Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) is a chronic medical condition characterized by symptoms that the affected person attributes to low-level chemical exposure. Commonly accused substances include smoke, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fabrics, scented products, petroleum products, and paint fumes. Symptoms are usually vague and non-specific, such as nausea, fatigue, and headaches.
MCS is a controversial diagnosis and is not recognized as an organic, chemical-caused illness by the American Medical Association or other authorities. Blinded clinical trials have shown MCS patients react as often and as strongly to placebos, including clean air, as they do to the chemicals they say harm them. This has led some experts to believe MCS symptoms are due to odor hypersensitivity or are mainly psychological. Regardless of the etiology, some people with severe symptoms are disabled as a result, and many government agencies recognize that people claiming MCS are disabled.
MCS has been given many different names by proponents, including toxic injury (TI), chemical sensitivity (CS), chemical injury syndrome (CI), 20th century syndrome, environmental illness (EI), sick building syndrome, idiopathic environmental intolerance (IEI), and toxicant-induced loss of tolerance (TILT). These names generally are intended to name the cause favored by the proponent or to emphasize the severity of symptoms.
Read more about Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: Definition, Clinical Trials, Symptoms, Chemical Triggers, Diagnosis, Treatment, History, Epidemiology, In Media
Famous quotes containing the words multiple, chemical and/or sensitivity:
“... the generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Freedom of choice for women, at the expense of the caring, warmth, and sensitivity to others so often associated with them, may be empty. In the thrust to redefine male and female roles, women must not become men; nor can men be permitted the continual dehumanization of their roles.”
—Kathleen Weibel (b. 1945)