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French Woman Gets €800/month For Electromagnetic-Field 'Disability'
An anonymous reader writes: If you were dismayed to hear Tuesday's news that a school is being sued over Wi-Fi sickness, you might be even more disappointed in a recent verdict by the French judicial system. A court based in Toulouse has awarded a disability claim of €800 (~$898) per month for three years over a 39-year-old woman's "hypersensitivity to electromagnetic waves." Robin Des Toits, an organization that campaigns for "sufferers" of this malady, was pleased: "We can no longer say that it is a psychiatric illness." (Actually, we can and will.) The woman has been living in a remote part of France's south-west mountains with no electricity around. She claims to be affected by common gadgets like cellphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
All available evidence on Electromagnetic sensitivity suggests that is actually a purely psychosomatic disorder, but belief is tremendously powerful thing and can produce real and measurable physiological changes in a person, causing immune reactions without any externally visible cause, change in hormone levels that should otherwise only be explainable by other external phenomonena, etc.
Treating serious psychosomatic disorders requires the person to not just be aware that the problem is all in their own mind, but it also requires that a person be aware of some pathway to a solution to their apparent problem. I have heard it best described by one psychologist as (althouh I am paraphrasing here, this is not a direct quote) "there's nothing actually wrong with your hardware, but basically the software in your brain is misfiring and telling your body the wrong thing.". A person with a psychosomatic disorder needs to learn a skill that is not necessarily easy to come by, and that is to learn how to ignore those essentially false signals that their brain is telling their own body, and causing it to react in ways that might otherwise be attributed to some external phenomena. This is why the person needs psychiatric help.
Simply telling an EHS sufferer that it's just all in their own head and they should be able to simply think their way out of their problem is only going to get you ignored, because their body may still be producing a real reaction to something, even if that something is only imagined.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
All a bunch of bullshit invented to sell drugs that don't even WORK.
So the conditions are fake and the drugs don't work??
I'm curious.... how would you know if the drugs were working?
Pretend to use a cellphone in her presence. When she starts complaining of symptoms and discomfort, show her that the phone not only isn't on, that it doesn't even have a battery in it so there's no chance it could have been on.
I did something similar to this with a friend of mine who claimed to be able to see infrared light from TV remotes. While he wasn't looking I removed the batteries from one, then called his name and when he turned around, pointed it at him and pushed buttons. He complained about how much that hurt his eyes, and how could I do that to him? Then I showed him the remote had no batteries in it. Needless to say he was somewhat embarassed. Still claims to be able to 'see' IR light though.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I dunno. Depression studies show that vigourous excercise several times a week is just as effective a treatment as the leading drugs at maintaining happiness and preventing suicide. Does that make Depression a real condition and disease, or just a result of our modern world allowing us to sit on our butts? If living a more simple lifestyle with more manual labor effectively cures your disease, is it even a real thing? We discussed this endlessly in biology. It's an interesting philisophical question.
There are plenty of ways to discipline a child without hitting them. For example, negative punishment: take something away from the child that s/he likes, such as a toy, television, internet, etc.
Also keep in mind that punishment does not train behavior, it merely stops it. Training behavior is best accomplished with rewards.
Actually, negative reinforcement works best when it is administered promptly after the undesired action, every time it occurs, be it physical punishment or mental punishment. There severity of it is of less importance, but obviously can't be too light.
Funny, the only people I know who know when to and when not to cowtow to physical violence are the ones who had a level headed mixture of physical and non-physical punishments growing up.
The generation of sheep are almost entirely comprised of people raised under the false ideal that violence and physical action are never acceptable responses. The kind who would sit idly by while another person is assaulted because to attack the attacker is somehow wrong.
One other important bit. All of the legitimate biological research shows that humans don't really multitask. We do very well at high speed time sharing. Your analogy is biologically false.
It's important and completely lacking in the psychology field to actually validate behavior models and such analogies against physiology. It doesn't happen, and is specifically why your false analogy can seep through the cracks as useful.
... but not a very popular disability, Especially not among people who depend on electronics for their livelihood, or in other ways in our daily lives - which is the entire user base of Slashdot. It goes without saying that someone with Electrohypersensitivity (EHS) will never ever post on Slashdot.
The theory behind EHS is well established in academia. The mechanism called NO-/ONOO+ - cycle is well known, and the trigger mechanism: voltage-gated calcium canals is too, and has been linked to the NO-/ONOO+ - cycle. The cycle builds up from prolonged exposure to certain chemicals, not electric fields by itself.
It is not an allergy, it is not a disease: it is a hypersensitivity. There is also not just one type of EHS, and not all EHS manifest themselves in physical sensation - which is why there have been many studies that have failed to detect it in people who claim to suffer from it. Almost every person with EHS has at one time or another had a job that involved strong solvents, and almost every person with EHS has also hypersensitivity to certain chemicals.
I am not going to post links to articles, because there are so many of them and you will in most cases need a degree in something or other to understand any of them. The keywords are above. Use Google! Instead I would suggest you search Youtube for lectures by Martin Pall.
That is not to say that there aren't people who claim to suffer from EHS who are emotionally unstable.
But ponder that if EHS was real, and you got it, and everyone you told about it called you a faker, wouldn't that make you paranoid?
You intrigued me with your claims of validity, but upon careful inspection I could find no credible research supporting your position.
As for Martin Pall, his work on this is clearly no more credible than Linus Pauling's work on vitamin C.
As for voltage-gated calcium canals (oooh, super-duper science!) if EHS were indeed valid the EM generated by your own nervous system would destroy you. After all, it would be difficult to get closer to a source of electricity and EM than actually inside of you.