As humans, we are connected to our environment in a vivid and visceral way that is seldom perceived by our technological society. Our culture is based on the assumption that we are masters of our environment. Have we not tried to control every aspect of the natural world, from pest management to indoor heating and cooling? If a hill is in the way, it is bulldozed. If a cancer grows in the body, it is cut out. How often is the awareness felt in your bones that you are, in fact, inseparable from the world around you? We have a reciprocal relationship with the natural world. What we give, we take. Maybe this is an intellectual thought for you, but what does it feel like? How does it feel to not be in control?
It is not until disaster strikes that most people take notice, and sometimes it's too late. We believe we are protected by an advanced medical system that would warn us of danger. But take the life of a woman who lived near Lincoln, Nebraska named Sindy Bryant. She worked as a beautician for many years until she could no longer hold the comb and scissors. The medical profession addressed her complaints of severe headaches and confusion with medications. She plunged deeper into dysfunction, developing symptoms which mimicked multiple sclerosis, and ended up at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where she was treated with more drugs. She couldn't swallow, couldn't walk, couldn't talk. She eventually went into a coma and died Christmas Eve. "Mystery death," the newspaper announced. But to people like myself who have an illness called multiple chemical sensitivity or MCS, her tragic story rings a familiar and sad note. It mirrors the experiences of many chemically injured people who woke up to the dangers of the shotgun drug approach in time to save themselves.
My belief is that Sindy was slowly poisoned from the years of handling and inhaling the concoctions of chemicals used to treat hair. We are porous creatures in constant exchange with all we eat, breathe, smell, and touch. The food we eat becomes the fuel and structure of our very tissues, while pesticide residues and food additives come along for the ride to cause havoc at the intercellular level. We not only inhale life-giving oxygen but the stinky or invisible fumes "outgassing" from modern chemical creations, which are then carried in blood vessels to every cell of our body. And our skin, which we assume to be a solid membrane separating us from the elements, is the most illusory boundary of all. It does not protect us from contamination. What we touch goes deeper than skin deep.
The liver attempts to detoxify foreign chemicals but its capacity is limited. Humans evolved through a closely knit dance with the natural world, more a part of it than a separate entity. Saturating thousands of newly created chemical monsters into our homes, workplaces, and diet is truly an aberration that our bodies are unprepared for. Of the more than 70,000 chemicals is daily use, fewer than 2% have been thoroughly tested for health effects. [Reilly, W., (editor): "State of the Environment: A View Toward the Nineties," The Conservation Foundation, Washington, D.C. (1987).] The chemicals that actually make it to the laboratory for toxicological testing are rarely tested for neurological or reproductive effects. How will the mother\rquote s exposure affect her unborn child? Do chemicals become more dangerous when combined? The answers to these questions so far indicate that we are playing a dangerous game. When you consider that cancer rates have increased 31.7% since 1950, it appears we are loosing. [Miller, BA et al, "Cancer Statistics Review 1973-1990," National Cancer Institute, NIH No. 93-2789.]
Once the liver runs out of steam, chemical injury from low level chronic exposure to toxic chemicals will occur. While the job of beauticians is not one we usually consider hazardous, take a look at the list of chemicals a beautician is exposed to on a daily basis. Hair spray can contain formaldehyde, propane, dibutylphthalate, dichlorodiluoromethane, dichloromonofluoromethane, dichlorotetrafluoroethane, dimethylphthalate, methylene chloride, trifluorobromomethane, and vinyl acetate. Hair waving solution contains bromine, ethanolamine, and ethylenediamine. Hair gels contain dibutylphthalate, ethylenediamine and formaldehyde. Hair dyes contain 2-aminopyridine, benzyl alcohol, and p-phenylene diamine. Hair conditioners contain epichlorohydrin and formaldehyde. Let' s not forget the added fragrances which may contain acetaldehyde, benzyl acetate, cresols, cyclohexanol, ethyl acetate, ethyl acrylate, methyl n-amyl ketone, and phenyl ether. You get the picture. The list of symptoms that these chemicals cause, including cancer and chemical hypersensitivity, is at least one hundred times as long as the list of chemicals. Suffice it tosay they can kill you.
Seven years ago I learned of my own diagnosis of MCS and began to research this puzzling phenomenon. I have watched chemically injured people fall through the cracks of medicine and through the net of social support. Usually when I hear about a death, it is from suicide because this illness is just too hard to bear alone and ostracized from the world, with no hope of recognition, treatment or recovery. Now I am hearing more stories of people dying in hospitals under the nose of medical professionals. Have these doctors become so blind with professional arrogance that they cannot see the results of widescale poisoning? Even acute cases of pesticide poisoning are frequently misdiagnosed as the flu. The very tools doctors use may be the instruments of death. Pharmaceutical drug-related deaths averaged 100,000 per year from 1981 to 1993. [Murray, F, "The Murray Report: Vitamins-1, Drugs-100,000," Let's Live. September 1996.] In fact, many medicines are actually malignant. They can accelerate the aging process, and even encourage cancer. Drugs are often approved by the FDA with studies done on less than 30,000 people. Drug companies spend almost twice as much on marketing costs than on research and development. [ Murray, M., "Natural Alternatives to Over-the-Counter and Prescription Drugs." William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1994.] The drug industry uses its incredible profits to influence and steer the direction of research studies and medical schools, in other words, to indoctrinate the very doctors who purport to heal us. To use drugs to treat illnesses that are the result of chemical overload simply adds fuel to a fire already burning out of control. As MCS survivors have learned, to quell the fire requires that the relationship to the body and the earth become one that is friendly and nontoxic.
The truly perplexing face of chemical injury is that it can sneak up on the victim, cause any symptom, mimic most diseases, and is truly invisible unless you know what you are looking for. I speak of MCS, one form of chemical injury, because the bearers of this illness are graphically reminded of our constant connection to the world. While varying degrees of severity exist, several studies have indicated approximately one-third of the general population are especially sensitive to chemical exposures. The victim becomes "sensitized" to low levels of common chemicals, which means that these supposedly harmless levels cause illness. The central nervous system is most frequently affected, causing symptoms such as headaches, confusion, exhaustion, and dizziness, but impaired digestion, haywire hormones, and suppressed immunity are also common.
A friend with MCS likened the experienced of trying to enter a toxic house similar to trying to step into a blast furnace. Hit in the face with chemical fumes, the body refused to enter. Where are these fumes from? Could be a new carpet. Maybe the walls were just painted. Maybe the pesticide applicator sprayed for spiders earlier that week. Once you have MSC, you can no longer ignore our relationship to the environment, visible and invisible. The nose, the brain, the skin, the digestive tract, the lungs all communicate their displeasure of invasion. When ignored and untreated, MCS will progress to cause severely disabling symptoms, including convulsions and coma. These sick people must flee to remote areas to survive, which is becoming nearly impossible as the growth of civilization consumes the wild places.
Are we really living in such a toxic world that an epidemic of chemical intolerance is blooming? Not just our cars but our culture is driven by the dark glossy plumes of petroleum. Many of the most dangerous offenders (pesticides, plastics, dioxin, solvents, and many drugs) are derived from the compressed remains of ancestral forests, black gold. The dictionary definition: a natural, yellow-to-black, thick, flammable, liquid hydrocarbon mixture found principally beneath the earth's surface and processed for fractions including natural gas, gasoline, naphtha, kerosene, fuel and lubricating oils, paraffin wax, and asphalt. As we draw out what some have described as the earth\rquote s life blood, burning it, altering its structure, engorging beaches in black slime, and creating garbage dumps of indestructible piles of plastic, we must pause to wonder why we are covering the earth with molecules of destruction. Is it so terrifying to relate to our planet as an equal, to respect and value her slow and faithful process of generating a living and livable planet?
Sindy Bryant\rquote s story may have had a different ending had she seen a physician who practiced environmental medicine. One such doctor, Sherry Rogers, related the case of a sick beautician who began the agonizing process of detoxifying the years of chemicals stored in her body. During the healing process, this woman would wake up to sheets and pillow soaked purple from her sweat, the exact color of the perm solution she had used for years. Through a pure diet, special supplements, and a pristine environment, the body in its infinite wisdom will expel the poisons and heal itself. But better yet, why suffer the effects of poisoning in the name of progress?
In ours eyes to the ways we all make war against our bodies and the earth, change is finally possible. Positive steps, no matter how small, add up. Across the country, "green" beauty shops are opening which eschew the use of toxic chemicals. We can all increase our sensitivity to the seamless connection we share with the earth, and perhaps save ourselves as we work to recreate a safe world. Those of us with MCS know in the very cells of our bodies the deep and enduring truth of connectedness.
" I believe that the community in the fullest sense: a place and its creatures is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms." Wendell Berry from Another Turn of the Crank
Selene Anema, RN, BSN, PHN, is a medical writer who has worked with the Response Team for the Chemically Injured in Atascadero, California
2000