Long time past—centuries ago—it was pathogens that caused most illness: microbes, parasites and, although we didn’t know it at the time, viruses. But gradually that came under control. By the 1960s we had entered what I call The Golden Age of Antibiotics. Most things could be cleared up with a short, sharp blast of penicillin or similar.
The Captain of The White Horsemen of Death (lobar pneumonia) was defeated almost exclusively. The novelists of old would have to come up with some new way to bring on sudden tragedy! Haha!
Lobar pneumonia was known as the Captain of The White Horsemen of Death. It was healthy at breakfast time, got wet in the morning, caught a cold in the afternoon, lobar pneumonia in the evening, fever and dead before daybreak!
For the second half of the twentieth century, for me, the signal breakthrough was the realization of what food was doing to us. See, everyone thinks of foodstuffs as those nice friendly substances that nourish our bodies. It came as a shock to many that foods can make you REALLY ill. Indeed, some still haven’t really grasped that! I’m talking food allergies.
The discovery of the “hidden food allergy” I rated as possibly the biggest medical discovery, since antibiotics! Forget heart transplants and dialysis machines, I’m talking about the sheer numbers of patients affected. So I rode the wave and became established as the “Number One Allergy Detective.”
For a time there were fewer than a dozen of us, worldwide, with the secret knowledge to make people magically well by changing what they eat! Patients were getting up out of wheelchairs, breaking free of conditions that had plagued them all their life, feeling decades younger… being (medically) born-again!
By then we were thinking in terms of environmental illness or “clinical ecology”. Food, after all, is one aspect of the environment we live in.
But troublesome cases kept coming forward. They were classic allergy cases, meaning symptoms would come and go, abruptly and without obvious reason; then go away and normalcy returns. Infectious diseases, cancer and degenerative diseases don’t do that!
Allergy is a classic for ill Monday afternoon; cleared up Tuesday morning. But symptoms again on Thursday morning but gone that same day; well till the following Monday and then three whole days of misery.
That’s the pattern of something doing it TO the patient, something in the environment.
To keep this short enough for a quick read, it turned out that some patients were reacting to ambient chemicals. By this time there were tens of thousands of alien chemicals being pumped into our environment: weedkillers, “fertilizers” (so-called), pesticides, solvents, paints, cosmetics, cleaners, flame retardants, cavity wall insulation… I introduced the term “human canaries” and it was soon picked up and copied worldwide; there were people being made sick by permitted levels of chemical exposure and they were acting, in effect, like canaries down the coalmine: if the birds got sick or died, that was a warning of danger to humans.
But the hugely rich and powerful chemical industry lobby denied everything and the problem was (and still is) swept under the carpet. If you get sick in our world—tough. The press were cruel with these people and headlines blared sneering phrases like “allergic to the twentieth century.”
By the mid-80s we noticed individuals who couldn’t tolerate electromagnetic forces (EMFs). They got just as sick as those who were chemically sensitive or eating hidden food allergies.
I remember very clearly, after over 40 years, a lady who walked into my clinic and said she felt sick when she switched on the television. I joked “You can always change the channel!” My thinking then was that the TV set would warm up, give off plastic chemical gases and she was chemically sensitive. But through her, I learned of electro-sensitivity.
People were being made ill by an electromagnetic environment. Of course there were no cell phones in those days; but we did have televisions, radios, microwaves (not common), bedside alarm clocks and tea makers, and early computers (not so much personal home computers yet).
I used to startle patients, if they had a battery-driven watch, by putting an EMF detector on the opposite side of their wrist to the phone and showing the needle blip every second or so. The EMF waves were passing though his or her body! I was soon joking that the Tokyo stock exchange was beaming through our bodies, night and day (and YES, true!)
So let’s take stock of environmental toxins, so far:
1.Pathogens
2.Diet and nutrition
3.Chemical sensitivity
4.EMF sensitivity
Is there anything I’ve missed out so far? YOU BET! Most people know about this but blank it out.
Plastics!
We are adrift in an ocean of plastics and commercial interests would have you believe it’s quite safe. Yes, a problem for seabirds and dolphins, but we humans needn’t worry. Oh no.
But the worry is not about the north Pacific gyre—which is horrible to be sure—we are now focused on microplastics, tiny nano-sized particles which get into our food and water supply, in the air and—inevitably—into our bodies.
Ocean plastic debris the N Pacific gyre
You would be startled to know that, according to a study carried out by the University of Newcastle in Australia on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund, the average human now swallows the equivalent of a plastic credit card EVERY WEEK. 5 grams per week; that’s 21 grams a month, 250 grams a year.
I bet you would have spat it out if you had known!
More than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic has been produced globally in the last 70 years, according to Dianna Cohen, CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
More plastic has been produced worldwide since the year 2,000 than in all the preceding years of Earth combined.
(https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/world-ocean-day-2019-oceans-plastics-problem/story?id=63324490)
There is NO ASSURANCE can be given that it is not the biggest health disaster of all time. We just don’t know. The fashion is to think that plastics are relatively inert; yes they can choke up the oceans and kill wildlife, but they don’t enter into chemical interactions with biological substances. Well that’s wrong.
Remember, they said smoking was good for our health.
They still say that sugar is not harmful to health.
Ultra-processed foods are not a problem.
We needn’t worry about ambient chemicals (even though they are chemically active enough to strip the outer layers off a stone building and ruin ancient statues!)
I say ENOUGH! Stop! We have to re-think all this before the Gadarene rush engulfs us all. It may even be too late. But I don’t think so.
But I do agree with WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini, who said in a statement, that the problem can only be solved by addressing the root cause of plastic pollution.
“These findings must serve as a wake-up call to governments,” Lambertini said. “Not only are plastics polluting our oceans and waterways and killing marine life — it’s in all of us and we can’t escape consuming plastics. Global action is urgent and essential to tackling this crisis.”
A worried Prof.
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
