NUTRITIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON MENTAL STATES
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NUTRITIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON MENTAL STATES
DR. ROBERT ATKINS
I have treated about 45,000 patients in my career. In just about every community around the country, psychiatrists are doing a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the problem of anxiety and depression. They never bother to ask, "Why is my patient having a problem?" Instead, they immediately ask, "What is the name of the problem and what's its standard orthodox treatment?" They are bypassing the most important question of all: "Why is my patient sick?"
I would classify anxiety and depression under the general category of "diet-related disorder." By this I mean, there is something in the diet that is actually contributing enough to this problem so that if we correct the diet, the problem will disappear. The first question you have to ask is whether the symptoms change from hour to hour. Is the depression worse for an hour, and then it suddenly lifts? Does the anxiety change from hour to hour? That is the cardinal thing to look for because if the depression or anxiety are changeable, then they are almost definitely diet-related.
What are the mechanisms of diet-related disorder? There are three major ones. The first--and the most important one--is blood-sugar instability. The old name was hypoglycemia, but that really doesn't describe it. It's the condition in which the blood sugar is capable of rapid escalations and rapid falls, so much so that the body is putting out other hormones--particularly adrenaline--to help regulate the blood sugar. Adrenaline is called forth when the blood sugar is on a free fall, which it usually does if something made it go up very fast, like a candy bar or a sugar- and caffeine-laden cola drink. You can make your blood sugar go up very fast and if you have this problem, which, I would say, at least half the population has to some extent, then adrenaline is released and you get a panic attack. That is really the basis of most anxiety states. Panic attacks can turn into an absolute phobia. You get a panic attack two or three times, and then become phobic in relation to whatever it was you were doing at the time you got your panic attack.
The second mechanism is food allergies, which works a little differently. First you eat the offending food--which is often a grain, or milk, or sometimes some of the protein foods. Usually, the foods you are allergic to are whatever you eat most often, and since in our culture so many people eat bread with every meal, you have to suspect wheat. A lot of people drink milk with every meal, so dairy is a prime allergen. After eating foods you are allergic to over a long period of time, you may develop a leaky gut syndrome, and then you will develop the inability to handle the protein complexes that are characteristic of that food. So you get a reaction after you eat it. With the blood sugar instability, on the other hand, you get your reaction before a meal, if you haven't eaten, or if you have eaten sweets and then you haven't eaten anything else, which is the classical way to get it.
The third mechanism of this triumvirate is yeast, specifically candida albicans. The yeast itself is capable, through biochemical intermediaries, of making people a little flaky right from the very beginning, but it also makes you more likely to have food intolerances and it also frequently arises in people with sugar imbalances. Very often we will see people with all three of those conditions and they are going to a psychiatrist who is not trained to diagnose diet-related disorders. So even though you have psychiatric symptoms, you have a good chance of being incorrectly diagnosed because the person you are seeing does not specialize in diet-related disorders.
DR. KENDALL GERDES
There are two definitions of allergies today. The traditional, or classic, definition describes an immunological reaction, and there are very good data suggesting that it is a fairly rare phenomenon--maybe three-tenths of 1 percent in children and even less in adults. Unfortunately, people will read about food allergies in books they find in health food stores, but then they go to a traditional physician who thinks about allergies in a classic way. So he says, "Well, this person is talking about something that is really rare." But in fact, the second definition, or type, of allergy, which is much more common, describes food intolerance or hypersensitivity. We have to be careful when we talk about an allergy, because we don't know if it fits into the classical definition or into the second type.
Many people do have significant symptoms related to foods, and these are not rare foods. They are not strawberries, or tomatoes, or peanuts that might be involved with the more classical, immunological food allergic reactions. They are the much more commonly eaten everyday foods, such as milk, wheat, and corn. These are the kinds of foods that can get to be problems.
The immunoglobulin E type reaction is really severe. That happens in the person who eats one peanut and has to be taken off to the emergency room. On the other hand, the kind of food sensitivity I am talking about occurs in people who eat fairly large amounts of a particular food, and many times they can't see the cause-and-effect relationship because they are eating that food all the time.
The first people to do research in the area of food intolerance did so 40 to 50 years ago. A physician named Herbert Wrinkle was the first one to observe that a food a person ate all the time might be causing symptoms, but you couldn't see the relationship. If you took the person off that food for a week and then gave it to them, then you might get a sharp and clear reaction. He called this "masked food allergy."
Dr. Ferron Randolph enlarged the concept. He observed that not only did people use these foods often, but they used the foods as if they were addicted to them. They didn't merely have wheat for breakfast, they craved wheat. They loved wheat. They might have it six times a day. They might even, if they had trouble sleeping, eat wheat in the middle of the night to help them get back to sleep. And he found that when people were using certain foods in this kind of pattern, they temporarily felt better after eating the food. By using the same principles that Dr. Wrinkle had used, he would take the person off the food and
then challenge them. In that way, many times he could see the reaction that the patient themselves could not see. The critical variable was, once he began to look for things that people were addicted to, he had a much better basis from which to look for those foods.
A person might have a wide array of emotional and mental reactions. A person can be irritable, depressed, or anxious because of foods that they are using or because of chemicals in their environment such as perfumes or formaldehyde in particle board or furniture. Research is only beginning to understand how this works. Dr. Iris Bell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona, is very interested in this topic and has been exploring it more than anyone else. She is finding that food and chemical sensitivities probably play into the endorphin system--the same system that produces a runner's high. The endorphin system is used as a way for the brain to give a feeling of comfort. For instance, when an infant is crying or upset, the mother gives him some breast milk, and the sugar and fat in the milk probably trigger the endorphin system so that the baby then can go to sleep. That same system can be activated under some circumstances by children and adults in order to make themselves feel good--which is exactly the same pattern in heroin addiction. As a consequence, people find themselves having to use a particular food or a group of foods to feel better. That is part of the basis of food addiction.
The simplest approach to use in order to figure out what foods you are sensitive to is to look for the foods that you are using a lot, if you are someone whose symptoms seem to fluctuate over the course of a day or week. This is the same approach that most of the physicians in the Academy of Environmental Medicine, and probably a good many besides that, use.
Here's a hypothetical 35-year-old woman. (I say a woman because women go to doctors more frequently than men do, for whatever the reason. Whether men are being more stoic and not coming in, or whether women are more vulnerable, we don't really know.) It would not be uncommon to find a woman who has a fair amount of fatigue, with a low-grade depression that sometimes gets to the point where she almost can't cope with things. When that occurs, and it is a variable type of thing, I will look for the two, or five, or ten foods that she is using a lot and suggest that she take them out of her diet for a week. Then, at the end of that week, many times she will find that she is not so tired and doesn't have that low-grade depression; she has more motivation to do things. Then I get more specific and test one food. I ask her to have a big meal of each of those foods that she has been avoiding. Many times we can find out which food or foods have been causing the low-grade depression and her other symptoms. Though this is a generic case, it is a fairly common story.
DR. ABRAM HOFFER I treated a young man who was both schizophrenic and alcoholic. He had been working on his Ph.D. when he became so ill that he could not continue. Eventually he came under my care. It turned out that he didn't respond too well to my program--the vitamins and the other things that I was doing--and finally I discovered from his mother, not from him, that he consumed 12 ounces of tomato juice every morning, and had since he was a child. That was one of his basic breakfast foods. And it turned out that he had a tomato allergy. Then his mother told me that she too had been allergic to tomatoes, but she hadn't touched them for at least 60 years.
When I put the young man on a tomato-free diet, and explained to him why, his depression and his schizophrenia vanished and he became normal. He was my second case in which a food allergy was a major factor in determining the illness of a person. It can be any one food or often a combination of foods--two or even three foods--that people have to learn to avoid, and their mental condition will improve dramatically.
DR. RICHARD KUNIN
In 1971, a beautiful son was born to me in October. In about June of 1972, he had enough hair for a hair test and I did one, and found that he had roughly 80 parts per million of lead in his hair. He should have had zero. Eighty parts per million is a toxic load and could only be coming from something he was eating. It was not something that we were putting on his hair; we certainly didn't use hair sprays or dyes. So I knew that my son, before he was a year old, was already poisoned. My heart dropped. I almost fainted with grief. We checked things out and found that a toy that had been given as a gift was tainted with 6 percent lead in the paint--that's 6000 parts per million. If we hadn't done a hair test, he would have continued to have been poisoned and would have been mentally retarded.
Lead poisoning has, first, a bad effect on the brain. The second bad effect is that you get bowel problems and colic. The third thing is you lose your coordination because the hands and feet are weak. Then the immune system is weakened. In other words, you are just not the person you could have been.
I once had an 18-year-old patient, a beautiful woman, who came to see me who was depressed. She graduated from college with a C average and was disappointed in herself. She had been raised on vitamins and an Adelle Davis diet by a very caring mother. But they had lived overseas, where they had bought native pottery, and as a baby she was already lead-poisoned. I know this because I did a hair analysis of the child's hair samples that her mother had saved at various ages. At 1-1/2, her hair was 180 parts per million of lead. At five, it was down to 80. At age 12 it was down to practically nothing, and at age 18 we couldn't find it. As she grew, this load of lead that she had picked up as a baby was being absorbed into her tissues and being diluted. But it left behind its damage on her. Her teachers would write on her report card, "Jennifer could have done so much better if she had really tried." The teachers couldn't understand it. The girl had an attention deficit based on an early-life toxicity that was undiagnosed because nobody looked.
In an enlightened society, all children should be tested for lead. But their hair and not their blood should be tested. The government is spending millions of dollars to test children by taking a blood sample for lead, which is absolutely ridiculous. Lead will be filtered out of the blood in a week. If you are exposed to lead this week, by next week it will be gone, but it will remain in your hair for six months. If a hair test is done once a year, if there is lead contamination, you are going to find it.
Hair analysis, for a reasonable price, gives you 30 or more real facts about the levels of mercury, arsenic, cadmium, lead, nickel, aluminum, and fluoride that have built up in your body. Everyone should know what toxic substances and physiologic minerals--chromium, selenium, boron--they're accumulating or are deficient in. We have very few tools that give us this kind of perspective. The contamination can be minute and the test accuracy is quite high.
DR. CHRISTOPHER CALPAI
We are exposed to metals from a wide variety of places. They are in our drinking water, in some of our foods, even in our work environment where we breathe in certain toxins. Lead, for example, can come into the body through exposure to metals in paints. We get cadmium from our food, air, and water; mercury from dental fillings and shellfish; and aluminum and excess iron from pots and pans. Many of the metals that are brought into the body are toxic to the brain and central nervous system tissue. They interfere with normal metabolism by disrupting enzyme systems.
The textbook Aluminum and Alzheimer's Disease: An Update presents the relationship between aluminum and mercury poisoning and disease:
"There have been reports of increased aluminum in the bulk of brain tissue in Alzheimer's patients and more recently associations of aluminum with neurofibrillary tangles and neuritic plaques. Aluminum has also been associated with neurofibrillary degeneration in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinsonism type dementia.
"Mercury is released during the placement and removal of amalgams. Areas of concern with regards to mercury exposure include kidney dysfunction, neurotoxicity, reduced immune function, hypersensitivity reactions, birth defects and overall changes in general health."
The Food Additives Handbook reports that lead, cadmium, and arsenic are put into animal feed, as are other heavy metals. They are probably placed there intentionally to remove germs. In addition, aluminum is found in baking powder, table salt, and vanilla powder. It's used as an emulsifier, and as an anti-caking agent.
Test and Treatment Protocols
When testing for heavy metal toxicity, you want to take the entire patient into consideration. Are they having any symptoms that can be related to an exposure to heavy metals? Have they had numerous dental procedures? Do they have decreased memory? Do they have changes in their behavior or mood?
Treating the condition is done via looking at a blood test for vitamins and minerals, looking to see what the person's diet consists of, what they do for work, where they work, what they're exposed to at work, their home environment, doing a 24-hour urine test with an intravenous chelation procedure, and testing for creatinine clearance (kidney function), as well as testing for heavy metals.
The latest and best treatment is a combination of oral vitamins and minerals to maximize immune function, exercise, and intravenous EDTA chelation therapy to remove the metals. Vitamin C is also beneficial. Some people use intravenous vitamin C and alternate that with chelation.
The vitamins and minerals that we recommend are based upon the individual's needs. We check to see if the patient is deficient in different nutrients or if they're not absorbing certain things. The ranges are individually different and depend on the result of the physical exam.
Chelation therapy is a treatment that has been around for many years. It involves using an intravenous application or induction of a protein substance that helps to bind heavy metals, to drag them and throw them out of the body through the urine. It takes about three hours to do. It also has been shown to produce significant changes in plaque deposition in the lining of blood vessels, so it can help to open up circulation. You can detect how well the metals are being taken out of the body by a repeat 24-hour urine test. The chelation for people who have heavy metals may be done once or twice a week for 15 weeks.
DR. ALFRED ZAMM
The standard conservative medical school textbook, TheTextbook of Pharmacology by Goodman and Gilman, contains the following passage about mercury, "Doctors very rarely make the diagnosis of mercury poisoning because the symptoms are so varied. It comes in many disguises." To paraphrase the text: Mercury poisoning is like a ghost. You don't know it's there. It comes and goes, in different masks. Some years ago, I wrote an article called "The Removal of Dental Mercury--Often an Effective Treatment for the Very Sensitive Patient," and I listed probably 50 symptoms associated with mercury poisoning. The top three of the 50 would be fatigue, inappropriate coldness, and sugar intolerance. These patients will crave sugar and eat sweet things, and may or may not know that they will get sick. They may eat sweets on Monday and get sick on Tuesday. They may have all sorts of bizarre symptoms--muscle aches and pains, fatigue, headaches, personality changes. Remember, you don't have to have all of the symptoms to have mercury poisoning. You can have one, and sometimes it comes, and sometimes it goes.
Here are some other common symptoms of mercury poisoning: headaches, difficulty concentrating, difficulty with reading comprehension, forgetfulness, depression, and skin changes.
It is very difficult to prove mercury poisoning, except after the fact when the mercury is out and the patient feels better. Now taking a whole group of fillings out is not a minor issue. So I have devised some tests that people can do themselves in order to assess whether or not it is worth proceeding in this direction.
First of all, if you crave sugar and sugar makes you sick, and you are already suspicious about that, then take this test. First, try taking selenium, which is a mineral that binds with mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. If you feel better after taking selenium, it is a clue, not a diagnosis. About 20 years ago, when I started to investigate selenium, I realized that there was a paradox. Some people got better right away, some people took about three months, and some people got worse. I finally figured out that the patients who got worse were those who were most sensitive. They were the ones who were really sick--the ones who needed it the most but because of a peculiar intolerance to everything, including the things they needed, couldn't deal with the selenium. To overcome this, I had the very sensitive patients dilute chemically pure selenium down to very small dilutions. By starting with very small dilutions and gradually building it up over a period of three months, these very sick patients started to get better.
Aside from tying up these toxic substances--mercury, cadmium, and arsenic--selenium is also protective against cancer. A study was done by a man named Schroeder at Dartmouth. He investigated 50 cities in the United States, found their cancer rates, and rated them from highest to lowest. Then he also found out the selenium content of their water and lined them up. The cities with the highest selenium had the lowest cancer rate, and vice versa. Later on, this correlation turned out to be causally connected. Selenium does provide protection against cancer--probably due to its tying up of toxic metals like cadmium, arsenic, and mercury. Moreover, selenium is an atom that fits into a molecule called glutathionperoxidase, which helps to destroy dangerous, foreign chemicals that just don't belong in our bodies, such as petrochemicals, floor wax, and insecticides. So when you take selenium, you're not only knocking out mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, you are also helping to produce more glutathionperoxidase, which protects you from environmental contaminants. So if you feel better, it is not an absolute diagnosis of mercury poisoning.
Within pyruvate dehydrogenase dehydrogentated complex, there are three enzymes. The first one uses thiamine, vitamin B1. If you are tired all the time, and you take 25 mg of thiamine once or twice a day, which is a low dose, and you notice you feel better, that is another clue you might have mercury poisoning. Now you have the selenium and the thiamine clue.
The last thing is zinc. If you look at the periodic table that shows how the elements are arranged, you'll notice that there is a column containing zinc, cadmium, and mercury, in order from top to bottom. If you have too much cadmium and mercury in the body, they will replace zinc in the enzymes. Now our bodies have 50 to 75 enzymes with zinc in them. So if you have mercury knocking out your zinc, then you know why it is poisoning you. It is inactivating enzymes by knocking out the zinc, which is supposed to be there, and replacing it with mercury which doesn't work. This is cellular poisoning. You are not burning sugar, which is why you are cold and tired, and that's why you are sugar-intolerant.
Why do some people who have mercury in their bodies not get sick? In a speech I gave to the FDA in March 1991, I explained the reason. We are all different; some of us are small, some tall. It's the same thing with enzymes. We are genetically pleomorphic, meaning that some people have a lot of enzymes that work very well and some people don't have much of the enzymes and they don't work very well. Some of us who have mercury in our bodies will be able to deal with it, and there are others who won't be able to deal with it. Those who are just getting by, who were born with a slight deficiency, will just get through. But if, at age 12 or 13, people are poisoned by having mercury fillings put in their mouths, those who have strong enzyme systems may not notice much, but those who are marginal start to manifest symptoms, but usually not right away. After a few months, a child can't concentrate at school. Maybe he develops allergies, and nobody connects it with the filling that was put in six months before.
I have patients with a single filling who experience problems. One woman, a Russian emigrant who had no fillings, at age 20 got a single filling. She came to me at 22 with a shopping bag full of medicine. She didn't know what was wrong with her. She couldn't think. She was nauseated and sick all the time. When I asked her when it all started, she said it had been two years. I looked into her mouth, and saw the single filling, and asked her when she had gotten it. She said it had been put in two years ago. I asked which had come first, the filling or the illness. And she said, "Oh my God. It was three months after the filling was put in that I got sick." She was a very skeptical woman who didn't trust American medicine or anything. I told her she had to have it taken out. She was so desperate that she said, "I don't believe a word you are saying but I'm going to have it taken out because I'm afraid that I will die if I don't." She had the filling removed. In 17 days, she was able to start eating some foods that she couldn't eat before. It took about three months before she saw some substantial results and she came back and said to me, "I believe it." Now that was a single filling.
I have one patient, a young child, who had a filling the size of a pinhead and I didn't see it because it was in the back. You'd need a special dental mirror. And I said to the mother, "I don't understand this case. This child can't tolerate sugar, he is hyperkinetic." (Hyperkinesis, or hyperactivity, is one of the symptoms of mercury poisoning.) I said, "This has to be a case of mercury poisoning. This child was perfectly well until he was seven. But I don't see any fillings." She said, "Doctor, there is a filling there." So I got a dental mirror from a colleague of mine and looked. Sure enough, there was a filling the size of a pinhead. I couldn't believe it. I had the filling removed, and within three months the child was substantially improved. This child was genetically pleomorphic in the sense that he had a very inefficient oxidation process.
When you talk about genetically pleomorphic individuals who are sensitive, such as the Russian emigrant woman, they are going to have all the things that I have mentioned, including depressions, anxiety, and sleep disturbances. If you are not oxidizing, if you are not burning sugar, you are energy-deficient and you are going to be deficient in many other organ functions. Mercury poisoning from dental fillings is so elusive because it is turning down the valve of their lives. Each organ will express itself in its own dysfunction. That is why muscle aches and depression and all those things go together. But some organs are a little stronger than others so they won't manifest symptoms.
If a patient comes in and says, "I'm depressed," one of the causes is probably mercury poisoning. I once gave a lecture to a group of graduate students in psychology because the chairman of the department, who was my patient, was so impressed with the fact that you could get the patient better physically and affect the mental illness. The title of the lecture was "How I Would Like to Be Treated if I Were a Patient."
Here's what I said, in short: First, we have to make sure the patient is physically healthy. Let the patient be investigated by a good internist who gives a thorough physical examination, assuming nothing. Next, we want to make sure that the person doesn't have allergies. Third, we ascertain whether or not the person has biochemical disruptions, from exposure to toxic elements, including mercury. After we do steps 1, 2, and 3, we go to step 4, which is to recommend going to speak to a psychologist.
In the case of mercury poisoning, there may be enough oxygen, but the person's body can't burn it because the burning mechanism has shut down. In every case of depression, physical deficiencies and toxic poisoning should first be considered before resorting to therapy and psychotropic medications such as antidepressants. I have seen hundreds of these cases.
How is it possible that, in the 1990s, dentists are continuing to put a toxic substance in our mouths? We need some historical perspective on the issue. In 1826, a Parisian named Taveau discovered that if you took silver coins and filed them into dust and mixed it with mercury, and then squeezed the mercury out, this putty would harden quickly. Then you could take this putty-like material, push it into a cavity in someone's mouth, and it would harden like concrete. Other people realized that this wasn't such a good idea and there were arguments back and forth. Then, in 1833 in New York, two brothers went into the business of doing this process on a mass scale. It's a cheap filling. You don't have to be a good dentist to make a mercury filling.
The so-called silver amalgam filling is a lie. This "silver" filling is only 30 percent silver, but it is 50 percent mercury and 20 percent various other metals that can produce hardness. They call it a silver filling when the major ingredient is mercury. So I refer to it as a mercury filling.
The reason this date, 1826, is important is it's the first quarter of the 1800s, when the degree of ignorance, compared to what we know now, was incredible. In 1860, just to give you some more perspective, a man in Vienna said to doctors, "If you don't wash your hands before you examine pregnant women, you are going to spread disease." They didn't know about germs in those days. This man was thrown out of the medical society because he was impugning the reputation of physicians. It was not until 1875 that Louis Pasteur and others proved that germs were the cause of disease. Now 1826 was roughly 50 years before doctors understood germ theory, and yet we are still using that same dental technology today, about 175 years later.
How can mercury fillings still be considered to be safe? The answer: If you did it before, it's okay to do it again. For example, lead pipes were the standard for years, so they are still okay now. Luckily, we have finally gotten around to seeing that lead pipes weren't really safe, that the lead leaching into the water causes brain damage. So we've stopped using lead in pipes. We still have tobacco from when the colonists smoked it with the Indians hundreds of years ago. You still can't convince some people that it's not healthy to smoke. We continue to sell tobacco and other poisonous substances out of habit and the profit motive.
The same is true with mercury fillings. There is no proof that they are safe. Now, if you went out to buy a can of soup in the supermarket, it would be strange to have the clerk behind the counter say to you, "I'd like you to prove the safety of this can." You would say, "What are you talking about? I'm purchasing the can. The fact that you are selling it implies that you are saying that it's safe." But the clerk says, "Not when it comes to soup. When it comes to soup, it is the responsibility of the purchaser to prove that it is safe or not safe. We as the sellers don't have to do anything." That's the situation we're in with mercury fillings. No one has ever proved that mercury fillings are safe in human beings. They should prove it. But instead, the dental industry has turned it around and said, "No, you have to prove it is unsafe." They say it is safe but they haven't proven it.
We are continuing to use a 175-year-old anachronistic mixture of crude coin filings mixed with mercury. And we are walking around with this mixture in our teeth without any proof of safety. Charlemagne said, "If the populace knew with what idiocy they were ruled, they would revolt." That goes for some of the things that they do in dentistry.,
DR. RAY WUNDERLICH
A 30-year old worker from an orange juice plant in Florida, who was a chemist and had been working there for about three years, came to me because she was depressed, irritable, and anxious; she felt like her brain was in a fog. I did a chemical analysis of this patient: I looked at her blood--her red cells and her plasma--her urine, and her hair. The results showed that she had excesses of five toxic metals: arsenic, cadmium, lead, aluminum, and copper. Now, she had an occupational exposure to heavy metals. Many systems went off in the body of this relatively young woman. When she was treated for heavy metal toxicity, she progressively improved and got well. Her case is a very dramatic example of a mental dysfunction and emotional problem that cleared up because of clear toxic exposure.
In the U.S., there's a lot of background exposure. Think about all of the auto tires on the road that are spinning off cadmium in their wheels as they wear down, all the 50,000 chemicals in the environment that weren't there 50 years ago. We are all receiving toxic exposures. Dr. Davis from England has shown that these gradually and insidiously accumulate in our systems with every decade that we live. So we have to face the idea that this toxic build-up is interfering with our enzyme function.
Chemicals and Other Environmental Factors Contributing to Mental Conditions
DR. MICHAEL SCHACTER
I tend to focus on a person's behavioral habits. I look for chemical sensitivities, for example. One woman whom I have been treating for some time now becomes very depressed and even has auditory hallucinations. We were able to make the connection that these symptoms are actually precipitated by her being exposed to a department store area containing formaldehyde. Recently, she was able to improve her condition by using a detoxification program in which she took sauna baths and certain nutrients, such as niacin and vitamin C. It took several weeks of a couple of hours a day of saunas to detoxify some of the substances that were in her body, because she had a history as an adolescent of a fair amount of substance abuse, especially hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, as well as marijuana. Though she has improved considerably, she still has some chemical sensitivity.
DR. RICHARD KUNIN
Once at a dinner party I met a woman and it turned out that the party was at the home of her psychoanalyst who was a transactional therapist, a psychiatrist, and also an M.D. And she was a victim of a depression that would come and go. The conversation turned to what kind of therapy a doctor like myself--an orthomolecular doctor and a nutrition physician--would use. She decided to come in for a consultation to explain her depressions. In the first two months, as I went through phase one, nutrition analysis, with her, nothing came of it. There was almost a 100-percent probability that we were going to find something chemical because the psychological inputs just didn't explain her depressions. So we went back over the whole case and hit upon something she had forgotten to tell me the first time around, which was that after she had had her third child by cesarian, she hadn't been able to breathe for a day. Probing further, we found that the anesthesia she was administered was accompanied by a paralysis of her respiratory muscles. It's a short-term muscle relaxant that blocks the neural muscular junction and the transmitter and you are supposed to recover in a matter of minutes. She recovered in a day. If they had not had an automatic pressure respirator there she would have died.
She has a potentially fatal disorder. When she was measured they found that her detoxifying enzyme, called cholinesterase, which is supposed to get rid of a chemical like this, was abnormally low on a genetic basis. Now she knew about this but nobody explained to her that it put her at risk for environmental exposure to pesticides that would damage this enzyme further. The common phosphate pesticides were life-threatening to this woman. Nobody told her. Now it turns out that she is a well-to-do woman who could afford to have an exterminator come in and spray her kitchen every month or two. And she would be disabled. The pesticide sprays are supposed to last about a week but it takes about two to three weeks to recover for an ordinary exposure and with her low cholinesterase she would be out for a month.
She would feel depressed, weak, and shaky. She would have intestinal bloat. She would wheeze a little. She would sleep poorly, have strange dreams. Her saliva would be a little thin. In general, her autonomic nervous system was a wreck.
When she would visit her family up in Napa Valley, California, which is full of vineyards that are sprayed, everyone else would be playing tennis, and she would be in bed with the covers over her head. Everyone thought that she was neurotic. Nobody measured her cholinesterase until I heard the story, checked, and, sure enough, she had a genetic deficiency.
In my own practice, I have come upon four cases like this, about one every two years. But in addition to these four, there have been well over 60 people in the past six or seven years who don't have the advanced or severe form, but a milder form of environmental susceptibility. One of these was a nurse who was in the hospital on the psychiatric ward for depression. While she was getting better at the hospital, she knew that this wasn't the answer. She wasn't even on medication. Just being in the ward, she was getting better, which already tells us something. She wasn't at home. She was in a new environment, and so the suspicion of environmental factors goes up.
This is an important point. If you go on a vacation and feel better, it doesn't necessarily mean that you needed a vacation. Maybe you needed to be out of your home territory where there are environmental factors that make you sick. Now in my practice I always measure cholinesterase levels. She was also below the normal limit. It turned out that whenever she was visiting her home territory, which was rural, she would be aware that they were spraying by airplane. From a mile away this woman would pick up drifts and her immune system was responding to the solvents and detergents that are used to disperse the sprays over a wide area. But when we measured her cholinesterase, we found that it fluctuated. When it went down--meaning it was inactivated by pesticide exposure--then she would have more symptoms, particularly depressions. When she would recover and be at her high level--meaning she was not impaired--she would feel perfectly healthy and normal and was a vivacious, dynamic person.
I call this the "pesticide neurosis." It's not rare and it's a very significant factor, because people are reacting to common, so-called "safe" pesticides. These are the same pesticides that California sprayed all over the city of Los Angeles, where there were people who were having all kinds of symptoms, especially when they would spray in two adjacent areas consecutively. If you lived in the cusp between two areas, you got a double dose.
These are the most common pesticide problems that show up as everyday nerve problems. If you eat out in restaurants, they are sprayed every few weeks, and chances are you are going to pick up some of the leftovers of some of these commercial pesticides. They are careful and they do it well, but accidents do happen. If you are having symptoms of environmental susceptibility, you have got to include this in your thinking. Doctors should be including it in their testing.
Of the 30 or 40 cases of environmental toxicity that I could refer to, there basically are two types. One type will have a family history. You'll find out that cousin Joe had it or you'll hear that there was a suicide in the family. In fact this may be the case of the nurse who came to see me looking for nutrition answers, and we found instead a toxic answer for her. She had a cousin who lived in the San Mateo area, south of San Francisco. When we had the Mee Fly scare back in 1983, after the area where her cousin lived was sprayed, he went into a terrible depression and committed suicide. Of course, I can't prove that the depression was brought on by a toxic reaction to the spraying. I didn't get a blood level on him. But when you have one person with a family history of an enzyme weakness and another person with related genes who goes into a deep depression after having been exposed to a bad environmental onslaught, you have to at least consider that the two events are causally related.
These kind of stories are a wake-up call. Even at this late stage when we think everyone is so aware and concerned about pesticides, until the government agencies and the higher-ups in the medical political structure admit it, the actual interventions are only partial and the medical profession at large does not really take environmental toxicity seriously. They see it as very rare and therefore they don't include hair analysis as part of a routine medical checkup. In fact, doctors have been told not to test for toxics, even though these tests are the best way to screen for poisonous metals as well as to identify how much of various minerals a person is accumulating in the tissues of his or her body.
DR. MICHAEL GALANTE
Pesticides are a major problem today, especially in more rural areas, although winds can carry them into urban areas as well. Pesticides have long been known to be extremely toxic to the bugs and the foliage they are aimed at killing. But the industry has sought to conceal from the public the toxic effect of these substances on humans.
Pesticides are a real problem even in suburbia, where people with small children have lawn care. There is a big risk to children and their pets playing on lawns that have been treated with chemicals. Possibly, this is even more of a risk than the agricultural risk.
I am a homeopath, and homeopathy talks about the active effect of a substance in terms of parts per million, parts per billion. As far as I'm concerned, something that is one part per million is active, and not harmless. So pesticide chemicals such as parathion, malathion, dichlor, and others that are used today in huge amounts are, in my opinion, extremely toxic in a lot of ways.
Low levels of pesticides in the body are hard to detect, but in general the symptoms match those of the modern patient that I see many times each day. The symptoms, plaguing millions of people today, are chronic fatigue, depression, and general malaise. Homeopathy and clinical ecology have had great success in treating this kind of condition. Most of these pesticides have been deposited or absorbed selectively by the nervous system or fatty tissues. The nervous system has a coating over it called the myelin sheath and the brain is covered by a sheath called the dura mater. These have a high fat content and so the pesticides are absorbed like a sponge by them. The liver and kidneys also end up having a much higher concentration of pesticides than other parts of the body because they have to detoxify them. So pesticide exposure tends to exhibit itself in overall weakness as well as in psychological and neurological symptoms.
Many people have theorized that the rise in cases of multiple sclerosis might be a misdiagnosis; they might really be cases of pesticide poisoning, or partial pesticide poisoning. You can die from complete pesticide poisoning.
Part of the process of getting healthier and stronger usually entails dietary changes. Ironically, vegetarians are the most susceptible to pesticide poisoning because they often eat a larger quantity of fresh fruits and vegetables than the general public does, and many pesticides are sprayed on all of these foods. I urge people, if they can afford it, to try to buy organic foods, especially now that the prices have come down quite a bit.
I am convinced that the fumes from new homes--the formaldehyde and the new rugs, which emit gas for a time--are definitely contributors to many kinds of chronic problems, such as headaches and allergies in general. Allergies are cumulative, so if you have a pollen allergy and move into a new home, then the pollen allergy will become much worse because of the chemical burden that you have added. In general, allergies or sensitivities are caused by an immunological weakness that affects the whole system. Changes in the white blood cells and other elements of the immune system affect the whole body. You can't say, "Well, it's only in my nose." Immune weakness affects your mental state as well as any disease process for the worse. It will weaken your energies. From the homeopathic point of view, it will drain your vital forces.
BETTY: A PATIENT OF DR. RAY WUNDERLICH
Back in 1991, I was injured on the job by some paint fumes and my whole life changed. I developed serious food allergies and sensitivities to everything in my environment. I became allergic to everything in my own home, I reacted to plastics of all kinds, and I couldn't breathe outdoor air. I was literally a captive in my own home for the first year. When I couldn't go out, all the air inside my own home had to be filtered especially for me and I had to wear charcoal face masks to breathe. Also, I began to experience depressions, mood swings, and a lot of confusion and memory loss. I would go into one room and forget why I was there. I know a lot of people have that complaint, but I had it consistently throughout the day. I would lose my memory about what I was doing. I couldn't go out in the car and drive myself to the store because I wouldn't be able to find my way. I lost the ability to read normally. Still now, two years later, I have to read things over and over and give my brain a lot of opportunities to retain the material. I still have that deficit. I have trouble dealing with numbers.
Unfortunately, because my chemical exposure happened to me on the job, I became a workers' compensation client. This meant that I was very often sent to doctors who were unwilling to believe that there was something wrong with me or who didn't understand what the syndrome was all about. So for months at a time, because of their diagnoses, I would go without any treatment at all and I would just get worse. My lifestyle changed so that I literally became a hermit in my own home. I had my family doing all my daily activities for me, such as shopping. I just became a captive in my home for about a year.
Luckily I found several doctors who were able to diagnose and treat me with various methods. Dr. Wunderlich was one of the first doctors that I saw and he helped me quite a bit. He administered vitamin C drips, a vitamin supplement program, and allergy treatments, because every allergy that you can think of was triggered in my body. I had a total allergy syndrome. Everything that I breathed in and everything that I put on my skin I became allergic to. To this day, I cannot use any kind of lotions, cosmetics, fragrances, or hairsprays, and I doubt that I ever will be able to use them.
Very, very slowly I began to get better. I still have a lot of setbacks because of chemical exposures. I can't tolerate anything like gasoline fumes, new plastics, or any kind of new materials in a building. I have very restricted access to public places because of fragrances that are often used in offices, stores, or public restrooms, and because of cleaning solutions and sprays used in public places. So now, after two years, I am still very, very slowly making progress. But from everything that I have learned, I have several more years ahead of me before I can bring my immune system back to where it should be.
I like people and I have always, all of my life, been around people. One of my greatest frustrations has been that now I find I have to dodge people because of the cosmetics, perfumes, and sprays that they use. A big part of my life is spent dodging people in order to protect myself from these things. They set off severe migraine attacks that can put me into bed for two and three days at a time.
I was forced into changing my lifestyle. I had to change my way of eating, and my way of living. I had to change a lot of the products that I used in my home to nontoxic products, like baking soda and vinegar solutions. Now, that is all I use in my home. I've gone to a semi-vegetarian diet. Most of my vegetables are organic. I eat very little meat, and no flavorings. I have to be on a completely yeast-free and sugar-free diet. It is an extremely restricted diet. But I have gotten used to it and I realize now that it's an extremely healthy diet. It's a natural diet, the type of diet that people probably ate 50 or 60 years ago.
My experience with various doctors has made me see the need for more physician awareness. It was frustrating when I ran into, or was sent to, so many physicians who saw me as a neurotic middle-aged woman because of the symptoms that I had. The symptoms that go with environmental illness are numerous and have to be taken seriously by the medical profession. It is not all in our heads.