Gittleman - Zapped: why your cell phone shouldnt be your alarm clock and 1,268 ways to outsmart the hazards of electronic pollution

Q uick. Look around you. What is the most fascinating high-tech thing you use?

Is it your iPhone or BlackBerry? Or that GPS mounted on your windshield? Perhaps its your Nintendo Wii video game system or your home theater with its monster-size plasma TV and surround-sound speaker system.

With all the latest technological innovations, you may be hard-pressed to come up with your personal favorite digital or electronic appliance or wireless gadget. The truth is, nothing man-made even comes close to the wonder of the human body as an exquisitely tuned and sensitive electrical being.

You might be surprised to know that everything your body did today was made possible by electricity. The organic computer, known as your brain, that runs the whole show emits waves that are electrical. All the sensory information (like hunger and pain) it sends and receives is electrical. This includes the neurons that discharge when you move a muscle, the signals that tell your body to heal a wound, and even the beat of your heart.

In fact, the electricity that facilitates the heart is produced when charged increments of energyknown as ionsflow through the heart and cause contractions. You may remember these ionscalcium, potassium, chloride, and sodium (which are especially high in conductivity). They are found on that Periodic Table we learned about in high school science. Well, every one of the elements on the Periodic Table carries an electrical charge, so we are, in a very real sense, electrical beings in an electrical world.

As Yale scientist Harold Saxton Burrwho first used a voltmeter to test the electromagnetic fields in the human body in 1936once said, Electricity is the way nature behaves. When an electric current flows through a conductor or wire, a magnetic field is created; thus, the term electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Electric and magnetic fields both interact with the body in various ways. When your heart pumps electrically charged blood (the electric current) through your circulatory system (the conductor), the process creates a powerful magnetic field that surrounds your body and can be measured.

The electromagnetism of the body is so crucial to our functioning that even conventional medicine uses it on a daily basis in diagnostic testing. Every single electron, cell, tissue, and organ in your body carries a very specific frequency or range of frequenciesan electronic signaturethat can be measured. This principle is utilized in some of the most accurate and life-saving diagnostic procedures from the electrocardiogram for the heart, the electroencephalogram for the brain, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the body.

MRIs work through the transference of energy via a specific frequency. The energy in this case is made up of radio waves. The atoms in the body or body parts that are being assessed only absorb these energies if their resonant frequency is a match for the frequency of the energy.

So, it is time to think of yourself as much more than a physical being. You are an energy being as well. And you are the most fascinating high-tech machine you use on a daily basis!

The decade of the 1980s ushered in a new awareness for many of us regarding the electrical nature of the body. Such awareness is truly essential to understanding how invisible man-made sources of frequencies from power lines, electrical appliances, and electronic devices can impact our physical health. Two pioneering researchers in the field of energetic medicine, Robert O. Becker, M.D., and Richard Gerber, M.D., were largely responsible for bringing this new awareness to those who were ready to receive it. Both authored books dealing with electromagnetism as the basic life force and its role in health and disease. Those books became time-honored classicsBeckers The Body Electric, first released in 1985, and Gerbers Vibrational Medicine, released three years later. The information in these books laid a foundation for understanding the electric nature of the body and related ancient healing arts, such as acupuncture, which deal with energetic balance.

Doctors of Oriental Medicine teach that the life force energy, which they call chi (Indian yogis call it prana, Hippocrates called it natural life force, and Christ called it light), flows through the body in a given sequence through long, narrow energy channels known as meridians. There are two polarizing forces, known as yin and yang through which chi manifests itself. Yin and yang are paired opposites, which express the female and male principles, respectively, that exist in all things in varying degrees. Our state of health, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, is determined and measured by the balance of yin and yang forces in our bodies.

Balanceenergetic balance, which expresses itself physically as chemical balanceis the key to health. When the energy balance is disturbed, chi no longer flows freely through the body. It may become stagnant or flow too forcefully through any of the major meridians, each of which is associated with an organ or set of organs. These imbalances are seen as giving rise to (and preceding development of) physical symptoms in the physical body.

Therefore, before physical symptoms manifestsometimes years beforean energy disturbance exists, which will eventually express itself in bodily illness if not corrected. To prevent this physical expression of imbalance as disease, the Doctor of Oriental Medicine uses acupuncture to redistribute disturbed energies in the body through insertion of needles at key points along the meridians (points that serve as booster amplifiers to bolster the energy flow).

Western medicine has long been skeptical about acupuncture. Such skepticism was largely based on the inability to think of the body in electrical rather than just biochemical terms. Furthermore, there was no proof of any physical structures that corresponded to the meridians through which the invisible chi was said to flow. Little did conventional health practitioners know that the actual physical structures had already been identified. In the 1960s Korean researcher Kim Bong Han discovered a fine duct-like tubule system that corresponded to the meridian paths as charted in Chinese medicine thousands of years earlier. (Gerber made this stunning disclosure in Vibrational Medicine.) This correspondence was later verified by tracking the movement of radioactive isotopes through the tubule system with a high-speed computed tomography (CAT) scan. The isotopes were found to travel the course of traditional acupuncture meridians when injected into acupuncture points. Injection into random, non-acupuncture points did not have this effect.