Clinical ecologists helped a few patients, mostly by listening to them, believing them, and helping them connect with consumer and industry advice about making needed changes to their environment. Unfortunately, while their approaches helped some patients, even several desperate cases, some of their scientific ideas and clinical practices were irresponsible and dangerous.
After consumers stopped using terms used by clinical ecologists, once we started using the term “environmental sensitivities” (1986) clinical ecologists changed their name to “doctors of environmental medicine” (1989) and pretended that our umbrella term “environmental sensitivities” referred to their unscientific and arbitrary sub-definition, the one that has become the stereotype. Some people you just can’t get rid of!
The “modern environment” stereotype
The most popular stereotype (and misconception) has it that environmental sensitivities are new, caused by the modern environment. In fact there are hundreds of years of science, centuries of institutional and clinical experience, generations of people affected. A 1985 Ontario report identified an existing, publicly insured method of diagnosis that has been used by most physicians for centuries. Health Canada and other federal departments and agencies were working to reduce harmful practices from 1988 to 1993.
- creates atmosphere of mystery more appropriate for new phenomena.
- ignores long-existing scientific, clinical, institutional, medical and consumer experience and solutions.
- invisibilizes existing means of reducing preventable harm.
- may disappear broader knowledge to favour a limited range of “new” research, treatments, disease models, products or services.
- enables abuse by obfuscating liability for ongoing damages.
- artificially divides consumers.
When he diagnosed me in 1981, my GP, who was studying to become a “Clinical Ecologist”, told me that clinical ecologists had discovered “ecological illness” in the 1950s, and that it involved food and chemical sensitivities that were “not recognized by medicine because they were new”.
What I did not know at the time was that sensitivities had long been known to medicine, and that it was the theories of “Clinical Ecology” that were not accepted. Their clinical practices were dangerous, and their billing unethical.
For instance, they regularly exposed patients to a risk of anaphylaxis without having emergency treatment available. They sold their patients homeopathic remedies while they, themselves, prescribed the need to purchase those remedies.
The worst part was that they would brainwash patients into thinking that if they didn’t support clinical ecology, the rest of medicine would think they were nuts. In fact, just the opposite was true.
However, I didn’t hear about these concerns until later, from other consumers, and much later, after reading the Ethical Guidelines of the Canadian Medical Association.
Once diagnosed, the first thing I did was to go to a University of Ottawa Medical Library to look it up. (I’d been a search junkie for about a decade by then, long before Google!)
Prior to 1966, when IgE-mediated reactions were isolated, medical literature used the term “allergy” to refer to all kinds of sensitivities.
In the medical library (where the air was absolutely dead) it took about a minute in the card catalog to find a reference from the beginning of the 18th Century, cited in a 1980 mainstream Canadian medical journal.
Within an hour, I’d found dozens more articles, with hundreds of references dating back centuries.
In 1985, Eugene Garfield, PhD, President & Founding Editor of The Scientist published a three part bibliography. It provides an assessment of academic opinion before the discussion was subsumed under debate about “doctors of environmental medicine” and the “modern environment” stereotype. Because the definition of “allergy” has narrowed over time, his bibliography includes citations that go beyond what some professionals now might strictly define as “allergy”.
Razi was advising patients with sensitivities in the 10th Century.
