So if, just possibly, the supplier gets an analogue meter out of the museum and the tinnitus doesn't go away, what is the next step?

AR Brearley said:

I sincerely hope you don't have to suffer this yourself before you start believing that this is a real issue.

Oh, I have no difficulty in believing that you have symptoms. What has not been demonstrated is a scientific or engineering cause, or dare I say, even a medical one.

OK, so that's good you believe I do have the symptoms. I have been open and honest about these symptoms which began soon after the first digital meter was installed on 9 February. I have described how those symptoms have been affected by leaving and returning to the house, what happened when the first meter was switched off and the second switched on, how I managed to attenuate some of those symptoms by surrounding the meter in a Faraday Cage, provided information on ultrasonic and electrical noise within my house and in comparison with other houses, I have found and presented research on the subject of digital meters being responsible for symptoms matching my symptoms of tinnitus, insomnia, fatigue and "brain fog" (as the Norwegians call it).

I started this discussion hoping to find out what other members of the IET members know about the scientific and engineering causes of my symptoms. (I don't expect scientific medical responses here, but they would be welcome from people qualified and/or experienced in the medical field.) I've had responses from other members who are sure their tinnitus commenced with their exposure to smart/digital electricity meters.

From your post of 24 July:

Chris Pearson said:

I know that the electricity meter is not responsible for his tinnitus because no electricity meter is capable of causing it.

Please can you counter what I have experienced since 9 February with your knowledge of how an entire class of device cannot cause tinnitus. Also, as no devices apart from the electricity and gas meters have been changed or added in my house since 9 February then let me throw back your question of what in my house suddenly became and continues to be dangerous to my health after 9 February, changing in severity with each different electricity meter installed and affecting me even with the distribution board switched off except to a lesser degree. Any suggestions? It doesn't make any engineering sense to me that it could be anything but the electricity meter(s) to blame.

AR Brearley said:

Please can you counter what I have experienced since 9 February with your knowledge of how an entire class of device cannot cause tinnitus. Also, as no devices apart from the electricity and gas meters have been changed or added in my house since 9 February then let me throw back your question of what in my house suddenly became and continues to be dangerous to my health after 9 February, changing in severity with each different electricity meter installed and affecting me even with the distribution board switched off except to a lesser degree. Any suggestions? It doesn't make any engineering sense to me that it could be anything but the electricity meter(s) to blame.

All that has been done is to demonstrate an association between the change of a meter and the onset of tinnitus. First, that is not evidence of causation; and second, there is no evidence that it is any more than coincidence. Tinnitus is common. Meter changes are common. Therefore, the two must coincide frequently.

Then we have the psychology. If it is believed that the new meter is the cause, then the fitting of a clockwork meter will fix the problem. However, if it is believed not only that the new meter was the cause, but also that it has acted as a trigger rather than a stimulus (in the same way that ionizing radiation may trigger a cancer which becomes apparent long after the stimulus ceased), there is a further problem.

So the solution lies in the psychological domain rather than the engineering one.

Chris Pearson said:

All that has been done is to demonstrate an association between the change of a meter and the onset of tinnitus.

That is not so, as I pointed out in an earlier note.

Chris Pearson said:

second, there is no evidence that it is any more than coincidence.

That is also not so, as both AR and I have noted.

You are of course welcome to adhere to your belief (and I stress it is no more than a belief) that AR's symptoms have nothing to do with resonant frequencies (EM or sound or ultrasound) in his house. You are also welcome to adhere to your apparent belief that there is no such thing as EHS, in contradiction to those medical scientists who claim to have measured physiological correlates. However, the conclusion you draw

Chris Pearson said:

the solution lies in the psychological domain rather than the engineering one.

is not in fact a conclusion. It is the premise with which you started your contribution. 

What you are presenting is a classic piece of what Peirce called "sham reasoning", namely in Susan Haack's words "making a case for the truth of some proposition your commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof" (Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, p8, University of Chicago Press, 1998). (Being au fait with "science", I assume you know of Peirce's and Haack's work on the methodology of science.)

Arguing ad hominem never really works. What I believe is irrelevant, but I do know medically unexplained symptoms when I see them.

Okay Chris, let's consider the psychological aspects of this. When looking at problems and solutions, we need to look at all the aspects and you are not wrong in considering tinnitus to be a psychological condition, sometimes.

I have made no secret that I have suffered tinnitus in the past. The first occasion I suffered tinnitus bad enough to request medical help was soon after an operation in 2011. The tinnitus I suffered afterwards stayed with me wherever I went and never seemed to change in intensity during the course of a day. After thorough checks and tests, nothing was found wrong with my ears and hearing, so I was referred then for psychological help. Thus I have first hand experience of being on the receiving side of such help. Here simplistically is what I learnt: Stress causes tinnitus, tinnitus causes stress, break the cycle and the tinnitus will go away with reduced stress too.

After weeks of going through what was going on in my life in great detail, the remedy prescribed would have caused even more stress than ever. (Sorry, the remedy is confidential.) I decided I had to tough out the tinnitus instead as I could not face going through all that stress. The tinnitus came and went over time passed and it ebbed away completely for a few years in 2017 not too long after my GP told me to stop taking Ibuprofen due to stomach issues. In 2020 the tinnitus started again in earnest after being prescribed a strong type of NSAID. After searching online for information about that particular NSAID and tinnitus, it soon became clear that there is a recognised issue with all NSAIDs that can cause some people to suffer tinnitus. Going back through my history of taking NSAIDs and tinnitus, it became clear that there was a strong link between suffering tinnitus and taking NSAIDs. It was all the diclofenac and Ibuprofen I'd been taking in 2011 after the operation that had caused the tinnitus, it was not a psychological problem at all. A lot of medical people seem surprised when I tell them about it, some do know about the link however. Had the medic who referred me known about it at the time, I probably would have not been referred for psychological help and I would have stopped taking NSAIDs and suffering tinnitus some 9 years sooner. Had I carried out that remedy, it would have changed my life and my wife's for ever and I would have continued to suffer tinnitus thanks to the NSAIDs.

So, back to the present day. If this bout of tinnitus is all a coincidental psychological problem:

1. Why have two other people felt some of the problems I have suffered during short visits to my house?
2. Why did powering up the Kaifa meter on 14 Feb result in a harsh pain in each ear being felt that was strong enough to make me flinch forward in my seat when I wasn't even aware what the fitter was doing at the time?
3. Why do all the symptoms vary in intensity when I leave the house?
4. Why with each meter change are there differences in the many effects, not just tinnitus?
5. Why with the audio equipment plugged in can I tell when the electricity is switched on or off just by how my eardrums feel?
6. Why have I heard the tinnitus step change in tone as if someone is playing keys on a very high pitch synthesiser? (ie Rather electronically)
7. Why does the Faraday Cage reduce some of the symptoms?
8. I wanted the meters, I didn't have to accept them (I still would still be happy to have them if I had no health reactions, I don't want to be different by having a meter that should be in museum - I like technology, that's why I chose the career I did and to be in IET), so why should I psychologically react to them like I have?
9. Why are there so many others reporting the same coincidental tinnitus after having meters installed? (Two occupants coincidental in Mark L's case. Re: RE: Severe Tinnitus Following the Installation of New Electricity Meters ) Even my energy supplier has told me they now have another customer experiencing similar issues.
10. Why does my experience of tinnitus and other symptoms tally so well with what the Norwegian research document states? (There are other sources pointing out the harm switched-mode power supplies and noisy transients on the mains cause, none of which I was aware of before the 9 February. The Norwegian document was only discovered in April, not long after its publication in english.)

During the last 6 months I have faced an awful lot of stress dealing with people who simply deny my problem exists and it would be wrong of me to deny that this stress plays some role in the tinnitus and my health generally. I have literally been browbeaten down a couple of times. Most of these people tell me to read the UK government's guidance documents stating smart meters are safe and they flat refuse to consider all the details and information I've provided on my non-smart meter situation. People have been complaining similarly about the onset of tinnitus immediately after having smart/digital meters installed for over 10 years and they too all complain that they are not being listened to, they are left to listen to awful high pitch tones buzzing around their heads keeping them awake at night.

Just how does a problem get solved if the people reporting a problem over and over again are not going to be listened to and conveniently written off as 'having problems' by the companies and authorities that are responsible for doing something to solve that problem? If I had known about just how many others have suffered tinnitus as a result of having digital meters fitted, I would not have accepted the request to remove my trusty old analogue meter. The time would have come for it to go, but perhaps by 2026 or whenever its certification expired, maybe the suffering would finally have been recognised and a solution put in place. Instead, I'm here, in a lot of trouble with the problems I'm reporting, putting my head above a parapet which I find no joy in at all, out of my comfort zone asking for a discussion about meter and power electronics, in the hope that the cause and solution can be identified one way or another with my professional colleagues. There's now been over 3200 viewings, so there's interest in this problem.

The solution I need is more than just about getting an analogue meter installed, that is just a sticking plaster. I and plenty of others need new meters to be made which will not induce tinnitus, insomnia, "brain fog" or other EHS symptoms (or whatever you want to call them), health effects. I'm afraid I have to disagree that the symptoms I am feeling are simply the product of a psychological problem, they are simply too real, too coincidental with the meter fittings and too many people are reporting similar experiences. A psychologist would probably have a lot to say, I won't say psychology has no part to play at all, but it's part is more about how I have been treated by people rather than by the meters.

Chris Pearson said:

What I believe is irrelevant, but I do know medically unexplained symptoms when I see them.

What you believe informs what you say. If what you believe is irrelevant, then so is what you say. With which I would agree.

Chris Pearson said:

So the solution lies in the psychological domain rather than the engineering one.

The ICD doesn't categorise tinnitus as a mental disorder. You are claiming that AR's tinnitus is, however, something mental - and I think we would all agree that it is a disorder.

So your claim that AR's tinnitus is a mental disorder is a pretty strong claim, something not supported by WHO classifications.

You like to talk about causality. Do you have any causal basis for such a claim?

Chris Pearson said:

Arguing ad hominem never really works.

I think it may be a good idea to understand what ad hominem arguments are. They are not about taking what you have said and showing it is bunkum. They are about criticising your clothing, your personal habits, the company you keep, and so on, as a proxy for criticism of what you have said. There is none of that in this thread. For all anyone here knows, you're a bot. 

Peter Bernard Ladkin said:

The ICD doesn't categorise tinnitus as a mental disorder. You are claiming that AR's tinnitus is, however, something mental - and I think we would all agree that it is a disorder.

So your claim that AR's tinnitus is a mental disorder is a pretty strong claim, something not supported by WHO classifications.

Not at all. Let's look at ICD11.

MC41 Tinnitus. A nonspecific symptom of hearing disorder characterised by the sensation of buzzing, ringing, clicking, pulsations, and other noises in the ear in the absence of appropriate corresponding external stimuli and in the absence os what the examiner can hear with a stethoscope.

Therapy for which lies in the psychological domain. There are specific forms of tinnitus therapy, e.g. masking, but CBT is pretty effective too.

For "medically explained" read "scientifically explained", or "engineeringly explained".

I fully accept that your symptoms are real, but in legal terms, the burden of proof rests with you to demonstrate that the meter(s) is (are) responsible.

I am not going to get drawn into any hint of diagnosis or giving advice in a forum, especially a public one. I have simply stated the science.

Whether or not to accept the science, and what weight to give to various published articles is an individual decision.

For "medically explained" read "scientifically explained", or "engineeringly explained".

I fully accept that your symptoms are real, but in legal terms, the burden of proof rests with you to demonstrate that the meter(s) is (are) responsible.

I am not going to get drawn into any hint of diagnosis or giving advice in a forum, especially a public one. I have simply stated the science.

Whether or not to accept the science, and what weight to give to various published articles is an individual decision.

Chris Pearson said:

I am not going to get drawn into any hint of diagnosis or giving advice in a forum, especially a public one.

Then please kindly withdraw your very public diagnosis of me.

Tinnitus can be caused by a multitude of things not just psychological problems. I made it quite clear I have suffered a misdiagnosis of psychological tinnitus in the past which could have been ruiness had I carried out the remedy prescribed. It would not of stopped me suffering tinnitus either. The first step to recovery is to remove the source or get away from the source. It's my house, it should be the source not me that has to leave it.

Chris Pearson said:

I fully accept that your symptoms are real, but in legal terms, the burden of proof rests with you to demonstrate that the meter(s) is (are) responsible.

I made it clear in my opening post that I wanted to achieve from this discussion: Helpful advice and to offer help with any research going in into the apparent EHS symptoms I am suffering with the goal that the problem is traced. Placing the burden of legal responsibility being put on the person who is being made ill sums up a lot about the expectations various people have placed on me. I'm doing my best but I have limited time, energy, resources and expertise, particularly medically. There are people who have researched for years and voiced concern over EHS and it still is not a recognised problem in most countries. (Sweden has.)

AR Brearley said:

There are people who have researched for years and voiced concern over EHS and it still is not a recognised problem in most countries.

That is because not only is there no good evidence that it exists, but there is evidence that it does not. The OP sought opinions and I have given mine in good faith. I fear that it is impossible to do more.

I think you may have upset a lot of Swedes now. There's other countries in the process of following suit, they wouldn't without good evidence. It has been debated in the UK Parliament. Here's a link to the Hansard record of a debate in 2019 directly to a statement by an MP that mentions an experience of smart meters being removed improving a couple's health: Electromagnetic Fields: Health Effects - Statement by David Drew  You can see that the debate features heavily on concern about 5G, which is why the low frequency problems are often overlooked and do not get the research they deserve. Don't forget that the current ICNIRP Guidance on low frequencies states: "When people are exposed to LF fields, electric fields and currents are generated inside the body and they can interfere with the body’s own electric fields and current flows related to normal biological functioning." There're groups campaigning to have this guidance tightened up citing lots of evidence of previous scientific research.

There's no amount of CBT that would have worked for me on Wednesday last week when I was suffering terrible head pains and then again on Saturday soon after I returned back to the house, up until leaving again on Sunday afternoon. I am now back home and yet those nasty head pains are gone and so has the Emlite meter. It was replaced with a Kaifa MA120 yesterday morning. Yes the same type of Kaifa meter is back which I tried so hard to get changed for four and a half months. It was the best choice available (L+G E470 the other) to replace the Emlite swiftly and it has been the least worst of the digital meters installed so far. I wasn't comfortable accepting having one put back in and it's not comfortable to live with either, but it is a significant improvement upon the Emlite. I can also tell you that the harsh sensations I felt with the Emlite were greatly relieved (not totally) as soon as my wife turned off the electricity at the distribution board. I could sense the difference stood outside the door. I am having a medical consultation with a specialist about those head pains in the near future. I hope that this will be a start to acquiring some direct medical knowledge into exactly what is happening to me.

Anyway, thank you for your opinions, but before you go, as previously requested and in accordance with your own wish not to make any hint of diagnosis in a public forum; please kindly withdraw your flawed diagnosis of me. Unless that is, you can answer each of those ten questions that I set out yesterday ( RE: Severe Tinnitus Following the Installation of New Electricity Meters ), backed up with pschological science, in such a way that it leaves me and the public in no doubt that it is all a psychological affair after all.

There are four main contributors to this forum. AR himself, mapj1 and myself who are both sympathetic to AR's predicament, and CP who is not.

Because of recent contributions, I thought to summarise CP's contributions over the last few weeks. (Summarising discussions is a professional skill I have developed over half a century.) Many of them exhibit bot-like characteristics, especially the tropes used, and I thought it worthwhile enumerating what those are. So I spent an hour or so wrestling with the forum editor (which seems not designed or intended for such things). The post never appeared. 

I am not one for wasting my time like that. I think engineering discussion is important, but it appears to be dying away on mailing lists (two lists I have been on for getting on for thirty years are all but dead, though their members are not). There are Internet forums such as this, but many of them are plagued by bots. The first bot I remember encountering on an anonymous forum was fifteen years ago. It was good, and different from "chat bots" - it was trying to learn aerodynamics and coming up against the issues that Cyc encountered 10-20 years before ("common-sense physics" was a hot topic in AI in the 1980's and Cyc was a serious attempt to get it, and other "common-sense understanding" of the world, to work. Cyc is still going fairly strong after 40 years). But it got help from a distinguished aerodynamicist colleague who got into a lot of private discussions with it.

Chat bots are now routine, thanks to the ML techniques of the last decade and a half, and massive open-access linguistic corpora on which they can be trained. But what public-facing bots still can't do is reason (some bots can, but those are generally closely-held assets. An MIT group has built one which it recently claims can do much of "university-level mathematics"). So they tend to work from a few tropes, and through a series of conversational gambits. This kind of bot is not in general fully automatic (they stumble too often for that) - there is a human there to guide it/rescue it. I encountered one in this forum in climate-change discussions last year, which I drove off (you need to figure out what it's doing, and say. The guide gets the message). There might be a second one. 

I recall when I mentioned there were bots on the forum, a moderator replied to say she didn't think there were any bots on the forum. Another view would be that any anonymous forum with relatively open membership is going to have some bots on it, and if you care about that then you need to learn how to recognise them. Signing up, running your bot in the background, and intervening when necessary, is such an easy thing to do and it's hard to see how to prevent it except by explicitly controlling membership. 

I have been mulling over giving up contributing. The forum seems to work very well for electricians. I don't think it works very well for discussing topics which require some degree of academic tertiary education in STEM, such as climate change, or the macroeconomics of energy, which I know more about. (I should say explicitly that I regard good electricians as highly skilled technicians whose capabilities I hold in very high regard, and with some of whom I have worked on key academic and professional tasks. But the electricians I know do not generally need to solve sets of PDEs to get their job done.)

I think, from reading what AR and mapj1 have written over the last couple of days, that they have the discussion well in hand. I am also happy to continue to work with AR on his document, which I think is important. 

But I am pretty fed up of reading tropes about "science" and "simple logic" and "well-understood" medicine from someone who is neither a scientist nor a logician and about an area of medicine whose practitioners tell me is anything but well understood. And who manifestly does not grasp why someone like me might think AR's case is worth pursuing.

Hi Peter, I was the moderator that you spoke to some time ago about your belief that chat bots existed on our forums. Again, we do not have automated chat bots operating on our forums, everyone posting here is a real life person and not automated artificial intelligence or 'bots' as you say.

All members of the IET will be sporting one of the membership badges in their profile information (FIET, MIET, TMIET, Students, Apprentices and Associates etc) so when you see one of those badges on someone's profile you can be sure that they are a bone fide member of the IET. 

Whilst we do welcome and encourage an honest and frank exchange of views and opinions, may I please remind everyone to be professional and respectful of the opinions of all users of our forums even if they differ from your own. 

May I also remind you of our Community Guidelines  that set out the type of interaction we welcome in the community. 

Please do report to the moderator team any content or community members that you feel are not adhering to our guidelines and etiquette. 

Lisa

Lisa Miles said:

we do not have automated chat bots operating on our forums, everyone posting here is a real life person and not automated artificial intelligence or 'bots' as you say.

With respect, Lisa, you are not contradicting anything I wrote. You can say that the originating account is associated with a real person. But how could you tell how the content of a message is generated? (Are you surreptitiously using the on-board camera to watch fingers hitting a keyboard? :-) )

For example, the MIT Eliza account in the late 1960's, on CTSS on an IBM 7094, was most certainly and most definitively associated with the late great Joe Weizenbaum. But anyone talking to Eliza knew they were talking to his bot. That was 56 years ago.

Peter Bernard Ladkin said:

There are four main contributors to this forum. AR himself, mapj1 and myself who are both sympathetic to AR's predicament, and CP who is not.

Hello, Bot here.

So we have the OP who seems to have a pretty firmly fixed view that his electricity meter(s) are causing him to experience tinnitus. Then we have PBL who agrees and Mike P-J who seems to have a more objective approach. I have stated some science with references as appropriate.

And nobody else. Not a single person has come forward with evidence that electricity meters are capable of inducing tinnitus; or for that matter, any other symptom which would otherwise be medically unexplained. No one, not a soul. Why might that be?

I didn't start this discussion without finding plenty of people reporting tinnitus immediately after meter installations in forums elsewhere. I as a professional engineer, I had to be certain to rule out other potential causes before making what is a undoubtedly a controversial claim. I've explained my reasoning why it has to be the meter affecting me many times before.  We've had two members come forward with the same issue in the discussion, one in an extremely similar situation to my own. This is a discussion, not a presentation of a legally sound scientific proof. The purpose of the discussion was to reach out and connect to fellow professionals with technical expertise who can help explain why I have had my life turned upside down by something that should be as simple as an electricity meter. Finding others reporting the same issue is if course extremely helpful to gain a better understanding by way of experience sharing. I am slowly making progressing on the medical side but privately for obvious reasons. 

Why might it be that you have been unable to answer my list of 10 questions if you are so sure that the problem is of my own making and not the electricity meters that are the only devices in my house that have changed since my symptoms began? Question 10 refers to research that digital electricity meters can lead to tinnitus being induced by these meters. You have never once acknowledged that research document exists let alone debunk it despite it appearing twice, once in direct reply to a post from yourself.

I look forward to reading your 10 answers.

Lisa Miles said:

I was the moderator that you spoke to some time ago about your belief that chat bots existed on our forums. Again, we do not have automated chat bots operating on our forums, everyone posting here is a real life person and not automated artificial intelligence or 'bots' as you say.

With respect, this comment by Lisa does need a reply. This post is not about the thread subject. It is about bots.

Computer security is one of my professional competences; indeed I and a couple of other colleagues advised the IET on it through the IT Policy Panel (as it then was) over a number of years, including that interesting year 2013 (there was a retired spook on the Panel; that led to, shall we say, a series of interestingly vigorous interchanges!). Because it is one of my competences, that I advise on and sometimes get money for and my handle is my real name, I need to respond.

First, an explanation. A "bot" is a piece of software that takes conversational (or other) text I as input, and produces text O as output. That output text O I shall call the "response" to I. Lots of software does that of course; we call it a "bot" only if O is intended to work as a conversational response to I. 

So supposing you have bot software - let us call it Bot - and you want to use it on this forum. You post any message to a thread and enable notifications; your email client will receive copies of all thread contributions from then on. You can manually copy the incoming message into Bot's input channel, and manually paste the resulting O into the thread (the notification comes with a "reply" option, and that function does not require authentication). Or you can run a chron job to read your "IEC Eng X" mail folder, classify inputs, send some of them to Bot, and (if you are moderately clever) "click"  on the "View online" toggle and the "Reply" toggle, paste O and toggle "Send". Many computer science students I have taught are well capable of programming that (the envelope, I mean - to program Bot takes some specific knowledge of computational linguistics and, if you want it to be any good, machine learning. But a potential deployer can pick up a Bot from lots of places).

Why would you want to use Bot on these forums (other than just for fun)? Maybe you have a particular message to promote (e.g., climate change is an illusion) and you don't care to engage personally with those of the contrary persuasion (maybe you are not that experienced at the pro forma reasoning on the typical tropes, or you can't be bothered searching your Merchants-of-Doubt WWW sites for the URL of a reference, or maybe responses need a fair amount of text and you're not very good at typing).

A wise user will look at I and O and decide whether heshe wants to add anything (maybe a sentence to say "here I really am", or whatever). We may call that (and I do) a "guided bot". Guided bots are how many "live chat" operations on service WWW sites are run.

Lisa and the IET may very well be doing a good job vetting applicants for accounts on the IET Eng X forums. I can't see any way she and colleagues have for preventing the use of bots as indicated above. I equally can't see any way she can be sure, as she wishes to be, that bots are not operating here.