield." (See bottom.)
- They claim that 80 MHz - 4 GHz background RF levels were tested before and after the experiment, but that excludes some of the most likely background frequencies, and they don't say whether the computer and display were turned on during those tests.

This is from my introductory electromagnetic compatibility manual:

TWO WAYS TO DESTROY A SHIELD

It's relatively easy to provide a lot of high-frequency shielding; it's also easy to destroy most of the shielding. There are cases in which a good 100-dB shield was turned into a 20-dB shielding wimp. The two shielding killers are slots and penetrations.

Slots: Intuition tells you that any opening in a shield can leak, much like an open window can cause heat loss in a building. The surprise is that for electromagnetic leakage, the longest dimension, not the total area, is critical. It's not a degree of opacity, and overlap does nothing. A slot that is 10 in. long by 1/100 in. wide is about 10 times more leaky than a 1-in.-by-1-in. square hole, even though it has one-tenth the area. That slot may not even be obvious - it could be a painted seam or cover, or a panel or door with a poor fit. (Put a cable next to a slot, and you're just waiting for an EMI disaster - more about that later.)

Slots behave like small antennas. In fact, slot antennas are often used in aircraft and space vehicles with success. (Wire antennas are vulnerable in such platforms.) Think about it: A wire antenna is a thin strip of metal surrounded by nothing, and a slot antenna is a thin strip of nothing surrounded by metal. A slot antenna is the dual of a wire antenna, so the polarization changes. That is, a horizontal slot has a vertically polarized electric field; a horizontal wire has a horizontal electric field.

[...]

Penetrations: The other destroyer of shields is the unterminated metallic termination. Dimensions don't matter here - even a pinhole with an insulated wire running through it can carry large amounts of energy across the shield, because the current on the wire passes through the penetration rather than diverting to the enclosure.

The penetrations can be intended conductors, such as signal/power lines or unterminated cable shields. They can also be unintended conductors, such as control shafts. We've even seen leakage due to water coolant carried in rubber hoses - most water is slightly conductive. In our experience, we've also seen reductions in shielding effectiveness of 40 dB or more because of a single unterminated penetration.

LCDs shouldn't be inside the shield for two reasons: First, they typically have something called a boost converter to generate the correct voltage for the backlight. For example, my mini-computer's display uses a Fairchild Semiconductor FAN5333BSX, which runs at 1.6 MHz:

http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/product.do?id=FAN5333B

As another example, this display uses a Linear Technology LT3754 boost converter, which runs at between 100kHz and 1 MHz:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1652

Second, they usually have pulsating dimmers. You can see in the schematic for the backlight on my mini-computer (pg.8 of the datasheet) that there's a line labeled EHRPWM1A. That refers to the EHRPWM facility of the Texas Instruments processor on the board:

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/StarterWare_EHRPWM

http://beaglebone.cameon.net/home/using-pwm-outputs

They also shouldn't have a keyboard in the shielded area:

http://pcbheaven.com/wikipages/How_Key_Matrices_Works/

On top of that, some switching power supplies operate at frequencies that aren't blocked by conductive shielding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_shielding

For static or slowly varying magnetic fields (below about 100 kHz) the Faraday shielding described above is ineffective. In these cases shields made of high magnetic permeability metal alloys can be used, such as sheets of Permalloy and Mu-Metal (trademark of Magnetic Shield Corporation, Illinois), or with nanocrystalline grain structure ferromagnetic metal coatings.

http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html

One interesting consequence of quasi-resonance is the switching frequency varies depending on the load (with 70kHz as a typical value).

sailplane

Re: Why Nocebo is Wrong

Anybody who never had EHS and doesn't know somebody with EHS doesn't really understand how the diagnosis gets made.
They think the person just decided they don't like Wifi and then it's causing them problem now.

Facts are, that symptoms appear first, and then the connection to EMF is made second. Also, likely in 100% of cases, the person is amazed and shocked at the correlation between their symptoms and EMF fields, and can't even believe it themselves.
You can't have retroactive nocebo.

Once the connection is made, nocebo can then start, and the person could technically become much worse even though they may have been just slightly affected. That part I can believe.