A paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal makes the suggestion that physicist Stephen Hawking’s disability, which famously confined him to a wheelchair and robbed him of his speech, was psychosomatic in nature.
Hmm. I think this says more about the author than it does about Hawking.
The paper is called Delusional Health Beliefs and it comes by British doctor Peter May. It was published a few days ago in the Medico-Legal Journal.
May begins the paper by discussing conversion disorder. This is the term for symptoms which appear to indicate physical illness but in fact are driven by a psychological cause.
May then drops the following bombshell:
I have to confess — and may be entirely wrong about this — that I have long been skeptical about Stephen Hawking’s diagnosis of motor neurone disease (MND). This is such an outrageous thought that I have until now largely kept it to ...
