One of the people in the story claims the florescent bulbs at the Dollar Store triggered her condition. If that's the case, it should be REALLY easy to verify some of these claims in a laboratory setting.
Overillumination has been known for some time to cause various other deleterious health effects anyway, and flicker aside fluorescents just put out plain terrible light. It completely baffles me why so many establishments install it (well, workplaces; retailers like it because it makes you buy more apparently).