Please Don’t Waste Your Money On “Anti-EMF Amulets”, People

Anyway. Have you heard about these anti-EMF amulets?

Do anti-EMF amulets work?

If you’ve spent much time online in the past 36 years or so, you’ve probably come across your fair share of ads for dodgy products. One of the latest ones – celebrity backed, no less – is an anti-EMF amulet, touted by its makers as “The World’s Most Tested, Trusted and Scientifically Proven EMF Protection.”

That’s quite a claim. So, does it hold up? 

Well, short answer: no. Long answer: no, but also, it doesn’t matter.

So, quick refresher: EMFs, or electromagnetic fields, are a form of radiation produced by electricity and the flow of current. “Electric fields are created by differences in voltage: the higher the voltage, the stronger will be the resultant field,” explains the World Health Organization (WHO). “Magnetic fields are created when electric current flows: the greater the current, the stronger the magnetic field.”

They’re all around us, all the time – and while they’re popularly associated with things like 5G towers, cellphones, WiFi routers, and powerlines, the fact is that EMFs are produced by everything from the sun, to the Earth itself, to even our own bodies.

It’s a big ask, in other words, for a single small amulet to block all of that out – which became very obvious when a team of YouTubers put it to the test last month.

“This is an RF [radio frequency] meter, which tells us the intensity of radio frequency electromagnetic radiation around us,” explained Linus Sebastian in a recent Linus Tech Tips review of one such amulet. 

With the amulet nowhere near him, the instrument showed readings “somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 to 1.7 volts per meter,” he demonstrated. But with the amulet nearby, the readings… well, they didn’t change. At all.

“It’s the same,” Sebastian reported. “Obviously, the [amulet] didn’t do anything.”

Further inspection of the, for want of a better word, device found plenty of reasons why that might be. First, a CT scan of the amulet revealed that the “silicon resonator” – presumably the bit that makes the whole thing “work” – isn’t actually connected to anything. But not to worry: after that, an RF spectrum analyzer showed that this “resonator” wasn’t doing anything in any case, even once removed from the resin casing of the amulet.

As channel presenter Alex Clark summed up: “Wow! It didn’t do anything.”

Are RFs/EMFs dangerous?

So, the amulet doesn’t do anything. Does that matter?

Well, from a monetary perspective, sure – it’s not a small amount of cash to hand over for a useless pendant. But if it’s your health you’re concerned about, you probably shouldn’t worry. 

Yes, we know that the amulet’s promotional material cites the WHO’s 2011 decision to classify RF fields as “possibly carcinogenic”, placing them in the same category as weapons-grade tungsten and welding fumes. But, as Sebastian points out, “what they fail to mention is that it also includes things like aloe vera, ferns, and pickled vegetables.”

“In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years,” the WHO points out. “Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals.” 

And the result of all that research? “Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields,” it reports.

Now, that’s not to say that EMFs have zero biological effects on us. We are, like pretty much everything in the world, a summation of charged particles, and (low frequency) electromagnetic fields interact with those particles the same as they do with the ones in anything else – by inducing voltages and circulating currents through our bodies.

Taken to an extreme, that could indeed be fatal. We exploit radiofrequency fields specifically to heat our food super-quick in microwave ovens – the same thing happening to our own bodies is quite literally the stuff of gory movie cliches.

But there’s a reason you’ve only seen that happen on screen. “Even directly beneath a high voltage transmission line, the induced currents are very small compared to thresholds for producing shock and other electrical effects,” the WHO explains, and “the levels of radiofrequency fields to which people are normally exposed are very much lower than those needed to produce significant heating.” 

“To date, no adverse health effects from low level, long-term exposure to radiofrequency or power frequency fields have been confirmed,” it adds, “but scientists are actively continuing to research this area.”

Why do people buy this crap?

The research is out there, then – so why do people still buy into these anti-5G/RF/EMF conspiracies? Well, the first thing to understand is that – just like being exposed to electromagnetic radiation itself – this is nothing new.

“Decades before the first generation of cellular towers were built in Japan in 1979, a different type of wireless communication tower spread across the United States: the AT&T Microwave Relay Network (MRN) (a.k.a., the ‘Skyway’),” explains one 2022 paper. “The microwave network represented the first commercial form of interpersonal (as opposed to broadcast) wireless communication.” 

“Between 1950 and the mid-1980s, thousands of these towers were built,” it says. “By the early 1970s they carried around 80 percent of all long-distance telephone traffic in the United States.”

From the beginning, conspiracies started circulating that these towers were harmful to human health – there were local protests at their construction, and even authorities like mayors – specifically, the mayor of Mahwah, New Jersey, in 1985 – promoted the idea that they could cause birth defects and cancers in the surrounding populations.

Similar concerns and actions happened with the rollout of just about every generation of wireless infrastructure. But it took the emergence of 5G for the conspiracy to really explode – and it was mostly thanks, the paper suggests, to simple bad timing: 2019 and 2020 was “a moment of hypervisibility,” the authors write, “when a nascent mobile infrastructure intersected with a global pandemic and became the target of conspiracy theories.”

It’s what psychologists and philosophers call a “phantasm” – a way of reorganizing reality to cope with your own feelings of anxiety (and let’s face it: there’s a lot to be anxious about right now!) And that means… well, it means it’s slippery. Fact-checking can sometimes be fruitless; challenges can cause believers to shut down.

Still, that doesn’t mean fighting back is entirely pointless. “By no means do we suggest that research and preparation will be able to fully stop the conspiracy cycle,” the 2022 paper concludes. “However, as communication scholars, we are well suited to both analyze these conspiracies and begin planning for what is likely to come.” 

“In other words, we need to start planning now for the intersection of the next health concern with whatever new mobile infrastructure arises in that future moment.”