Epilepsy from Magnetic Ballasts?

[FlowerFarmer]

Hello,


I was curious if magnetic grow lights could be source of epileptic seizures.


I have a buddy who recently started having pretty bad seizures at the age of 31. They started occurring pretty much at the exact time he started growing. He has had zero seizures his entire life prior, and has recently had 3 in a 6 months span.

He is now seeing a neurologist which claims they may be due to PTSD as he did serve some time at war.


He's been in bad shape recently due to the seizures, breaking his back and literally biting off of his tongue when they occur.


He has recently asked me if they may be related to his grow lights. Now, he's been around digital lighting at friend's houses with seemingly no issue, but his house grow using magnetic ballasts and I know they have a bit of a flicker unseen to the human eye.

I was curious if it was plausible that these magnetic ballasts may be the source of his epilepsy, or if it is merely a coincidence that he started having seizures at this point in his life. The doctors seem to link it to stress, but they oddly started occurring right when he started growing.


Any thoughts? I've told him to stop visiting his garden during lights on and use green LED to do his work at night to see if that'd have any effect at reducing/eliminating them.

 

[lost in a sea]

my thoughts are it is probably a coincidence, the flicker rate shouldn't be able to induce epilepsy as far as i understand.. also the seizures should only come on whilst he was in the grow room if the lights were the cause..

if he was "at war" in the army then he may well have had various things tested on him that were still in experimental stages, and one of the results in later life has been found to be epilepsy as well as a long list of horrible disorders and diseases..

soldiers are guinea pigs.. was he in the gulf by any chance?

many of the guys who were out there now live in misery to some extent because of the drugs and "vaccinations" given them by the army..

the doctors call it stress caused but they say what they are told to say..

 

[Pinball Wizard]

mag ballasts are 50/60Hz. same as 99% of all UL electrical equipment in the U.S.

I like to go to sleep with the sound of soft hum from the mags

 

[FlowerFarmer]

Thanks guys.

Likely a coincidence, but I told him I'd throw it out there to see if anyone had issues relating to grow lights.


He does have 2 600w digital in the room as well, but it was only when magnetic lights were brought into the house from a remote location did the seizures start occurring.

They are however NOT occurring in the grow room, but elsewhere in his home.


I'll have to inquire more about his war time.

 

[dddaver]

Very compassionate of you dude. Some folks just do need help. Like that old commercial used to say, simple things are not so simple anymore for some.

I can only add I think we might have heard more about this before now if those mag ballasts were a problem. Most street lights are HPS. If they were causing problems you'd think somebody would have jumped all over that by now.

I just wanted to add, I was sent to the Gulf, twice. My bod is pretty messed up. I can't say it was a direct result from those shots although the timing coincides pretty good.

I also know I was zapped by a lot of close proximity radar radiation my whole career, besides the shots. People like us that did that had absolutely no choice and were not informed of even the possibilities that might be harmful. Bastards. But don't ever expect those political assholes to ever admit culpability. That's a long slippery slope. Just help him as much as you can. Good on ya dude.

 

[lost in a sea]

i'm told some of the shots were also claimed to be being administered to "help" deal with toxic effects of the war zone environment,, alot of radiation essentially, may have done something short term but without a doubt the kinds of gene expression modification they attempted resulted in predictable side effects over a predictable time frame, i'm deeply sorry to hear that dddaver, the reason i mentioned the shots is a theory that a friend who was out there has about what happened with him..

the whole thing is so deep and dark and fucked up that most people would go insane after getting to the bottom of that rabbit hole..

 

[dddaver]

I vaguely remember, besides the wearing the chem suits, they wanted us to take these pills that were supposed to ward off some kind of sickness if we were chemically attacked. They kept on saying how safe they were. But me and whole bunch of us Air Force rats flatly refused. We were threatened with court martial and commanders said how they took them and they had nothing go wrong. But we stood our ground and told them go ahead, send us to jail, at least we'll still be alive.That whole thing just ended abruptly.

That top secret clearance crap has been in the news a lot too. It's all crap. There are over 450,000 defense contractor personnel that have an SSCI. I myself just had a secret clearance. My bosses wanted me to get SSCI. But I didn't want SSCI (even though I would easily have been eligible, I'll leave it at that) but because I was told I would be pigeon holed into jobs I had no desire for and made to do things I didn't want to, I refused that too. It's all crap though. Sounds important doesn't it? TOP SECRET. It's bullshit.

I think things have gotten WAY out of hand. I certainly could never have been a recruiter. They knew that and used me for other things, like being in the Kosovo first wave. After seeing the bomb craters, burnt out houses, women holding babies while pounding on our Humvee windows begging for us to feed their babies, at least I felt I was there to actually help stop the out-and-out blatant murdering of innocents. BTW, we were too scared (scared shit-less, literally) to unzip the window and give her an MRE then because we thought she might drop a Molotov cocktail in. We really did actually save their lives though.

I don't know what set me off. Sorry to hijack. Rant over.

 

[The Hatter]

Hello,


I was curious if magnetic grow lights could be source of epileptic seizures.


I have a buddy who recently started having pretty bad seizures at the age of 31. They started occurring pretty much at the exact time he started growing. He has had zero seizures his entire life prior, and has recently had 3 in a 6 months span.

He is now seeing a neurologist which claims they may be due to PTSD as he did serve some time at war.


He's been in bad shape recently due to the seizures, breaking his back and literally biting off of his tongue when they occur.


He has recently asked me if they may be related to his grow lights. Now, he's been around digital lighting at friend's houses with seemingly no issue, but his house grow using magnetic ballasts and I know they have a bit of a flicker unseen to the human eye.

I was curious if it was plausible that these magnetic ballasts may be the source of his epilepsy, or if it is merely a coincidence that he started having seizures at this point in his life. The doctors seem to link it to stress, but they oddly started occurring right when he started growing.


Any thoughts? I've told him to stop visiting his garden during lights on and use green LED to do his work at night to see if that'd have any effect at reducing/eliminating them.

I have problems with partial seizures and I find that lighting that is powered by ballasts and which is flickering does seem to screw with me sometimes. I tend to get headaches under dodgy fluorescent lights for instance.

I think it is likely unrelated but it couldn't hurt to keep him away from the lights and see how he fairs. Another thing to consider is other changes in his environment that may have coincided with the start of the seizures and his growing.

Does he use any funky pesticides for instance? If he is seeing a doctor who thinks he has PTSD he may also be on meds that could be causing the problem. Many psychiatric drugs come with the risk of causing seizures. There are so many possible triggers that it seems unlikely that it is his lighting but you never know. Obviously something has changed with your friend since he never had seizures before. That change could be almost anything. Does your buddy drink alcohol?

 

[Drift13]

FlowerFarmer, please tell your buddy for his service from another Vet. That goes for all the Vets(don't matter what country) here on IC Mag.
Wish I had something of use to add here. But all I can do is say TY.

 

[Gelado`]

Thank you guys for your service. From a quick Google search, HID lighting does seem to cause issues for epileptics. Maybe he should switch to LED?

 

[Haps]

Magnetic ballasts are safe, this thread is silly, but that is OK, silly is fun. Not logical.

 

[devilgoob]

Remember the inverse square law. A microwave left open won't get you from twenty-feet....too much.

Remember that it's not the load causing it, and that other 50/60hz equipment may produce in the same back-and-forth - it's not XX amount owatts like a grow light. As the tranformer of what not is powered with coils that don't touch, that's why they buzz.

Other things may use 60hz, but don't use these the air between two coils to generate a magnetic field that generates electron movement in the second coil, and also aren't of high wattage, and are not close enough (by inverse square law)

Anything can exacerbate seizures, it can even be the buzzing or high-intensity light.

As long as you're feets away from it, the EM shouldn't get you. In extremely sensitive individuals, it has been proved the 60hz bothers them and their symptoms resolve quick when removed.

It believe it's the buzzing causing pre-seizure activity. It could be flickering, but to what degree?

The halide salts don't power down so quick, and it's 60 times per second, not a lot of time to get dim and bright

Unless the bulb is somewhat devoid of salts, and is now flickering as a result.

 

[DarthFader1]

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=268543

Hope this helps, i asked the same question very recently

 

[soil margin]

I have had epilepsy for over 4 years. I've been growing indoors for 3 years with magnetic and digital ballasts, never noticed it affecting my seizures or health. Got a buddy who has been growing alongside me in the same rooms and he's never had a seizure or any negative health effect from being around either kind of ballast.

 

[00420]

Magnetic ballasts are safe, this thread is silly, but that is OK, silly is fun. Not logical.

Lights & sound triggers seizure it could easylie be the reason don't rule it out until you take them out to be 100% sure, I know someone that can't watch fireworks or set in a car with loud audio

 

[AFGHANICA79]

Does he smoke weed? High thc strains can be both pro and anti convulsant. Growing weed can be stressfull even if he is not conciously aware of the stress. Epilepsy is neurological but can be psychological causing a neurological disorder. It would be a near imposibility that if he was consuming a cbd rich strain that these seizures would not be happening. Stress is a monster cbd can kill that monster. ptsd and epilepsy sounds like stess sub concious more like. Go digital if make him feel more at ease and increase cbd problem solved. I have been taking tonic clonic seizures for 17 years cbd and less concious stress helped me alot

 

[rives]

I missed this the first time around, apparently. It is entirely possible that your friend's seizures are being triggered by the flicker from the lights. These "triggering events" do not cause epilepsy, but can trigger seizures in someone that has latent epilepsy. There is a well-known phenomena amongst architectural/engineering students where seizures have been triggered when people were driving on bridges that had supports for the hand rails on the sides of the bridge at certain distances. At certain times of the day, the sunlight shining through the supports worked in combination with the speed of the vehicle to create a high-speed flicker. After numerous single-car accidents with no readily apparent cause, it was discovered that the shuttering effect was inducing seizures in people with no known record of epilepsy. Interesting stuff.

 

[devilgoob]

It was a ghost case at first. Then they find certain people, when it's removed, the symptoms are gone, single-blind.

Ya, so it can. To prove it though?

LEDs can cause seizures. Look it up. Also magnetics can cause brain synchronization with them, and cause them to pulse. Look up TCMS.

But those are high magnetics, close to the brain. It has been proven, a small percentage are unusually effected and that IT DOES effect them. Get a fence and put it there. Or anything like that. It literally blocks shit. Faraday cage. And no I am not afraid of EMF nor do I wear hats.

Tinfoil (aluminum) hats are antennas.

Growing can cause anxiety similar to seizures. Some states are similar to seizure activity.

 

[Amphigor3y]

no thats the DEA using a medical device