Another hoop jumped
I'm living in the wrong era, clearly.
We know just enough about the health issues I have to know that we don't know enough. At least the providers I see don't think I'm delusional, but they don't even have any way to quantify what's wrong, let alone solve it.
I just saw an allergist, at my primary care doctor's suggestion, to talk about my chemical sensitivity and see whether there are any ways to decrease my sensitivity or reactions. Predictably, it was fruitless; allergists handle IgE reactions (true allergies), and MCS is not typically IgE related. It was about as useful as sending a bicyclist to an auto mechanic... I actually felt kind of sorry for the guy. The reason I went was that it was part of the routine one has to follow -- allergists handle the things most similar to MCS reactions, so in the course of "we have to send you to some kind of specialist", they're the ones who get tagged in. I mean, it's not a car, but it's got wheels, right?
And that's the trouble: nobody handles the system which is most commonly involved in MCS. Cytochrome P450 is a massive, sprawling, interconnected system with large numbers of parts involving many different organs, and there is no department in standard allopathic medicine which addresses it. Integrated medicine docs are probably closest, but they're still considered "alternative". All of the resources available for troubleshooting are theoretical, found in research papers and models. We know it exists, we know some of what happens with it, but we don't even have a full understanding of how it affects the body, let alone how it might break. And so MCS patients and others with C-P450 disorders (some of whom are already labeled "autoimmune") are shunted to allergists and immunologists who document the symptoms, run tests which don't target the salient things, and toss up their hands.
Like several things which are starting to look like gut biome disorders, we don't understand the system involved well enough to do anything more than poke at it in the dark. You react to that class of chemicals? Avoid them! (Thanks, Sherlock.) And a whole class of people gets shunted off to the roadside of medicine, trudging along with their thumbs out. The engineer in me says that there must be some way to fix these issues, or compensate, or supplement, but nobody's come close to even determining the dimensions of the black box yet.
I can't even look to cryogenics for hope... though I'm not sure I'd trade what I have now for an unfamiliar future world. I mean, look how that worked out for all the cold-sleepers in sci-fi longships.
I have an account as Torquill on Dreamwidth, and that's where I posted this. You can sign in with OpenID to comment on the original post, or you can go ahead and comment here; either way works.
We know just enough about the health issues I have to know that we don't know enough. At least the providers I see don't think I'm delusional, but they don't even have any way to quantify what's wrong, let alone solve it.
I just saw an allergist, at my primary care doctor's suggestion, to talk about my chemical sensitivity and see whether there are any ways to decrease my sensitivity or reactions. Predictably, it was fruitless; allergists handle IgE reactions (true allergies), and MCS is not typically IgE related. It was about as useful as sending a bicyclist to an auto mechanic... I actually felt kind of sorry for the guy. The reason I went was that it was part of the routine one has to follow -- allergists handle the things most similar to MCS reactions, so in the course of "we have to send you to some kind of specialist", they're the ones who get tagged in. I mean, it's not a car, but it's got wheels, right?
And that's the trouble: nobody handles the system which is most commonly involved in MCS. Cytochrome P450 is a massive, sprawling, interconnected system with large numbers of parts involving many different organs, and there is no department in standard allopathic medicine which addresses it. Integrated medicine docs are probably closest, but they're still considered "alternative". All of the resources available for troubleshooting are theoretical, found in research papers and models. We know it exists, we know some of what happens with it, but we don't even have a full understanding of how it affects the body, let alone how it might break. And so MCS patients and others with C-P450 disorders (some of whom are already labeled "autoimmune") are shunted to allergists and immunologists who document the symptoms, run tests which don't target the salient things, and toss up their hands.
Like several things which are starting to look like gut biome disorders, we don't understand the system involved well enough to do anything more than poke at it in the dark. You react to that class of chemicals? Avoid them! (Thanks, Sherlock.) And a whole class of people gets shunted off to the roadside of medicine, trudging along with their thumbs out. The engineer in me says that there must be some way to fix these issues, or compensate, or supplement, but nobody's come close to even determining the dimensions of the black box yet.
I can't even look to cryogenics for hope... though I'm not sure I'd trade what I have now for an unfamiliar future world. I mean, look how that worked out for all the cold-sleepers in sci-fi longships.
I have an account as Torquill on Dreamwidth, and that's where I posted this. You can sign in with OpenID to comment on the original post, or you can go ahead and comment here; either way works.