Welcome to the Winter Flame Wars

[Guest guest]

Sorry some of us are feel a little less than spectacular. The comments

about indoor vs. outdoor mold sensitivities were pretty much on the mark, I

think. We're running a couple of weeks behind the expected schedule, but the

Winter Wars are off to a lovely start this year. Close the windows, close the

doors, roll up the car windows, turn on the heat, and get ready to spend a few

months cozied up to whatever indoor environmentals are trapped in there with

you. And let the good times roll, y'all, because if there's anybody anywhere who

knows how to become irritable from the junk in our environments, it's definitely

us! The airlines can only wish their arrival and departure times were as steady.

Merry Bah Humbug, everyone. : )

The Allergen vs. Toxin thing. I may live to regret this, but I'm gonna try to

explain it as best I can, given my present understanding. And then I'm probably

gonna duck and cover and you all can do as you will with it.

There are two sides to the two sides of it, if you will. If you _are_

colonized, fungi like aspergillus can do stuff to your intestinal tract that

makes the gut permeability candida causes look rather pretty and benign. We're

not talking microscopic pinholes. We're talking holes you could put a finger

through. A little diet and nystatin for that, thinking you're only killing off

c.albicans, and you could just about kill someone if you didn't have a clue what

was really going on. You'd tell them incredibly stupid things like " Herxing is

good. It means it's working. " You wouldn't know whether you were killing off

candida, or provoking a total mother of a response from the dieoff of some fungi

that are known killers - like aspergillus, with its aflatoxin product. You

wouldn't get that people who have become sufficiently loaded up with other

mycotoxins are going to suffer some responses Herxheimer didn't even think

about. You wouldn't realize that c.albicans is just the newborn puppy

in the wolfpack. " First, do no harm " means that first, you'd better know what

you're dealing with. C. albicans is grossly underrated and grossly undertreated,

but it doesn't hold a candle to the big boys like stachy.

There's another side to the allergen/toxin mess. If I'm understanding what

Shoemaker was trying to say about the biotoxin pathway, it's more like the

tollbooth on the biotoxin superhighway. Once the toxins are able to provoke a

sufficient inflammatory response, it's ALL on - every (apparent) allergic

response all the way up to MCS status. As long as those toxins remain riding

around on those fat cells, you can't really dial it back down. To treat

allergies, you have to be dealing with someone before they have gone so toxic

that they can no longer be dealt with by those means. But if you CAN remove the

toxins sufficiently, the allergic responses will get dialled back down right

along with the reaction caused by the toxin load. For those who don't possess

the genetic problem with offloading the toxins in the first place, this is a

pretty simple matter. Get away from the mold, and treat the allergy. Problem

solved, it's your lucky day.

But for those who do have the genetic problem, you have a messy problem that

will increase slowly throughout your whole life until you hit " the wall " - the

point where the inflammation cycle is switched on and can't switch back off

again. That is what happens when the very low-level background exposure that

happens in normal life is replaced by the higher level of exposure we get when

indoor mold is allowed to grow. When that happens, ALL inflammatory responses

are exacerbated - allergies, toxins, and every other ache or pain you possess.

The whole thing. You could treat any accompanying allergies until hell freezes

over, but until you remove the toxin load sufficiently, it won't really help.

You could get away from the moldy environment, and the most obvious sensitivity

responses (the hacking, coughing stuff) might be relieved, but the rest of the

inflammatory problem would probably remain. MMP9 goes through the roof, VEGF

climbs, and there's a whole additional range of responses

such as that seen in compliment. Those markers will be common, but the exact

results will vary considerably, depending on the exact toxins involved, and the

patient's age, gender, genetic makeup, and other factors. Kids will get asthma.

Adults will get that, or CFS, or perhaps an even broader range of resulting

illnesses. If the genetic type is found in about 25% of the population, then

whatever percentage of that group suffers the exposure and finally hits the wall

is where you'll find the chronic illness. They might not so much as sneeze or

show a rash until the load becomes sufficient to turn the inflammatory responses

on. But it's in there, waiting for the opportunity to do its thing. It's like

pickles. Nobody knows exactly when a cucumber will become a pickle. All you

really need to know is, it'll never be a cucumber again. And God help any of us

who have additional problems lying in the muck that used to be a functioning

body. It just complicates the mess.

In a situation like this, some of the CFS researchers believe that the

inflammatory response of a patient is such that they can bang their shin and get

a migraine. Not referred pain - but a total body response caused by extremely

exaggerated inflammatory responses. In a sufficiently overresponsive state, a

hangnail could send you to bed. I'm not saying they've nailed it, exactly, but I

think it's close enough for government work (if you can stand a little mold

humor). All that aside, once that inflammatory response is turned on, you could

just about bet that any existing allergies would be greatly exacerbated, to all

appearances. You may view the allergy component as an immune disorder if you

like, but the results of it - as with any immune response - are inflammatory in

nature - always. That's what it does - it attacks invaders, and you get a fever,

a swelling, an itching or burning, a runny nose, diarrhea, or any other way you

body can try to drive out the bad stuff. How many of

those symptoms sound like an allergy? The real answer is, that whether it was

caused by an allergy or a poisoning, or a full moon, the _inflammation_ is what

you're looking at and experiencing.

Within the CFS community, there are two opposing lines of lore - the one that

says we are the people who will roll over for the first bug that bites us, and

then there's the other one, which says that we are so immunologically tuned up

that we should probably be the first to volunteer to work with cholera victims,

because we won't get it no matter what we do. (I fall into the latter category.

Lesser bugs beware. I bite back.). But ALL of us, across the board, will tell

you that we have hyper-responses to various chemicals, and that we didn't always

have these problems. Hopper, in England, has noticed that sensitivity to

musk-based fragrances are nearly universal amongst us. I leave it to those

smarter than me to figure out what the chemical components in that fragrance are

- but you can bet there's not enough natural musk in there to get a doe to

blink, let alone consider doing the wild thing. I'm betting on a couple of fungi

that are used to produce exactly those kinds of scents -

Harriet Ammad touched on that, independently, I might add. I think she's onto

something there. (They are also used in various cleaning products. I don't know

why anybody thinks that stuff smells clean, but ask . She knows the

stuff I'm talking about. She thought it was mold, I thought is was nasty

cleanser. I think we were both right, and I think I know why now. I encountered

it again about a month ago and nearly collapsed on the spot.)

The key to sorting out which crowd is which - allergic or toxic - isn't all

that difficult. Neurotoxins sit on nerves, including the optic nerve. You can

demonstrate their presence with Visual Contrast Sensitivity testing. Allergens

don't cause massive endocrine disruption like that. Allergens don't fry the

hypothalmus. Neurotoxins do. Lack of homeostasis, sleep disruption, panic

attacks (caused by, IMHO, adrenal exhaustion and which doesn't require

psychotropic drugs or coundelling to fix), reproductive dysfunction, depression,

subclinical hypothyroidism, diabetes insipidus...just make a list of them all,

because that's what a neurotoxin-exposed patient will have to some degree or

other. The genetic inability to offload the toxins is also easy to find - a

simple blood test finds the immune types for that.

So here's the thing - you guys can argue the fine points of this all you want.

I'm not a physician, don't pretend to be. But I am educated, and can read

English, and even with brain fog, I can still understand enough to see that

these things work together. It's a continuum - not a set of pigeon holes. (And

that's probably why G.P.'s and holistic physicians have a better shot at

figuring these things out. They look at the broader picture, and this one is

very broad.) Provide a highly-toxic individual with a challenge of the wrong

kind, even in a miniscule amount, and you can set off a chain reaction that you

would NOT want to try to live with, if it was you. We're not just talking

anaphylactic shock. This isn't a person who is acutely allergic to a single

substance. We're talking about someone whose entire body is already in crisis

mode, and will react to any irritant - be it an annoying voice or an annoying

chemical - like it was Armageddon unleashed (yay - Happy Holidays again!).

You might have been able to treat their allergies successfully at some point in

the past, but it won't work right now. This also explains why you could detox a

person, and see the allergies vanish. The apparent allergic response came with

the toxic inflammatory response and they will go away together, most of the

time. The group of people I can't explain are the MCS people. For them, yet a

third phenomenon has taken place, and I don't get it. Shoemaker still didn't get

it at the time he wrote " Mold Warriors " , and I don't know what's happened since

then. All I know is that there is also a subset of people for whom the

inflammatory response itself finally " hits the wall " , and just like with the

neurotoxins, once you hit it, your life is going to change whether you like it

or not.

Anyway - you see where I'm going with this. There really, truly is no such

thing as an anomaly. Even barring any problems with the testing method itself,

you would still have a subset of provocation/neutralization patients who are

poor candidates for both the testing and the treatment. They aren't " just " some

number of people for whom environmental medicine is failing. They're people you

can find in advance and deal with. Of course, on the other side, you could detox

some people until there wasn't a gram of cholestyramine left anywhere on the

planet, and if they didn't have the genetic problem, it wouldn't really make any

difference. If they'd spent thousands and gone broke trying to detox, you'd hear

the same screaming about it. But you don't hear a lot of screaming, and I think

I know why. The answer is to screen patients for neurotoxicity FIRST, because

many of them can't so much as tolerate the provocation testing, let alone the

treatment. That way the arguments can stop

altogether. The one is not superior to the other - it merely precedes the other

in the chain of possible causation, and can seriously interfere with anything

else you planned to do. Plus, the screening is dirt cheap, fast, and so easy to

do, even a brain-fogger can learn to do it (true story).

So, the notion of cruising for neurotoxins prior to treating possible

downstream effects hasn't really got anything to do with anybody's ego,

politics, money, or anything else. It's only a matter of logic. (Even though I

can't remember stuff, I can certainly operate some mean logic on whatever

information remains in my poor head.) The posting on the psychiatric effects of

HIV/AIDs was interesting - and not that different from what you'd find if you

looked up symptoms of Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder, ADHD, or

some forms of Schizophrenia. And all of them contain common components of

neurotoxic effects. And possibly an allergic type of response, if you count the

unexplained sudden aversion to various substances, environments, and people -

not to mention the constant scratching some of them do. I will bet any amount

you care to name that Psychiatry would see this as an attack, rather than

looking at it as a unifying field of thought that can be put to very

practical use. Doubt me? Take a look at what is being done to ME and Lyme

patients in England. They're de facto head cases and can't get anywhere near a

proper diagnosis because the Psych Squad owns control of their health insurance

right now. Nothing keeps people sick like politics, money and ego.

We have at hand a real possibility of seeing a lot more people get more well,

and of experiencing less harm along the way, and actually, creating more success

stories amongst those who are trying to help us - and what we get are these

running arguments instead about what is the ONLY " right " way to treat this. And

it's just a shame. There's not a right or a wrong in it. There's just new

information, and the only really stupid move is to not to engage with it fully

and see what we can do with it.

So. Ho Ho Ho and Bah Humbug. All I want for Christmas is an open, functioning

mind and maybe a semi-decent attitude. With those, I can probably figure out

how to get anything else I want. Nog, anyone?

Serena

There is no such thing as an anomaly. Recheck your original premise.

...Ayn Rand,

paraphrased

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