Tech Outlook: Kevin Lorenzen explains EHS

Kevin Lorenzen can use a cell phone. But his wife says she physically can’t.

Self-diagnosed with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, she reports symptoms of brain fog, headaches or exhaustion when she’s around radio frequency radiation.

Lorenzen, whose background is in engineering, came on the Tech Outlook podcast to talk more about the condition and how his wife lives with it.

Find a preview of Monday’s Tech Outlook conversation about EHS below, which comes out Monday afternoon on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes and Soundcloud. The preview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS?

“It’s not really well known yet. … Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is really driven by people’s effect of electromagnetic fields on them.

So I like to use ultraviolet radiation as an analogy because I think people get that. So everybody knows that if you’re hanging out in the sun for eight hours out on the beach, you’re probably going to get burned, right? But if you have a much darker skin tone — more melatonin — or if you happen to be Irish and just came off the boat, the two people can be at the same beach for eight hours: One person is going to be severely burned; the other person, maybe not so much, and they’re okay. ...

So electromagnetic radiation is what comes from electrical fields, magnetic fields. It comes from radio frequency, RF, radiation. …

The interesting thing is that EMS doesn’t necessarily cause EHS. What they do is they actually have a biological reaction. So it really goes down to the cellular level. … Essentially, the electrical magnetic and RF fields … will affect the cells and cause what they call a voltage-gated calcium channel to open up, flood the cell with calcium, and that’s going to create inflammation and then really all different types of biological endocrinological issues within people’s bodies. ...”

You don’t have EHS yourself, but your wife self-diagnosed herself and a natural doctor later diagnosed her as well. So can you tell me about the symptoms that led to that?

“When we started looking at her health over the course of the last decade, she had some symptoms but you really didn’t know that it was driving toward EHS. So it wasn’t until probably she reached more of the toxic burden that it really had an impact on her. …

She was driving her (hybrid) car, and got to the point one day where she literally had to pull the car over, park it and called me and said, ‘There is something wrong with this car.’ She said, ‘I cannot drive it.’ She said, ‘I’m literally getting a heart attack. … My heart is pounding and my brain is burning.’ And she goes, ‘When I get in the car and turn it on, it’s bad, and when I get out, I’m better.’ So that really kind of told us something. …

Right now there are thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed papers written by scientists, written by doctors, MDs. And so the information is out there. It’s just that you don’t see it readily available.

So we kind of had to research a little bit and sure enough, found out that she was sensitive to pretty much anything that was an electrical, magnetic or RF. …”

How does your wife cope?

“We’ve had to do a lot in our own house in order to make it safe for her, or safer.

So we tried to do as much in terms of reducing the magnetic fields, electric fields. … We got completely rid of our Wi-Fi router. We went to a wired router and modem. So it’s old school. It’s like we used to do, right, so we now have literally cables going everywhere. … We got rid of every single smart device that we possibly could. …”

You mentioned before that there’s data, there’s peer-reviewed studies, but still medical doctors and federal officials say that EHS isn’t scientifically linked to EMF or radiation. So can you speak to that?

“It’s interesting because the FCC right now is standing by, essentially, guidelines that it put into place back in 1996. They’re so completely outdated. … The guideline that they have in place is strictly based on what they call a thermal effect. It’s only looking at the use of a cell phone, and how much that cell phone heats up over a period of time. … They’ve never, ever addressed what the radio frequency radiation is that is emitted from a cell phone. …

The fact that the FCC says it’s okay, you have to question whether or not they’re really doing their job. … Three years ago, the FCC was ordered to go back and review what its guidelines were and actually put in place specific requirements or regulations that we should have for radiation emissions, and they’ve done nothing for the last three years. …”

You and your wife have talked about wanting to raise awareness for these kinds of things. So what would you recommend that people do in their daily lives to lessen their exposure to radiation?

“There are a lot of communities right now that are putting in fiber optics. … Not everything has to be wireless. What was wrong with being wired?

So for my wife, … if she has to go on the computer, we’ve done a lot of modifications to it. So we’ve literally removed all of the guts from it, including the cooling fan, so even if she wanted to use that, she really can’t use it for much more than about five or 10 minutes because it will overheat. … She has a wired mouse now. She has a wired keyboard. … She literally has a stainless steel wall between her and the computer screen., and that’s how she’s able to use it (in a) very, very limited amount.

So completely different than what you would see in any normal working office environment where everything is pretty much wireless and everything is Bluetooth.”