Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: Understanding Causative Factors

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Jan, 2001  by Paul Yanick, Jr.

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Increasing worldwide pollution coupled with overcrowding, contaminated water and food, and indoor air contaminants gives a friendly welcome to a wide spectrum of serious and complex diseases. Escalating levels of these pollutants build up in the body and can exceed and incapacitate the body's natural detoxification capabilities, weakening immunity to the point where Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), chronic and fatal infections, and cancer are becoming our greatest health challenges. With the continual rise of cancer and the increase of many treatment-resistant syndromes, many professionals are challenged with multisystem, complex disorders that do not respond to their best clinical efforts.

Indoor air contaminants from the widespread use of synthetic cleaning agents and synthetic colognes, perfumes, body care products, and air fresheners wreck havoc with immune functions of the body. These pollutants infiltrate and damage delicate detoxification mechanisms of the body and rapidly deplete the body's nutrient reserves of precursors and co-factors needed by the liver to keep toxins from suppressing immunity and congesting the lymphatic system.

The prevalence of MCS is greater among individuals with a history of childhood allergies or who were not breast fed. Between 15 and 37% of the American population consider themselves sensitive or allergic to chemicals, car exhaust, tobacco smoke, air fresheners, and the scents of many common household cleaning agents and body care products. Only 5% of the these allergic individuals are actually diagnosed with MCS. Symptoms of MOS may include headaches, seizures, fainting, dizziness, extreme fatigue, muscle or joint pain, asthma, sinusitis, insomnia, irregular heartbeat, maldigestion, depression, anxiety or panic attacks, and skin disorders.

The best way to understand what MCS is -- and what it is not -- is to see how it affects the lives of people who have it. Many of the symptoms of MCS have serious implications and social effects that demand more public and professional understanding. Many MCS individuals experience personality changes -- becoming angry, irritated, anxious, fearful, and lethargic -- when exposed to certain chemicals. Most sufferers find it impossible to live a normal life. Shopping and the normal social routines of life can result in acute brain and nervous system reactions, an inability to breathe or a feeling of suffocation, intense headaches, dizziness, brain fog and short-term memory disorders, muscle spasms, and convulsions. Sadly, in an attempt to avoid these symptoms, MCS individuals experience isolation and withdrawal as they are often left with no choice but to avoid social situations where a given chemical could potentially trigger a serious or near fatal allergic reaction.

Problems with chemical sensitivity can occur at a number of different levels and in a number different ways. Symptoms maybe silent and internal, producing a symptom pattern that may be diagnosed as ADD or fibromylagia earlier in life. Indeed, many inflammatory disorders such as fibromylagia involve the excess storage of toxins in the joints and connective tissue. Many of these patients are resistant to treatment and continue to suffer because they and their doctors are not aware of the hidden and toxic effects of synthetic chemicals that are used in their body care and household products on a daily basis. When these irritating substances are eliminated from their body and home environment and other causative factors are corrected, many will respond in a positive manner to alternative health care approaches that previously yielded no results. Unknown to most consumers, 95% of most fragrances are synthetic compounds (acetone, camphor, benzene, ethanol, g-terpinene, propylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfate, para bens) that deplete detoxification mechanisms and suppress immunity.

In the early stages of this illness, many patients with MCS are misdiagnosed with allergies, migraine headaches, sinusitis, asthma, while the real causes (indoor air pollution, dental foci and silent chronic infections, nutritional deficiencies and dietary factors, and toxicity) remain obscured and masked by antihistamines, decongestants, anti-inflammatory drugs, and cortisone. Taking a careful history of MCS patients along with energetic and biochemical testing may reveal clues as to why their body's detoxification are failing and why they can't disarm and excrete toxins in a healthy and natural way.

More and more practitioners are discovering that Native American medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese herbal medicine, homeopathy, nutrition, and Acupuncture have virtually little or no effect on counteracting these effects of MCS and repairing the resultant damage to the immune and neuroendocrine system in these cases. Treatment-resistant syndromes are increasing at an alarming rate as many traditional and natural methods fail to stabilize neuroendocrine balance, cellular physiology, and augment optimal detoxification of the kidneys, liver and lymphatic system. Clearly, natural health care practitioners of the 21st Century need to focus more on novel methods of nourishing and detoxifying patients that respond poorly or not at all to traditional or ancient healing systems. With immunomodulation and broad spectrum detoxification methods they will be able to free the body of trapped cellular and lymph toxins that cause MCS and immunosuppression.