By Sandra Tan, Buffalo News staff reporter
Officials rule out environmental factors
Updated: January 13, 2012, 7:24 AM
When a dozen female students at Le Roy High School started exhibiting strange and involuntary movements, seizures or “tics” over the past few months, alarmed school and state health personnel scrambled to determine the cause.
After months of investigation and a battery of health and environmental tests, however, what school and state health personnel told concerned parents this week is that there is no known environmental or infectious cause for the bizarre condition that debilitated most of the girls.
State Department of Health officials declined to publicly diagnose them, citing privacy laws, but at least one local expert in the field of movement disorders stated Thursday that what most of these girls experienced is likely the result of mass hysteria.
“Over a long period of time, this has been recognized as an underlying cause for such outbreaks,” said Dr. David G. Lichter, a clinical professor of neurology at the University at Buffalo.
More properly identified as “mass psychogenic illness,” the condition experienced by these students was likely a real physical manifestation of an underlying psychological condition, said Lichter, who has evaluated one girl and is a trained movement disorder expert.
Essentially, mass psychogenic illness is the result of the brain making the body sick, not unlike what occurs when people suffer nausea and breathing difficulties as a result of “stage fright,” say medical experts. No one denies the reality of the symptoms, and healthy people can temporarily suffer from it.
While some parents at Wednesday night’s community meeting at Le Roy Junior-Senior High School expressed concerns about exposure to harmful chemicals or vaccines, both Lichter and Health Department officials dismissed these as causes of the outbreak, which began with a few students exhibiting symptoms and led to a greater number of girls being affected.
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Mass hysteria and conversion disorder diagnoses sound antiquated and rather sexist to me. I think the real problem(s) causing the illnesses in Le Roy are not understood.
What’s Out There Making Us Sick?
Stephen J. Genuis Faculty of Medicine, University of Alberta, 2935-66 Street, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6K 4C1 Correspondence should be addressed to Stephen J. Genuis, Received 6 June 2011; Accepted 26 July 2011 Academic Editor: Janette Hope Copyright © 2012 Stephen J. Genuis.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Throughout the continuum of medical and scientific history, repeated evidence has confirmed that the main etiological determinants of disease are nutritional deficiency, toxicant exposures, genetic predisposition, infectious agents, and psychological dysfunction. Contemporary conventional medicine generally operates within a genetic predestination paradigm, attributing most chronic and degenerative illness to genomic factors, while incorporating pathogens and psychological disorder in specific situations. Toxicity and deficiency states often receive insufficient attention as common source causes of chronic disease in the developed world. Recent scientific evidence in health disciplines including molecular medicine, epigenetics, and environmental health sciences, however, reveal ineluctable evidence that deficiency and toxicity states feature prominently as common etiological determinants of contemporary ill-health.
Mass hysteria involves a number of people to whom a symptomatology (and/or an alarming environment) is suggested by one of them either by verbal direction or by example. An atmosphere is thus created by which the symptomatology spreads and the mass reaction becomes self-sustaining.