The Chemical Cassandra

IN THE PRESENCE OF CERTAIN SCENTS AND CHEMICALS, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE SUFFER INEXPLICABLE, OFTEN DEBILITATING REACTIONS. MY MOTHER IS ONE. ANOTHER IS THE CONDITION'S LEADING SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY.

- BY Lexi Pandell

After my birth, my mother became allergic to the world.

That's the only way I knew how to put it. So many things could set her off: new carpeting, air fresheners, plastic off-gassing, diesel. Perfumes were among the worst offenders. On top of that, she developed terrible food allergies. The sound of her sniffling became the chorus of my childhood. Some days she couldn't get out of bed. I'd peek into her darkened room and see her face pinched in discomfort.

Her joints ached, her head swam. Doctors suggested that maybe she was depressed or anxious. "Well, you'd be anxious too if you couldn't lick an envelope, couldn't pick up your daughter in a car," she'd reply. She tried allergists, got nowhere. Finally, she found her way to holistic health, whose practitioners told her she had something called multiple chemical sensitivity.

As long as people have complained that man-made stuff in their environment causes health problems-migraines and asthma, exhaustion and mood swings-the medical establishment has largely dismissed them. The American Medical Association, World Health Organization, and the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy & Immunology don't recognize chemical sensitivity as a diagnosis. If they talk about it at all, they tend to dismiss it as psychosomatic, a malady of the neurotic and health-obsessed. Why, these authorities wondered, would people react to minute traces of a huge array of chemicals? And why couldn't they ever seem to get better?