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from the staying-indoors-without-power dept.
A French woman has been awarded disability payments for a condition which is not recognized by medical science:
Despite dispute over the very existence of the syndrome, it has emerged that a French court has recognised a 39-year-old woman's disability claim for "hypersensitivity to electromagnetic waves".
In the first case of its kind in France, the Toulouse court awarded Martine Richard €800 ($900) a month for three years - according to Robin des Toits, an organisation that campaigns on behalf of sufferers. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS or électrosensibilité in French) is purportedly caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields such as those generated by WiFi and mobile phones.
In a statement on Wednesday, Étienne Cendrier, Robin des Toits spokesman, hailed the news as a victory, saying: "We can no longer say that it is a psychiatric illness." Victims of EHS say it causes headaches, joint pain, sleep disruption and dozens of other varying symptoms. Nonetheless the World Health Organisation has no clear diagnostic criteria for the condition.
Richard, a former playwright and radio documentary director from Marseille, says she is now forced to live in a remote part of the Pyrenees, without electricity, to escape from electromagnetic fields.
The French National Agency for Health Safety of Food, Environment and Labour (ANSES) accepts that those claiming électrosensibilité have real symptoms, but note the absence of "an experimentally reproducible causal link" to electromagnetic waves. A report is due in early 2016.
[Editors note: If you want to see an extreme case of this portrayed, check out Chuck in the first season of Better Call Saul}.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @11:43PM
You're right. Is no pain. All in my head.
Obviously, the problem here is that I'm .... I don't know. I don't even know for a fact that the source is electromagnetic - it just seems to fit the symptoms.
I noticed the symptoms decades ago, before I knew that anyone else even had this. I just thought I was a freak.
But you're right, the studies prove there is nothing there, so any pain was just coincidence. Thank you for liberating me from my ignorance and superstitions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:54AM
The road to recover begins has to begin somewhere. Now try correlating it with the stock market, or bitcoin price, or perhaps the Cottingley Fairies. Anyway, it's probably just evil humours that can be removed with a little blood-letting.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:44AM
I'm sure your pain is real.
(Yes, yes there're certainly those who fake those sorts of symptoms, but nowhere near enough to even begin to suspect that somebody claiming pain isn't in pain until the other end of a really long road.)
But I'm also certain that your pain isn't caused by EM radiation. As certain as I am that your pain also isn't caused by Ice-9 contamination in the water supply, alien spaceship exhaust fumes, or the psychosexual remnants of Elvis's farts.
I hope you choose to see a competent medical physician to try to get relief for your pain. Your ideal doctor will take your concerns seriously but also walk you through why EM radiation can no more possibly be the cause of your pain than the dust from Tinkerbell's wings could be.
Only then will you readily accept that the cause of your pain, whatever it is, isn't supernatural...and only that will open the door to safe and effective treatment.
And I should hasten to add: there's no guarantee of successful treatment. Doctors only seem like miracle workers, but there's still lots and lots to learn....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:19AM
I'm perfectly open to discussion on what the cause might be.
I have actually thought pretty hard about what the plausible avenues might be.
Chemical? No, nothing's being introduced into my head, and phones don't start suddenly putting out gases/particulates/plasma/any other specific substances when they receive a call, so it seems unlikely.
Heat? Not directly. Bluetooth headsets don't get any hotter than regular headphones.
Physical vibrations? Strongly doubt it, since it doesn't have to be touching my head to be palpable.
Gravitation? Vanishingly unlikely, since everything of the same mass and proximity should have the same effect.
Magnetism? I doubt it, since regular phones, headphones, and speakers don't have the same effect and they certainly contain plenty of moving magnets.
I'm sure there are lots of ideas I'm missing here, including I suppose some related to weird quantum entanglements and so on - but I still see no mechanism there.
The only sources of energy coming from a cellular phone that I'm aware of are sonic (not a problem) and electromagnetic (jury is out). You seem supremely confident that it isn't radiation, but you don't really explain why it mightn't be and you don't offer any alternative hypotheses.
The last time I spoke to a neurologist about it, he advanced a couple of hypotheses on how EM radiation might be doing it, largely based on non-ionising interactions with neurotransmitters. Those remain the current best guess.
Oh, and yeah, he took me seriously. In the end he sort of shrugged and said that I use cellular telephony at arm's length, for SMS or speakerphone calls only, and avoid bluetooth. And you know what? His advice worked.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:46AM
Erm...you're way over-thinking this.
Headaches are caused by much, much, much more mundane matters.
Like physical trauma of infinite varieties, exposure to a wide range of noxious fumes or the like, low blood sugar, tumors, muscle tension, various forms of stress and anxiety -- and that's before we get into the entire realm of migraine.
Whatever is causing your headaches, it's something mundane, not exotic. Stop wasting your time looking for the exotic, and start looking for the mundane.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @06:12AM
This may come as a surprise to you, but this is where the neurologist actually started.
We tested it in his office, where I had no trauma, there were no noxious fumes, I was otherwise ostensibly in good health, and I called out exactly when he sent a phone signal to his phone, about a second before it started ringing.
Was it a hyper-measured double blind? No. But as of that test, he took me seriously.
He actually proposed that what I was experiencing matched the broad symptoms of a kind of migraine, but that it was externally triggered by the phone. I forget the details, but it related to altered rates of blood flow in the brain owing to neurotransmitter activity - but we didn't go so far as to prove it.
In the end we had a great discussion, he gave me some painkillers, and we discussed management of the condition, concluding that it was a hell of a lot more manageable than any medication he could justify putting me on.
So. Yeah. Been there, done that. Do you have any other slick ideas founded on your conviction that cellular telephony is fundamentally incapable of causing headaches other than by drunk dialing of exes?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @08:17AM
There's a name for that: reality. For the uneducated, that's an evidence-based system based on objective facts rather than subjective opinions.
You can (and do) keep coming back, whining that "But it's happening and the pain hurts so it must be EM!"
You remind me of a friend of mine. He has a doctorate in Physics, is a fundie Christian, but also believes that the pre-Christian ancients really knew stuff about the universe that we don't - such as the crystal skulls being real magical artefacts made by space aliens from space. He once told me that we don't know how magnets work therefore god. His PhD topic is weather forecasting, and according to him I should also ignore everybody else who says there is anthropogenic global warming because he's seen the graphs and therefore it's not true. Anybody who disagrees with him by definition doesn't know what they're talking about, or is a liar who is earning money from specialised interests.
This is precisely what you sound like. "What I'm experiencing is not explainable by terms that I won't accept, and I only accept that it's EM radiation!"
If you can detect EM radiation, then you've no problems for the rest of your life: go win a fortune from the Randi Foundation - bank it and live off the interest. You'll have the most amazing life, and you can build a house with a fucking Faraday cage. You don't even need the Randi Foundation, though, because you'll have proved one of the basic medical marvels of the last 100 years and will be able to make more money than god.
What it really comes down to is: Which is more likely?
That you can detect electromagnetic radiation in a method that nobody else has ever been able to rationally and scientifically prove?
Or that you get headaches because you think microwave radiation is bad?
The correct answer, the answer based in reality, is the latter. As I said, if you can disprove otherwise please do so - but no amount of your childish foot-stomping and appeals to authority will provide this counter-evidence.
Yes, appeals to authority. You claim you've spoken to a neurologist. I wouldn't care if you'd consulted the president of physics, because without actual evidence to back up your statements then all you're doing is claiming that aliens put cancer in your head. Claims are all you have.
It's far more likely that you've lied here about speaking to a neurologist (because, in your mind, it adds weight to your arguments and most people don't understand what an appeal to authority is) than it is that you've convinced one that you're detecting EM radiation, but even if you have all that would prove is that you're a better conman than he is a rational person: get some REAL evidence, conman. Until you do so, you'll be called that.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:16PM
Yeah, I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls. But it's Sunday, I have nothing going on, so let's go.
> There's a name for that: reality. For the uneducated, that's an evidence-based system based on objective facts rather than subjective opinions.
I brought my evidence. Celphones, even ones about which I didn't know (until I try to figure out why I feel as if I've been whacked in the head with a sock full of sand) do a thing which results in pain for me. That's my evidence of a thing happening. The pain - I guess that's subjective, because only I as a subject get to experience it. But there's a lot of consistency.
> You can (and do) keep coming back, whining that "But it's happening and the pain hurts so it must be EM!"
It's happening. The pain hurts. I never said that it must be EM. I don't know what it is. I quite explicitly said that I don't know what it is, and I haven't ruled out every possible alternative. Try reading my posts again, this time with attention to detail. If it turns out not to be EM, that might actually be good news because it might be easier to block. Turns out these days lots of employers in the tech field get quite snippy when you say you don't want to be called on any cellular device, please and thank you. I haven't heard anything more compelling as an explanation from you yet, but who knows? You might be the guy that works it out.
> You remind me of a friend of mine. He has a doctorate in Physics, is a fundie Christian, ...
[snip blathering about someone who isn't me, who has their own issues unrelated to mine]
> This is precisely what you sound like. "What I'm experiencing is not explainable by terms that I won't accept, and I only accept that it's EM radiation!"
Again, in small words, for the slow members of the class: I have no fixed opinion on the source or mechanism other than the evidence I have collected. Maybe cellular devices attract invisible zombie fairies which like to chew on my dura mater. I don't know, and have no proof in any direction. So take your preconceptions about what I'm saying, shove them somewhere dark and smelly and ride them straight to Washington, D.C. where you'll find many like-minded people.
> If you can detect EM radiation, then you've no problems for the rest of your life: go win a fortune from the Randi Foundation - bank it and live off the interest. You'll have the most amazing life, and you can build a
> house with a fucking Faraday cage. You don't even need the Randi Foundation, though, because you'll have proved one of the basic medical marvels of the last 100 years and will be able to make more money than god.
Believe it or not, I don't really want to be a public spectacle, and you'd have to pay me an insane amount of money to put up with it. If the Randi Foundation will give me the number of a neurological researcher in reasonable
driving range of me, we can work out a test. Until then, the fact that I have to avoid bluetooth headsets and cellular phones around my head just isn't that big a deal to me.
> What it really comes down to is: Which is more likely?
> That you can detect electromagnetic radiation in a method that nobody else has ever been able to rationally and scientifically prove?
> Or that you get headaches because you think microwave radiation is bad?
Given that it happens even when I don't know, pre-headache, that the source is present, I strongly doubt that my opinion on microwaves has anything to do with it. Given that I've been able to predict celphones ringing, it seems that whatever is going on does have predictive value. What someone else has bothered to investigate or prove has no bearing on my way of life. And frankly? I have no stake in what you believe or not.
> The correct answer, the answer based in reality, is the latter. As I said, if you can disprove otherwise please do so - but no amount of your childish foot-stomping and appeals to authority will provide this
> counter-evidence.
I have yet to stomp my feet over it. I have come close to punching a dickhead coworker who set a celphone to silent mode and hid it near my seat, but no foot stomping.
> Yes, appeals to authority. You claim you've spoken to a neurologist. I wouldn't care if you'd consulted the president of physics, because without actual evidence to back up your statements then all you're doing is
> claiming that aliens put cancer in your head. Claims are all you have.
OK, suit yourself. I spoke to the ghost of Aleister Crowley. Feel better? (Actually, I totally didn't, but whatever helps you sleep.) This isn't a peer reviewed venue anyway, so again, your opinion on what I may or may not have done while you weren't watching is of less importance to me than how much salt I get on my steak tonight.
> It's far more likely that you've lied here about speaking to a neurologist (because, in your mind, it adds weight to your arguments and most people don't understand what an appeal to authority is) than it is that you've
> convinced one that you're detecting EM radiation, but even if you have all that would prove is that you're a better conman than he is a rational person: get some REAL evidence, conman. Until you do so, you'll be called
> that.
Please, do feel free to call me whatever makes you feel better. But since you're so passionately involved, I'll reveal that (despite the fact that this discussion earns me no money and plenty of calumny) I do have an agenda.
Ready?
Primed for me to reveal the hideous extent of my sinister agenda?
I wanted to let people know that something like this happens, and regardless of the reasons, it's apparently real - real enough to hurt me at any rate.
Why? Why would I undermine the cleverly-organised society provided us by the benevolent actions of the Freemasons and Illuminati under the guidance of Aleister Crowley?
Because the first commentary was people joking about homeopathy, as opposed to serious investigation.
But you're right, I don't get paid, it's not that big a deal, and you're absolutely entitled to your opinions. Y'all have a nice day with that.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday August 31 2015, @04:14AM
Perhaps it's something like this [stackexchange.com]? The water at lipids in your body SHOULD absorb all the radiation, but if eg. you've got a filling in the front of your mouth, your teeth show, and your dentist is good at making microwave antennae who knows. (I certainly don't know enough about microwave antennas to comment further). Have you risked looking like a real conspiracy nut and tried shielding on various parts of your head, around your mouth etc? Perhaps you could get a better handle on a possible mechanism.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday August 31 2015, @04:20AM
Oh, and if you want a minimum amount of pain I'd suggest shielding all of your body then unshielding gradually. It could potentially be really interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @04:46PM
Interposing barriers does make a difference.
People using their phones with the ear facing away from me aren't too bad.
Light fabrics don't do it.
I haven't done detailed experiments.