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Prevalence - Caress and Steinemann

“We examined the prevalence of multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), a hypersensitivity to common chemical substances. We used a randomly selected sample of 1582 respondents from the Atlanta, Ga, standard metropolitan statistical area. We found that 12.6% of our sample reported the hypersensitivity and that, while the hypersensitivity is more common in women, it is experienced by both men and women of a variety of ages and educational levels. Our prevalence for MCS is similar to that (15.9%) found by the California Department of Health Services in California and suggests that the national prevalence may be similar.”

- Stanley M. Caress, PhD and Anne C. Steinemann, PhD

Fear of Liability

"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

The Tree of Life

Hippocrates vs Galen
This image represents the split in the classical Greek medical lineage. The Tree of Life represents the Healing Arts. On the right is Hippocrates holding in his right hand a flowering branch symbolizing the vitalist schools. In the patriarch' s left hand is the text of the Hippocratic Cannon. On the left is Galen holding the withered branch of a reductionist, mechanistic appproach to medicine.

Odours and Mental Illness

Benjamin Rush, MDBenjamin 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.

On Airs, Waters and Places

by Hippocrates, 400BC
Translated by Francis Adams

Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)

HippocratesWHOEVER wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces for they are not at all alike, but differ much from themselves in regard to their changes. Then the winds, the hot and the cold, especially such as are common to all countries, and then such as are peculiar to each locality. We must also consider the qualities of the waters, for as they differ from one another in taste and weight, so also do they differ much in their qualities. In the same manner, when one comes into a city to which he is a stranger, he ought to consider its situation, how it lies as to the winds and the rising of the sun; for its influence is not the same whether it lies to the north or the south, to the rising or to the setting sun.

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