Immune Dysfunction

Excerpt from Immune Dysfunction: Winning My Battle Against Toxins, Illness & the Medical Establishment

    It seems curious that mainstream medicine has so thoroughly ignored the toxicity theory of immune-suppression diseases in favor of virus hunting. But the reasons for this bias are based on financial, not scientific, considerations. Toxicology is rather a backwater in medical research. After all, it generates very little money to tell people to avoid poisonous substances and clean up their diets.

    Virology, on the other hand, is everyone's favorite cash cow. There is plenty of expensive research to be done, using costly high-tech equipment. Test kits are marketed, along with the attendant lab work. Vaccines need to be developed. There is the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry to be considered. And, of course, virology is the high road to Nobel Prize gold.

    For those of us with immune deficiency disease, however, it is doubtful that that road will lead to a cure. No virus has been found to cause CFS; furthermore, experts are now revealing their confusion over the very question that perplexed me from the beginning - the question of transmissibility. Way back in the 1980s, I kept wondering why nobody caught this virus from me. It took many years, but I got my answer in the remarks of Mark Loveless, M.D., a panelist at the 1994 American Association for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (AACFS) conference: "There is no convincing evidence at this point that CF(ID)S is caused by a transmissible agent [i.e. virus or bacterium] . . . . In clusters that have been evaluated, we can't find true point-source outbreaks or that they are associated with person-to-person transmission."

    . . . Each of us has to examine his or her own life to see where the toxic problem began and how we might find our balance again. However difficult it may seem, it can be done.

    My own health is greatly improved, but still far from perfect. I go out and about doing "real people" things, but I must conserve energy and take care not to overdo my activities. I'm still sensitive to many chemicals; entering the average office, with its synthetic carpeting and copy-machine fumes, can set my brain reeling. When we moved into a new house, it had to be completely stripped and refinished with nontoxic paints and sealants. I have a distance to go before I can say, "I am well."

    My struggle, now three decades long, has been painful but has taught me some worthy lessons. It tried my will to survive and showed that will to be more resilient than I expected. It tested my husband's love and caring for me, and that, too, proved to be stronger and deeper than I knew. It taught me the absolute necessity of thinking for myself, for I had to defy the doctors and search elsewhere for the real cause of my illness - the cause that has such profound implications not only for me, but for the lives of others as well.