Girls’ twitching ‘an inconvenient truth’

When a bunch of US girls began twitching, theories differed about the cause, from mass hallucinations to toxins, writes Nancy Haas

SOME 20 high school girls are now uncontrollably twitching in rural upstate New York. And the media circus is making it worse.

The doctors have tried to tell her every way they know how over the past three months: delicately, constantly, even urgently. But as Heather Parker sips coffee in her weathered clapboard house, she still isn’t buying that the Tourette’s-like twitches that have consumed her 17-year-old daughter, Lydia, since she woke up from an October nap are a product of a psychological disorder, not a physical one.