Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: What Is It & How To Treat It

I don't want to spend a lot of time on the negative. But why do some doctors literally. One quote, I heard patients said they had multiple chemical sensitivity. That means they're crazy. That's literally what this doctor said. What that really means is you need to find a different health care provider. And then what does it mean? That it's made worse both from within and without. I'm Dr. A. This is my YouTube channel. So the first thing with multiple chemical sensitivity is people can have all manner of symptoms. They may have allergies, allergy based symptoms, such as maybe itchiness, maybe fever or chills. They can get joint pain, muscle pain, they can have brain fog, they can get migraines. Pretty much any big picture symptom that you can think of can happen with multiple chemical sensitivity, even things like digestive pain and digestive disorder or dysfunction. So it really is one of those things where it's often a standalone problem, but sometimes a piece of a bigger problem too. And we'll look at why. But here's the big picture there you can become either genetically, you're born with certain genetic weaknesses that get epigenetically turned on by chemical exposure. And then you start to handle chemicals differently than other people do. And what that usually is poor detoxification. And then the chemicals maybe get stuck on their way out of your body, or they maybe aggravate you more than the average person. So that's one side of it. Also, some people develop this just because they get overwhelmed, maybe through work exposure or they're in a home. We generally don't see chemicals when we're exposed to them, and we don't think about how many we're exposed to all of the time. The other thing is that we often see an overlay of multiple chemical sensitivity and things like mast cell activation or mast cell disorders, allergy syndromes, atopic allergic syndromes. I don't want to spend a lot of time on the negative, but why do some doctors literally. One quote, I heard patients said they had multiple chemical sen activity. That means they're crazy. That's literally what this doctor said. What that really means is you need to find a different health care provider. And then what does it mean that it's made worse both from within and without? Well, what that means is the without part, of course, separate from you means you might be affected by things like fragrances. You walk down the soap aisle or the detergent aisle at the store and you start to wheeze or you get a headache or something like that, or someone's wearing a fragrance and they get know you're sitting next to them on the bus and you, you get a headache from that. All sorts of things like that can happen. The other thing that can go on is that you don't necessarily realize it when you're in certain environment, say at home, and it might be from cleaning products or something, or you yourself or somebody else in the family comes and every, you know, third day they clean a certain area of the house, but they're using a real high fragrance cleaner. And on those days you get more symptoms. That's. That's another really common without thing. The next thing is category called biotoxins. And this doesn't sound good and it's not. Well, biotoxins, the most common one we deal with in multiple chemical sensitivity are mold exposure. And we call mold biotoxins, we just call them mycotoxins. So people that have mold exposure and mycotoxin exposure, etc. Often have a higher sensitivity and a lower threshold to fragrances and, and other chemicals that are going around. The next thing, which is real sneaky sometimes, sometimes you can see it because you have a bottle, it's got a label and it says, you know, this is a pesticide or this is an herbicide, or there's bad things in here. You know, those are easy, easier to pick up. And maybe if you're real sensitive, you don't want to be using those things. Right? But there's a lot of chemical and metal toxins that are just in our environment. Those could be from cleaning products that are used all of the time. They could be from things being sprayed around in your neighborhood or along freeways. They could be because of off gassing. Certainly off gassing can happen in, in your own kitchen. But also our food and water supplies, even if we do our best to get organic and clean purified water and everything, we're still going to get some chemical and metal toxins. So that's another way. And the big concept with the from without outside of me is how full is the bucket before it overflows. Well, the first time I noticed it was when I did this. The tiniest thing. I opened up this cleaner and I cleaned whatever or I was fixing my car and I used this product. And often because it's human nature, they'll focus on that one thing that they did, that one cleaning product or the thing they used in their car or the garden or whatever or the thing they encountered at their work. What happens though is that's just the Last straw. It's the last thing dumped into the bucket and the bucket overflows. And so when the bucket overflows and we have other stressors on our body, then we become sensitized to everything. Because you get the bucket right up to the top where it's overflowing, another drop will make it overflow another drop. So every time you get exposed, that's a problem. Now one of the things then that that's a good segue to the full bucket is what is the within part. How does my body play a role? And this is a place where the research has gotten interesting, I'll say over time because researchers, in trying to prove that multiple chemical sensitivity does exist, have looked at the obvious things like these very high level detoxification markers in the blood. And they find that people with multiple chemicals sensitivity and those without don't have any difference. So then other doctors say, see, it's not a real disease. Well, here's the problem. You can look at the same detoxification markers, but if you're not also looking at the genomic, so the genetic signatures that are different from one patient to another that code for those detoxification pathways, if you've epigenetically had your bad genes turned on and now you're a poor detoxifier, you're going to deal with chemicals differently than someone who has the same exact levels of those enzymes. So it's coding errors and things like that. The other thing is multiple chemical sensitivity from within can be not just from our big detoxification pathways because our body has ways it tries to get rid of stuff, right? Not, not always very completely, but it tries. So when you're looking at these things, the big thing to keep in mind is that you've got your big detox pathways, but then they are intersected with a lot of cofactors. And so you can have a genetic dysfunction in the cofactor feeding of these pathways. You can have genetic dysfunctions that get turned on epigenetically in the actual coding of the enzymes or the other helpers that run these pathways. And then a number of other things can go on as well that are even above and beyond that. So we can have inborn poor detoxification pathways, we can have genetic damaged and epigenetically activated poor detoxification pathways. We can wind up with our body trying to detox so hard that our body depletes us of the CO factors. And what that means is if we're using a lot of enzymatic processes to get rid of Junk out of the body chemicals. They require inorganic and organic types of cofactors and those are usually minerals and vitamins. In almost all cases, our body will keep sucking the minerals and vitamins out of our system in to these enzyme systems when we get toxic until we deplete them. And then once we deplete those nutrient sources, but when they get depleted and very low, then those enzymes slow way down. And then what happens? The bucket overflows again. The other problem can be you might have a collaboration, a bad collaboration of processes. And it's easy to talk about say biotoxin illnesses like mycotoxins from mold, because they will often mycotoxins have this nasty way of not only derailing your immune system, but also mycotoxins will get in there and they can actually shift the way that your body uses its natural detox processes. So the mycotoxin itself is plugging things up, but it's also going in and saying, we're going to block this enzyme here and we're not going to allow you to detoxify. So the biggest thing when it comes to multiple chemical sensitivity is number one, you generally can't work through this on your own. That requires then that you find a healthcare provider who is open minded and knows what they're doing around multiple chemical sensitivity or at least knows how to do these different things, such as looking not only at your detox pathways but also your detox genomics to see if you kind of have a double whammy there of the pathways plugged and the genomics are plugged up, et cetera. And again, we have some provider referral links. They're just general links, but they're the more open minded providers. And then you have to sort of undo from both without and within. So from without you decrease your exposure as much as you can. You can never fully decrease it, decrease as much as you can. And then from within you start to work on whatever the underlying things are. If it's a mycotoxin exposure, you got to try to work on getting that out, which can be slow. If it's metal or chemical toxins, work on getting those out. But then you have to try and work on getting the detox, the natural detox pathways turned back on. Very, very important in multiple chemical sensitivity.