By Dr. Mercola

Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are one of the most pernicious threats to your health. The question is, how do you limit your exposure to healthier levels? Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, one of my longtime mentors, was instrumental in educating me about the influence of EMFs on health. Klinghardt, who founded the Sophia Health Institute¹ in 2012 where he’s still actively involved in the treatment of patients, will not even take you on as a new patient unless you agree to address your EMF exposure. He’s that convinced of its influence.

In Germany, which is where Klinghardt hails from, they’ve been using beneficial pulsed EMF for healing purposes since the late 1800s. Even in high school, they were made aware of the fact that disease-causing EMFs created by high power lines, high magnetic fields, and microwave signals were hazardous to health.

“We were made aware that we shouldn’t sleep next to an electric outlet; that we should not have any lights close to our bed or electric alarm clocks. That was already known in the 1960s,” Klinghardt says. Once Klinghardt took up residence in the U.S., that background knowledge sort of fell by the wayside — until he began working with autistic children. At that point, the reality of EMF and its health effects came back to the fore.

“I was looking at this incredible crisis in autism and I started treating autistic kids in the late ‘90s and went to the medical meetings, the biomedical approaches to treat. What was entirely missing in those conferences was the aspect of electromagnetic fields that the child is [experiencing],” he says.

Excessive EMF Exposure During Pregnancy Raises Risk of Autism

Klinghardt conducted a pilot study in which he evaluated the EMF present in the bedroom where the mother slept during pregnancy. It turned out the average exposure of an autistic child to high frequency EMFs from household currents and microwaves from cellphones and other wireless technologies was twentyfold higher than that of the non-autistic children. Unfortunately, the study never made it into publication, but it convinced him that EMFs were an unacknowledged factor that contributes to autism.

Another study cited by Klinghardt shows that microwave radiation from cellphones, Wi-Fi routers and similar devices concentrate twentyfold in the womb, meaning whatever the reading is outside the womb, the measurement will be 20 times higher inside the mother. As noted by Klinghardt, “Unfortunately, the membranes around the womb have that strange effect in significantly concentrating the ambient EMFs that the mother is in, reaching levels that are not sustainable for human development.”

The real-world impact of EMFs is also evident in his clinical practice, as families with autistic children who take EMF remediation report seriously significant improvements. These findings have also made Klinghardt passionate about warning would-be parents about the importance of avoiding EMFs during pregnancy to reduce the risk of having an autistic child. Unfortunately, Americans have been slow to grasp the importance of such advice.

US Needs to Take EMF Exposure Seriously, Before It’s Too Late

According to Klinghardt, Russia and Iran have some of the strictest rules governing the amplitude of cellphone radiation.

“My brother sent this to me (and I have a Russian colleague working with me) of a lecture that Putin gave to his assembly [where he] basically said, ‘We do not need to go to war with America. America is committing collective suicide by the way they are using electricity. We just have to wait until they are all in the psychiatric hospital.’ That was Putin pretty much verbatim translated …

[Putin] wants Russia to be a strong nation again, and so he is doing it differently. He is doing it by limiting the electromagnetic exposures, knowing it’s going to create a whole different crop of children that are going to grow up to be intelligent, to be leaders in the world, to be scientists.

[The U.S. is] a dying nation, basically, because of the way we are fluoridating the water, the way we have adapted the vaccine program, the electro-smog. We’ve created a perfect storm to dumb down a whole nation.”

But autism is not the only problem exacerbated by uncontrolled EMF exposure. This kind of nonionizing radiation has also been linked to Alzheimer’s and infertility, especially in men, and all three of these problems are rocketing skyward in terms of prevalence. At their current trajectories, society as we know it will eventually cease to function.

The Threat of Human Extinction Is All Too Real

According to Klinghardt, Barrie Trower, a leading scientist for the British MI6, explored the effects of microwaves on human health by exposing children living in orphanages to various frequencies and levels. This research was later brought into psychiatric hospitals, where they discovered you can sterilize an entire population by exposing them to 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) — the same carrier frequency now used in Western countries for cellphone services.

“It’s estimated that over two or three generations of exposure, ongoing exposure to the same cellphone radiation that we’re using now, we will all be sterile and we will basically die out as a species,” he says. Klinghardt also cites research by Olle Johansson² (whom I interviewed in 2008), a neuroscientist and tenured professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, in which he found that areas with the highest density of Alzheimer’s disease in Sweden were directly correlated to the areas with the highest EMF exposures.

Johansson has issued warnings about cellphone radiation for over a decade now, and has come under intense pressure to resign from Karolinska, as the cellphone industry has threatened to withdraw its funding to the institute if he remains. Johansson is currently asking for private donations to continue his work on EMF.³

Practical Nighttime Remediation Strategies

One of the best prevention strategies I’ve found so far is to eliminate exposure to extremely low frequency (ELF; frequencies in the 50 to 60 Hz range) electric and magnetic fields during sleep, as this is a most important time for your brain. During deep sleep, your brain’s glymphatic system is activated, allowing it to detoxify and eliminate accumulated waste products, including amyloid-beta proteins, which are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

In most areas, the only way to do that is by turning off the electricity to your bedroom by flipping the circuit breaker. Exceptions include Chicago and New York, as the building codes there require all electrical wires to be in a conduit. As a result, if you live in either of these places, all you need to do is unplug your electronic equipment. You do not have to turn off your electricity, which makes it a whole lot easier to remediate EMF.

If you are ill or pregnant, you’d be wise to follow Klinghardt’s stricter recommendation, which is to shut down electricity in the entire house — with the exception of your refrigerator, air conditioning or heating, and any essential medical equipment — not just the circuitry in your bedroom. Klinghardt explains:

“Electric fields are very funny. You can switch off the electric field in your bedroom and have it on two rooms away, and through induction, the field can still jump from one circuitry to the next one and you can still be in a really bad field. We are talking about body voltage — that’s sort of what builds up in your system when you’re in a field of the low-frequency, the 60 Hz field from a household current. At nighttime, we want the fuses off …

[I]f possible, spend a few hundred dollars and get a remote switch installed properly, so that from your bed you can click a button and it switches off the fuses at the fuse box. That’s No. 1. Secondly, [if] you are in an apartment building and you have people below, next to you, above you, my first line of advice is to move if possible.

If it is not possible, you can create a protective wall against the neighbor simply by using aluminum foil, the sparkly, more shiny side toward the neighbor. The entire wall needs to be covered.

You can also do that with the floor toward the person below you, but it needs to be earthed. There needs to be an alligator clip on it … conducted into the wall outlet into the earth. This works beautifully [against] microwaves — [blocking] the cellphone router that the neighbor has underneath you, above you, next to you …

The earthing is for the low-frequency fields (low-frequency emitting devices). It’s a practical solution we often have to do because it costs at best one or two rolls of aluminum foil, plus a cable from RadioShack, so you can do that for less than $20 …”

The Worst Culprits Are Right Inside Your Own Home

It’s important to realize that if you have a Wi-Fi router, you have a cellphone tower inside your home. Ideally, you’d eliminate your Wi-Fi and simply use a wired connection. If you absolutely must have a router, you can place it inside a shielded bag when not in use. You can find shielded items online, or make your own using Swiss Shield fabric.

Be aware that some other forms of radiation can be very difficult to shield against. This includes frequencies in the 400,000 Hz range that police and fire departments are using. If you live close to a police or fire station and have developed health problems since you moved in, moving would be your best option, as this wavelength is virtually impossible to shield with any known technology. For most people, however, the worst exposure is your household electrical currents, your cellphone (when not in airplane mode) and Wi-Fi router.

Another important point to remember is that EMF will affect you regardless of whether you actually feel it or not. Those who are electrosensitive are physically aware of their exposure, but regardless of sensitivity, the disease rates are the same. On average, a person will experience biological effects from a cellphone at a distance of 12 feet.

Using a meter, I discovered I was still exposed to unhealthy levels at a distance of 30 feet, so when I’m not using my cellphone, I always keep it in airplane mode and/or inside a Faraday bag.

According to Klinghardt, the degree to which patients report improvement of their conditions directly correlates to their EMF mitigation efforts. Those who report no improvement at their four-month checkup have done little or nothing to mitigate their exposure, whereas those who report significant improvements have taken proactive steps. “It’s black and white,” he says.

Daytime Remediation

Reducing your EMF exposure during the daytime is trickier, as most of us need to use electronics during the daytime, and move about in areas that are Wi-Fi enabled. For seriously ill patients, Klinghardt recommends using Stetzer filters to decrease the level of dirty electricity or electromagnetic interference that being generated. You can also take these with you to work.

Also reconsider your use of compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs, as they emit microwaves. “Every (CFL) lightbulb is like a small cellphone tower emitting at those frequencies, which is absolutely devastating to the health of people,” Klinghardt says. “Those need to go and they need to be replaced with the old (incandescent) light bulbs.

They are safe. They cost more in electricity, but the cost to health that people have by [using] CFLs is a million times more than what you save on electricity.” Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are also best avoided.

As for internet, opt for a wired Ethernet connection and remove your Wi-Fi. When not in use, make sure your cellphone is in airplane mode and/or inside a shielded Faraday bag. When you do use a cellphone, you can reduce your exposure by texting (and keeping it short) or using Blue Tube (air tube) headphones so you can keep the phone further away from your body. Avoid wearing a Bluetooth earpiece and standard headphones, as they conduct the electric field right into your brain through your ears.

“In general, people should go back and insist on having land lines in their homes and at work and use that as much as possible. Only use the cellphone as an emergency device or for texting,” Klinghardt says. “Lastly, there’s the protective clothing. LessEMF.com is a good website that has all of that, including the full burqa …

[T]here are very attractive T-shirts, there is underwear. That’s the minimum I require of my patients with neurological disease and autistic kids; they need to wear that 24/7, and that has made a huge difference … By protecting your larger part of the body with the T-shirt, you get more benefits for your brain than when, for example, you wear a [shielded] cap on your head.”

How EMF Causes Harm

EMFs cause harm through a number of different mechanisms. As explained by Klinghardt, the radiation affects your microbiome, turning what might otherwise be beneficial microbes pathogenic. Research by Martin Pall also shows that microwave radiation activates your voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCCs) — channels in the outer membrane of your cells.

Once activated, the VGCCs open up, allowing an abnormal influx of calcium ions into the cell. This increased intracellular calcium and the accompanying increase in calcium signaling appears to be responsible for a majority of the damage that occurs. For more details on this, please see my previous interview with Pall. For this reason, natural calcium channel blockers such as magnesium can be helpful against EMF exposure, and it’s important to make sure you’re not magnesium deficient.

Magnesium threonate appears particularly beneficial as it acts as a potent anti-retroviral agent. Klinghardt recommends taking it to bowel tolerance, meaning you increase the dosage until you get slightly lose stools. For his patients, he always combines it with 12X calcium phosphate (calcium phosphoric), a homeopathic that helps modulate the calcium channels.

Environmental Impacts of EMF

Klinghardt also notes that electro-smog plays a significant role in the disappearance of bees and other crucial pollinators — that in combination with toxic pesticides and herbicides. And, as beneficial insects die off, disease-bearing ticks become more prevalent, as they turn out to be rather insensitive to cellphone radiation.

“The devastating thing is that what controlled the tick population in the past was birds. Birds eat ticks, but birds cannot live on ticks alone, they need all the other insects, and so there’s been a dramatic disappearance in songbirds and insect-eating birds,” Klinghardt says. “There’s a dramatic reduction of [insects], but only where there’s exposure to microwaves. We have German footage that shows trees, whole forests, dying just because a cellphone tower was put up.

The cellphone radiation, the way it’s used right now is completely against life and it’s compounded by the heavy metals that are in us, especially the aluminum that comes from the sky and from the air we breathe. We know that the glyphosate and atrazine and other herbicides, pesticides, along with [food] preservatives, all have a compounding effect in our body.

We have basically created a perfect storm, which we can still by eating organically, and by avoiding certain things, certain environments …”

I have become firmly convinced uncontrolled EMF exposure is a major, hidden factor that contributes to virtually all chronic disease, and hinders recovery. Klinghardt’s clinical experience supports this view, as patients rarely get well unless or until they start taking EMF remediation seriously.

Keep in mind that if you are ill, simply reducing your cellphone use from several hours a day to just a few hours is not likely to go far enough. You really need to take more drastic steps to limit, and ideally eliminate electric and magnetic field exposure, at least at night.