Dr. Erica Elliott is one of a new breed of physicians who offer hope to anyone who has been written off as a hypochondriac or who just generally has “The Blahs.” In “Environmental Medicine, the Missing Piece of the Puzzle,” Dr. Elliott runs down the list of the oh-so-many factors that can contribute to a person getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. If traditional western medicine has failed to pinpoint your problem, it’s just possible that environmental medicine can track it down, though it’s usually far from obvious. Dr. Elliott gives this example:

If ten workers are exposed to the same amount of formaldehyde and other toxic fumes, not everyone will develop the same symptoms. One worker might develop depression, one arthritis, one sinusitis, one diarrhea, one asthma, while five may remain apparently unaffected.

All day long, most of us are exposed to biological, physical, and chemical substances in the air, food, and water. They can cause physical malaise or sickness, and worse, they can affect the mind and emotions in ways that make us strangers to ourselves and our loved ones. The effects can creep up over a period of years until they are noticed and misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s. We’re taking in stuff that can cause anger, insomnia, unstable moods, debilitating fatigue, and foggy-mindedness. Western medicine calls it depression and prescribes mood-elevating pharmaceuticals, the reputation of which lately is not too good.

The average home, school, or workplace can emit an astonishing variety of at least 850 known chemicals that are poisonous to the human nervous system. They’re in the walls, the furniture, the air. Even a person who takes preventive measures at home cannot avoid chronic, low-level exposure in the workplace and other public venues. Even our hobbies and do-it-yourself projects often use materials that do their part in making us feel lousy.

Heavy metal particles can enter the body through the skin, or through food and water, or leak from the fillings in your teeth. Skeptics think that worrying about mercury-amalgam fillings is as nutty as wearing a tinfoil hat to fend off alien mind-control transmissions. They’re mistaken. And food allergies can mimic just about any symptom or disease, including mental disorders.

Then there’s mold, which can be invisible and undetected, but those little organisms are busy producing poisons, although we can’t see them to catch them at it. Even the vaporizer we might use to alleviate a condition can aid the growth of mold that worsens the health. Don’t forget to add in the various kinds of hormone imbalances, as well as hidden infections that we don’t even know we are affected by, such as yeast and parasites. Any of these things can affect the body, including the brain.

Sometimes a person “gets used to” an environmental toxin, meaning that the body struggles like crazy to compensate for what’s going on, and keeps itself going somehow. This is called “masking.” It can fool a person, or the parents or caregivers responsible for that person, and it generally doesn’t last for long. Eventually, the body’s desperate attempt at adaptation ends in maladaptation, a.k.a. illness.

So, with one thing and another, our immune systems are just taking it on the chin. Fortunately, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine recognizes that there’s more going on than just germs. These physicians have extended their conscious awareness beyond what can be seen through a microscope. One thing they’ve done is develop the Total Load concept, meaning that any or all of several factors added together can be at the root of a problem. And any one of them can be “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

This is why it takes a village. One thing we have heard from teachers is that a great truth can also be a great paradox, holding a contradiction within itself. In How to Thrive in Changing Times, Sandra says,

As I learn to heal my toxic thoughts, the environment will reflect back to me a state of health and well-being.

Of course. Our toxic thoughts can poison the environment. And, our poisoned environment can cause, in our vulnerable brains, toxic thoughts. So we and the environment need to take care of each other.

P.S. Sandra welcomes stories of spiritual discovery. If you have a story to tell, that illustrates any of the kinds of transformation we talk about here, send it in!

SOURCE: “Environmental Medicine, the Missing Piece of the Puzzle”, Erica M. Elliott, M.D.
SOURCE: “American Academy of Environmental Medicine”
Image by boliston , used under its Creative Commons license.