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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.
Subject says it all. It really is time to start taking lawyers and other bottom feeders to task. Mentally ill people should be treated for their paranoia, not have it confirmed.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Well controlled and conducted double-blind studies have shown that symptoms were not correlated with EMF exposure."
Done in one.
I suffer from hyper-sensitivity to delusional stupidity. I'm living on the same planet as this woman and it's crippling me.
A documentary isn't a study.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Even if cellphone radiation increased risk of head and chest cancers (and there is no evidence to demonstrate that, despite questionable and biased documentaries on the subject), such increased risk would have nothing to do with the lady's claimed symptoms, which include real-time maladies like headaches, nausea, fatigue, etc.
I saw a third party documentary that said the Pyramids were constructed by aliens...
What do you expect from a "modern" welfare state?
See, this is why you can't give pseudoscience an inch. Every little success validates it in the eyes of its own practitioners, and legitimizes it in the eyes of the public, until society tumbles down the rabbit hole of paranoia and irrational fear of the harmless on one hand, and blind trust in actually harmful practices on the other hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In English, Irish, Latvian, and Maltese, the Euro symbol is placed before the value. This is actually encoded in official European Union usage guidelines.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Now that they've started to gain ground, imagine the next steps: they start suing you because your Wi-Fi router is harming them, suing coffee shops and restaurants to remove Wi-Fi hotspots because of the harm it causes them, telecom companies to remove cell towers because it is harmful to them, etc. This will not end well...
Especially if they do get this classified as a disability and start trying to leverage Americans with Disabilities Act.
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'
Considering that the incidence of head and chest cancers of the past 20 years is available, why would you assume that the rates have been going up?
http://www.cancer.gov/research...
I would love to see any scientific evidence to show that somehow with the drastic increase of cell phones in society over that period of time, the incidences of cancers effecting the head and neck have gone down drastically.
I'm not sure what you mean by chest cancers, last I checked most people don't put cell phones against their chest frequently. Lung cancers however have been going down as well due to the reduction in number of smokers and places to smoke.
http://seer.cancer.gov/statfac...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
A third-party documentary? Aren't they all?
Required reading for internet skeptics
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!
Careful. In one NIH study they did find one woman that was sensitive to the power cycling of EMF devices. She couldn't sense the device when it was already on and brought into the room, but could sense when it was turned on or off. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
What amazes me is that the courts resort to non-scientific rulings when the case is so easily scientifically tested. Ignorance of rampant.
You realize that not all of the phone is the antenna?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... 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.
I saw a documentary made by the aliens who constructed the Pyramids.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
But, it was on TV!
Why ? You say "800 euros" or "800 dollars", so why place the sign before ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?