ASK DR. BAUGHAN                                             July 18, 1997

LEAVE ‘EM IN BOSTON

I hate it when science fails to support one of my prejudices.  Take cellular telephones as an example.  I was living in southern California when cellular phones first hit the market, so they rapidly became implanted in my mind as another status symbol in the materialist world of high finance, celebrity, fast-paced wheeling and dealing, competitive pretentiousness.  As I  chugged along with the freeway herd in my Toyota Corolla and noticed everyone with a phone plastered to their ear, I scoffed,  “What can be so damn important to so many people that they have to talk on the phone during rush hour?  Really!”  Traffic is bad enough.  Wearing a beeper is bad enough.  Do I really want to have to answer a ringing phone, too? Being a closet curmudgeon,  I held out on getting a VCR for about 5 years.  I  figured I could hold out even longer before “going cellular.”  I finally got one so I would not have the stress of having to get off the freeway and find a phone when my beeper went off.  It worked for a while, then I had the stress of the battery going dead repeatedly before I had the stress of getting of the freeway to find a phone.  I threw it in a box when I moved to New Hampshire.

So I took smug delight when a study conducted in southern California reported that people talking on cellular phones in traffic were four times as likely to be involved in automobile accidents.  Yes, they also help police by having citizens report criminals on the road, and they expedite emergency responses to accidents, but here was a clear justification for my belief that if you needed to talk on the phone so much you could pull off to the side of the road and get out of my way.

Then I thought I could deliver the coup de grace on the subject when I spotted the article in the May 22, 1997 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine entitled, “Interference with Cardiac Pacemakers by Cellular Telephones.”  I could self-righteously chastise  all those Bostonians bringing their cell phones to our pristine woods and threatening the lives of our dear cardiac-paced neighbors.  “Leave your cellular phones in Boston!” I imagined commanding.  Wouldn’t you know it, it turned out to be one of those rarities in the medical literature - a published article where they (almost) did not find anything wrong or new!  Yes, they could document some electromagnetic interference, but it only approached significance if the phone was held over the pacemaker.  Not every kind of phone and not every kind of pacemaker was tested (there may be hope for my bias), but the interference observed did not seem to be a genuine health risk.  The only caution they came up with was that if you have a pacemaker, don’t leave your cell phone  on in a pocket over your heart.  I might add, don’t let your grandchild listen to your heartbeat over a cell phone, and don’t transmit your pacemaker check signal over a cell phone.  Cordless home phones apparently have no risk, either.

So science let me down in maintaining a prejudice, and I am very disappointed.  The ability to change one’s mind is evidence for enlightenment, however.  It is made easier with a helpful rationalization.  I recently discovered that cellular phones are now so inexpensive, that many people in third world countries can afford a cellular phone when they cannot afford a phone in their homes.  So the phones are now tools that give access to communication to millions, not to the privileged few.  That makes me feel a little better.  But I’ll still leave mine in its box.