We honestly don’t know. Current safety standards mostly focus on preventing tissue heating, because that’s the one effect we can reliably measure and understand. But there’s a chunk of exploratory research out there looking at potential “non-thermal” effects—things like subtle shifts in cell signaling, membrane permeability, or oxidative stress—that might not show up as a measurable temperature increase.

So far, the studies that have been well-designed and replicated haven’t consistently nailed down a clear causal link between non-thermal EMF exposure (within the limits that regulators consider safe) and actual health problems. Still, some researchers argue that we’re not accounting for all the slow-burn, cumulative effects that might be happening. It’s not easy to tease out these subtle influences from the noise of environmental variables, and that makes it hard to really say we’ve got a handle on the whole picture. Check out Prof Michael Levin's Bioelectricity work if you want to go down a very interesting rabbit hole about what we're only recently discovering about how our biology might really work and how electricity and emf's shape it.