SONIC WARFARE OR MASS HYSTERIA? [FT363:4]

The physicians treating the 21 or 24 patients involved in the socalled ‘sonic attack’ on staff at the US Embassy in Cuba have released their preliminary findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association (15 Feb 2018). While the authors claim that all 21 suffered concussion-like symptoms without head trauma, their study is highly descriptive, remarkably vague, and makes claims that are not supported by the data. To their credit, the JAMA editors published an accompanying editorial by neurologists Dr Christopher Muth and Steven Lewis, and a separate commentary by medical reporter Rita Rubin. Both are very cautious and highlight serious criticisms of the study’s claims. The study is inconclusive at best; all of the symptoms have plausible alternative explanations. Claims of “white matter tract” changes and “concussion-like symptoms” are very much open to alternative interpretations and the evidence is far from clear-cut.

There are a host of problems with this study, not the least of which is their dismissal of the possibility of mass psychogenic illness. As Dr Robert Bartholomew has shown, some types of mass psychogenic illness begin slowly and persist for months or years. Dr Douglas H Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the JAMA study, said that mass psychogenic illness was unlikely because not everyone knew everyone else in the cohort, and “there were cases where some individuals had no idea that anyone else was affected.” However, as British psychiatrist Simon Wessely has pointed out, MPI can spread without people meeting. The key is whether or not they knew that others were becoming ill and/or knew that there was a suspicion that sonic weapons, etc were involved. Crucially, the social networking aspect of the cohort was left out of the JAMA study. psychologytoday.com, 16 Feb; NY Times (Int. edition), 20 Feb 2018.