Treatment of Tourette syndrome
Tourette syndrome (also Tourette's syndrome or TS) is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by the presence of motor and phonic tics. Treatment of Tourette syndrome has the goal of managing symptoms to achieve optimum functioning, rather than eliminating symptoms; not all persons with Tourette's require treatment, and there is no cure or universally effective medication. Explanation and reassurance alone are often sufficient treatment; education is an important part of any treatment plan.
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine
According to Kushner, the French physician Jean-Martin Charcot chose his resident, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, to investigate the "relationship between tic disorders and jumping and startle behaviors reported in Malaysia, Siberia, and Maine"; Gilles de la Tourette translated Beard's descriptions and published them one year after Beard's papers. In 1885, Tourette published "Study of a Nervous Affliction" where he included the startle disorders in the typology of what he called "convulsive tic illness", that included what later came to be known as Tourette syndrome. Kushner argues that none of the patients studied by Tourette supported this assertion, and says that "many of his contemporaries refuted Gilles de la Tourette's typology".