ALLERGIES: CHEMICAL SUSCEPTIBILITY
Nora Barnes came to me as a patient in 1947. Mrs. Barnes had been repeatedly diagnosed as a hypochondriac. No physician had been able to find the cause of her multiple symptoms and complaints.
In childhood she had been the victim of widespread allergies and had frequent problems with runny nose, cold sores, and outbreaks of hives. These went away as she grew to adulthood but were soon replaced by fierce headaches— blinding pain which sent her running to her bed. She suffered from persistent fatigue, irritability, nervousness, and tension. She also had a cough, which eventually turned into bronchial asthma.
At one time she had been employed as a cosmetics saleswoman. She noticed after a while that when she applied nail polish, her eyes would itch furiously. She soon had bags under her eyes, and the skin around them became red and inflamed. She applied make-up to hide this problem.
By the time she came to see me, she was in a wretched condition. She had had to drive through the industrial belt of northern Indiana to reach my office, and as she approached the city limits of Chicago, she felt sicker than ever. In the city, she practically caused an accident when she swung out of traffic to escape from the exhaust fumes of a bus.
Arriving at a hotel in Chicago’s downtown Loop district, she was practically incoherent when she called me on the telephone. By chance, the desk clerk gave her a room on the twenty-third floor. Soon she felt somewhat better and attempted to go downstairs and do some shopping. But she found that when she went into the lobby or onto any floor below the twentieth, her nausea, dizziness, and feelings of suffocation returned.
She had had three experiences in which she had collapsed in a “drunken” stupor while driving her car. Only the fact that someone was in the passenger seat beside her prevented a serious accident. She often became ill while riding in the back seats of cars, but rarely in the front. Some cars, especially those with noisy mufflers, seemed worse than others.
All of this was confusing, but the single most intriguing fact in her case was that her symptoms became progressively worse after July Fourth and did not get any better until after Christmas. Between New Year’s and Independence Day, she remained tolerably well, only to get miserably sick and “neurotic” again after the Fourth of July.
One possible explanation of this could be hay fever, but there were no pollens in her state which were troublesome during that particular period. In the course of our conversation, however, Nora mentioned that she always went to a cabin in the woods for the summer—on July Fourth. Something in that cabin, I felt, might be responsible for these various symptoms. By testing samples from her home, it turned out the main culprit was the pine paneling of the cabin. Pine was also burned in the fireplace, and various pine scented materials were used in the house, including disinfectants. When all pine products were removed from the cabin her symptoms improved.
Some time later, however, she and her husband went to a hunting lodge which had been heated by a fuel-oil stove. She began to cough and wheeze within a few minutes after entering the building, and became unconscious.
She reported that the odor of her gas kitchen range made her feel sick, as did those of her gas-burning home utilities, sponge rubber padding, plastic upholstered furniture, rubber mattress and pillow, and beds whose mattresses were encased in plastic coverings. She was able to effect real improvement by simply removing all these items from her home and replacing them with less offensive substitutes. Her Christmas-time malaise was traced to the pine Christmas tree.
The overall picture of Nora Barnes’ illness did not strike home until one blustery day, when a fierce storm threatened the Chicago area. All other patients had cancelled their appointments, but Mrs. Barnes came in, and together we reviewed over fifty typewritten pages of her record. Finally, a pattern emerged. Almost all her problems could be traced back to petrochemicals, combustion products, or man-made chemicals manufactured from petroleum. Nora Barnes was allergic or susceptible to a wide range of supposedly safe environmental agents. Her susceptibility to pine and pine products fit into this picture, too, since our current supply of hydrocarbon fuels is believed to be derived, ultimately, from a huge prehistoric pine forest, crushed beneath the earth.
This theory led to new revelations in Mrs. Barnes’ case. By eliminating all plastics and chemicals from her life, she discovered that she could dramatically improve her health. Food stored in glass, for instance, could be eaten, but the same food stored in plastic containers made her sick.
A drink of creme de menthe invariably made her sick—in fact, she passed out on several occasions when trying to drink it. She now found out why: she was incredibly sensitive to all artificial food colorings and so she avoided not only this green liqueur, but also maraschino cherries, mint sauce, frankfurters, and similar products (see list, Chapter 4).
She noticed that canned tomatoes made her sick, but that she was able to eat tomatoes from her own garden. The problem was traced to the lining of the tin cans in which the commercial food was packed. Also, foods sprayed with insecticide would bring on headaches, whereas unsprayed food would not. She found that she could eat beef raised on a neighbor’s farm but not commercially raised beef, which had been fed pesticide-treated feeds and sprayed for fly control.
The case of Nora Barnes provided a new perspective on medical practice. It soon became apparent that she was not alone, that many of the patients seen by physicians with similarly peculiar and multiple symptoms were actually suffering from allergies to synthetic chemicals. These people were not born this way. They acquired a high susceptibility because of constant, day-in and day-out exposure to chemicals, especially in the period since World War Two.
Almost inevitably, their susceptibility to chemicals intermingled with food allergies, to form an overall picture of environmental illness. These patients were reacting to foreign substances which are known to be toxic (poisonous). But it had always been assumed that reactions of toxicity occurred at much higher levels of exposure. These “chemical patients” reacted to minute amounts of contamination, which doctors until then had not considered problematic.
The full clinical implications of the chemical susceptibility problem developed over a number of years. As this environmentally oriented medical problem emerged, each new patient revealed some aspect or feature of this condition not previously appreciated. Full realization of the two most important sources of chemical pollution of the environment, namely, the contribution of gas utilities to indoor air pollution and the crucial roles of pesticide exposures in both indoor and outdoor (ambient) air pollution, did not become clear until Ellen Sanders came to me as a patient in early 1953.
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