What we don't know
about Earth Radiation
In this article about electromagnetic
fields and their effect on human biology, Simon Best surveys
the growing concern and search for more information about the
phenomenon of harmful earth rays, or 'Geopathic Stress'. It is
a phenomenon widely and officially accepted in parts of Europe,
particularly Germany, but, largely because of the language barrier,
almost completely unrecognised in Britain.
The view that harmful earth radiations
- that is, ionising or non-ionising electromagnetic radiation
emanating naturally from the planet's geophysiology - can cause
or exacerbate many types of disease is one a growing number of
dowsers, doctors and alternative practitioners, especially in
Germany, have come to accept over the past 50 years.
It is an idea commonly now summed up
in the term 'Geopathic Stress'.
So seriously is the notion these rays
can be harmful taken in Germany that in 1987 the West German
government began to fund a DM 400,000 (£130,000) project
to investigate the claim that cancer and other major diseases
can be encouraged by living in places through which run lines
of Geopathic Stress.
The research is being undertaken by Professor
Hildebert Wagner at the University of Munich's Institute of Pharmaceutical
Biology.
Other German research has been carried
out on the location of accident 'black spots' in relation to
earth radiation. Engineer Robert Engros and Professor Karl Ernst
Lotz, now retired, have studied the high number of accidents
and head-on collisions on certain stretches of road occurring
for no apparent reasons.
In all cases, drivers who survived reported
having a complete blackout. In many instances Lotz has found
underground water crossing the path of the road just before the
'black spot' in question, which he proposes causes a form of
radiation giving rise to Geopathic Stress.
In Poland too the government is funding
research on Geopathic Stress and cancer.
Germany is where the majority of work
in this area is being carried out and where studies began. Some
of the first research was undertaken by the German scientist
and dowser Gustav Freiherr von Pohl and is presented in his seminal
book recently translated into English.
In 1929 he mapped danger areas in houses
in Vilsburg, south Germany, which were then investigated by the
German Central Committee for Cancer Research in Berlin.
After checking the local hospital records
it was found that all 54 patients who had died of cancer since
records had been kept had slept in beds marked on Pohl's map.
Further research carried out by von Pohl
and other doctors, added asthma, depression, rheumatism, arthritis,
MS, heart problems and a host of other disorders to the list
of illnesses that harmful earth radiation seemed to help initiate
or exacerbate.
One of the most extensive and recent
research projects was started by an Austrian school teacher,
Kathe Bachler, in the 1970's . She concluded 95 per cent of the
problem children she investigated slept in beds or worked at
desks placed at harmful sites. She also checked a sample of 500
cancer cases: every one was found to be sleeping over harmful
earth radiation.
Her findings were published in Austria
in 1978 in a best-selling book which has been published in Britain
with the unsurprising title 'Earth Radiation'
