General practitioners (GPs) play an important role in advising patients on all sorts of matters related to their health, and this includes, of course, the possible risks of electromagnetic fields (EMF). Their views on EMF are thus relevant and potentially influential.
A team of German and Danish researchers therefore conducted a survey comparing GPs using conventional medicine (COM) with GPs using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) concerning their perception of EMF risks. A total of 2795 GPs drawn randomly from lists of German GPs were sent an either long or short self-administered postal questionnaire on EMF-related topics. Adjusted logistic regression models were fitted to assess the association of an education in alternative medicine with various aspects of perceiving EMF risks.
Concern about EMF, misconceptions about EMF, and distrust toward scientific organizations are more prevalent in CAM-GPs. CAM-GPs more often falsely believed that mobile phone use can lead to head warming of more than 1°C, more often distrusted the Federal Office for Radiation Protection, were more often concerned about mobile phone base stations, more often attributed own health complaints to EMF, and more often reported at least 1 EMF consultation. GPs using homeopathy perceived EMF as more risky than GPs using acupuncture or naturopathic treatment.
The authors concluded that concern about common EMF sources is highly prevalent among German GPs. CAM-GPs perceive stronger associations between EMF and health problems than COM-GPs. There is a need for evidence-based information about EMF risks for GPs and particularly for CAM-GPs. This is the precondition that GPs can inform patients about EMF and health in line with current scientific knowledge.
True, the evidence is somewhat contradictory but the majority of independent reviews seem to suggest that EMF constitute little or no health risks. In case you don’t believe me, here are a few conclusions from recent reviews:
- At present, there is little, if any, evidence that the use of mobile phones is associated with cancer in adults, including brain tumors, acoustic neuroma, cancer of the salivary glands, leukemia, or malignant melanoma of the eye.
- Mobile phone-like EMF do not seem to induce cognitive and psychomotor effects
- No clinical association has been demonstrated between cell and cordless phone use and vestibular schwannoma.
- The balance of epidemiologic evidence indicates that mobile phone use of less than 10 years does not pose any increased risk of brain tumour or acoustic neuroma.
But even if someone wants to err on the safe side, and seriously considers the possibility that EMF sources might have the potential to harm our health, a general distrust in scientific organizations, and wrong ideas about modern technologies such as mobile phones are hardly very helpful – in fact, I find them pretty worrying. To learn that CAM-GPs are more likely than COM-GPs to hold such overtly anti-scientific views does not inspire me with trust; to see that homeopaths are the worst culprits is perhaps not entirely unexpected. Almost by definition, critical evaluation of the existing evidence is not a skill that is prevalent amongst homeopaths – if it were, there would be no homeopaths!