When the Ozarks Makes You Sick

This is an article from OzarksWatch: Series 2, Volume II, No.2, Spring 2009. Pages 44-56

I was one of the authors of this article, it’s good food for thought about the environment here in the Ozarks. It’s a draft of the article, which is published through the journal OzarksWatch.

For more information about the magazine, the website is: http://ozarkswatch.missouristate.edu/

When the Ozarks Makes You Sick:

Illness, Environment, and Some
Futures for Complimentary Medicine

Julius Santos; Dr. Neil Nathan, M.D.; Dr. Cindy Beemer, D.C.; and Jim Echols, M.S.

Of course, I could have gotten sick anywhere, not just in the Ozarks. (“You’re genetically disposed to it,” my physician, Dr. Neil Nathan, has told me.) And it wasn’t really the land or climate’s fault; it was the buildings that I lived and worked in. It turns out that they had “gotten sick.”
The HVAC system in my workplace, the hallway ceiling in my church, the foyer of my credit union, the bathroom in the local supermarket, my own basement: these had “amplifications of mold” (that’s industrial-hygienist talk), and cumulative daily exposure had made me sick. But it took years of misdiagnosed symptoms before the culprit was identified, much less removed from my body and environment.

1. The situation’s bad.

I know I’m not the only Ozarker to suffer from illnesses whose causes are environmental. (“One in four people are genetically disposed to mold toxicity,” Dr. Nathan says.) But it’s been my experience that “mainstream” medicine isn’t yet well-informed on the various symptoms and their effective treatment. (As my physician says, “The three-out-of-four people who are immune will disbelieve the diagnosis—they’ll think it’s all in your head.”) Some innovative treatments may save your life, as they did mine; but your insurance company will likely call them “experimental” and refuse to pay. You’ll be on your own, brother, on your own.

As best you can afford, you’ll cleanse the neurotoxins from your body and “remediate” your basement or bathroom (again, that’s industrial-hygienist talk); but you’ll still have to visit moldy buildings around town. You’ll be able to smell it, that telltale musty odor. And then you’ll see it: in the circles of water stain on ceiling tiles, in the discolorations
along baseboards and behind wallpaper. Sometimes you won’t see it, but you’ll feel it when the symptoms come scurrying back. (“You’re like a canary in a coal mine,” the good doctor has told me: “you don’t need a scientist to tell you there’s mold in a building.”)

But, really, you don’t have to go it alone. Here in the Ozarks, a growing army of health providers, industrial hygienists, and building contractors are tackling environmental illnesses, their local causes, and their remedies. Readers of OzarksWatch may know someone—a coworker, a family member—whose diagnosis of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, or what-have-you seemed “to come from nowhere.” Perhaps they should look to their environment, where all may not be well.

I’m telling my story because I think some might be helped by it, and I’ve asked the doctors who treated me to tell their share, particularly the “what” and the “why” of their treatments. My symptoms came in two waves—a double-whammy of mold toxicity and chemical sensitivities—so Drs. Neil Nathan of Springfield, Missouri and Cindy Beemer of Springdale, Arkansas will have each their say.

2. Dr. Nathan responds.

It seems obvious that microbes (bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, and other infective agents) make us sick by infecting us, and equally clear that treating such disease-causing microbes should make us better. But the medical profession is just now learning that some microbes, even as they are killed by our immune system, release toxins into our bodies which make us even sicker. Since these toxins are made by biologically-living systems, we call them biotoxins (thus distinguishing them from synthetic and heavy metal toxins, which are not made by living systems or microbes.)
We are just now learning that some of these toxins are often not effectively excreted or destroyed; in which case, they remain and accumulate within the body.

The body’s natural method for processing toxins is to concentrate them in the liver (our main organ of detoxification), where they are bound to bile and sent into the gastrointestinal tract for release in the stool. However, the body’s natural recycling system (which we call the enterohepatic circulation) re-absorbs the bile when it reaches the small intestine; and then the toxin, still attached to bile that had been secreted by the gall bladder, returns to the liver.
So, even after we’ve killed the invading microbes, the toxins that they have produced may continue to plague us.

Not everyone is subject to this problem. For most of us, the immune system recognizes these biotoxins as such and produces antibodies capable of destroying them. However, about 25% of us are genetically unable to make these specific antibodies. So we get sick, and then sicker, as the biotoxins build up.

What are the symptoms of biotoxicity? We see deep, persistent fatigue, weakness, chronic muscle aches, muscle cramping, impaired cognition and memory (“brain fog”), disorientation, confusion, numbness and tingling of the hands and feet, shooting sensations whose patterns do not follow known nerve channels, unusual sharp, lightning-like pains,
chest pain and shortness of breath, headaches, sinus congestion, vertigo, mood swings, irritability, depression, anxiety, and increased susceptibility to static electricity shocks.

Some of these symptoms sound a lot like fibromyalgia, or chronic fatigue, or clinical depression, or (in children) ADHD. In fact, many patients with these diagnoses may have unrecognized biotoxicity as either a component or the direct cause of their illness. But keep in mind that only 25% of the population is genetically susceptible, and these people may live
or work in mold-infested buildings where no one else has gotten sick. Since the patients alone are sick, family and co-workers assume that it is “all in their heads.” Such patients feel like no one, their physician included, is listening to them. (And no one is listening). It is hard enough to fight a biotoxin illness, and harder still when no one really believes you are sick.

Even when presented with the above facts, some physicians dismiss the whole subject: “In the natural world, we are literally surrounded by molds, so why are we making such a fuss?” It is true that our environment is filled with molds—with thousands of species, in fact. And they produce biotoxins, not to damage us humans specifically, but to keep other species of mold at bay, since each species seeks to claim its own piece of real estate in the natural world. However, when a species of mold grows without natural competition—say, within a damp inner wall or an HVAC system—it simply grows wild, releasing billions of spores and producing biotoxins at alarmingly high levels. While most
of these species remain relatively harmless to humans, several, including Stachybotrys or “black mold,” Penicillium, Cladosporum, and Aspergillus, can make us quite ill.

Such has been the case with Julius, whose symptoms began four years prior to my first seeing him; these included muscle cramps, numbness in his hands and feet, blurred vision, chest pains, unexplained shooting nerve pain, and a chronic sinus infection. Physicians that he had seen gave no explanation, though one suggested multiple sclerosis as a possibility. The fact is that I, myself, had only recently learned to ask patients about their living and working environment. When Julius reported that his home and workplace were, indeed, mold-infested, his range of symptoms
became far less mysterious.

We administered a simple visual screening instrument called the FACT (Functional Acuity Contrast Test). In this well-established test (used by ophthalmologists for many years), the patient looks at a series of grayish lines of decreasing clarity. If the patient is unable to see the lighter lines that normal people can, this indicates poor retinal function—which has been linked symptomatically to biotoxicity. We also conducted genetic tests that confirmed what I had already come to suspect: Julius was among that fated 25% of the population.

Initial treatment was surprisingly simple: three doses daily of one teaspoon of cholestyramine mixed in water. Cholestyramine’s active ingredient is a tree resin (hence, a naturally-occurring substance), whose powerful binding properties allow it to attach to biotoxins, thus drawing them out of the intestinal tract while the body’s bile production returns to the liver. After several weeks on cholestyramine, Julius reported significant though by no means complete improvement of symptoms. Hence, we tried a more aggressive treatment consisting of intravenous
infusions of phosphatidyl choline, followed by intravenous glutathione. (Both intravenous agents are natural materials which have the capacity to bind with toxins.) This was combined with a special diet and a battery of B vitamin supplements. Julius’s symptoms improved further, though an unexpected allergic reaction to the transfusions curtailed this mode of treatment. But perhaps the most important aspect of Julius’s treatment lay in his own power: he had to remove the accumulated mold from his environment, which meant remediating his home.

I can confirm that, for many seriously ill patients that I have seen over recent years, such treatments do work. Some of these patients had been given up on by their physicians as being hopeless (or hypochondriacs) or untreatable, yet they have been able to resume their normal lives. In a sense, the problem lay less in treatment than in diagnosis—that is, in believing that biotoxicity actually exists. Keep in mind that mold toxicity is not an infection or even an allergy (although these can occur simultaneously, further confusing the diagnosis); rather, it is the body’s complex reaction to the mold biotoxins, which is, in essence, a new problem for medical science.

As reported below, Julius’s problems were not quite over, but we had at least found an important piece of the puzzle.

3. It gets worse!

Having cleaned up my body I turned next to my basement, whose dampness (previously unattended) had contributed to my symptoms. I had help. A remediation specialist, Monty Sowersby would supervise the “tear out” and “put back.” Jim
Echols (“Mold Boy,” as he calls himself) was the industrial hygienist who did the mold-testing, in the end giving my home its clean bill of health. And I was helped supremely by my local contractor, Joe Nolting, who learned everything he could about mold remediation. We did not stop with the basement but proceeded to remodel the whole house, installing
a hospital-quality filtration system. Little did I know that the remodeling would bite back.

As my wife and I slept for the first time in our refurbished bedroom, I sensed that the new carpet pad was affecting me, and I suspected that the new mattress was affecting me, too. I thought I could tough it out; surely the headache, heart palpitations, and brain fog couldn’t last. But it turns out that solvents in the carpet and mattress had triggered
a violent systemic reaction that would snowball to include virtually every VOC (“volatile organic compound”: more industrial-hygiene talk) in my near-environment. The fresh paint on my walls; the fabric softener in my clothes; the disinfectant in my bathroom; my old shampoo; my wife’s perfume: everyday things had suddenly become poisonous to
my nervous system.

“Your immune system is globalizing, and that’s not a good thing,” said Dr. Nathan, telling me what I already knew. “Multiple Chemical Sensitivities,” he continued, “is a condition that usually doesn’t get better, and it often gets worse.” Again, I knew that: mainstream medicine offers no treatment for MCS except avoidance—which, in my case, meant avoiding my house, my car, my clothes. Dr. Nathan paused, then continued: “I had another patient who developed similar sensitivities and couldn’t leave her apartment. She took NAET treatments, which gave her relief. Here’s a book she gave me,” he said, pulling a copy of Devi Nambudripad’s Goodbye to Illness from his bookcase. “Read it and see if it helps.”

I did read it, and my wife’s internet search led us to Dr. Cindy Beemer, D.C., whose advanced training in Nambudripad Allergy Elimination Technique (NAET) had made her a specialist in MCS treatment. Thus began my twice-weekly
trips from Southwest Missouri to Northwest Arkansas, a round-trip of 250 miles. Based in principles of Oriental medicine, NAET combines technologies of acupuncture, kinesiology, and chiropractic. It boggles the Western
mind, admittedly, which conceives of the body as anatomy and not as “energy” or free-flowing chi (that’s oriental-medicine talk). Put simply, an allergic reaction to one’s environment is a blockage in the flow of chi: unblock the energy, and you eliminate the allergy.

4. Dr. Beemer Responds.

While aspects of NAET originate in Oriental practice (acupuncture, for instance, and manipulation of the body’s “energy meridians”), the Nambudripad Allergy Elimination Technique can be explained in Western-scientific terms. Julius points to the problem: whereas allopathic medicine treats the body primarily as structure (skeleton, muscles, organs, and so on), modern energy-based medicine approaches the human body through a different paradigm. As
quantum physics tells us, all matter is an expression of energy.

Every material object on earth, living or nonliving, radiates an electromagnetic field that forms, in effect, that object’s unique energy-signature. We have all seen magnets both attract and repel. In like manner, the energy fields of the earth and its various objects remain in constant interaction, subtly attracting and repelling each other, depending on
their energy differences. So, when the body comes into contact with a foreign substance, their respective energy fields interact; this is a simple enough proposition, but what, one might ask, has it to do with human health?

The body and its various organs remain constantly engaged in interpreting and responding to the substances—or, more precisely, to the energies of those substances—with which it comes into contact, often inhaling, ingesting, or absorbing them in some way. And, once ingested, inhaled, or absorbed, how will the body react to these substances? Take the liver, the body’s filtering organ. When it encounters an unknown entity (such as the preservatives and food dyes commonly added to processed foods), it does one of two things: it causes the unknown entity to be expelled from the body as natural waste, or it stores the entity for some “future use.” Unfortunately, that “use” may never manifest itself, since the substance has no natural function in human biology. As the substance builds up, so does its potential for damage. If the body interprets this substance as neutral or benign, its impact on a person’s energy system will be minimal; if, however, the body treats it as an antigen (that is, as “repellent” energy), an allergic response will result. This response may range from an inconvenience—a rash, a bout of sneezing,
some tightness of the throat—to more dire, indeed life-threatening symptoms: sinusitis, hives, full anaphylactic shock.

Though the Ozarks has its share of regional and seasonal allergies—mold from chicken houses, cedar and oak pollen, ragweed and local grasses among the more common—the fact is that anything can be interpreted by the body as an antigen. In the case here described, Julius’s compromised immune system (precipitated by mold toxicity) went on a rampage, turning common chemicals—household disinfectants, detergents, and perfumes—into so many poisons. By the time his system settled down, Julius had developed a laundry list of chemical sensitivities which, untreated, would have left him virtually disabled. But here NAET comes to the rescue.

Interpretation
is a term repeated above, and it provides a key to understanding NAET’s workings. Doubtless, there are real poisons in the world (cyanide, sulfuric acid) that we should seek to avoid, and no one would argue that molds, chemicals, even food additives are entirely benign. But there is no inherent reason why an individual’s body should, of a sudden, fall deathly ill from the ingestion of peanuts or the inhalation of disinifectants. If the body, in fact, learned to treat a particular substance as an antigen, then it stands to reason that the body can unlearn its allergic response. In sum, the body’s energy system can be retrained in such a way that it reinterprets its one-time allergens, treating them once again as neutral or benign. The manner of this retraining is homeopathic, in that “like” is used to cure “like.” Briefly, let me explain.

We began our treatment of Julius with kinesiology, a well-studied science of “muscle-testing,” whereby particular muscles in the body (the shoulder of one’s extended arm, for example) “remain strong” when in the presence of a benign substance, but “go weak” when in the presence of an antigen. By means of “muscle testing,” we were able to diagnose the full extent of Julius’s chemical sensitivities. We then proceeded to desensitize Julius’s energy system to each chemical, one at a time. And each chemical itself—homeopathically—provided the means of desensitization: while Julius held the substance in his hand, we applied acupuncture to specific meridian points or “gates,” thus unblocking his system’s energy-flow. (Admittedly, this aspect of NAET remains foreign to the Western mind. In a healthy body, energy
flows freely within a circular “channel” or meridian; whereas an allergen “blocks” one’s energy, acupuncture applied to a series of regulatory “gates” serves to restore free energy-flow throughout the meridian. I should add that we at the Beemer Back center use cold lasers instead of traditional needles: the results are the same, while the procedure is itself rendered painless.) Having held the chemical during treatment, Julius then avoided the offending substance for 25 hours (by which time a full “meridian cycle” had been completed). When Julius returned the next day, a second “muscle testing” would confirm the treatment’s success. One after another, the “energy signatures” of various offenders were rendered harmless.

I know, I know: my account of Julius’s successes fly in the teeth of mainstream medicine, within whose paradigm MCS remains untreatable. It saddens me to think that people suffering from chemical sensitivities and other environmentally-based allergies are either ignorant or skeptical of NAET. It’s a procedure that offers real hope. By its means, we at the Beemer Back center have successfully treated individuals with allergies to wheat, milk, peanuts, shrimp—substances that most people find wholesome, though they have killed others. To succeed, this type of treatment does not require a belief system; but it does require an open mind.

I am pleased that Dr. Nathan has referred patients to me who have suffered from MCS and other severe conditions. He and I have reached the same broad, sad conclusion: it’s not just our bodies, but our environment that needs healing. Most of us no longer pick vegetables from gardens that we grew, eat meat from cattle, livestock, or fowl that we raised,
or drink juices from fruit trees grown in our back yards. We Ozarkers, rather, have joined the rest of modern consumerist society, and are delivered our vegetables in boxes and cans, eat vacuum-packed meats from animals artificially induced to mature in shorter and shorter periods of time, and drink juices, milk, sodas containing mixtures of chemicals both of known and of unknown qualities. “You are what you eat,” goes the old cliché, but we’re no longer sure precisely what it is that we’re eating—and breathing in, and absorbing through our skin.

5. Dr. Nathan responds again.

Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, autism, ADHD, asthma, cancer, Alzheimer’s: chronic illnesses such as these—several virtually unheard of twenty years ago—have become epidemic. But how? And why? I agree with Dr. Beemer, and have come to conclude that the causes of such illness reach beyond human biology to include energetic, emotional, spiritual, chemical, and (most important for this essay) environmental components.

For most of our species’ brief time on earth, we have lived in some degree of harmony with nature. We’ve hunted and gathered, fished and farmed, paying careful attention to our impact upon the environment. If we over-hunted a species of game, we had to move on; so we learned to diversify our food sources. If we didn’t treat the soil properly, we learned that it would not produce in abundance. But now, rather suddenly (let’s say, over a mere half-century), we’ve lost that care and intimate contact. I take a walk with my family and almost all of the joggers, bicyclists, and fellow walkers are wearing earphones and are plugged in to a virtual, technological world that separates them from the natural world in which they live and breathe. This dissociation from the natural world is a deeply spiritual disease with real consequences. We can see its local effects in the loss of good farmland through urban sprawl and the pollution of ground water through waste run-off and chemical fertilizers; we look beyond the Ozarks and see global warming and the
eradication of rain forests. As to the use of untested chemicals on our soils and in our homes and schools, I quote from Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring:

For the first time in the
history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact
with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
In the less than two decades of their use, synthetic pesticides have
been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate
world that they occur virtually everywhere . . . . [T]o adjust to these
chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would
require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations.

Carson’s “two decades” have grown to six. And although her book led to a ban on DDT, a recent study shows that, even forty years after its prohibition, virtually all of us still have DDT in our bodies.

The chemical industry introduces approximately 500 new chemicals every year. It is estimated that there are 80,000 chemicals in our environment, of which only 500 have been adequately studied for their effects on health. Worse, there are virtually no studies of how these chemicals interact with each other. We are swimming in a sea of chemicals
that are almost certainly poisoning our bodies—indeed, poisoning our world—and we are making no effort to measure their intense effects upon us. This should be a terrifying fact, but most of us go along blithely with an indifferent attitude: “If these materials were dangerous, surely we’d know by now.” But how many years did it take to discover
the profound effects DDT has on the environment and our hormones?

We rarely drink the water available to us from the tap. We drink from plastic bottles instead, because we think that this water is purer. But is it? Currently, we have evidence that many plastics and common chemicals in our environment are xenoestrogens (xeno meaning “foreign”). Such chemicals behave like hormones in our bodies and, even in exquisitely small amounts, they block or interfere with our normal hormonal functions. We know that male sperm counts (and fertility rates all over the world) have decreased by 50 percent in the past twenty years. Don’t we think this is really significant? No: we gloss over it, hoping that, magically, the problem will just go away.

Let’s be frank. What is it that caused Julius’s illness to begin with? The surface answer is mold toxicity, but the deeper answer is our modern lifestyle, which has changed our building practices over the past half-century. In the olden days, here in the Ozarks and elsewhere, buildings were drafty, cold in the winter and hot in the summer. They lacked central
air conditioning. For the sake of “energy efficiency” (doubtless a real economic and environmental consideration), we “wrapped” our buildings more tightly and added layers of insulation (many cellulose-based), which prevented inner walls from breathing; and, once inside a slow-breathing environment, moisture tends to stay and collect. Compounding the problem, we introduced paper-backed sheetrock, whose processed wood pulp already contained mold spores.

Dare I mention that mold feeds off of cellulose? Dare I mention that an inner wall is an eco-system?

The recipe for uncontrolled mold growth in the inner wall of a typical modern home or public building
is ridiculously simple: “just add water.”

So I, like many others, believe that it is our environment that is making us so sick in so many new, chronic ways. Some of us (like Julius) are more sensitive and susceptible than others, and they are the ones who are coming to my office now, seeking relief. I don’t think it will be long before their numbers increase dramatically. Those who have felt immune, somehow, to environmental pollutants will have to deal with them in time. (And I mean pollutant not only in terms of chemicals, but also of noise, of electromagnetic radiation, and of information, among other stressors). Until now, most people have taken an “I’m okay, so what’s your problem?” approach. And even when showing compassion, their response has been, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Sorry, but we’re all in this together and there is no rug
to sweep this under. It will not go away.

There is an elephant in the room, and we have all agreed not to notice or talk about it. There are obviously tremendous economic pressures to avoid this discussion, but I am convinced that our future depends on an immediate admission of the problem and not delaying another minute in dealing with it. I don’t see that we have any choice.

3. A happy ending?

I still don’t like mold, and some odors still offend me. But after 60 or so NAET treatments, I can go back to my old house (for a while I was virtually homeless, sleeping on an air mattress in a garage); I can drive my old car, teach in my old crowded, perfumey classroom, and shop in the old hardware store whose aisles reek with VOCs. Without benefit of so-called “complimentary,” energy-based, homeopathic medicine, I would be as good as disabled by now, a hermit isolated from the outside world and its smells. Surely there’s a moral to this story; there are likely several. First, our environment can kill us: the construction- and healthcare-industries need to acknowledge this fact. Second, our
environment need not kill us: there are modes of treatment that can take over where mainstream medicine ends. Third, we need an active medical partnership between East and West: homeopathic methods may well come to the rescue when so-called allopathic methods fail. Above all, we need to know more—patient and practitioner alike—about the new
world of illnesses facing Ozarkers today and the new horizons of available treatment.

Let us know if you enjoyed the article.  Hopefully it can shed some light on any similar issues you may personally be experiencing as well.