Twenty-five percent of Americans are chemically sensitive. But this diagnosis does not exist, and patients are given a psychiatric diagnosis.
Dr. Claudia Miller explains, "Over the past century, the United States has undergone a chemical revolution." “Fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, their combustion products, and then their synthetic chemical derivatives are mostly new since World War II,” she says. “Plasticizers, forever chemicals, you name it: These are all foreign chemicals.” They’re everywhere you look, in homes and offices, parks and schools. They’re also, Miller believes, making people very sick.
In 1997, Miller proposed a career-defining theory of how people succumb to this condition. It came with a technical-sounding name, toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, and a convenient acronym, TILT. You can lose tolerance after one severe exposure, Miller says, or after a series of smaller exposures over time.
In either case, a switch is flipped: Suddenly, people are triggered by even tiny amounts of everyday substances—cigarette smoke, antibiotics, gas from their stoves—that never bothered them before. These people become, in a word, TILT-ed. It’s not unlike developing an allergy, when the body labels a substance as dangerous and then reacts accordingly.
“The world becomes like a torture chamber, and then nobody believes you,” Miller says. “That’s the worst part.”
After falling ill, some people become hermits out of fear of exposure, abandoning their friends and family to live in remote areas. For others, nothing can keep them from spinning out of control. My mother knew someone who tried to escape her triggers by moving to the country in a trailer. Eventually, even that became unmanageable, and the woman shot herself in the head.
Miller explains, "Imagine feeling incredibly sick every time you encounter a cloud of cologne or fresh paint, then being told you’re making it up. I thought about my mom. Sometimes, catering to her needs could feel exhausting. But what must that have been like for her? The thing was, I never doubted her condition..."
She continues,"... my aunt gifted me a set of scented lip balms. My mom offered her a tight smile but, once we were alone, told me to toss them out. Instead, I hid them and, soon, weaponized them.
After yet another argument, I sneaked into my mom’s room, peeled back her pillowcase, and smeared the lip balms directly onto her pillow. Later that night, as she tried to sleep, she kept waking up, sicker and sicker, her head pounding. Finally, her nose helped her uncover what I’d done. She found the telltale smudges."
The best validated scale for diagnosis is the QEESI. Created by the expert on chemical illness, Dr. Claudia Miller. It stands for: Quick Environmental Exposure and Sensitivity Inventory.