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by lcvw 653 days ago
How could it be? The radiation wavelength is far too high to cause any sort of chemistry. I know there are those that will still believe it does though.
5 comments

It's not about the wavelength, it's about the power.

I use shorter or higher wavelengths (depends on the channel in question) to cook my food every day but my phone sure doesn't emit 700W

Getting cooked is also not cancer. There is also not evidence for a link between burn injuries and cancer anyway.
No evidence is needed. Tissue damage is damage and genetic stress. It can increase the risk of a local cancer.

In fact, when the healing occurs, keloid scars can form, which is a benign growth.

> No evidence is needed. Tissue damage is damage and genetic stress. It can increase the risk of a local cancer.

"No evidence needed" works if you want to be an astrologer.

Then everything causes cancer (and death really) by means of break, bruise, bump, burn, cut, prick, sprain, tear, etc.

Where evidence is needed is if you want to show a statistically significant result of your analysis that something indeed causes injury, and does it often enough to cause cancer within a person's lifetime.

>No evidence is needed. Tissue damage is damage and genetic stress. It can increase the risk of a local cancer.

Why doesn't the same damage occur when you're being blasted with 600 THz radiation (ie. visible light from your lightbulb)?

The healing of repeated damage to the body is a vector for cancer. For example, mesothelioma caused by asbestos. The asbestos is continuously damaging tissue in the body, and the healing of said damage leads to calcification of tissue and potentially cancer.

It's certainly possible that other repeated tissue damage, such as those from burns, could also be cancer causing.

I am not a doctor, but..

..let’s assume that a specific area of our inner body is “micro-cooked” constantly, the body will certainly try to repair that area with higher frequency and therefore there would be a higher risk of cancer, wouldn’t it?

I guess we should consider heated seats dangerously carcinogenic then. They put out far more power than a cellphone. Same with heating bags and homes without air conditioning.
For sure it can’t be good to put our heads on a heated seat for hours a day, every day for decades.
What's the mechanism by which UVA and UVB radiation cause cancer?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation :

>Exposure to ionizing radiation causes cell damage to living tissue and organ damage.

>Gamma rays, X-rays, and the higher energy ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum are ionizing radiation, whereas the lower energy ultraviolet, visible light, nearly all types of laser light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are non-ionizing radiation

In other words, the UV causes cancer because it's in the ionizing range of the spectrum. Radio waves don't because they're not.

Aren't UVA and UVB the low energy / non-ionizing parts of the UV spectrum?
You're right! But also, it's effectively the same as ionizing:

"UV-A and UV-B are technically non-ionizing, but all UV wavelengths can cause photochemical reactions that to some extent mimic ionization. For example, ultraviolet light, even in the non-ionizing range, can produce free radicals that induce cellular damage and can cause skin cancer."

https://radiation.ncdhhs.gov/NonIonizing/UVRad.htm#:~:text=U....

Ionization
The non-ionizing range of UV still poses a cancer risk.
I think it depends on the amount of the radiation. While non-ionizating radiation doesn't have the ability to remove electrons, it still can heat up surfaces. Microwave ovens for example use non-ionizing radiation to heat up food, but this amount of radiation could potentially be dangerous if exposed to, because it could destroy human tissue.
You're right, it is entirely possible to get RF burns at the UHF frequencies involved here. I wouldn't want to hang out near a 1kW UHF antenna!

But let's look at the scale of emissions here. A microwave oven is going to be radiating anywhere from 800 to 1600 watts of energy into a box designed to focus most of the energy where the food is. A phone is going to emit maybe 2W of power at its peak transmission power omnidirectionally. Meaning a lot of that 2W isn't going anywhere near your head.

Wouldn’t it then hypothetically also kill the cancer cells? And due to increased water and blood flow, in an even higher rate compared to healthy cells?
Unless you happen to be irradiating a tumor, then your going to be damaging a lot more healthy cells than cancerous ones
AFAIK "cellphone cause cancer" proponents moved to more vague mechanisms like localized heating and/or "inflammation".
Will that ever change? i.e. is 5G as undangerous as 2G?
Well, based upon some Googling, 2G's wavelength is ~33cm and 5G's is ~80mm, so that's a big increase, but the kicker is that ionizing radiation's wavelength starts at ~100nm, so we're still a huge distance away from dangerous. We're not even at visible light yet (~700nm). 5G has less potential for damage than your computer screen.