health care

Benjamin Rush
1812

5. Certain Odours. There is a place in Scotland where madness is sometimes induced by the fumes of lead. Patients who are affected with it bite their hands, and tear their flesh upon the other parts of their bodies. It is called by the country people mill-reck. Dr. Prost describes a furious grade of madness in Peru, brought on by a mineral exhalation, but he does not mention the metal from which it is derived. From among many other facts that might be mentioned, to show the connection of odours with a morbid state of mind, I shall mention one more. An ingeneous dyer, in this city, informed me that he often observed the men who were employed in dying blue of which colour indigo is the basis, to become peevish, and low spirited, and never even to hum a tune, while engaged at their work.

"An important point is the fear of liability (at the legal and moral level) which perpetrates attitudes and actions. The protective psychological mechanism that comes into action when one knows deeply other people have been harmed, because of their negligence, or because they have been hiding behind the presumed lack of science, because they have minimized, belittled the issues, this mechanism which hides behind denial, camouflage, or aggression needs to be uncovered. Consequences need to be brought to the conscious level, for healing to take place, and prevention to take its role. Now people at governmental, industrial and academic level hide behind the oppressive properties of fear, fear of acknowledging what has happened."

- Michel Joffres, MD, PhD

In 1985, Eugene Garfield, PhD, President & Founding Editor of The Scientist provided an excellent overview of medical literature about sensitivities. Garfield documents several approaches, as described in scientific and medical literature before the discussion was subsumed under debate about the approaches of doctors of environmental medicine. The human rights implications and lethal clinical dangers of subjecting sensitive patients to a reverse onus should be obvious to anyone familiar with the clinical and scientific approaches described in Garfield's series of 1985 articles and accompanying bibliographies. The irresponsibility of professionals who forward a self-aggrandizing revisionist history has very real ongoing consequences.