My mother is obsessed with new-age quackery, and has rented an "E-Power" machine, a device that appears to be a waveform generator connected to a belt that you wrap around your waist. I'm concerned that it might be dangerous because it seems to create electrical currents within one's body. It purports to allegedly increase the electrical potential across the membranes of one's cells, creating a host of health benefits.
One of their video demonstrations concerned me most. They show the person wearing the belt holding one side of a fluorescent light bulb, with the demonstrator touching the bulb partway. They show that the bulb lights up. It appears that the belt is inducing a potential within the participant, and creating a current which flows through the participant's arm, through the bulb, and through the demonstrator's arm. Since the demonstrator is wearing shoes on what appears to be a wood floor, I can only assume that either the potentials between the demonstrator and participant are equalizing, or the demonstrator is connected to ground in some way that's not obvious.
I was informed of the dangers of conducting current directly through one's body in my electrical engineering classes, so seeing the current conducted through the participant's arm concerns me, especially since the product advertises itself as functioning at 70 kilohertz. As I understand, humans cannot feel pain from electricity at high frequencies. This person's foolish experiment indicates that people stop feeling electrical pain somewhere around 20 kilohertz. This means that any possible injuries caused by this machine would be impossible to feel.
Am I right in being concerned about the safety of this device? Are there any safety concerns I've missed?
