Tourette's tic left me afraid to hold my son. Then doctors put electrodes in my brain - and this is the effect it's had on my life...

Tourette's tic left me afraid to hold my son. Then doctors put electrodes in my brain - and this is the effect it's had on my life..

. By Lucy Elkins for Daily Mail Published: 12:02, 21 May 2024 | Updated: 12:38, 21 May 2024 e-mail View comments To most people eating out is a pleasure, but until recently for Tom Dufton this, like many social outings, often descended into an experience to be endured rather than enjoyed. It wasn’t that Tom, 36, who runs his own horticulture business, isn’t sociable — he is — it was the reaction from others that made the experience so awkward.

Since the age of six, Tom has lived with Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition that affects around 300,000 people in the UK, according to the charity Tourettes Action, and which causes them to make sounds or movements — known as tics — over which they have no control. Tom Dufton, pictured with wife Emily and son Henry, has received a confidence boost after the treatment In Tom’s case, these tics have changed over the years — from blinking or clicking his jaw to grunting and, at one point, kicking out his leg at random. Five years ago, it turned into almost constant spitting.

‘Of all the tics I’ve had, this has lasted the longest and been the hardest to deal with,’ says Tom, who lives near Truro, Cornwall, with his wife, Emily, 32, who works in human resources, and their baby son, Henry. ‘I absolutely hated it. It made me so self-conscious.

I would see people staring and thi.