Dr. Wilkinson says, that physicians who have been practicing environmental medicine for the past three or four decades note that treating patients' illnesses has become more and more complicated over the years because of the increased use of chemicals and medications. Rarely is the solution to a problem as simple as finding one single food that causes all of the patient's symptoms. Effective treatment requires the complicity and cooperation of the patient, who may be asked to make changes in lifestyle, diet, and environment, and perhaps minimize the use of pharmaceutical medications.

 

  A person's living environment needs to be as clean as possible, in order to treat mold and pollen allergies. There are also some medications that have minimal side effects and are effective for simple hay fever symptoms. These can often be prescribed for short-dated, seasonal hay fever. In some cases it is necessary to test for allergies and then begin specific treatment to increase the body's resistance to those substances. This is best accomplished by giving the patient a customized mixture of treatment material prepared from the substances he is allergic to and administered in the form of drops taken under the tongue or shots.

  According to Dr. Mandell, eating the wrong foods during a pollen season or peak mold season often worsens  the pollen and mold symptoms and greatly reduces the effectiveness of helpful medications and shots.

 

  According to Dr. Mandell, allergic responses to frequently eaten foods are responsible for many forms of chronic physical, mental, and emotional problems that are either misdiagnosed or inappropriately treated, because they remain constantly present in the system. One effective and helpful method of treating food allergies for the patient is to avoid, or at least vastly lessen, the intake of foods which are allergic for him. This is the most consistent and widely used method of treatment. Dr. Mandell, states that symptoms caused by eating a known food allergen daily or twice weekly may be reduced by eating the same food only once every seven to ten days.

  Nevertheless, there are other ways to treat some types of food allergies, such as the provocation/neutralization technique. After skin testing for food allergies, treatments consisting of a mixture of very diluted symptom-relieving solutions of the offending foods can be administered to the patient by either injections or drops given under the tongue. A number of doctors have found this technique to be an effective treatment for certain patients.

   Dr. Mandell recalls an Italian woman with cerebral palsy who suffered for years from unpredictable attacks of fatigue, painful muscle spasms, and loss of balance. She had been told by her neurologist that these symptoms were from the cerebral palsy and she should learn to accept them because that's the way cerebral palsy is.

  Dr. Mandell was able to reproduce several episodes of these symptoms in his office by performing symptom-duplicating provocative tests with tomato extract: the woman should take several single-food test meals at home at seven-day intervals. The meals consisted of tomato juice and fresh tomatoes. If she ate tomato juice and tomatoes once every two weeks, there were no unpredictable flare-ups of her familiar cerebral palsy symptoms. Nevertheless, the attacks could be brought on by eating tomatoes, in any form, less than twelve days apart.

 

  An important cause of hyperactivity in many children is food intolerance. Dr. Joseph Egger, a pediatric neurologist in Germany, has demonstrated an effective treatment for hyperactive children who have their symptoms triggered by food sensitivity. The children avoided the foods to which they were allergic for several months and they were given a very low-dose injection therapy called enzyme potentiated desensitization-which is distinguished from conventional methods of desensitization by the fact that just prior to injection a minute amount of a naturally occurring enzyme in the body is added to the antigen solution. The injections were given three times at two-month intervals. Fifteen of seventeen patients were cured of their food sensitivities using this method.

  The father of bioecologic medicine Marshall Mandell, M.D., of Norwalk, Connecticut, and Doris Rapp, M.D., past President of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, have documented on videotape the often serious effects that allergies have on the nervous systems of many children with emotional, behavioral, and learning problems, as well as autism and seizures. During feeding tests and tests with sublingual drops prepared from foods and other types of offenders (pollens, molds, food coloring, tobacco smoke), the children suddenly became angry, confused, and hyperactive. Rapid and striking improvement was seen in many of these children who avoided or decreased their exposure to the offending substances.

  A few years ago, the New York City public school system decided to change the children's school diet. They decreased the amount of sugar, food colorings, synthetic flavorings, and two commonly used preservatives. Over the next four years, there was a dramatic 15.7 percent increase in academic performance by students in the city's schools. Prior to the dietary changes, the academic performance of the students never varied more than 1 percent up or down in the course of a year.

 

  Chemical sensitivity was first described by Dr. Randolph. Today it is usually accepted that herbicides and pesticides in the earth's food supply and environment pose a danger to human health. Even low-level exposure to a number of different chemicals can cause a wide variety of chronic diseases, according to Nicholas Ashford, Ph.D., J.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Claudia Miller, M.D., M.S., M.A., of the University of Texas.

  Moreover, Michael A. Evans, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, believes 70 to 80 percent of human cancer is due to synthetic chemicals that are not themselves completely carcinogenic, but become carcinogenic when they interact with other environmental or genetic factors.

  The essential underlying causes of chemical sensitivity and allergies are still discussed by medical researchers, even though in 1987 a National Academy of Sciences workshop estimated that about 15 percent of the United States population is chemically sensitive. Many medicals believe that the post-World War II petrochemical revolution can be the result of  at least part of this sensitivity.

  Today, people are unprotected to chemical concentrations far greater than were previous generations. Also, the human body has no capacity enough  to adapt to  ecological changes in the environment occurring to fast. Today  there are about 55,000 chemical compounds in production: 3,000 chemicals are added to food supplies, over 700 are added to drinking water, and as many as 10,000 are used in the processing and storage of food.

  People are constantly unprotected to products containing harmful substances that the body cannot properly break down: pesticides, gasoline, paints, industrial waste, household cleaners, smog, food preservatives, and dry cleaning chemicals. According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), more than four hundred toxic chemicals have been identified in human tissue. Certain pesticides like malathion, diazinon, and dursban accumulate in various parts of the nervous system and can cause brain disease, motor system dysfunction, and psychological disturbances. According to the latest studies environmental pollutants can cause cancer and such neurotoxic diseases as depression, apathy, and a diminished capacity to think.

  Chemical sensitivities differ in intensity. Some patients note mild irritation or headaches  while using certain perfumes, disinfectants, paints, tobacco smoke, or automobile exhaust. Others are so sensitive to almost all man-made chemicals that, to minimize their reactions, they are forced to leave their troubling environment and move to clean housing in unpolluted areas, or in the country.

  Frequently the milder forms of chemical sensitivity will improve with adequate intake of some of the antioxidant vitamins (vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, and selenium), minerals, adjustments in diet, along with treatment for airborne allergens like pollens, molds, and dust mites. The more severe forms of allergies or sensitivity can be extremely complicated. It is very difficult to treat patients with severe cases of chemical sensitivity. It takes persistence on the part of both the doctor and the patient to affect improvement.