About Health & Medicine

Beverly Mehta came to me after reading in a popular sports weekly about my treatment of golf professional Billy Caspar. Miss Mehta was a singer and a teacher, but multiple, unexplained health problems were interfering with both of these activities. She often ran a low-grade fever of undetermined origin. She had rhinitis (runny nose). Above all, she suffered from physical and mental exhaustion and seemed to be unable to rouse herself to do anything. Because of the severity of her symptoms, she was hospitalized for diagnosis.

On the first day of her fast, a terrible headache set in. Her eyes became highly sensitive to light. On the next day she was listless, tired, and nauseated most of the time. Her head and legs ached. On the third day of the fast the symptoms started to clear. By the end of her five-day fast, she was feeling quite well—better than she had in a long time, she said.

Many foods, even in their chemically less contaminated form, caused unexpected symptoms. For example, lobster was followed by a hot, gassy sensation in her stomach. Her ears and eyes hurt, and two-and-a-half hours later her eyes were still visibly red, her glands swollen and painful.

Eating an orange was followed by a ringing sensation in the ears (tinnitus), itching, and chest pains. Carrots were associated with belching and sighing respiration. Potatoes made her feel hot and nauseous, with tremendous itching, perspiration, and sore throat. Her face became red and blotchy.

Wheat induced an equally dramatic reaction. First Miss Mehta felt warm and got transient pains in her fingers. She started sighing and complained that she felt as if “someone had given me knockout drops.” She said that she felt like crying, but couldn’t. These cerebral reactions were accompanied by belching, nausea, and coughing—and all this from some “innocent” wheat.

Coffee brought on “weepy” feelings. Corn and corn sugar caused a jump in her pulse rate from 90 to 135 beats per minute, a finding which Dr. Arthur Coca believed indicates food allergy.3

There were other foods to which Miss Mehta had no reactions. When some of these were given to her in a chemically more contaminated form, however, she had equally dramatic responses. Canned peaches were followed by huskiness in her voice and a chilled feeling which required her to be brought extra robes and blankets. She developed a sore throat, and her temperature rose to 100°F. “This is the way I feel at home much of the time,” said the young musician. “I simply sit in front of the television, with little desire to do anything. When I’m singing 1 slur my words at times like this.”

Athought she left the hospital in good condition, when she returned home she soon became sick again, with many of the brain-fag symptoms, although she had tried to follow the prescribed regimen. She told of feeling even worse at work.

I therefore decided to make a house call and I inspected her house and her place of employment for environmental sources of reactions. Her classroom was in the basement of a church. The janitor cheerfully showed me the plethora of chemicals used to clean the premises and to spray for insects on a regular basis. As I entered the room, I was immediately struck by the odor of solvent. The children in Miss Mehta’s class sat around a low table with big pads in front of them. Each child held an oversize marking pen of the solvent-based kind in his hand. The fumes from the pens filled the air. I also detected the odor of petroleum candles coming in from the church above. I suggested to Miss Mehta that this environment was helping to perpetuate her brain-fag symptoms and that she seek another job, which she did.

I did not hear from her for a number of years. Then one day she called: she had gone back to college, then to medical school, and was doing well. But she had gotten into the habit of drinking ten cups of coffee a day to keep up with the grueling amount of work. I helped her break this addiction. She finally graduated and became a physician.

This case illustrates very well most of the features of environmental disease. The patient did not have just one or two neatly defined symptoms, but many and varied complaints, physical and allegedly mental. Because of this, other doctors tended to dismiss her problem as “hysterical” in origin. The actual illness remained hidden from Miss Mehta, as it did from her physicians, because of nature’s own coverup of food and chemical susceptibility. It was only through the methods of clinical ecology that her many symptoms could be put into some recognizable framework (the plusses and minuses) and her particular problem could be worked out.

It turned out in this case, as in every other, that the particular causes of illness were unique for this teacher, just as they are unique for every allergic patient. There was no universal prescription or panacea for all such cases, no pill, potion, or drug which could really serve as a cure-all.

Beverly Mehta was fortunate in that her allergy was discovered and corrected, and she went on to have a useful and productive life. Many others have seen their ecologic illness progress to the final stage, the minus-four category.

In summary, one of the most commonly occurring symptoms in medicine, and especially in the histories of allergy patients, is chronic fatigue. Although fatigue may be the only manifestation of clinical ecology, it more commonly exists in conjunction with other manifestations. It occurs so frequently with brain-fag—especially among students—that the two conditions are best described together. Indeed, this combination is often a cause of students being accused of not working up to their measured expectations.

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When married couples try but fail to have children, both the wife and husband need to be tested. There are several possible causes. In men, the Journal of the American Medical Association (249:2947) reports, perhaps the easiest type of infertility to treat is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. This vitamin is also known as ascorbic acid, a name reflecting its ability to prevent scurvy (a disabling illness, with painful bruising around the bones that used to afflict sailors after months at sea without fresh fruit or vegetables).

A much less severe vitamin C deficiency, which is by no means severe enough to produce scurvy, can cause male infertility due to clumping together of the spermatozoa. Failure of separation prevents sperm from swimming towards the ovum. Mild deficiencies of this nature are diagnosed by measuring the concentration of vitamin C in the blood. The infertility can easily be overcome in a few weeks with one or two tablets of vitamin C (500 mg each) taken every day by mouth.

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Acute gastroenteritis is a highly contagious infection of the digestive tract. It is probably caused by viruses, only a few of which have been identified. There is evidence that the disease may also be caused by some types of Escherichia coli bacteria. These bacteria are normally found in the human intestines, and most types of the bacteria are known to be harmless and even beneficial.

This disease is readily transmitted from person to person. Symptoms may begin within one to four days after being exposed to the germ. The disease is not generally serious except in young babies, who may become dehydrated (a serious loss of body fluids). Acute gastroenteritis has no relationship to true influenza (a disease of the respiratory tract).

Signs and symptoms

Acute gastroenteritis causes sudden vomiting or diarrhea and cramps. The disease may last one to three days or as long as a week. Fever may be high (40°C), low (38.3°C), or absent. Blood in diarrhea is rare. Occasionally, if vomiting is severe, there are small amounts of blood in the vomit, and petechiae (red spots) may appear on the face.

Acute gastroenteritis is more easily identified if there are other cases in the family or neighborhood. It occasionally may be confused with dysentery and food poisoning.

Home care

Treat both vomiting and diarrhea by limiting food intake to clear liquids until the illness subsides. To avoid dehydration, give the child plenty of the following clear liquids: tea, water, flavored gelatin water, and commercial mineral and electrolyte mixtures. Do not give the child milk. Paracetamol is better for relief of fever than aspirin because aspirin occasionally aggravates vomiting in some children.

Precautions

• Practice good hygiene. Be sure to wash your hands before going from the patient to other children in the house. Wash hands carefully before preparing food.

• If a young child develops the disease, watch carefully for signs of dehydration (infrequent urinating, dryness in the mouth, sunken eyes, drowsiness, rapid or slow breathing, sunken soft spot in the scalp). If any symptoms of dehydration appear, call your doctor.

• Do not give anti-diarrheal medications to children, since side effects are common and can be dangerous.

• If there is blood in the stools, high fever, prostration (extreme weakness or collapse), or severe or prolonged diarrhea (more than two to three days), call your doctor. Dysentery may be the cause.

Medical treatment

Your doctor will confirm the diagnosis by knowledge of what illnesses are occurring in the community, by the circumstances of the child’s illness, and by absence of other physical findings on examination. Blood count and a stool culture might be required if diagnosis is in doubt. Otherwise, your doctor’s treatment will be the same as home treatment. If there is evidence of dehydration in an infant, hospitalization will be necessary in order to give the child intravenous fluids.

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