Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics

WHAT CHEMICAL IS SENSITIVITY:LINKING WITH PERSONAL OR PSYCHIATRIC PROBLEMS

No objective measure of chemical sensitivity exists, other than challenge tests (when individuals are ‘challenged’ with chemicals to provoke a reaction) in controlled conditions. Doctors are largely dependent for diagnosis on symptoms reported by patients, and because of this, many of them do not believe that it is a real disorder. Furthermore, because many of the symptoms people typically complain of are mental symptoms, many doctors commonly diagnose a psychiatric or psychosomatic illness, saying that the individual’s problems are all in his or her mind, that no-one can be made unwell by tiny doses of chemicals, that the illness is a stratagem, probably unconscious, for dealing with personal or psychiatric problems.

Psychosomatic illnesses clearly exist – the link between mind and body is strong – and there will be in the field of allergy and sensitivity, as in any other area of medicine, cases where underlying psychiatric disorder is a component, perhaps an important component, of the individual’s ill-health. However, the fact that psychosomatic illness exists should not lead to the common bias that people claiming that tiny doses of chemicals make them ill must be suffering from psychiatric problems.

The evidence from clinical practice of doctors who treat people who have positive results from controlled testing with chemicals is that the vast majority of their patients are average, happy, sane people whose abnormal symptoms (psychiatric or otherwise) appear when they are exposed to certain chemicals, and disappear when they are not. The level of improvement in symptoms in clinical practice is significantly above that expected from the placebo effect. (In medical trials, it has been found that, on average, one-third of patients – or more in the case of psychiatric patients – respond to being given dummy or inactive therapy or medication – a placebo. Only improvement in excess of expected placebo results is taken as serious evidence of the effectiveness of any therapy.)

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