The next thing you feel could ruin your life

After my birth, My mother has become allergic to the world. This is the only way I knew how to say it. So many things could make it unleash it: new carpet, air deodorants, plastic, diesel. The perfumes were among the worst transgressors. In addition, he developed terrible food allergies. The sound of his annusted became the choir of my childhood. A few days could not get out of bed. I would have peeked into his dark room and saw his face pinched with unease.

His joints hurt, his head was swimming. The doctors suggested that perhaps it was depressed or anxious. “Well, you would also be anxious if I couldn’t lick an envelope, you couldn’t take your daughter in the car,” he would answer. He tried the allergists, he didn’t get anywhere. In the end, he found his way to holistic health, whose practitioners said that he had something called multiple chemical sensitivity.

As long as people complained that artificial things in their environment cause health-migraine problems and asthma, tiredness and mood changes-the medical establishment has largely rejected. The American Medical Association, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Asma, Allergy & Immunology do not recognize chemical sensitivity as a diagnosis. They talk about it at all, they tend to reject it as a psychosomatic, a neurotic disease and obsessed with health. Why, were these authorities wondered, would people react to minimal traces of a wide range of chemicals? And why could they never seem to improve?

This is not a bit of trivial affliction. About a quarter of American adults reports some form of chemical sensitivity; He lives alongside chronic pain and fibromyalgia as evidently real and resistant to traditional diagnosis or treatment. My mother tried a thousand things: elimination diets, antihistamines, lymphatic massage, antidepressants, acupuncture, red light therapy, saunas, heavy metal detoxification. Sometimes his symptoms have loosened, but he has never improved. His illness ruled our lives, dictating which products we purchased, which food we ate, where we traveled. I heard that there had to be an answer for the reason why this was happening. I didn’t want me to learn that, if there was one, it would come from an unpretentious figure as provocative: the scientist Claudia Miller.

On a heat The afternoon of Texas, Miller and his affable husband, Bob, guide me through the Botanical Garden of San Antonio. A monarch moves by. “I have noticed so many less butterflies, so many less birds, even in the last two years,” Miller observes. His roca voice comes out so silently that, sometimes, my recording device cannot collect it. People protrude perpetually closely or ask her to repeat themselves. At 78, Miller generally uses a stick, but Bob brings the walker out of the car so that he can cover more distance. Wear her silver hair in a horse tail with a low side, fixed in position with a scrucchie.

With its wide and bright glasses, Miller disappears into the scenario, but it is a particularly visible presence in his field. Now emeritus professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Miller has held numerous federal events, chaired at the meetings of the National Institutes of Health, testified in front of the congress, consulted for the environmental protection agency, author of dozens of articles and has worked with the Canadian, German, Japanese and waving governments. In all this, he tried to make sense and raise awareness of chemical intolerance. A supporter of the patient I interviewed called “Saint Claudia” for his commitment for neglected and misunderstood patients. Kristina Baehr, a lawyer who defends the victims of toxic exposures, said to me: “Having experts like Dr. Miller tells them that you are not crazy, this is very real, it is very vital for people. He is able to validate their experience with the facts, with science.”

One of these facts, explains Miller, is this: during the last century, the United States have undergone a chemical revolution. “Combustable fossils, coal, oil, natural gas, their combustion products and therefore their synthetic chemical derivatives are mostly new from the Second World War,” he says. “Plassizer, forever chemicals, call it: these are all foreign chemicals.” They are everywhere look, in houses and offices, parks and schools. They are also, he believes Miller, making people very sick.

In 1997, Miller proposed a theory that defines his career on how people succumb to this condition. It came with a name with a technical sound, a loss of tolerance induced by toxic and a comfortable acronym, inclination. You can lose tolerance after a serious exposure, says Miller or after a series of smaller exhibitions over time. In both cases, a switch is launched: suddenly, people are triggered by small quantities of daily substances – cigarette smoke, antibiotics, gases from their stoves – which have never annoyed them before. These people become, in a word, inclined. It is no different from the development of an allergy, when the body labels a substance as dangerous and then reacts accordingly.