We've all seen the dismissive, "mysterious illness", or put-down editorials about MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity), such as when some editor must have had a quiet news day and is hoping to boost readership. We've even seen a practicing psychiatrist dismiss people with MCS as "just a belief system" in a major newspaper front page article. Such presentations have the unfortunate effect of creating an information environment that disaccomodates people with this health condition.
Here is a template letter you can copy to your word processor, remove any points you are uncomfortable with, and address it to the the offending pub;ication. Educate an editor!
Dear Editor,
Appreciate seeing the coverage of someone's illness that developed after a pesticide poisoning. But your interviewer utterly goofed in not having done serious research on a big health problem for a lot of people.
The correct name for this health condition is Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS). That name has been used in over a 1,000 medical papers for the last some 50 years.
Instead of the condition being dismissed as "mysterious," it amounts to a sequence of injuries that develop from an injury or genetic defect in the blood brain barrier which lets toxins into the limbic area of the brain which in turn aggravate several neural areas, which in turn release internal toxins that are poorly detoxified and in turn aggravate parts of the immune system which in turn brings on so many of the "downstream" health conditions which have confounded the medical establishment for many years.
This illness has been verified by research in Europe that identifies several biomarkers that provide physical evidence that the condition is real.
Support therapies based on that model have helped many people. A clinic in Texas says they have helped some 30,000 people with some degree of MCS. The symptoms your interviewer listed amount to the same that are reported over and over by most people who develop MCS. I hope the person you interviewed has by now made contact with medical support that realistically support MCS.
MCS appears to have been documented in medical papers back in the 1880's when people were using coal gas to heat and light their homes. The immune system began to be unraveled in the early 1900's, which in turn led to the development of the classical allergy field. At that time, it was shown that the people complaining about coal gas definitely did not have an allergy, a point the professional allergy field has been defending since the 1920's.
Repeated studies say over 10 percent of the population has a serious level MCS. Actual values range from 11 ... 16 percent for the U.S. Comparable values are reported from most industrialized countries.
The health condition is recognized by Environmental Illness doctors in America. It has been assigned an ICD (International Classification of Diseases) number of 989.9; a classification that has been recognized by many medical personnel.
MCS is a serious problem for people who develop it and for our country, there is yet no complete cure; everybody is at risk, and much more research needs to be done. Put-down articles that pretend it does not exist amount to disacommodating some ten percent of our population.
Please encourage your research staff to be aware of current medical conditions, and use correct terminology in the future.
Thank you,
Follow the links below to learn more about RMEHA and Environmental Illness.