[Dylan16807]

> It's as awful as it sounds.

Well to me it sounds like you'd get heat stroke and pass out before anything reaches particularly painful temperatures, because it's heating you pretty evenly and not via contact, but maybe that's not the right way to think about it?

At higher frequencies I would guess it gets closer to normal burning?

[azalemeth]

This isn't really correct I'm afraid. The cause of SAR is predominantly dielectric losses and the loss tangent is a strong function of tissue type -- CSF, fat and bone are really quite different in terms of epsilon r and sigma, and one has to solve Maxwell with a human voxel model to work out SAR effectively which computationally is a pain.

Once tissue heating has occurred what happens next is well described by the bioheat equation, which is basically the thermal diffusion equation with a massive percussion term. The blood supply is very different to different tissue types and the depth at which peak heating occurs is a very strong function of wavelength.

For frequencies, the combination of these effects means that your eyes are most at risk -- water like and terrible blood supply. This gives rise to the first piece of advice I was given when a graduate student playing with electron paramagnetic resonance -- never look down a waveguide and treat them like a loaded gun!

[azalemeth]

Perfusion not percussion! Damn autocorrect...

[worewood]

> because it's heating you pretty evenly and not via contact

My microwave oven disagrees

[ctrw]

Without knowing anything about tissue interactions the reason why microwaves heat so unevenly is the sanding pattern that waves make.

[andrelaszlo]

If you want to get heated evenly, don't remove the spinning glass plate before entering your microwave oven.