I have worked for over 35 years as a nursing sister, midwife, practise nurse, in a war in the Middle East and various fields of Western medicine, but I had never heard of anyone suffering from what has been termed ‘electrical sensitivity’.
In the late 1980s I began running the Health Centre at Middlesex University in the UK, despite being dubious about the substation that powered the whole University sitting six metres from my office wall. The Health and Safety officer told me that it was covered in lead, and he assured that I would not be affected. I loved the job, the beautiful green surroundings and the term time hours.
The effects of the substation were at first subtle: feeling frazzled and fatigued. When I started complaining about the station, I was belittled and undermined at work and by some of my family. I had always been an energetic and healthy person: qualifying as a shiatsu practitioner and giving treatments part-time, running tennis teams and a home with two boys, studying for a diploma in crystal healing, exploring new avenues of health and healing. I was not a complainer, and was used to working hard.
When given a computer around seven years into the job, and jammed between it and the substation, the situation deteriorated drastically. Shiatsu, crystal healing and holiday time no longer reversed the symptoms, as I now realise that chronic exposure had slowly weakened my defences extensively. Physicist Professor David Melville states that even chronic exposure as low as 0.2MT may cause significant changes within the cell membranes, which in turn may trigger changes in cellular biochemical processes (Cyril Smith, Electromagnetic Man).
Indeed I could feel my red and white blood cells changing polarity which was extremely uncomfortable. I began suffering from insomnia, palpitations, tinnitus (from frequencies outside my head), muscle pains, headaches, flushing, not being able to think clearly and forgetting people’s names. My skin lost all elasticity, and was dry and full of red blotches, and I would often turn grey and start shaking in front of the computer.
At full moon symptoms were exaggerated and unbearable. I was so exhausted, finding it difficult to move my body to get up in the morning. I’d almost pass out when using the photocopier, and struggled in places with a lot of radiating technology such as banks, and around supermarket freezers. The television at home was a nightmare, and I could feel the radiation coming through my bedroom wall when my son turned on his computer: it felt like a live current passing through my body.
Certain people such as those who work on computers extensively, people with negative thought-forms, or those with certain illnesses, affected me immediately. I remembered reading about a child in America who had to be separated from her father because she was ‘allergic’ to him. I can well understand this now as of course each person has an energy field and if there is any ‘negative’ or un-harmonious aspects to it they can really have a detrimental affects on someone who is sensitive (or anyone for that matter).
Eastern Electricity and the National Grid came to my office and said the electromagnetic fields were ‘acceptable’. My GP told me it was menopause, and prescribed me anti-depressants, which I refused. At the time I didn’t know quite what was happening and it was quite scary, but I knew I had to change the polarity of my body back to resonating in harmony with the earth. When I went for a crystal healing session with my teacher Ivy, she told me I had to leave my job as I had enormous tears in my aura and she didn’t know how I was functioning. She sent me to Harry Oldfied who had computer equipment that could take pictures of the aura just so I could see for myself. Harry again expressed that he didn’t know how I was walking around, as my aura, considered the body’s etheric shield amongst other things, was in shreds. He said I was on no account to return to work.
At the Royal National Homeopathic Hospital I was told that a number of people suffered from these symptoms and couldn’t hold down a job, or go anywhere at all. I was referred to Dr Cyril Smith who had written on electrical sensitivity. Professor Smith said that people exposed to pesticides or chemicals, as I had been while working on a kibbutz when younger, were far more likely to be electrically sensitive. He later e-mailed me saying it was remarkable I had survived ten years of working there and that I hadn’t died of leukaemia. He referred me to Dr Munro at the Environmental Hospital.
At the Breakespeare Environmental Hospital Dr Jean Munro explained my symptoms and that electrical sensitivity was a big problem for many people. She said her patients suffering from allergies were also sensitive, and people all over the world were coming to see her. Indeed when eating anything in a heightened state of ES, I became allergic to it. As a Doctor she was able to put me off work for six months. However, as the condition was not recognized in the UK at the time it was put down as ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’.
This was all over a period of about three years. My last year I was mostly off sick, and then had to take early retirement. I knew I had to avoid all electrical appliances. A Japanese film crew came to interview me about the subject, as this is a condition that is extremely prevalent in cities such as Tokyo that are wall to wall radiating un-harmonious electromagnetic fields. The populations of other ‘overdeveloped’ areas of the world such as North America and Western Europe are also subject to mass exposure of various fields, frequencies, and waves.
I knew I had to change my life radically, and with my boys older now, I returned to South Africa. The cold Atlantic ocean cleanses my body of any electromagnetic pollution and enables me to function. Salt, the grossest form of crystal, absorbs the positive (those that harm), and when the sea is clean and unpolluted it is truly a blessing for me. Indeed, during that time in London salt baths were able to absorb much of the radiation from my body, and with cold showers helped to alleviate my symptoms.
Symptoms of microwave exposure:
Fatigue disproportionate to effort
Frequent headaches
Sleep disturbances
Emotional instability
Inability to concentrate
Difficulties in memorising
Decrease in sexual potency
ECG abnormalities like bradycardia palpitations
(from R. Coghill’s Something in the Air
I have so much information on the subject that I have trouble putting it all together. I felt it was important to tell my story, my truth. From the Soviets radiating the US Embassy in 1956 in Moscow causing illness and cancer in workers, to the Americans today having developed microwave weapons designed to heat the skin and cause intolerable pain in under five seconds for the purpose of crowd control (Alan Duggan, Editor of SA’s Popular Mechanics reported in the Sunday Argus 3/7/05); studies from the 1960s showing bees subjected to Electromagnetic frequencies (ELFs) sealing up their hives mid-season, ceasing honey production and committing social suicide (Wellenstein 1973), and various other effects on the animal kingdom; from office workers and engineers working in dense electromagnetic fields, to horror stories of families living near power lines or cell phone towers suffering chronic illness and death.
Although there are many studies showing the link between leukaemia and power lines government bodies refuse to acknowledge this. How could they admit anything and pay out compensation to all those families?
Dr Robert Becker, one of the early bio-electromagnetic researchers in this field (twice nominated for a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on healing with bone fractures with externally applied ELF’s), but lost research grants and was subject to much harassment by US government bodies because his crime was that he established a clear link between power lines and health hazards:
“I want to tell the public about it because it makes me furious. I want the general public to know that science isn’t run the way they read about it in the newspapers and magazines. I want lay people to understand that they cannot automatically accept scientists pronouncements at face value – far too often they are self-serving and misleading. The way science is currently funded and evaluated we are learning more and more about less and less, and science is becoming our enemy instead of our friend.” (R. Becker, author of Body Electric)
Because we cannot taste, smell, hear, see or feel these things in the air, (unless you are ES), to them it doesn’t exist. Electromagnetic stress is too persistent its effect is accumulative, the immune system can’t cope and the body is unable to detoxify. There will be a decline in the endocrine system function and effects on the cardiovascular system, adverse effects on blood composition and tissue function, changes in carbohydrate metabolism, rise in blood sugar levels and decreased muscular strength. (R. Becker and G. Selden, The Body
Electric).
“Certain scientists keep telling the public that we still do not whether electro-pollution is a threat to human health – however there is so much scientific proof and information to the contrary that one cannot help but think that this is a programme of deliberate disinformation and deception.”
(Harry Oldfield, Harry Oldfield’s Invisible Universe)
What I now realise is that my sensitivity was able to save my life, as it acts as an early warning system. Those who are able to detect these things before they manifest in the body are far more likely to avoid degenerative diseases later in life. The problem is that while there are so many sensitives out there, denial about electrical sensitivity is rampant for perhaps three reasons that come to mind now:
1. It won’t do for the growth of technologically oriented business and government to admit the dangers.
2. Generally people are so saturated on a daily basis with electromagnetic radiation that their senses have for all intents and purposes been numbed, (especially by medication, alcohol and red meat — vegetarians are more sensitive.) If they were to feel any effects the lack of information about ES leads them to being misdiagnosed.
(Indeed one of the first undiagnosed cases of ES was the father of electricity Nikola Tesla. His over exposure to electromagnetic fields left his nervous system highly sensitised. He was close to death without any of the top physicians of the time understanding why). There are many, and I personally know of people who have been misdiagnosed and tragically institutionalised by the mental health industry. Because we cannot taste, smell, see, hear or feel these things in the air, to them it doesn’t exist.
3. Most people do not like to admit that their everyday practices and lifestyle are detrimental to their own health, the health of those around them, and the health of the planet.
Some tips are to pull out all plugs at night, and not sleep in metal-framed beds or on mattresses with wiring or use electric blankets. Sleeping over geopathically stressed or negative earth lines can be devastating.
(As a member of the British Dowsing Society for the past 10 years, my sensitivity and acquired knowledge has been instrumental in helping myself and other people).
If one insists on putting a lap-top on ones lap, protect your testes or ovaries with a fresh daily newspaper. House-plants such as Peace Lillies, Hen and Chicken (Spider Plant) and certain cacti such as cereus peruvianus, thrive on electromagnetic chemicals and stress, and are important to place such plants around workstations.
There are many other simple things one can do –
Drinking lots of water, eating enough protein, taking MSM and Vitamin C as well as walking barefoot on the beach or communing with Nature. I wonder what we are denying ourselves and our children by saturating them with unharmonious electromagnetic fields?
The ‘modern home’ with its multiple televisions and computers, wireless technologies and satellites, electric fencing and security beams, are simply dens of electromagnetic radiation. It all draws us further away from the natural world and its magic, and indeed will leave not a corner of it alone and unpolluted, when it is perhaps only with nature that we can realise our full potential on this planet.
Feel free to get in touch: Barbara Baum (021 783 1943)