Flora Graham

I'm moving to London in October. I plan on taking advantage of this service. If only they had a British fish and chips rush delivery service to Canada, I wouldn't have to move!

I recently (almost) finished reading The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life.
My review:
This book has three parts: the author's description of the research that he has done on electromagnetism in the human body, and how it contributes to healing; his troubles getting his unpopular research funded and published; and his musings about the potentially negative effect that environmental EM is having on human health.

The author, an MD, describes his experiments with the electical currents in the body and brains of frogs and salamanders. His description of inducing the regeneration of severed legs on frogs, and his successful work extending to human bone fractures, are facinating and thought-provoking. I particularly liked the line drawings of hapless salamanders looking mournful after their amputated leg stumps were stimulated into regenerating arms.

Maybe because of my background in physics, I found the idea that electrical currents are a mechanism for healing and cell communication completely reasonable. So much so that I found the stories of the author's difficulty in getting funding tragic, especially considering the potential unveiled by his experiements. However, I think my background also made me a little wary of his constant complaints about the hidebound scientific orthodoxy, which tends to be the sure sign of a quack, in physics circles. Perhaps medicine, having only really bought into the scientific method in the last century, is still behind th times when it comes to an open-minded analysis of research findings.

I found my doubts increasing when the author started discussing his speculations that EM could be behind phenomena such as ESP. I cheerfully absobed the facts of his experiments, but I found these ideas unhelpful, in that he didn't support them with any data except the usual (quack indicative) references to Russian papers that couldn't get published in our status quo-loving North American journals.

Nevertheless, I found the book's ideas exciting--just take my advice and skip the second half.

If you know me, you may want to come to my party.

Aren't you wondering where the International Space Station is right now?

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