Imagine having to take shelter anytime you inhaled someone’s perfume, laundry detergent or the smell of common cleaning products.
This is the life that people diagnosed with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) lead, and 80 percent of the sufferers are female.
A handful of doctors are now speaking out about how the medical community has shunned people diagnosed with the syndrome.
The specialists are claiming the symptoms that MCS sufferers live with are severe and that doctors must take the little-researched illness seriously to help diagnose patients living with it.
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) is a rare disease that causes mostly women to experience severe reactions to commonplace chemicals (file photo)
MCS causes patients to react negatively to a variety of odors. They experience intense symptoms when exposed to everyday chemicals that are hard to avoid.
Among these are chemicals found in perfumes, tobacco, pesticides, carpets, paint, building materials, air fresheners, laundry and cleaning products. Simply getting a whiff of someone’s scented laundry detergent can leave an MCS patient reeling.
While a high amount of exposure to these chemicals would make anyone sick, even a low amount is harmful to an MCS patient. MCS patients often react negatively to drugs, foods, pollen and molds.
Patients with the illness report experiencing irritability, sleep disturbances, trouble concentrating, anxiety and depression.
Bodily signs of the disease include joint pain, muscle pain, headaches, nausea, fatigue, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, dizziness, seizures and an irregular heartbeat.
For children, the symptoms can include red cheeks, red ears, hyperactivity, dark circles under the eyes and learning and behavior problems. Following exposure to harmful chemicals, patients’ symptoms may take up to a few days to materialize.
These symptoms might last for weeks or even months. The chronic illness affects people from all backgrounds and of all ages.
MCS expert Dr Martin Pall told Vice that he thinks the disease is related to hormone regulation, which is why it affects one sex more than the other.
‘The best evidence on this gender ratio comes not from studies of MCS but rather studies of the related disease, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS),’ Dr Pall said.
He added: ‘In CFS sufferers who were diagnosed before puberty the gender ratio is close to one to one. In sufferers diagnosed after puberty the ratio is close to four females to one male. That argues for a hormonal affect.’
He continued to explain that women’s symptoms change when they become pregnant and after they give birth, which supports his theory. ‘This provides strong confirmation for the importance of hormones,’ Dr Pall said.
Dr Pall thinks that one of the reasons that the disease is written off as ‘not a real illness’ has to do with the proportion of women who have it.
‘I do think there is a gender bias, which has made it easier for the psychogenic claimants to essentially write off all of these conditions that are majority female,’ he told Vice.
But this is dangerous, he warned. The symptoms that MCS patients go through can be devastating, and it is important for doctors – and the rest of society – to treat the illness as a serious medical condition, according to Dr Pall.
He explained: ‘It would take hours to convey the depth of the heartbreaking consequences of those who have more severe MCS.’