The battle for recognition SYMPTOMS. Not only do people with chemical intolerans fight to get their everyday life to function as good as possible. They have a hard time getting the people around them to accept that their illness is for real. Read the article.
April 4. 2001
The fight for recognition
Symptoms: Not only do people have to fight against their
chemical intolerance just to make things sort of work day-to-day, they also have to
struggle to get the world around them to recognise the existence of their illness.
In Denmark somewhere between 10,000 and 200,000 people suffer from chemical intolerance. That’s what Søren Vesterhauge, senior physician at Copenhagen’s National Hospital (Rigshospital) estimates.
Around 300 people who have more severe MCS – multiple chemical sensitivity or chemical intolerance – have gravitated to the Rigshospital in order to get a diagnosis. But most only have it in a milder form.
People with MCS react by becoming sick from minute quantities of chemical substances, and the trigger for their symptoms may be solvents, combustion by-products such as vehicle exhaust and tobacco smoke, perfume and alcohol.
The major problem for people with MCS is to get the rest of the world to recognise the illness, says Søren Vesterhauge.
“In Denmark they have tried to define the illness away. When you talk to individual patients, none of them have received any kind of treatment from the social or health services which looks even vaguely like recognition that the illness exists. By contrast, MCS is now widely reocgnised in the USA and Germany, for example.”
“MCS is a relatively new illness concept, and when some people in either the social or the health services say that it doesn’t exist, that’s because there is a tendency to reject things we don’t understand,” feels Vesterhauge.
All in the mind
“Some of the symptoms hardly seem concrete – dizziness and fatigue – and that points many doctors in the direction of mental illness. Once more they are concentrating on an area that they know something about. But if patients’ mental balance is out of kilter, it’s because of their physical illness and a lack of understanding by the world around them. I and other doctors have met so many patients with matching symptoms that we are in no doubt as to the existence of MCS”.
The doctors don’t know exactly what is going wrong inside the body when some people have such strong reactions to chemicals. But the theory that Søren Vesterhauge subscribes to is that some people’s nerves are more efficient at transporting chemicals up into the brain than others’.
Søren Vesterhauge believes that we are seeing the illness now because people are being exposed to more and more chemicals. And that we have just about reached the limit of what we can tolerate in terms of chemicals in the form of food additives and air pollution.
Facts about MCS
*MCS - multiple chemical sensitivity - is a fairly new illness (disorder). It was first described by an american by the name of Cullen in 1987. But already in the beginning of the 1980ies people with painter's syndrome was found in Denmark, who did not have a chronic brain disorder, but actually had acute poisening due to solvents (VOC's).
*Also people from other jobs with many solvents (VOC's) have been exposed : printers (people working at print-houses), mechanics and hairdressers. *There are many different symptomes for having MCS : breathing problems, tiredness, memory problems, headaches, stomach.intestine problems, joint- and muslce pains are just some of them.