[00:00:00] Aaron Goodman: You're listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I'm Aaron Goodman, the podcast creator.

My feet are on fire. It’s 2:17 in the morning and I’ve been awake for hours. I have this pressure in my head. My tongue is swelling. Hours ago, I was getting out of the car. I didn’t have my mask on, and someone was doing their laundry. I tasted it in the air. And when I got inside, I smelled it on my skin. Then came the brain fog. My mind is a whiteboard—swept blank—and the tingling moves up my feet from my ankles to my neck. And this time, my forearms are ablaze.

I sit up in bed. What’s wrong with me? What is in this stuff? My tongue swells some more, and my lips puff up. If only there were a pill—something—but I’d probably react to the filler. If only there were a doctor who had some sense of this quagmire and knew what to do.

I recently told someone I had to seal up our gas fireplace in our condominium. Someone’s air freshener was finding its way into our place. He’s the neighbor I confided in. When I first sealed the fireplace with plastic sheeting, he didn’t believe me that fragrance was coming into our home. He knows I have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. I’ve told him. He’s seen me with my face mask. I have to take a few steps from him every time he gets close. It’s his laundry smell. I don’t ask what kind of detergent he uses. It’s not my business. Or is it?

Just like the folks whose laundry products fill up the block in the neighborhood. A couple of years ago, I put a flyer up in the building where we live and put it under people’s doors. I invited people to consider using dryer balls instead of dryer sheets. Someone threatened to sue me. Others tore up the flyer from the bulletin board. I put up another, and they took it off again.

When I’m up most of the night, sometimes I think about how this came about—these chronic, debilitating reactions to scented and chemical products, to laundry products, cigarette smoke, vehicle exhaust, virtually all preservatives in food—and a lot more. What’s happening in my body? And I try not to take it personally when people roll their eyes. And I cherish friends who don’t judge. And I keep going.

You are listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. This episode is called “Nutrition, Detox and MCS.” I’m speaking with Dr. Jenny Goodman. We share the same last name, but we’re not related. Dr. Goodman is a medical doctor specializing in environmental medicine, and she’s based in London, England.

Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:02:45] Jenny Goodman: You’re very welcome. It’s lovely to be here, Aaron.

[00:02:48] Aaron Goodman: Would you like to talk a little bit about the focus of your new book?

[00:02:52] Jenny Goodman: So the new book is called “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times: An Ecological Doctor’s Prescription for Healing Your Body and the Planet.”

What it’s essentially saying is that we are sick because we’ve made our environment sick. And because we cannot in any way ever be separate from our environment—our mother, the Earth—we are one. So the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat—which is grown in the soil beneath our feet—everything that we’ve put into our environment, of course, is going into us. And everything that’s damaging our wildlife—trees, plants, animals, and so on—is damaging us as well.

So the book, in a way, is answering the question, “What’s got into you?” Literally, not metaphorically. What chemicals have found their way from our soil and water and air into your body? What are they doing to you? How can you get rid of them—by detoxification? Also, how can you avoid them so that you don’t retox when you’ve detoxed? How can you find out where all these chemicals are, both in your home and outside your home, so that you can avoid getting them into you and hopefully get well enough to join one of the campaigns—and there are many—which are trying to stop these pollutants being released into our environment and therefore into us in the first place?

One of the chapters is called “A Tour of Your House,” and it’s about indoor pollution. Because that’s doubly important, since we spend about ninety percent of our lives indoors. If you simply look in the cupboard under your kitchen sink or in your bathroom cabinets, you will see a whole range of chemicals that you don’t need and you can throw out. And if you really think you need them, you can replace them with safe, natural, herbal alternatives.

[00:04:50] Aaron Goodman: I know in your practice you see people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, and I imagine they ask you, “What’s going on in my body?” Do you understand MCS as a body burden issue or rain barrel phenomenon—where every person has their own maximum amount of chemicals that they can live with, and then once the barrel overflows, so to speak, that’s when we get chemical sensitivity? Is that how you see it?

[00:05:17] Jenny Goodman: Yes. And to extend your barrel analogy, we all have a different size barrel, right? So two people can be exposed to the same level of chemicals in their environment in the same way at the same time—and one gets very ill, and one doesn’t. And this genetic difference is absolutely crucial. And what it’s about is the capacity of your liver to make the enzymes—to manufacture the enzymes—whose job is detoxification.

So it is not, you know, me or any other doctor that’s going to detoxify you. It’s your liver that’s doing the detox. And so our focus is on helping the liver to do its job by recognizing that everyone’s liver has a different capacity. So it is about how much you’re exposed to. And if you are exposed to a whole lot of chemicals, you are far more at risk of MCS. But equally, if you have that genetic predisposition whereby your liver is not so good at making the enzymes—or the enzymes don’t work so well—then that same exposure is going to have a worse effect on you. You’ve got a smaller barrel.

So the total load—it is the key concept here. The total load of chemical pollution, electromagnetic pollution, radiation, stress, infection—the whole lot. One person can take more than another. So the total load determines how ill you get, whether you get MCS. But the genetic predisposition is crucial.

And I want to make it clear—the job of the detox system originally was mostly to detox our own hormones and also to deal with the occasional spider bite or plant sting, something like that. Now, those enzymes have to cope with huge numbers of petrochemicals in our air, pesticides in our food, chlorine, fluoride, plastics—and God knows what’s in our water supply—and everything else.

So we all need to reduce our total load. But if you’ve got MCS, you’ve got to reduce it as much as possible. Reduce the total load by, yeah, looking in all your cupboards, going through every room in your house with a fine-tooth comb, thinking: do I need that shampoo? Or can I get a natural, herbal version? What’s in that soap? What does it smell like? Does sniffing it make me feel bad?

Because you can get soap that’s made of very safe, natural, herbal ingredients. What about hair dye? Do you need to dye your hair? If you’re an older person and it’s going white, that’s what’s been happening for millions of years—and it’s okay. And it can be really beautiful as well.

And hair straighteners—as I say, they’re toxic. And so are hairsprays.

Nail varnish is an interesting one, because once it’s dried on the nails, it’s harmless. Because it’s not going in through the nails—like the ends of the hair, the nails are dead. But when you are putting it on in a confined space, you are inhaling it. And both nail varnish and nail varnish remover are toxic. So if you must do it, ladies, do it outdoors.

Air fresheners are really nasty and really toxic. And they damage the lungs as well as going in and damaging the whole body. But my key question there is: why does the air in your house need freshening?

Two simple things. Empty the trash. And open the windows.

Get rid of all the cleaning chemicals. Before you do that, get a magnifying glass and look at the ingredients list on the back. Look some of them up. They’re all toxins. They all have publicly available data sheets to show that. And quite often, these bottles of disinfectant under your sink have the skull and crossbones on them to show that they are indeed dangerous.

In fact, if you walk around a perfume factory—as a colleague of mine did some years ago—you will see all the ingredients laid out on the bench that go into the perfume. They all have the skull and crossbones on them as well. Things like benzene, which are implicated in leukemia.

Now, those perfumes are not just in perfume. They’re in air freshener as well and all these other things. Most deodorants have got parabens, which are carcinogenic petrochemicals. And they’ve got aluminum, which is a heavy metal implicated in Alzheimer’s disease—found at high levels at post-mortem in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and autism.

And Alzheimer’s is not the only thing caused by aluminum. Aluminum is also implicated in breast cancer. And that’s not surprising if you think where you put the deodorant or the antiperspirant. You put it under your armpit. And it’s very near the breast. And most breast tumors are found in the upper outer quadrant, which is the bit of the breast that’s nearest to the armpit.

And again, they have found in biopsying breast tumors, they contain a lot of aluminum. And then you look at the normal breast tissue next door to the tumor—it’s not full of aluminum. So the tumor can be the body’s response to that excess of aluminum.

I would recommend a wonderful book by Professor Christopher Exley. It’s called “Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom,” and it explains the biochemistry of aluminum and the damage it does.

Heavy metals, of course, that have got into the earth and the atmosphere through mining include mercury, nickel, cadmium, and many others. They’re all implicated in neurodegeneration. So that could be brain tumors, or it could be Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease—other forms of neurodegeneration like motor neuron disease, which I think you call Lou Gehrig’s disease.

[00:11:06] Aaron Goodman: So do you think there’s a link, perhaps, between heavy metals and chemical sensitivity? And if so, what can we do?

[00:11:15] Jenny Goodman: What I would do, first of all—and this is absolutely crucial—you’ve got to be eating organic. Because if you are eating organically grown food, not only are you avoiding the pesticides, which do exactly the same kind of damage as the heavy metals, so they’re additive…

Now, what you can do for heavy metal detox is, first of all, ideally get tested, so you know which metals you are dealing with. Because there are certain nutrients that are particularly good for certain metals. But first of all, there are some supplements that are really brilliant for every kind of heavy metal poisoning. And number one, number two, and number three are vitamin C—and vitamin C. It is absolutely brilliant.

And at the end of my first book, "Staying Alive in Toxic Times," at the end of Chapter Seven of that book, I describe exactly how you build up your vitamin C dose. Right? You don’t want ascorbic acid—it’s too hard on the stomach. You want ascorbate. So, magnesium ascorbate, potassium ascorbate, buffered vitamin C. Ideally as powder, but not the fluorescent—not the stuff that fizzes, not the effervescent stuff.

And you start off with a really tiny amount. Right? If you’ve got MCS, you start off with a tiny amount of absolutely anything you are advised to try. Okay? You start off with a tiny amount and build up. So normally I say, you start off with 500 milligrams twice a day. If you’ve got MCS, it’s a hundred. And you build up gradually. And you spread the dose out over the day, because vitamin C is water-soluble, right? So you do pee it out.

So 500 milligrams spread out over the day as 100 milligrams five times a day is both safer and more effective than the 500 milligrams taken all at once. But ideally, when you’ve built up to that, you want to be able to take 500 milligrams three times a day, and then 1,000 three times a day. And you build up very slowly, by 500 milligrams a day. It’s all described in Chapter Seven of "Staying Alive in Toxic Times."

And what you are trying to do is find your personal maximum. And it’s possible that with MCS, your personal maximum will be lower than it will be with someone else. But not necessarily, because actually, vitamin C dose is about the gut. It’s not directly about the genetic proneness to chemical sensitivity.

But at some point, when you’ve built up to 10 or 20 grams—not milligrams—when you’ve built up to 10 or 20 grams a day, you will get diarrhea. You will get the runs. And if you are building up really gradually, there’ll be a really definite point where, let’s say, for example, you are fine at 7 grams a day, but when you go to 8, you get diarrhea. So you know. Now you’ve learned that 7 grams a day is your personal maximum.

And with some people, the personal maximum is well over 20 grams a day, and with others, it’s 1 gram. So you have to find this out for yourself. But when you’ve reached your maximum and you’re trying to detox heavy metals, I would take that maximum dose, spread out over the day as much as possible, for six months.

Okay. So that’s number one.

Number two is PC—that’s phosphatidylcholine. That’s a liquid. I’m afraid it’s really expensive. But if you can take a little bit every day, mixed with yogurt and blueberries is the easiest way to take it—although some people can take it off the spoon—that is not only going to help remove the heavy metals, it’s also going to remove the fat-soluble substances like pesticides and plastics from your fatty tissue and from your brain.

The next thing I would say is glutathione. Now glutathione is a simple substance made of three amino acids strung together, which helps the liver massively in its detoxification task. But almost everybody with MCS doesn’t produce enough of their own glutathione. And again, you’re not going to overdose on it.

So if you can’t afford the genetic test, assume as a person with MCS that the gene that makes glutathione is probably not working well at all. So you need to take glutathione.

Now, I have some colleagues who say you’ve got to have it intravenously—it doesn’t work orally. But my personal clinical experience is, it does work orally. It works really well. So I would definitely take glutathione. PC if you can afford it. Vitamin C. And milk thistle.

Now, milk thistle isn’t directly detoxifying any substances, but it is the perfect medicine to help the liver do its job. I’m not sure we know exactly what it does or how it does it, but there have now been studies—and I quote two of them in the references at the back of my first book—showing that milk thistle does actually improve liver function enormously. And the liver’s main function is detox.

[00:15:50] Jenny Goodman: Then we should move on to which particular heavy metal is your main problem right now. If it’s arsenic, I don’t know anything specific other than these main ones that I’ve mentioned already. If it’s aluminum, there is one—and it’s gold dust—and it’s silica. Natural silica.

So you can either take it as a supplement—the company I use is called LLRG5, based in Ireland, but it’s a French company—but you can also take it in the form of horsetail. Horsetail is a herb that preferentially absorbs silica from the ground, assuming the ground it’s grown in has got enough silica. And usually there is. But obviously, with any herb, you want to make sure it’s organically grown.

So horsetail will give you the silica that you need. There’s also a special type of spring water from Malaysia that Professor Christopher Exley, whom I mentioned earlier, recommends, and that’s called Acilis—A-C-I-L-I-S—which is silica spelled backwards. Now, I used to not recommend this to people with aluminum poisoning because it only came in plastic bottles. And they come with their own problems—vast amounts of microplastics for ourselves and the oceans and the planet as a whole.

However, you can now get Acilis in glass bottles, so that’s another really good source of silica. And you might want to investigate which mineral waters that occur naturally in your own area—your own location—have got high levels of silica.

So: silica for aluminum. For mercury detox, there are lots of things that work—chlorella, cilantro. Cilantro is just the posh name for coriander. Sulfur, which you don’t need as a supplement—you just need lots of onions and garlic. Curcumin, which is a herbal supplement—that’s brilliant for everything: detox, anti-inflammatory, for the brain, for longevity.

So be very careful, though, if you are using—for example—cilantro, which is just coriander, if you are using that for detoxing mercury. Hang on a minute—why does it work? It works because it has an affinity for mercury. It’ll pick it up from your body and take it out. But precisely because it has an affinity for mercury, it will equally pick it up from the soil, if it’s in the soil.

So you do not want your coriander grown in contaminated soil. You want your coriander to be organic. And I use this for detoxing mercury out of the autistic children, who always have mercury or aluminum toxicity.

If you’ve got nickel toxicity—and this is very common in diabetes because it messes with the sugar metabolism—then you need two things. You need zinc, and you need a particular amino acid called methionine. Now, methionine is in protein—so particularly in animal protein—but it’s probably good to take it as a supplement.

Now, the way that these heavy metals are largely doing their damage is by displacing cofactors from enzymes. Let me explain that. So an enzyme is a huge protein molecule who’s doing a crucial job in the body—converting something to something else. Quite often converting a toxic substance to a non-toxic substance.

Now, all enzymes need particular minerals or vitamins on their surface as cofactors—which means helpers. Now, if an enzyme needs zinc—as many enzymes do—and you’ve got a toxic metal on board like mercury or nickel, it will displace the zinc. And that’s precisely how it does its damage.

So if you give lots of zinc, you push the nickel atoms off the enzyme molecule. But then—hang on—they’re loose in the system. You don’t want that. That’s where the methionine comes in. The methionine is the chelator. Right? So the zinc is displacing, but the methionine is chelating—grabbing onto the nickel that you’ve displaced and taking it out of the body.

So I give an example in the book of how nutrition makes a difference. If you’ve got an enzyme that should have an atom of zinc on it, but it’s got an atom of, say, mercury on it instead—if you’ve got 10 mercury atoms floating around in that bit of your internal milieu and only one atom of zinc, then the mercury’s going to win, and the enzyme function is going to be messed up. But if you’ve got a hundred atoms of zinc, then by simple statistics, the zinc is going to win.

So all of us at risk of heavy metal poisoning—or with MCS—need vast amounts of zinc and vast amounts of magnesium, quite a bit of iodine, and selenium as well. And it really is as simple as: the more you put the good stuff in, the more you, A, displace the bad stuff that’s there already, and B, prevent the bad stuff that’s out there from getting in.

Right? So a child who is zinc-deficient is going to be more damaged by the pollution around them than a child who’s got good levels of zinc. And this applies across the board. And that’s why nutrition is relevant to protecting us even from air pollution—but particularly from pollution of the food, the soil, and the water.

[00:22:16] Aaron Goodman: You mentioned air pollution. Sometimes it’s hard to get away from it. We try, but a lot of people don’t have the options.

[00:22:24] Jenny Goodman: That’s right. And all you can do is walk as far as possible away from the traffic, because the most dangerous parts of air pollution are not the gases. They’re the particulate matter—the tiny nanoparticles of soot contaminated with all sorts of chemicals that come out of the exhaust pipe. And they only travel a few feet. So just keep as far as possible away from the source of fumes. It makes a difference.

If you are walking somewhere, take the side roads. Don’t take the major thoroughfares. And most of us don’t have the choice to just move out to the countryside. And even if you do, you’ve got to be careful of pesticide spraying in rural locations.

So yeah. But the nutrition makes a difference. Eating organic makes the most enormous difference, because then you are avoiding the heavy metals and the pesticides. And the other crucial thing for everyone—but especially people with MCS—is fitting a water filter. In an ideal world, a whole-house water filter. But if not, at least a plumbed-in water filter in your kitchen.

Now I know that in the United States, they have put fluoride in the water supply. I don’t know about Canada—I think you have it there as well.

[00:24:07] Aaron Goodman: We do.

[00:24:08] Jenny Goodman: Okay. Virtually no European country has got fluoride in their water supply. A couple of them tried and took it out again because of the disastrous health effects. The UK is in between that—we’ve got some areas with fluoride and some areas without. But they’re trying to introduce it everywhere.

[00:24:29] Aaron Goodman: I think that’s like Canada. I think in some places they have it, some don’t. I’m not sure, but I—that’s, if I understand correctly—a mixed hodge-podge.

[00:24:39] Jenny Goodman: So all over the UK, there are campaigns to try and stop it being introduced into areas where it isn’t already. And I devote a lot of space to this in Chapter Three about water pollution in my new book.

[00:24:55] Aaron Goodman: I noticed that. Because we have a water filter in our home, and when a family member came to visit, they commented on the filter. And I reminded myself—and my family member—that part of what it does is remove fluoride. And my family member said, “You have kids—that’s not a good thing. You want to have the fluoride.” So I was really—I'm interested in seeing that in your book. Maybe it is something that people with MCS need to think about.

[00:25:24] Jenny Goodman: I think it’s part of your total load.

The main issue with fluoride is it damages the bones, the brain, the ovaries, the kidneys, and the thyroid gland. People with MCS and chronic fatigue syndrome often have low thyroid function. And the thyroid gland needs iodine—and fluoride pushes out the iodine.

So, you know, if you have been drinking unfiltered water, take a little bit of iodine to try and counteract the fluoride. And get a water filter. Because it’s incredibly important. And it is part of the total load.

It’s related to bone cancers in young people—primary bone cancers like osteosarcoma and osteoclastoma—and there is some research on this, and it’s hotly contested for commercial reasons. Right? Because what—fluoride is a waste product of the phosphate fertilizer industry. It’s a waste product. But all their websites now call it a “co-product,” as if they’re making it deliberately to help save children’s teeth from decay.

But the fact is, if you look at the statistics, the graphs of how tooth decay in children has been declining since the 1960s, you will find it is declining where they’ve put fluoride in the water—and it’s declining just as fast in the areas where there’s never been any fluoride added to the water. It’s declining because people understand about dental hygiene.

So, two things you need to do to make your children’s teeth healthy: one is brush their teeth, and the other is cut out the sugar. And if you cut out the sugar from their diets and have proper dental hygiene, you’ll have very little dental decay.

What fluoride does to the teeth and the bones is it hardens them. It makes them more dense, but it does not make them stronger or healthier. And you sometimes see dental fluorosis, which is this horrible yellow-brown discoloration of the teeth. The same thing happens to the bones—it’s called skeletal fluorosis.

And studies done—actually by an American team, but in the UK—have shown that although fluoride makes the bone a little bit more dense, so you would think that’s good for osteoporosis, it increases the fracture rate. Right? The higher the fluoride intake, the higher the fracture rate of bones. And that’s what we’re meant to be concerned about in the older woman, and to some extent, the older man. Osteoporosis. Bone fractures.

No—fluoride makes it worse, not better. But you have to understand, there are two massive industries pushing this fluoridation of the water. There’s the phosphate fertilizer industry—which is part of the petrochemical industry—and needs a way to get rid of its waste product. And there’s Big Sugar.

Because who has a greater incentive than Big Sugar to say, “You don’t need to worry about your teeth. It’s fine to eat as much sugar as you want. We’ll put fluoride in the water, and that will save your teeth”?

No, it won’t. And sugar is toxic—not just to the teeth, but to the pancreas, the heart, and everything else. Cancer cells love sugar. It feeds them. And they hate vitamin C. It kills them.

[00:28:35] Aaron Goodman: Something that’s on the minds of a lot of people these days is climate chaos and wildfire smoke. And maybe people don’t immediately think of wildfire smoke and chemicals, but in those devastating fires, a lot of human-made buildings are destroyed and go up in flames. So there’s a lot of chemicals that are being released and people are being exposed to.

[00:28:58] Jenny Goodman: Yes. And I think that’s extremely dangerous. And it’s the most frightening source of air pollution.

We’ve had two episodes of that in the UK—at least, known episodes. So about twenty years ago, there was the BSE epidemic—mad cow disease—and vast numbers of cattle were killed. And their carcasses were burned.

Incidentally, organic cattle never got it, because they weren’t fed on the ground-up remains of other cows and sheep. But they burned all these carcasses, and they released dioxins and other chemicals into the atmosphere. And I noticed, at that point, a huge upsurge in illness—in chronic fatigue, in MCS, and in people having colds and flu-like symptoms that didn’t resolve.

So yes, the burning of anything—but particularly the burning of buildings that contain artificial chemicals, which are plastic, those construction materials—is very dangerous indeed. And it’s one of the many reasons why we need to address our environment. The same petrochemicals that are causing the climate change are directly poisoning us—and the wildlife as well.

[00:29:47] Aaron Goodman: When you meet people with MCS—and I have no doubt they share with you stories of being dismissed by other healthcare professionals and misdiagnosed and told it’s all in their heads—I imagine you have some empathy and compassion for people with MCS. Is there anything you’d like to share with listeners who have experienced this on multiple occasions? Not only with healthcare professionals, but with family and friends and loved ones. And we know it’s very devastating. Do you have anything you might want to share with folks?

[00:30:26] Jenny Goodman: I just want to say: believe the truth that your own body is telling you.

I’m thinking of a particular patient whose case history is actually not in the second book, but I hope it’s going to be in the third—who had walked through an orchard that was being sprayed with chemicals, with her husband. He was fine. She was desperately ill—for years.

She had been to see neurologists who said, “There’s nothing wrong.” Endocrinologists who said, “There’s nothing wrong.” Rheumatologists—because her joints were agony—said, “There’s nothing wrong.” And finally, of course, a psychiatrist who said, “There is something wrong. You’ve got depression. Take these antidepressants”—which of course are more chemicals and would’ve made her worse if she’d been foolish enough to take them.

By the time she came to see me, she was so ill she had to lie down on the couch. Her husband had to do the talking. We had to turn off the lights, because she was so photosensitive. And she had to wear a mask because my clinic was in central London, and she couldn’t cope with the traffic fumes at all.

She got better—very slowly. We did a genetic test, and we showed that a particular enzyme, PON1, which does detoxify the organophosphate pesticides, in some people—very low in her, and was perfect in her husband.

So we tried to get these things out—very slowly. Firstly, she needed to rest. And then she needed to take the PC that I mentioned earlier. She needed to take lots of glutathione. Lots of vitamin C. Organic vegetable juice every morning.

And we did that for six weeks. And she stopped getting worse. And she said—and this is often the case—physically she hadn’t got her energy back at that point, but her brain function was better. She’d started to be able to think clearly.

And over the next six months, using vitamin C, glutathione, PC liquid, and eventually, when she was strong enough, some saunas to get those fat-soluble pesticides out of her system—plus eating all the good fats: nuts, seeds, avocados, cold-pressed vegetable oils organically produced in dark glass bottles and not cooked, and coconut oil and organic butter—all of that good fat helped get the pesticides out of her fat, which was where it was stored.

So after eighteen months, she was well enough to start looking for a job. I would say she’s seventy-five to eighty percent recovered. To get to a hundred percent, she would have to live at the top of a mountain in the middle of the desert on a little island in the ocean. But she’s eighty percent better.

It took eighteen months. And yes, to come back to your question—I think possibly the first and most therapeutic thing that I did was to believe her. Because she knew when it had started and what had caused it. It was the walk through the orchard that was being sprayed with pesticides. But nobody believed her. Nobody took any notice.

And the fact that her husband had been in the same place and was fine meant to them that she was inventing it. Whereas when we tested both of them, it was very clear. She had virtually none of the PON1 enzyme for detoxifying, and he had the full quota. 

[00:33:45] Aaron Goodman: And what do you make of some researchers who further the false argument that Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is a psychological disorder or a psychogenic problem?

[00:33:58] Jenny Goodman: Yes. They only believe that until they or a relative suffer from it themselves. It takes that to convince them. And it suits the medical model to believe it’s all in the mind. But if you press them and you ask them for the mechanism by which it is a psychological disorder, they have nothing to say.

It’s a diagnosis of exclusion because it’s not in their textbooks yet, because they don’t know the right test to do to diagnose it, because it doesn’t show up on their tests. Now your blood calcium’s normal, your red blood cell count is normal. All the stuff that they test, which is crude and superficial, is normal. Physical examination is normal. Therefore, there’s nothing wrong.

So saying to someone “it’s psychological” is medical code for saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s not in my textbook. And we were not taught to say, ‘I don’t know.’” So instead we say, “It’s all in your head.”

But actually, it literally is all in your head. It’s the toxic fat-soluble pesticides and plasticizers that are all in your head. And the proof is: we can make people better. And there’s a vicious circle here, because obviously, if you’ve got MCS and nobody believes you, you are going to get depressed. And they can say, “Oh look, you are depressed. It’s all in your mind.”

So my main piece of advice is: believe yourself. Trust yourself. And these professionals who are supposed to know—they don’t know. I know that they don’t know, because I’ve done that six-year training. And frankly, I’ve had to learn everything else since I finished it.

[00:35:37] Aaron Goodman: And about that training—Dr. Goodman, do you believe that more physicians, healthcare workers will get the necessary training, whether in environmental medicine, ecological medicine, functional medicine, or other, that will equip them with the knowledge to understand what is happening for folks with MCS? Is that happening more?

[00:35:59] Jenny Goodman: It’s happening. I’ve just been in a three-day conference called the IPM Congress—Integrative and Personalized Medicine Congress—full of conventionally trained doctors who are fed up of not being able to make their patients better. They’re really demoralized by the fact that they’re sitting there writing out prescriptions for drugs which they can see are making people worse and not making them any better.

So they are looking for alternatives. Those who succeed are those who have the courage and humility to unlearn a lot of what they learned in medical school. So yeah, that is happening.

[00:36:34] Aaron Goodman: It’s not happening immediately, but it’s happening. So longer term, perhaps. And in your own experience, have you ever had any pushback?

[00:36:44] Jenny Goodman: All of us doing ecological medicine, functional medicine, holistic medicine—whatever you call it—using a herb instead of a drug, we are all being persecuted by the General Medical Council in Britain. And many of my colleagues have been struck off. And the more successful they are at making people better, the more likely they are to be struck off.

[00:37:04] Aaron Goodman: Now when you say “struck off,” you mean fired?

[00:37:07] Jenny Goodman: Told that they’re not allowed to practice medicine anymore. They have their license to practice taken away because they are succeeding with natural methods. The natural methods make no profits for the drug companies.

[00:37:19] Aaron Goodman: Is it a risk you face—that you will face that sort of threat to your profession?

[00:37:24] Jenny Goodman: I did face it. They tried to get me on something completely ridiculous. I’d seen someone who was exposed to a particular occupational chemical, right? It was causing classic neurological symptoms that it is known to cause. I measured it in a test—yes, this person was very high in that chemical.

I proposed a detoxification regime to start to get rid of that chemical, but I also suggested working fewer hours and having better ventilation in the place where this person was working so they weren’t inhaling so many of these particular fumes.

We only had two sessions. At that point, the person told their GP—their general family practitioner—whom I’d written to as well, and the practitioner reported me on the basis that I had used a test that they had not heard of. That was it. I had used a blood test that they had not encountered in their training. That was sufficient grounds to refer me.

It went on for about a year and a half. I was completely exonerated. No case to answer. And I continued practicing for some years after that. I’m 67, so I’ve retired now anyway, because I want to focus on writing more books. And that way I can get the word out about what’s happening to our health and what to do about it to thousands of people rather than to five or six patients per day.

[00:38:47] Aaron Goodman: You’ve been listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I’m the host and podcast creator, Aaron Goodman. The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast is by and for the MCS community. The podcast is generously supported by the Marilyn Brockman Hoffman Foundation and listeners like you. If you wish to support the podcast, please visit chemicalsensitivitypodcast.org.

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Thanks for listening.

The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast and its associated website are the work of Aaron Goodman, made possible with funds from the Marilyn Brockman Hoffman Foundation, supporting efforts to educate and inform physicians, scientists, and the public about Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.

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