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French Court Validates Completely Invalid Electromagnetic 'Allergy'

However unintentionally.
Image: courtesy of the author

Marine Richard lives in a barn in the mountains of deep southwestern France. It's here that she's able to live healthy and free from the omnipresence of the electromagnetic waves emanating from any and every electronic device, from cell phones (definitely cell phones) to microwaves (especially microwaves) to light bulbs (even light bulbs). As a sufferer of electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), this is how it has to be, and, according to a Toulouse court, she is entitled to three years of disability payments for her affliction.

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In fairness, the court didn't formally recognize EHS in its award—citing instead the presence of disabling symptoms, whatever the underlying cause may be—but Richard and her lawyer were quick to hail the ruling as a victory for EHS sufferers around the world—a "breakthrough," she said, according to Agence France-Presse. So, whatever the court's intent, the result is validation of a disorder that's been refuted ad infinitum, and what's commonly considered to be the result of a "nocebo" effect.

The court's indirect validation isn't anything all that unusual. EHS as a disorder is recognized fairly widely, including by the WHO, but always in the sense of patients have these symptoms and saying they're because of electromagnetic waves and not patients have these symptoms because of electromagnetic waves. Which is a huge distinction, but also one that allows for misinterpretation, intentional or otherwise. This is more or less the bread and butter of the whole health-conspiracy movement.

Like many health conspiracies, EHS revolves around a set of non-specific symptoms, including headaches, nausea, fatigue, etc, which are symptoms that describe virtually any malady including those psychological in nature. It's tricky because the symptoms really do exist and warrant serious attention, whatever their source, and bunk diagnoses do nothing but throw up barriers to actually getting to the bottom of things, which is a scenario that's pretty widespread across the alt medicine realm.

For a court, the trickiness is in acknowledging a syndrome without acknowledging EHS, even though acknowledging the syndrome might as well be acknowledging the EHS. Denying disability isn't the answer, of course, but what is?