I'm doing my best to not reply angrily but joking about a person with Tourette's needing a muzzle is uncalled for in my opinion - I have treated several children and adults with Tourette's and they are debilitated enough by their condition they do not need judgment by an ignorant public.

To the poster, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and am going to assume your comment was not meant in this way and that I am making an incorrect assumption about your comment being mean-spirited. Let's all move on and have an intelligent conversation about this.

It's not just Tourette's, the issue comes up often. Autistic children can be loud or struggle with stimuli, friends of ours have an autistic child and fly often, and often get dirty looks despite their best efforts. Developmentally disabled adults can fly alone. A client of mind did this for years without incident. Sadly, he did become agitated during a flight once and caused a disruption. You can come up with many other scenarios as well. Obviously, I'm talking about the truly incapacitated and not the willfully difficult adult or unrestrained child.

I am aware that a mostly ignorant public cast cruel and unfair judgments on those they don't understand. There is always someone willing to do this. Flyertalk members are by and large a caring and intelligent group. Perhaps a better question would be how can we set a good example for those we fly with with very real Illnesses or disabilities? We can inspire for good or ill.