Legal disclaimer: This article is not offered as medical advice. This is a blog based on anecdotal, personal experiences and thoughts.
There are lots of tips online and the purpose of our website is not to become one that itemizes all of the “how-tos” like “how to disable the wireless option on a printer” (e.g. Cece Doucette’s youtube video about the acoustimeter shows that). However, I did want to put in a couple of blog articles about the management of EMF sensitivity because I know that there are some my readers who will be curious and other folks who will end up finding this blog because they are looking for help themselves in dealing with this condition. It can be difficult for sufferers to do much online searching for help since even using a computer can be problematic.
Note: If you are a student researching this topic, please check the links in my brochure that is found here.
So, here’s my 2 favourite (and concise) places to find out details of how to live with EMF sensitivity, while you might wait to be seen at Women’s College Hospital Environmental Health Clinic (Toronto) or similar research teams:
- The Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Workbook: A Guided Journey to Feeling Better (2011), written by Angela Hobbs, published in Canada. ISBN# 978-0-9868528-5-5. Note: We do NOT sell this book. We do not get any compensation for telling you about this book. It is simply a recommendation of a resource that I have personally read.
- EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF… Europe seems to have more advanced research going on over there and it appears that what they conclude is the direction that the understanding EMF specialists are tending to follow on this side of the world. This is a long, scientific document but is quite well articulated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27454111
Now for the “funner” way of summarizing how to live with this. This following analogy is not original with me. But I did decide to draw it out and explain it like this. I think it helps children as well as adults to grasp what is going on and how to manage it:
Think of a BUCKET!
For whatever reason(s), people have various sizes of “buckets” as to how much environmental pollution one’s body can handle before showing signs of reacting against that pollution.
What determines the size of your “bucket”? No one knows exactly “why”. (You might also want to read Part 2 about Management of the Bucket here.)
The reasons might be genetic (i.e. you might be born this way because of your family’s sizes of “buckets”) or injury-related (e.g. at some point your environment caused an injury which damaged you and “shrunk your bucket” for the long-term). That “injury” might not have been noticed at the time by you, for example, it could be that you had no “household grounding wire” working where you lived or another wiring error so that your body became a “human ground rod” for the flow of electricity through your house. It could be because you lived or worked very close to high voltage power situations, or moldy basements, or used harmful chemicals that you thought were safe, etc..
The “Bucket” Sizes:
A “Total Body Burden” Explanation
(Rather Than Thinking It As A Single or Repeating Allergy-Event Situation):
There is NO perfect environment in this world. But some areas have less pollution than others. People get sick and/or injured and eventually die here for various reasons, not just environmental ones. Only God’s heaven (which is a real place as described in the Bible) is perfect, without sickness, without death, without pain of any kind, and without any wrongdoing. But here, we people sometimes make choices which pollute the world we live in and all of us suffer to one extent or another.
When anyone is in a “cleaner” environment, their body can sigh a bit of relief and begin to heal from any damage from the polluted environment. The longer one can live in that better environment, the more opportunity one has to recover at least some of their health. This is because that person’s bucket can begin to “empty”…. to heal by replacing with healthy cells faster than getting them damaged by pollution:
- The holes and cracks in this bucket represent the amount of TIME spent in a better environment to recover and get rid of some of the effects of pollution.
- The more a bucket (person) empties (recovers from environmental damage), there is more opportunity to be healthier.
- The person who can just spend a short amount of time in a low-polluted environment (e.g. sleep in low-pollution but work in high levels of pollution) and/or a lot of time in a somewhat polluted environment (e.g. living 24/7 in low-levels of some but not all pollutants), just has a few cracks and holes at the top of the bucket. Therefore the bucket can’t empty a lot and remains almost full. This means that it won’t take very much of an exposure to a pollution trigger (for example, going out in public) to result in that person overflowing with a reaction to it.
- The person who can mainly live, work, and sleep in areas of low-environmental pollution gets a lot of holes in their bucket and can empty/recover much faster. The tolerance also improves because there is room in that person’s bucket for pollutants (e.g. when going occasionally out in public where there are pollutants such as in stores). More stuff can be tolerated before overflowing to a reaction and might not even get to the point of overflowing with those symptoms if those exposures are not long or heavy. And then, of course, re-healing can occur easier when coming back to sleeping, etc. in the area of low-environmental pollution.
Being willing to change the living environment (e.g. eliminating wireless in a house) or if necessary, to move to a better environment, is critical for the likelihood of recovery of people with very small buckets! Many people CAN recover from this but that could involve some difficult decisions for lifestyle changes.
Because our modern lifestyle often accepts a lot of pollutants in it every day, those with the very small buckets who aim for recovery often must change their lifestyle. This is not always accepted as “sensible” by people they have known (e.g. co-workers, extended family, friends, community leaders) or even some professionals.
I am blessed to know that almost everyone that I have personally explained my/our family’s environmental sensitivities to, have been willing to learn about it and remain supportive to us.