4 ms·

If you're worried about the health effects of bluetooth headphones, then presumably you're also worried about the signals sent/received by the mobile phones the

If you're worried about the health effects of bluetooth headphones, then presumably you're also worried about the signals sent/received by the mobile phones themselves. The power in the signal between the phone and the nearby base-station/cell-tower is going to be orders of magnitude larger than between the phone and any bluetooth headset. I don't think anyone is arguing that using bluetooth headphones is 'good for your health', just that it's 'not bad for your health'. I'm not aware of any mainstream studies that have shown adverse effects from exposure to 'normal' levels of radio waves of the type produced by consumer products. I am open to being proven wrong though!

tomhoward 10y ago
As someone who is working to overcome a long-term fatigue/auto-immune illness and therefore has to be somewhat cautious about these things... I often listen to audio on my iPhone through wired headphones as I'm going to sleep (either relaxing ambient sounds, or podcasts). When I do this, I put the iPhone on Airplane Mode to disable all radio transmissions. I also keep any other radio transmitting devices well clear of the bed (this is commonly recommended for people who have impaired sleep, which I do). On any occasion when I neglect to enable Airplane Mode before falling asleep, I awake feeling significantly less refreshed in the morning (or even awake in the early hours of the morning feeling terrible). Given this, the prospect of having to switch to Bluetooth headphones while I sleep is at least somewhat unappealing. Bluetooth may not be as powerful and disruptive to brain waves as cellphone transmissions, but when sleep is already impaired, you want to avoid anything at all that will make it any harder than it already is. So, I'll be sticking with wired headphones and keeping all transmissions turned off when I sleep. I'm not aware of any mainstream studies that have shown adverse effects from exposure to 'normal' levels of radio waves of the type produced by consumer products. I am open to being proven wrong though! Studies of these kinds of effects are notoriously hard to do accurately, as they usually study a random sample of "average" people, but don't/can't take into account increased sensitivities of people who fall outside the norm due to illness or other factors. Anecdotal evidence is often sneered at by those who pride themselves on being only persuaded by "data" and "evidence". But those of us who fall outside the populations represented by the samples usually included in mainstream studies learn the hard way that anecdotal evidence is the only way for us to figure out what is good or bad for our day-to-day wellbeing.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  What about during the day though? Do you not carry it around with you? or is it always in airplane mode till you want to use it.
  - tomhoward 10y ago
    I carry it in my back pocket turned on without any apparent problems. I'm not averse to having a cellphone or other transmitting devices close to my body for extended periods of the day; it's having it right next to my head/brain for the entire 8 hours I'm trying to get good quality sleep that I'm more cautious.
- joncrocks 10y ago
  I think you aren't helped by the studies that have been done on people who have self-diagnosed 'hyper-sensitivity', that have shown that they can't reliably detect EMFs. http://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/ http://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/ This leads people to think that this means that no-one can be effected, whereas it could be that the self-diagnosed simply have a large false-positive (a high-proportion of people that while believing to, do not have any hypersensitivity). It also doesn't help that there have been no proposed mechanism by which EMF could act on the CNS/body. It also doesn't help that usually the signals complained about are orders of magnitudes smaller to other signals that people might just not be aware of/think about, like TV/Radio transmissions. You're right that it's not very easy being in the fringes, here's hoping you get better.
  - tomhoward 10y ago
    Before answering further, please ask yourself what's more important to you: feeling "right" about something on which you have a pre-determined belief, or listening to and fully considering the experiences of someone who has a strong personal incentive to understand this issue more thoroughly than most people do. I haven't diagnosed myself with "EMF hypersensitivity", or hypersensitivity to anything else (I'm not a voluntary gluten-avoider, or heavy consumer of organic kale or chia seeds or any other faddish "superfoods"). I'm surrounded by EMF all day from the iPhone in my pocket, the Wi-Fi enabled laptop on my lap, and the Bluetooth sound system in my car, not to mention all the incidental EMF that you mention. And I don't have any belief that any of it is a major problem, any more than the full-gluten bread and pasta I eat, the red meat I enjoy, or the red wine and beer I drink - all in moderation of course. Over the 10+ years I've been dealing with this illness, I've tried living with and without all of these and many other things, and have developed a very good sense of what my body tolerates well and what it doesn't. One thing I know very well is that my sleep is of lower quality when I have a transmitting cellphone right beside my head all night. And whilst I don't need lab studies to convince myself, for your benefit I can point to some studies [1] and a perfectly plausible mechanism for why this is the case, which is that the phone transmissions alter brain waves (i.e., Alpha, Beta, Theta, Delta), which play a significant role in sleep quality. (Speaking of which, I've personally had good success improving my sleep by entraining my brainwaves through the use of binaural beats [2] – indeed this is one of the very reasons I use the headphones while sleeping in the first place.) Whether this will also be the case with Bluetooth, I don't know - I'm open-minded either way. As I've always done, at some point I'll experiment and go with what enables me to sleep and feel my best. But in the short term I'll stick with what has been working well for me up till now. You're right that it's not very easy being in the fringes, here's hoping you get better. Made all the more difficult when your conversations on the topic so often tend towards patronising misappropriations of science to dismiss your experiences. But for what it's worth, my health (and sleep) is the best it's been in at least 5 years, and continuing to improve at an increasing rate, thanks. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-cell/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-ce... [2] https://www.stevens.edu/news/sound-asleep-student-uses-binaural-beat-entrainment-sleep-aid https://www.stevens.edu/news/sound-asleep-student-uses-binau...

tomhoward 10y ago

As someone who is working to overcome a long-term fatigue/auto-immune illness and therefore has to be somewhat cautious about these things... I often listen to audio on my iPhone through wired headphones as I'm going to sleep (either relaxing ambient sounds, or podcasts). When I do this, I put the iPhone on Airplane Mode to disable all radio transmissions. I also keep any other radio transmitting devices well clear of the bed (this is commonly recommended for people who have impaired sleep, which I do). On any occasion when I neglect to enable Airplane Mode before falling asleep, I awake feeling significantly less refreshed in the morning (or even awake in the early hours of the morning feeling terrible). Given this, the prospect of having to switch to Bluetooth headphones while I sleep is at least somewhat unappealing. Bluetooth may not be as powerful and disruptive to brain waves as cellphone transmissions, but when sleep is already impaired, you want to avoid anything at all that will make it any harder than it already is. So, I'll be sticking with wired headphones and keeping all transmissions turned off when I sleep. I'm not aware of any mainstream studies that have shown adverse effects from exposure to 'normal' levels of radio waves of the type produced by consumer products. I am open to being proven wrong though! Studies of these kinds of effects are notoriously hard to do accurately, as they usually study a random sample of "average" people, but don't/can't take into account increased sensitivities of people who fall outside the norm due to illness or other factors. Anecdotal evidence is often sneered at by those who pride themselves on being only persuaded by "data" and "evidence". But those of us who fall outside the populations represented by the samples usually included in mainstream studies learn the hard way that anecdotal evidence is the only way for us to figure out what is good or bad for our day-to-day wellbeing.

intoverflow2 10y ago
What about during the day though? Do you not carry it around with you? or is it always in airplane mode till you want to use it.
- tomhoward 10y ago
  I carry it in my back pocket turned on without any apparent problems. I'm not averse to having a cellphone or other transmitting devices close to my body for extended periods of the day; it's having it right next to my head/brain for the entire 8 hours I'm trying to get good quality sleep that I'm more cautious.
joncrocks 10y ago
I think you aren't helped by the studies that have been done on people who have self-diagnosed 'hyper-sensitivity', that have shown that they can't reliably detect EMFs. http://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/ http://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/ This leads people to think that this means that no-one can be effected, whereas it could be that the self-diagnosed simply have a large false-positive (a high-proportion of people that while believing to, do not have any hypersensitivity). It also doesn't help that there have been no proposed mechanism by which EMF could act on the CNS/body. It also doesn't help that usually the signals complained about are orders of magnitudes smaller to other signals that people might just not be aware of/think about, like TV/Radio transmissions. You're right that it's not very easy being in the fringes, here's hoping you get better.
- tomhoward 10y ago
  Before answering further, please ask yourself what's more important to you: feeling "right" about something on which you have a pre-determined belief, or listening to and fully considering the experiences of someone who has a strong personal incentive to understand this issue more thoroughly than most people do. I haven't diagnosed myself with "EMF hypersensitivity", or hypersensitivity to anything else (I'm not a voluntary gluten-avoider, or heavy consumer of organic kale or chia seeds or any other faddish "superfoods"). I'm surrounded by EMF all day from the iPhone in my pocket, the Wi-Fi enabled laptop on my lap, and the Bluetooth sound system in my car, not to mention all the incidental EMF that you mention. And I don't have any belief that any of it is a major problem, any more than the full-gluten bread and pasta I eat, the red meat I enjoy, or the red wine and beer I drink - all in moderation of course. Over the 10+ years I've been dealing with this illness, I've tried living with and without all of these and many other things, and have developed a very good sense of what my body tolerates well and what it doesn't. One thing I know very well is that my sleep is of lower quality when I have a transmitting cellphone right beside my head all night. And whilst I don't need lab studies to convince myself, for your benefit I can point to some studies [1] and a perfectly plausible mechanism for why this is the case, which is that the phone transmissions alter brain waves (i.e., Alpha, Beta, Theta, Delta), which play a significant role in sleep quality. (Speaking of which, I've personally had good success improving my sleep by entraining my brainwaves through the use of binaural beats [2] – indeed this is one of the very reasons I use the headphones while sleeping in the first place.) Whether this will also be the case with Bluetooth, I don't know - I'm open-minded either way. As I've always done, at some point I'll experiment and go with what enables me to sleep and feel my best. But in the short term I'll stick with what has been working well for me up till now. You're right that it's not very easy being in the fringes, here's hoping you get better. Made all the more difficult when your conversations on the topic so often tend towards patronising misappropriations of science to dismiss your experiences. But for what it's worth, my health (and sleep) is the best it's been in at least 5 years, and continuing to improve at an increasing rate, thanks. [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-cell/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-control-by-ce... [2] https://www.stevens.edu/news/sound-asleep-student-uses-binaural-beat-entrainment-sleep-aid https://www.stevens.edu/news/sound-asleep-student-uses-binau...