Radiation from mobile phones and health effects

What level of radiation exposure do you get from your mobile phone? Should you be worried about brain cancer? How about other types of health problems such as decreased concentration, personality changes, memory loss, etc.?

You may want to take a look at this:

Cell Phones' Radiation Report Card

Until we get more scientific data on this topic, it will remain a controversial area of debate and discussion. 

Another study looking at cell phones and brain cancer

I don't think we'll ever see the end of this debate. Do cell phones emit enough radiation to contribute to brain tumors and cancer? Specifically, people are concerned about glioblastoma. Mobile phone companies and carriers will probably do everything to convince the world that the answer is "no." Activist groups and cancer patients will do everything to convince the world the answer is "yes." Meanwhile, we as health care professionals will probably shrug our shoulders and say, "we really don't know."

The Interphone study overseen by the World Health Organization may be one of the largest studies evaluating the association between cell phone use and brain tumors. Here's a quote from The Daily Telegraph :

A preliminary breakdown of the results found a “significantly increased risk” of some brain tumours “related to use of mobile phones for a period of 10 years or more” in some studies.

Now, keep in mind that phones have evolved dramatically and that older analog phones emitted higher levels of compared to modern digital phones (although smartphones and high bandwidth data plans are a different story).

To get a preview of some of the results from this study, click here.

Do You Have Cell Phone Elbow?

CNN has a story about a phenomenon called "cell phone elbow." Instead of focusing on the thumb, fingers, hand, or wrist, this story focuses on the elbow.

You may have heard of BlackBerry Thumb and even PDA Nail. But have you heard of cell phone elbow? To the medical community, this may be called: cubital tunnel syndrome (no, not carpal tunnel which is in the wrist/hand area).

Cell phone elbow (or cubital tunnel syndrome) occurs when a nerve in the arm gets damaged because you're tightly bending your elbow for long periods of time. As a result, you may get numbness and tingling in your pinkie and ring fingers (which nerve is being pinched? Answer = ulnar nerve). According to Dr. Peter J. Evans, the director of the Hand and Upper Extremity Center at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, cell phone elbow "could impede your typing ability, your writing ability." In other words, it could get very serious.

The tips provided in this article include the following:

• Avoid activities that require the elbow to be bent tighter than 90 degrees.
• Fix workstations so the elbows aren't overly flexed.
• Don't lean on your elbows for an extended period of time.

Image source: CNN

Health Effects of Texting in Teens

Do you text? I'm not a huge fan of texting, but I tweet like crazy (however, most of my tweets are automated). Teenagers and other young people have taken texting to an entirely new level by creating a language of acronyms that can only be understood for those who are familiar with texting. According to the Nielsen Company, teens sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008. Wow!

The NY Times has an article on the health effects of texting. Physicians and psychologists are worried about anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation. That doesn't sound good, does it? The article quotes Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Here's a snippet of the quote: "Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be," she said. "Texting hits directly at both those jobs."

Frequent typing on tiny thumb keyboards can also cause BlackBerry thumb.

Annoying Phone Calls

We all get annoying phone calls. There's no way to escape them. Is there any way to Trace That Phone Number? However, you may be interested to know that there are services that can help you remove some of these calls. One way is to ask your phone provider to block that specific number. I had to do that a few weeks ago because I continued to get calls from a 1-800 number that would call me in the middle of the night. Each time I would go to answer the call, the caller would hang up. It was essentially an automated prank call (or crank call if you prefer).

Trace That Number is one service where you can enter a phone number and get a fair amount of useful information. I've used this service several times and it's helped me identify mysterious callers. I've also used Google and other search engines to look up strange phone numbers, but often you end up reading about complaints against that same number. It doesn't always yield useful information. So, the next time you have to perform a Free Phone Lookup, give this service a try.

Medical "Smart Patch"

Would you wear a digital patch on your skin if it could help you lose weight? Let me rephrase the question. Would you be willing to wear a "smart patch" that determines your caloric intake and expenditure? How?

PhiloMetron is developing a digital "patch" that you can wear. It uses a variety of sensors, electrodes, and accelerometers (the type of technology that auto-rotates your iPhone) to calculate your caloric I's and O's (in's and out's). This information then gets transmitted via Bluetooth technology to your mobile phone. Image source: Technology Review

RadioShack Trade-In Program

Have you heard about the RadioShack trade-in program? You can trade your old gadget for a gift card. Let's save the planet and go green! Dig up your old computers, mobile phones, laptops, and other gadgets. See if any of them qualify for a gift card.