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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: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:50AM
Man I'm glad the CRT is dead. I've always had very good high frequency hearing. I could walk into a room where a monitor was on but blank and positioned such that there was no visual indication that it was powered up, walk straight up to it and ask if I could shut it off. Other people would be surprised it was even on, but the piercing screech would really get to me after a while, so I wouldn't hesitate to ask.
Once I had a terrible job in college where I worked at a Juvie detention home. There were set hours for TV but the kids would try to get some extra by watching it with the volume off. I could be 100 feet away in the building and I'd hear it the moment the TV was turned on, or if I walked in the building and the TV was already on. The kids hated that.
As for this story, I tend to think that these kinds of conditions are psychological, but I also leave some room for doubt that in some cases it is true based on my experience of hearing what others could not. Birds for example are able to make use of magnetic fields and maybe, some people still have those structures buried in the older parts of the brain. It would be interesting to see fMRI studies on such people provided they could pass a double bind test of being able to sense EM fields. I know I could have passed a double blind "is the CRT on or off" test with 100% accuracy.