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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.
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.