What do brain surgeons know about cell phone safety that the rest of us don’t?
Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cell phones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”
Dr. Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University who is an outspoken critic of cell phones, said: “I use it on the speaker-phone mode. I do not hold it to my ear.”
And CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Black he used an earpiece.
Along with Senator Edward Kennedy’s recent diagnosis of a glioma, a type of tumor that critics have long associated with cell phone use, the doctors’ remarks have helped reignite a long-simmering debate about cell phones and cancer.
That supposed link has been largely dismissed by many experts, including the American Cancer Society. The theory that cell phones cause brain tumors “defies credulity,” said Dr. Eugene Flamm, chairman of neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, three large epidemiology studies since 2000 have shown no harmful effects. CTIA (the Wireless Association), the leading industry trade group, said in a statement, “The overwhelming majority of studies that have been published in scientific journals around the globe show that wireless phones do not pose a health risk.”
The FDA notes, however, that the average period of phone use in the studies it cites was about three years, so the research doesn’t answer questions about long-term exposures.
Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set…