Everyday poisons?

Believing that most, or all, modern chemicals are poisons may be an obscure form of denial.

Some people with chemical sensitivities maintain that the chemicals that sicken them are also harming healthy people—that they are 'canaries in the coalmine', their sensitivities revealing the universal harm of certain chemicals before they undeniably affect the population as a whole. This is akin to people with the acute peanut allergy maintaining that peanuts are poisoning everyone, but that they alone are sensitive to the effects.

Believing this entails believing that the chemicals in question are having an identical deleterious effect on everyone, regardless of the fact that most people consume these chemicals with no evidence of harm. It also unites the chemically-sensitive with the healthy population: it says that those affected by chemicals differ from those unaffected only by degree, and not that there is something fundamentally different (e.g. physiologically) about sufferers.

To my mind there is little evidence that the chemicals that produce unpleasant and disabling side-effects in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity sufferers are harming healthy people. The fact is, MCS sufferers often react to naturally-occuring chemicals in foods (just as those with the allergy react to peanuts) which have been consumed by people for hundreds of years without population-wide harm.

The alternative to the canary-in-the-coalmine mindset is to believe that something specific is malfunctioning in the bodies of MCS sufferers (the immune or nervous system?), and that it is producing symptoms when the patient is exposed to certain chemicals. It seems to me this offers more hope to those with MCS. The former mind-set suggests everyone is being poisoned by common, widespread foodstuffs and additives, and suggests the only solution is that these items be eliminated from our diet, leading to a severe reduction of available (and otherwise nutritious and useful) foods. The alternative suggests that whatever has gone wrong in the bodies of MCS sufferers can be pinpointed and treated, allowing them to someday live free of the vigilance required to avoid the many chemicals triggers of their illness.

However, in accepting this alternative, sufferers would have to relinquish the idea of themselves as essentially healthy people affected by ubiquitous poisons, and instead regard their symptoms as indicative of a specific illness. It's not easy to see yourself as a sick person in western society, where illness is generally regarded as a minor irritation to be rapidly fixed. Healthy people often don't cope well with chronically ill peers, unable to adjust to someone whose unpredictable affliction leads to their seeming well one moment and ill the next. Nevertheless, it is a relief to honestly recognise one's own disability, and surely more hopeful to see regaining good health as a possibility, rather than to believe that everyone is unwittingly headed down the same path to sickness and disability.