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The Next Thing You Smell Could Ruin Your Life
Millions of people suffer debilitating reactions in the presence of certain scents and chemicals. One scientist has been struggling for decades to understand why—as she battles the condition herself.
Roughly a quarter of American adults report some form of chemical sensitivity; it lives alongside chronic pain and fibromyalgia as both evidently real and resistant to mainstream diagnosis or treatment. In 1999, Miller and her colleagues designed the Quick Environmental Exposure and Sensitivity Inventory, or QEESI (pronounced “queasy”), a survey to help doctors and researchers identify chemically intolerant patients. The major problem is that, assuming TILT accurately describes the process of becoming chemically intolerant, we don’t know what biological changes occur inside the sensitized body, why so many symptoms crop up, or why one exposed person gets sick while others seem to walk away unscathed.
Or read this on Wired
