404. From Tech Burnout to Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Experts: How We Reclaimed Our Health

For the Rumble version, see HERE.

Yoho comment: I have an Easter Egg here somewhere that I have not found. If any of you figure it out, I will send the first one to comment accurately on it a paperback copy of any of my books. Here is the story: this charming couple interviewed with me, then vanished. I sent this draft to them several times to review and correct, but they had disappeared. Maybe my emails went to spam.

I try not to be offended by anything that happens online involving people I have never met, but being ghosted by those whom I thought I had treated courteously and spent 30-plus hours evaluating their platforms is aggravating. If you can find anything offensive in what I said or wrote, let me know. I realize that I am not generally considered a courteous dude.

EMF is a vast topic, and we all need to remind ourselves regularly of the dangers involved so we can avoid them—and this is not hard if you take a few precautions. Some people are affected more than others, but it potentially damages anyone exposed. This is a lot of material, but it is essential, so at least scan through it.

The rest is Roman and Bohdanna Shapoval, with a few comments from me.

Our Wake-Up Call

Roman: Eight years ago, I was selling computers for a living. I had spent ten years immersed in technology, watching the industry evolve toward cloud computing, near-field communications, and the Internet of Things. I stayed up all night burning out on screens and video games, convinced that this technology would advance civilization. But my health crashed, I gained weight, my sleep deteriorated, and my mood followed.

Then I married Bohdanna.

Our honeymoon became a nightmare—not the marriage, but what Bohdanna experienced. She hit rock bottom. She couldn’t stop crying. She felt her life spinning out of control. We were newly married, and she couldn’t contain her emotions.

Bohdanna had been on the SSRI antidepressant Paxil for 14 years. Her doctor prescribed it in her early 20s after she started experiencing depression while on birth control pills.

Yoho comment: No greater crime exists in medical care than prescribing a new toxic medication to compensate for the side effects of another. Psychiatrists do this daily using fraudulent drugs that have never had double blind, placebo-controlled studies.

She got a double dose of Rockefeller medicine—first, the pill destroyed her hormonal balance, then SSRIs were prescribed to mask the symptoms, making her far worse. When she tried to quit before our wedding, nobody warned her about withdrawal, and it became the worst experience of her life.

Yoho comment: For background, Unbekoming wrote several posts about how the Pill damages women. One is The Birth Control Deception: What 60 Years of Lies Cost Women. The following is from his book summary of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: How the Pill Changes Everything (2023) by Sarah Hill:

When Sarah Hill went off the birth control pill after a decade of daily use, she expected her body to return to its natural state—like stepping out of a costume she’d been wearing. Instead, she discovered she’d been living as a different person entirely. The psychology researcher found herself attracted to different types of men, experiencing emotions she’d forgotten existed, and suddenly passionate about music she hadn’t cared about in years. Her investigation into what had happened to her would reveal that the pill doesn’t just prevent pregnancy—it fundamentally rewires the brain, alters who women are attracted to, changes their stress responses to resemble those of trauma victims, and may even influence whether their future relationships succeed or fail. Yet most women taking hormonal contraceptives have no idea they’re chemically restructuring their personalities, their desires, and potentially their entire futures.

Hill’s research uncovered something that should have been front-page news: women on the pill have stress responses that mirror those of people with PTSD, their hippocampi shrink like those of depression sufferers, and they’re attracted to different types of men than when cycling naturally. Danish studies tracking millions of women found that teenagers on the pill showed 80% higher depression risk and triple the suicide risk. Women who chose their partners while on hormonal contraceptives were more likely to initiate divorce when they stopped taking them, suddenly finding themselves unattracted to men they’d married. The pill changes which genes are expressed throughout the body, alters the gut microbiome, and may contribute to the epidemic of autoimmune diseases that disproportionately affects women. These aren’t rare side effects—they’re fundamental changes to how the brain and body function, affecting millions of women who were never told that their daily pill was doing anything beyond preventing pregnancy.

Bohdanna’s psychiatrist initially “diagnosed” her SSRI withdrawal as a “mixed mood disorder.”

I used quotes because these names are made up by a vote of the members of the shrink “scientific” society and then enshrined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The following quote from Butchered by “Healthcare” explains it:

The DSM is a kind of chaotic bible used to promote mental diseases. With its code numbers used for insurance, some call it the billing bible. Created primarily by psychiatrists on industry payroll, it mutates and metastasizes every few years through a vote of the APA members. In 2017, after many editions, it was 947 pages long.

Insiders have decried its intellectual disarray for decades. It has become the perverse standard in the service of drug marketing.

The psychiatrist added lithium, sleep medication, and anxiety drugs. Bohdanna ended up on a cocktail of psychiatric medications, all because she tried to quit an SSRI she’d been taking since her early 20s. Psychiatrists medicate everyone they see, and their standard operating procedure is to add more and more drugs—with more side effects—if anyone complains.

Back to Roman: The conventional medical approach failed. So we looked at alternatives, starting with the most basic—sunlight.

We began walking outside every day in January in Ontario during dark, bleak January. Bohdanna trudged along while I pushed and pulled her. We did it anyway. The circadian rhythm and light reset a fundamental process. It took time, but we saw improvements.

Once we noticed those changes, I started investigating the invisible aspects of light. What was Wi-Fi doing? I unplugged our router. Then I took it further—we started turning off the power to our house at night using the circuit breaker. Everything except the fridge and freezer. Later, we moved the fridge outside, but soon discovered that the food inside tolerates the power cuts if you crank the temperature cold enough before cutting power.

This became our foundation. We call ourselves “The Power Couple. We help others power their bodies on using light, and power off their homes at night.

Bohdanna’s recovery took 2.5 years. She tapered off the “medications” slowly and carefully. July 22, 2019, became her rebirth date—the day she had nothing in her system. She hasn’t taken anything since.

Yoho: Withdrawal is so much effort and pain that most people who have been taking SSRIs for more than five years cannot do it.

The journey forced us to audit every aspect of our health: nutrition, sleep, EMF exposure, blue light at night, and our indoor environment. We got outside for sunrise together every morning. That quiet time strengthened our relationship with ourselves and each other. We discovered health can be simple, though not always easy.

Decoding EMF: The Five Fields

EMFs are confusing. When we started researching eight years ago, the subject overwhelmed us, too. But I’ve made it my mission to simplify EMFs so even a child can understand them. Five main electromagnetic fields affect your health:

First, electric fields:

These exist whenever power runs through wiring, oscillating at 60 cycles per second (60 Hertz). They should create a clean sine wave—alternating current that smoothly alternates between positive and negative. These fields extend from your walls, potentially reaching one to eight feet into your room, depending on what else is happening in your electrical system. You measure them in volts per meter—the force coming off your wall.

When we turn off the power at the circuit breaker, we eliminate these fields. Even if something is plugged in but turned off, it may still draw current because electricians make mistakes. That’s why we cut power at the source.

Yoho comment from my prior post:

The “E”—Electric fields from proximity to alternating current in unshielded wires. This causes sleep problems, and switching off the local electricity supply fixes them.

The culprits are unshielded, plastic-jacketed (”Romex” type) electric wires in walls and floors, and the power cords plugged into room outlets. Refrigerators and other appliances plugged into non-grounded outlets are another source. These electric fields pass through insulation and sheetrock and sometimes extend six to eight feet from the source. Commercial construction standards (and in New York and Illinois, all construction) require that the wires be covered with metal rather than plastic, which prevents electric fields and also decreases the fire hazard.

Since electric fields affect the depth of sleep, reducing them in bedrooms is particularly important. In rooms used in the day and evening, however, electric fields are of less concern for most people. We reduce electric fields where people sit for extended periods, such as at a desk, couch, or easy chair, particularly for individuals who are electrically sensitive. This maintains their energy and vitality levels.

Mitigation can be achieved by rewiring with shielded cable or by turning off the power to the part of the house where you sleep. This can be done at the main breaker box or with a special switch that an electrician can install. Unplugging the power wires to lamps and appliances in the bedroom at night eliminates these additional sources. Hotel room tip: Since commercial construction codes require shielding, unplug the lights and appliances in your room, and you’re good to go.

Second, dirty electricity:

This rides on top of your wiring. Modern devices create it: phone chargers, laptop chargers, blenders, printers, TVs, refrigerators, solar power inverters. Anything using a “switch-mode power supply” causes problems.

These devices switch alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) thousands of times per second so your energy-efficient appliances can run. But instead of that clean 60 Hertz wave, you now have 100,000 Hertz or more—a tsunami of spikes running across your wiring. The North American power grid never got designed to handle this. After the 1970s energy crisis, we introduced energy-efficient appliances but never updated the infrastructure.

The problem extends beyond your house. Utilities put ground rods throughout neighborhoods instead of running dedicated neutral wires back to substations like other countries do. This means dirty electricity saturates the ground itself. You could sit in a radiation field comparable to a cell tower just from your home’s wiring—even without a cell phone.

Yoho: from my post:

Dirty electricity—common, and can usually be improved using inexpensive filters. This shows on a meter as an irregular pattern rather than a smooth wave. Many household devices, including dimmer switches, switched-mode power supply transformers in compact fluorescent lamps, and some LEDs, produce it. Other sources include computers, printers, and variable-speed motors, such as new energy-efficient furnaces. Solar panel inverters produce dirty electricity when they convert the low-voltage direct current from the sun to 120-volt alternating current.

Most “smart” electric meters (with a digital display and not a rotating wheel) create dirty electricity. If these are a problem, they may be shielded with special covers. This type of EMF can also come from the electric and magnetic fields in circuits, plastic power cords, and power lines inside the room.

Third, radio frequency:

This is what radiates from cell phones, Wi-Fi routers, and Bluetooth devices. The inverse square law applies here: distance is your friend. The closer the source, the higher your exposure. A cell phone next to your body creates much greater power density than a cell tower a mile away.

But here’s what most people miss: when the signal weakens, your device works harder to connect. This increases radiation tenfold or even a hundredfold. Sometimes, having a stronger Wi-Fi signal and then putting your device on airplane mode when not in use works better than relying on weak Wi-Fi, which constantly forces your phone to boost its signal.

From my prior post:

Radio Frequency (RF) is everywhere, can go twenty to thirty feet, and can be eliminated by hard-wiring routers and other devices and distancing from the sources.

These arise from wireless devices such as cell phones, tablets, laptops, routers, WiFi printers, smart TVs, and cordless telephone handsets and their bases. These both send and receive, and their RF often includes Bluetooth and WiFi. Wireless frequencies can also enter homes from outside sources such as smart meters, cell antennas, airport radar, radio and television broadcast towers, and now 5G cell antennas. Inside sources are almost always far more significant than outside sources.

Fourth, light itself:

People forget light is an electromagnetic field. It controls everything: how you feel, how you sleep, how you digest food, and how strong your immune system is.

Fifth, magnetic fields:

These get attention from building biologists, but the evidence doesn’t support the same level of concern. Magnetic fields appear whenever electric fields exist—they’re connected. But focusing on magnetic fields while ignoring electric fields and ground currents misses the point.

Yoho: My building biologist disagrees (again, this is from my post referenced above).

The “M”—Magnetic fields: serious but less common, and usually due to wiring errors. These are the most harmful EMFs. Properly installed electrical circuits produce no magnetism because the current in the two “hot” wires flows in opposite directions and cancels each other out. Correctly connected ground wiring (the third plug) covers the rest. Another possible source is wiring errors in circuits that power continuously running appliances, such as refrigerators or furnace/air conditioner motors. Half of Los Angeles homes have wiring errors, but most cause few problems.

I have several clients with depression, chronic fatigue, and even cancer, likely caused by magnetic fields. Correction requires an electrician operating under the supervision of someone like me, and it isn’t cheap. It might cost $1800 to correct the problem I found in the Yoho home.

Back to Roman: In our bedroom, we use only amber lights—rechargeable amber LEDs on USB plus red light headlamps. We expose ourselves to longer wavelengths of red light at sunrise. These gentler frequencies penetrate deeper into your body and prime you to absorb the more intense, shorter-wavelength UV light later in the day.

Your Biggest Exposures

Cell phones and wireless headphones cause obvious, measurable problems. The inverse square law makes proximity the key factor—placing that radio frequency device directly against your body results in intense exposure. But beyond cell phones, your home’s electrical wiring likely causes your highest chronic exposure.

Dirty electricity runs through your wiring 24/7, regardless of whether you own a cell phone. The frequency may be kilohertz instead of the gigahertz from your router (hundreds of thousands of pulses per second versus billions), but you can’t escape it. It’s always there. And these fields magnetize to each other—if you have dirty electricity in your office, adding a Wi-Fi router and Bluetooth AirPods can combine them into an electromagnetic soup.

The solution: reduce your overall electric field. When you reduce the base level of electrical noise in your home, you lower the total EMF field you encounter daily.

I got certified as a Building Biology Advocate in 2020, but I found problems with their approach. They emphasize body voltage testing—measuring your body’s electrical potential. But voltage only measures potential force, not actual current running through you. Getting your body voltage to zero doesn’t show microcurrents that could cause harm.

Robert O. Becker’s book The Body Electric explains how minuscule currents can either heal and regenerate tissue or cause disease, including cancer. Building biologists sometimes focus on the wrong metrics. They also push magnetic field mitigation while downplaying electric fields and ground current, despite limited peer-reviewed evidence that magnetic fields at typical home levels cause problems.

The controversy dates back about ten years. Dr. Mercola followed building biology advice to ground and shield his entire house. He turned his home into an antenna—a cage that made him sick. Dave Stetzer, an electrical engineer who worked on US military aircraft in the 1970s, helped him. Stetzer showed that even very low levels of specific frequencies cause problems.

Some building biologists originally called Stetzer a con man. They tested his filters using a device called a PicoScope, which generated its own electrical current, interfering with the measurement. His filters work—he proved it by helping Mercola recover. Building biologists raise awareness about important issues like mold, radon, and chemicals, but they’re self-accrediting. Nobody checks their work.

I recommend Stetzer filters for dirty electricity. Yes, it seems difficult to believe that a small device plugged into your outlet can fix the problem, but it does. Shielded cabling in houses also helps.

Light as Medicine

Sunlight might be the most powerful EMF and is the easiest to control. We go outside and watch the sunrise first thing every morning, exposing ourselves to the longer, regenerative red light wavelengths. This primes our bodies to absorb the shorter, more intense UV wavelengths later in the day.

Bohdanna used to insist that going outside was pointless on cloudy days. Wrong. Infrared energy persists regardless of clouds. Near-infrared makes up 70% of the sun’s infrared spectrum and appears 42% of the time throughout the year. Even the gloomiest winter day is ten times brighter than the brightest office. Think about a Walmart lit with LEDs versus some apocalyptic movie scene with dark clouds—the overcast day outside still wins.

We’re measuring photons, which are particles of light. How much light energy penetrates those clouds? A lot—99.97% of light is invisible. Your body absorbs that energy. Why leave it on the table?

Morning exposure prepares you for midday UV. If you stay inside all day and then suddenly go out at 11 a.m., when UV is present, your body struggles. UV has shorter wavelengths and higher intensity. It’s like eating a thick brownie first thing in the morning before your digestive system wakes up. You need gentle wavelengths first—like warm tea—to prime yourself.

UV benefits you when you’re ready to absorb it. Most people get burned because they emerge mid-year without building tolerance, or they go out midday without preparing in the morning. Get outside at sunrise, then get your UV exposure. You can check the UV index in your area online.

Our ancestors understood this on some level. They woke with the sun because they had to make use of the available daylight. This synchronized their circadian rhythms and built their solar “callus.” We’ve become an indoor culture that forgot these basics.

Bohdanna has blue eyes, blonde hair from childhood, and light skin. She always burned until we started consistent morning sun exposure. Now she can be out canoeing all day in a t-shirt without burning. We also stopped wearing sunglasses, which is essential because they reduce the production of melanocyte-stimulating hormone, an anti-inflammatory that protects against sunburn.

We expose as much skin as possible because skin produces melatonin. Sunlight has vastly more energy than artificial blue light. Focus on the good stuff, and the bad stuff fades away.

Sun gazing: yes, we do it, but take it slowly if you’re light-sensitive. So many people wear sunglasses on cloudy mornings. Their eyes can’t handle natural light because they burned them out staring at phones at night. The gloomiest winter day contains more photons than they can process.

Start at sunrise—those longer wavelengths are gentle. Staring at a campfire works too because of the infrared and red light that regenerates your retina. Build tolerance with gentler morning and evening exposure. I’ve looked directly at the sun at high noon for ten to fifteen minutes without problems, but I built up to that over time. Start slow. Get out in the morning. Watch the sunrise. That’s the foundation.

Taking Action

The solution starts simple: turn off your cell phone whenever possible. Put it on airplane mode and disable location services. This single action could cut your EMF exposure by 50% or more. You might drop below the threshold where symptoms appear.

Comparing dirty electricity to radio frequency is like comparing apples to oranges—both matter. Dirty electricity creates constant exposure, whether you own a cell phone or not. Radio frequency is harder to hide from now with satellites and more cell towers everywhere. But you can control radio frequency exposure more easily by using airplane mode.

PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic field) devices might help mitigate EMF exposure, but this is unclear. Some people report improved relaxation, sleep, and focus from devices like the BEMER system. In Switzerland, PEMF in some dental offices instead of pharmaceuticals—they pulse electromagnetic fields to numb pain.

Devices that run on a battery are safer, but those that plug in may have power supplies that generate more dirty electricity. Some have Bluetooth. You’re fighting fire with fire, so vet these products carefully before buying.

More importantly, don’t rely on any device until you’ve handled the basics. Your circadian rhythms matter. If you’re watching Netflix at night, checking your phone first thing in the morning, and skipping sunrise, your body runs on the wrong frequencies. Adding another frequency from a PEMF machine creates another variable your body must process. It may not help.

Get the fundamentals right first: see the sunrise, cut blue light at night, reduce your baseline EMF exposure. Then, if you want to try PEMF or similar technologies, you’re working from a solid foundation.

For your home, start with what you can control immediately:

• Cut power at the circuit breaker at night (keep the fridge and freezer on their own circuit if possible)

• Unplug devices when not using them

• Put your phone on airplane mode and disable location services when not in use

• Install Stetzer filters for dirty electricity in each room if you have solar panels and for many modern appliances

• If you have solar power, put the inverter away from your living space and never on your roof

• Use anti-flicker software like the Iris app for your computer screens

• Replace your lighting with amber or red lights for evening use

• Get outside at sunrise every single day

If you have solar panels on your roof, you’re radiating your entire house. Put them in the yard, away from beehives or anything you want to protect. Inverters vary in quality, so use one that minimizes dirty electricity.

Wi-Fi routers should emit only when necessary. Some models do this automatically. If you’re using Wi-Fi, having a stronger signal and then switching to airplane mode beats a constant weak signal that forces your device to work harder and radiate you more.

How we saved each other

Our experience showed what marriage should be: true partnership through severe crisis. Going through Bohdanna’s ten months of SSRI withdrawal together, taking those dark January walks, and watching sunrises forged something real. Both partners must dedicate themselves to the journey.

We’re writing a children’s book together to help parents and adults understand EMF and light, showing how it impacts not just humans but birds, bees, and the entire biosphere. We’re fundraising to create hard copies—we refuse to make people stare at digital screens to read about EMF problems.

Moving Forward

Modern medicine is a terrible assault on human health. We’ve seen it firsthand—14 years on SSRIs, multiple psychiatric drugs, and birth control destroying Bohdanna’s hormonal balance. The medical industry has zero scientific basis for most of what it does. Psychiatrists have never run placebo-controlled studies on their drugs. They’re fraudulent from start to finish.

EMF complicates these problems. Put a screen in front of a child diagnosed with ADHD or autism, expose them to blue light and radio frequency, and you compound the damage. It’s a toxic soup.

The root problem: those who profit from making us sick. They do it through screens. When we change our relationship with technology, we change our relationship with ourselves and them. There’s a psychological component too.

We’re more powerful than we know. That’s our motto. Our bodies aren’t broken. Our minds don’t need medication. Western medicine doesn’t believe this, but we do.

Take responsibility for your health. Nobody else will do it for you. Every individual has their own journey. We share our experiences and offer advice, but you make the choices. You face the consequences.

Get outside. See the sunrise. Cut the power at night. Put your phone on airplane mode. Start there. Health can be simple. It’s not always easy, but it is simple.

Resources

The Shapovals’ Substack is HERE, and their website is thepowercouple.ca. They interview EMF researchers, doctors, and health practitioners, and cover the history of how the telephone, microwave, and other communications technologies have evolved. Feel free to email them at [email protected].

Roman describes his work:

We offer virtual and on-site EMF consulting. Anyone in Arizona can contact us for in-home assessments. We’re also selling Tesla magnetic induction industrial lighting in Arizona—full-spectrum, no-flicker lights based on Nikola Tesla’s forever bulb design. Up to 38 million Americans suffer migraines, and most have photophobia (light sensitivity). Businesses lose revenue because their lighting triggers customer headaches.

Here are more references that they shared with me after the interview:

Hi Robert,

Thanks again for having us on. We sincerely enjoyed the interview and questions. You kept saying that you “interrupt” but we both thought you were an excellent listener. Other podcasters out there talk more about themselves than they ask questions.

Here are some links for you:

Basic article that can get someone up to speed on EMF is HERE.

Podcast with Dave Stetzer talking about how he helped Mercola and saved him from the protocols that got him in trouble when he listened to building biologists (18min mark) is HERE.

Podcast with one of the only EMF consultants I trust, Paul Harding, on grounding being harmful and dirty electricity is HERE.

HERE is our funding link to the Children’s Book on EMF.

Best regards,

Roman & Bohdanna

Bonus for Substack authors: The following is a video tutorial on how Roman links his chapters to his Table of Contents. I could not get it to work without dropping the posts and then doing the modifications.

Yoho’s concluding comment:

The totality of EMF exposures is far less malignant than the harm that even single medical specialties do to us—witness psychiatry, pediatrics, oncology, and many others. Realizing what is happening in our field is intensely painful for physicians. I know because I still go through it. Jack Kruse, mentor to the Shapovals, is preoccupied with these relatively minor EMF issues rather than having the courage to face the far greater evils of medical “care.”

And Bohdanna’s problems are all explained by birth control and psych med withdrawal without invoking EMF.

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I will never use paywalls, but if you want to help me, I offer competitively priced affiliate products HERE that I have personally tested and used. There is a new entry for grass-fed beef.

Disclaimer: You may use a journalist like me as a starting point for your research, but I am retired, resigned my medical license, and do not give medical advice. Good luck out there with your “providers.”

Parting shot

Many years ago, Eric and I climbed Yosemite’s Astroman, a challenging 1100-foot overhanging route. He had done it before and coached me through each pitch. With his guidance, I was able to lead the hardest parts, then repeat the whole thing a few months later with another partner. Two photos of the climb are below.

Eric’s painting hangs in my house:

HERE is more about Eric.

Despite my warnings, Zschiesche took every Covid vax as they came out, and a year ago, he had a massive heart attack. You may recall that our closest climber friend, Chic, DFL to me, either. He had an incapacitating stroke a few weeks after his first poison shot and now behaves like a deaf mute. These guys never worked in conventional jobs and led counter-cultural lives, yet they naively trusted conventional “medicine.”

Thrombosis (clotting) is the hallmark of strokes, heart attacks, and “vaccine” injury.