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Allergies: case study: mental exhaustion with physical fatigue ALLERGIES: CASE STUDY: MENTAL EXHAUSTION WITH PHYSICAL FATIGUE
Charles Henderson, a prominent businessman, came to see me because he was troubled by mental exhaustion, mental confusion, and fatigue. He was a top executive of a large company who dictated to a battery of secretaries from morning to night. One of his secretaries pointed out to him that he did not give understandable dictation during the late afternoon. This was hard for her, for Henderson usually scolded her the next day for not accurately reproducing his previous day's dictation.
In desperation, the secretary suggested that Henderson relax with the office staff in the afternoon and have a snack. Once he did so she was able to comprehend his words and directions somewhat better. For this man, a snack meant only one thing: eggs. In fact, he had eggs for breakfast, egg salad for lunch, and some dessert containing eggs at dinner almost every day. His secretary literally "egged him on" to have eggs at break time, as well.
When I finished taking this man's history I told him, "Mr. Henderson, I think you are allergic to eggs."
He jumped from his chair and said, "Doctor, you obviously didn't understand what I just told you! Let me repeat it: eggs are the one food I know agrees with me. Now you tell me I may be allergic to them. That doesn't make any sense to me at all." He was clearly on the point of walking out of the office. He knew what he was allergic to and what he wasn't. This episode took place in the late 1940s. I had just finished a rather intensive study of drug addiction and had privately reached the conclusion that food allergy and drug addiction were aspects of the same problem. I decided to explain the problem to Henderson in terms of addiction. I explained that he seemed to have a three-hour "high" from eggs, after which he started to come down, with attendant symptoms of confusion and fatigue. He had to eat eggs every three hours or so in order to remain "high."
This made some sense to him, and he agreed to take a test to prove its validity. Since it takes between two and three days to clear any particular meal from the intestines, Henderson ate no eggs, or product containing eggs, during the next few days. He suffered from withdrawal symptoms, and was so weak that he could not get out of bed to go to work.
He began to feel better after the eggs were entirely out of his system. Then he came back to my office, where he was fed eggs in a testing room. Within less than an hour, he had returned these eggs, through violent projectile vomiting, halfway across the room. He was terribly embarrassed, but amazed to see that his "favorite" food really did not agree with him at all.
By staying off eggs for six months or so he was able to break his addiction to them. After that, he was able to reintroduce eggs into his diet, but only once every four days, in order to prevent the addiction from reforming. By controlling this and other food allergies, he was able to restore his ability to think and dictate clearly.
Henderson's case is fairly typical of food allergies in general. The man had multiple symptoms, including some which are vaguely called "mental" problems. Yet they were not "mental," in the usual sense of that term: they stemmed from actual, physical exposures, and not from psychological conflicts.
The basis of the problem lay hidden from sight and could not be readily deduced by the patient himself. In fact, common sense had led him to believe that eggs relieved his symptoms, when, in fact, they caused them.
The relationship between eggs and Henderson's fatigue was suspected on the basis of his history, but it was demonstrated by an actual feeding test, a procedure which will be described more fully later.
One should not conclude from this story that eggs, in and of themselves, are somehow particularly addicting and dangerous. One could substitute any commonly eaten food, or combination of foods, in this story, and it would still be realistic.
Food allergy is the result of an interaction between an individual and his own particular environment. Whether or not a person actually develops a food allergy depends, first of all, on his ability to react. Anyone can develop such an ability, but people with a family history of-allergy have a greater chance of becoming sick in this way. If a patient tells me that he suffers from hay fever, for example, or that one or both of his parents does, I am more likely to suspect the existence of food allergies in his case. But a lack of overt allergies is no guarantee that the person cannot develop hidden food allergies.
Second, the development of such allergies depends on exposure. The more frequently a person is exposed to a food, the greater is his tendency to become addicted. An unusual, massive exposure can also trigger a susceptibility problem. Some patients, for example, appear able to tolerate wheat in moderate doses. But a big spaghetti dinner might bring on obvious symptoms. As can be seen from the addiction pyramid (page 18), the most rapidly absorbed portions of food, such as sugars and alcohols, are more readily addicting than more slowly absorbed foods.
Even more addicting than foods per se are food-drug combinations. These include alcoholic beverages, which are mixtures of ethyl alcohol and various food fractions. Alcoholism is, in a sense, the acme of the food-addiction problem (see Chap. 10). Coffee is a natural combination of a food (the coffee bean) and a drug—caffeine. Some kinds of coffee contain 2.5 percent caffeine. Chocolate, cola drinks, and tea are similar food-drug mixtures.
Despite the fact that our culture treats these beverages as harmless foods, many researchers now consider them to be potentially harmful mixtures of food and drugs. Caffeine, even in modest amounts (a few cupfuls of tea or coffee), can affect the heart rate, heart rhythm, blood-vessel diameter, coronary circulation, blood pressure, urination, and other bodily functions.5 Knowing the billions of doses in which these substances are taken and the often compulsive way in which people crave their favorite beverage, one begins to suspect the existence of a widescale food-addiction problem in the United States.
Other environmental factors which may cause addictions include tobacco, drugs, and environmental chemicals. All of these may have a cumulative effect. Pollens, dusts, molds, danders, and other inhaled substances are less apt to be associated with addictive responses because exposure to them is seasonal or intermittent.
It is natural to want to know how common these food allergies or addictions are. In my experience, food allergy is one of the greatest health problems in our country. Combined with the chemical-susceptibility problem, which is discussed later, it is a growing source of ill health and particularly of those chronic, vaguely defined problems which almost never respond to conventional medical treatment.
Marshall Mandell, M.D., author of a recent book on allergies, has estimated that "50 to 80 percent of the daily medical practice of many doctors" is the result of allergy and chemical susceptibility.6 The late Dr. Arthur Coca believed that as many as 90 percent of all Americans had one or more food allergies.7
Many of the people reading this book are probably suffering from some form of these problems; and the majority of their chronic illnesses which do not respond well to conventional therapy are probably caused by some undiagnosed allergy or susceptibility.
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