Tourette Syndrome

“These changing claims of the etiology of Tourette syndrome were due less to compelling and robust scientific findings than to the dynamics of the political culture of medicine. The difference between French and Anglo-North American medical views about Tourette syndrome reminds us that medical research and clinical findings, in themselves, often are insufficiently persuasive in the face of long-held assumptions about the etiology and treatment of syndromes. . . . The rise and fall of each successive explanation for and treatment of Tourette syndrome has been as much a story of the power of a shared set of beliefs of a professional faction as it has been a vindication of either rigorous scientific testing or carefully analyzed clinical results. Often, as in the case of Margaret Mahler’s psychoanalysis, the failure of an intervention to achieve amelioration of symptoms was projected onto the afflicted and their families, while the assumptions of the theory itself remained unquestioned. This was no less true of a number of interventions that assumed that involuntary tics and vocalizations were organic in origin” (Kushner, 218, 219).