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Environmental Illness and Allergies
Where do they come from ?
Chronic long-term illnesses are personal --
they are tailored to your genetic and self-experience.
A Personal Experience.
What is a "Hypersensitivity" ?
A STATE OF HEALTH in which a person reacts with great intensity to specific stimuli is termed a hypersensitivity. A person can develop such extreme reactions to any combination of the following:
- foods
- forms of energy
- metals
- toxic chemicals
- "non"-toxic chemicals
- antibiotics
- metals
- water
ANY SUBSTANCE WHICH HAS A PROTEIN COMPONENT --- essentially all life and pre-life forms --- can emit a singular "clean" vibration. This "radiation" can be detected by the most primitive and most powerful structure of the human brain: the Reptilian structure (brain stem).
WATER containing minerals or chemicals or bacteria or virus ... can produce hypersensitive reactions. Each has its own specific identifying harmonic frequency print. We humans can exercise and develop our extended perception of substances in the environment through a combination of meditation, self-awareness, hypnosis, and feedback. We can, but seldom do.
THERE IS NO EASILY DEFINED PROCESS by which hypersensitive reactions are developed.
As you will find, an unaware exposure to a very toxic chemical can produce an immediate hypersensitivity reaction. More commonly, as with many allergies, repetitive exposure to high concentrations of a substance will result in the gradual development of one's sensitivity until one becomes hypersensitive.
SYMPTOMS CAN BECOME SO INTENSE as to be life threatening.
Frequently, once an individual begins to form hypersensitive reaction patterns, such associations continue to grow in number. Usually, the person so influenced has little or no conscious control over the symptoms nor their multiplication.
In North American society it is common for persons without hypersensitivity reactions to assume that such persons are acting out for reasons of ...
- attention,
- weak willedness or emotional weakness,
- insanity or a nervous breakdown.
THIS REACTION OF DENIAL AND PROJECTION, which some so-called professionals term "objective" (to demonstrate their lack of understanding) is counterproductive. It encourages persons who are prone to the development of hypersensitivities to follow actions of self-denial until the health challenging results become lifestyle destroying and life threatening.
INTOLERANCE AND THE REALITY OF REJECTION by the majority of society are powerful motivators when the same community are ignorant of the influences which generate hypersensitive reactions and the potential for THEIR contribution of attitude and behavior to benefit or worsen such symptoms. Having been a hypersensitive person, and having known hundreds of others who were --- I can affirm that I have never known anyone who chose consciously to develop life threatening symptoms for the purpose of manipulating others.
REMEMBER THIS:
You can become hypersensitive to anything to which you have been exposed ... with the exception of pure glass.
What do I have to be afraid of ?
I WAS AT MY WORST with hypersensitivities, in 1988-89.
It was then that I had the following reaction to a tiny amount of a chemical called phenol contained in a "Drinkin Box" juice. This group of and progression of symptoms is commonly experienced by those with a sensitivity to phenols.
I WAS DRIVING BACK TO MY OFFICE, and temporary residence between the towns of Durham and Mount Forest, Ontario, Canada ... from a business meeting near Kitchener. About 90 km (56 miles) from my destination, I stopped for a few minutes to eat a small lunch I had brought with me. The meeting had gone well, the weather was pleasant, there was no urgency rushing me, --- I was relaxed and optimistic.
A SMALL BOXED JUICE made up part of my snack.
I opened the juice before finishing my fruit.
Before I had drank more than 2 or 3 ounces,
I experienced immediate and overwhelming feelings of nausea and my neck muscles began tensing. Within seconds, my eyes became oversensitive to the sunlight ... a symptom experienced by some migraine sufferers. I put down the drink and went into a strategy of coping familiar to many hypersensitive persons: I headed home.
Why not simply go to a hospital or doctor ?
IF YOU KNOW SEVERAL PEOPLE WHO HAVE BECOME HYPERSENSITIVE, you will no doubt have heard repetitive reports of how doctors "typically" respond to the symptoms such persons experience. In the late 1980s, I was a member of the Advocacy Group for the Environmentally Sensitive (A.G.E.S.), at the time based in Burlington, Ontario. About 50 people were members then. In a very short time I had heard ... NOT the particulars of the reactions which members had but rather ... how the medical "authorities" and hospitals had treated members in distress. Very little seems to have changed to date (1999).
THE CONSENSUS WAS that going to such authorities and institutions was enough to make you worse. Instead of listening, they told you what you felt and thought. Instead of following procedures to lessen the symptoms, they often insisted on doing what made the symptoms worse. There would always be someone who could tell you that you would be treated coarsely and forced to take dramatic measures to save yourself rather than let the experts "kill" you. And the fact that they had confirming witnesses and were now alive was a strong testimony in favor of their description. Emotionally, a hypersensitive person so treated and so informed views going to a doctor or a hospital as next to committing suicide. And I have met few who favored that route.
HOW CAN THIS BE !, you may exclaim.
These socially and politically empowered experts always help you, don't they? But consider for a moment. At great cost and under considerable stress of expectation and demand of study and long hours of internship --- medical trainees are "educated" to believe in a cause-effect health system. Such a system suggests that every symptom is defined by one or two causes and can be resolved with one or two medical responses.
THIS 'TECHNICAL" APPROACH TO MEDICINE is often referred to as "scientific" because it ignores most of the real complexity of biology and neurophysiology and treats the patient like a sick automobile going up on the hoist to have some adjustments made or a part changed. Imaginative theorizing and rationalized guesswork replaces the reality of direct communication and feedback. How could the patient possibly know anything about THEIR health difficulties ? Does the student dare question this approach. This is a system which their elder mentors, most politicians, and most social authorities worship, and, which entry into is supposed to guarantee respect and wealth.
AUTHORITARIAN SYSTEMS ARE PROUD, POWERFUL, inflexible, intolerant.
So when exposed to symptoms which may be the result of unusual and multiple influences, how do you expect this "trained" technician to react? Very simply! Report after report records how doctors routinely ignored anything the obviously distressed person had to offer. Because the person may be really fighting for their life, the doctor assumes they are hysterical.
EXTERNAL SYMPTOMS CAN BE DECEIVING.
One is not bleeding to death here. Rather, one may be having extreme difficulty in breathing.
One's heart may be beating so hard and erratically that the person fears the reality of a heart attack coming at any moment. One may feel so emotionally confused and disoriented that there is extreme difficulty in trying to describe the problem. How can a cold, distant, technician, rewarded for an inability to empathize and an ability to act relate to these symptoms?
A HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT ITSELF reinforces all the disastrous elements of disease that threaten the hypersensitive person. Hope is replaced by long depressing waits to see a person who is supposed to know about health, but has no time to listen, and, little ability --- so it would seem --- to understand humans as something different from machines.
THE VERY NATURE OF THE ORIGINS OF THE DISEASE demonstrate that most hypersensitive persons are so little self-absorbed that they hold off going for help until the situation is serious --- and they are then forced by circumstance to become self-absorbed. Such individuals have frequently spent an intense part of their life in self-sacrifice to help others. Now, they finally ask for help ... and they are treated with disrespect like children, or, totally irrational patients who, obviously, don't know what they are talking about.
HOSPITALS ALSO HAVE A PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT.
Perhaps less so as time advances, hospitals tend to be washed down, sprayed and embalmed with deadly toxic chemicals ... such as phenol-based insecticides, fungicides, and bactericides. These represent some of the common substances to which persons become hypersensitive. Going to a hospital may be like asking for more intense symptoms --- before, during, or, after treatment. Flower scents, perfumes, and laundry-borne chemical odors provide other possible triggers. Do doctors or nurses know this ?
REMEMBER THIS:
The only known shared strategy is to get away from whatever was triggering the reactions while trying to remain as calm and relaxed as possible.
I HAD LEARNED SOME INTENSIVE RELAXATION SKILLS a few years before my juice experience, mentioned above, so I had some idea what to do when my world turned inside out in minutes. In addition, I had found a small region ... my temporary residence and office location, which acted like a health Shangri-La. I had invited a number of highly hypersensitive persons to the property as a test. As they approached the property on their journey, their symptoms lessened until ... they were symptom free at the property. My focused strategy was to get back to that property with as little excitement as possible.
Was that the end of it ?
SEVERE HYPERSENSITIVITY REACTIONS DON'T always STOP at a simple set of symptoms. They can continue to escalate until you feel you are past dying. This is one reason why some persons in such situations do panic, act out, or start crying. You are reading this, so if you ever have such an experience, or know someone who does, you will not be completely confused and alarmed. I had earlier training as a Scuba diver so I knew of the potentially destructive influence of fear and panic.
MY UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY & NEUROPHYSIOLOGY also helped me cope by allowing me to keep consciously recording, noting, and analyzing what was going on. It is when we have no knowledge and no strategy and no mentor that our mind gets distorted trying to make sense out of what seems to be nonsense. I determined for the next 12 hours to use all the power of my strong will to focus on resisting panic and fear regardless of the intensity of the symptoms.
WITHIN 10 to 30 MINUTES after drinking the orange juice, my abdominal muscles tightened into a knot so tight that my belly ached. An intense depression clouded over me from nowhere and seemed unconnected to any conscious thought. I felt like crying with no conscious association with any reason to do so. Thankfully, I was driving along a low-traffic rural highway to my destination. Even so, it took all of my concentration to drive safely and remain aware of where I was headed.
WITHIN AN HOUR of the original sips, I was experiencing a severe migraine headache.
My neck was so stiff I could hardly turn it. My chest tightened with the skin drawn so tight I could hardly breathe. My jaw muscles tightened and became rigid ... it was as if I had clenched my teeth in the extreme. I seemed to drift into spells of anxiety and dizziness forcing me to slow in my driving and almost forcing me to pull over and interrupt my desperate drive to health recovery.
A STRONG WILL (EGO or SUPEREGO) is a factor shared by most of the hypersensitive persons whom I have met. How you use that will can determine when, how, and if you cope with hypersensitivities. If you have no strategy and little awareness of yourself and this condition, it would not be unusual for you to become completely confused and disturbed. After all, in a matter of minutes you have totally lost control of your life!
IF TAKEN TO A HOSPITAL, you could be placed in a psychiatric ward and heavily sedated. I have known others who were. That could calm the external symptoms for your attendants. Internally, worse and permanent damage could result. After the incident, who is to know when the damage happened ?
AFTER ABOUT A 90-MINUTE DRIVE, I reached the health enhancing property. I parked the van and dragged myself into the house and into my room. I stayed there for the next 24 hours --- in complete darkness and as quietly as possible. I focused on simply staying alive ... by continually forcing myself to relax. No phone calls. No visitors. No meals. No unnecessary activity.
THE SYMPTOMS GRADUALLY LIFTED.
I would be Ok until the next time. And, like this time, I would have no warning of when or where. Tens of thousands of North Americans share similarly intense experiences. Without knowledge, understanding, coping options, and a potential for cure ... each such experience can build a new trauma onto the last.
REMEMBER THIS:
A traumatic experience is an intense emotional and/or physical reaction to a potential or real threat perceived by the brain to be either momentarily or eventually life threatening. We are usually not consciously aware of the significance of the original event either due to emotional denial, rational confusion, or lack of awareness.
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