Stephen J Barrett, Ronald E Gots
Prometheus Books, £23, pp 212
ISBN 1 57392 195 5
Environmental damage to health is highly topical. Newspapers carry horror stories about things in the environment causing cancer, heart attacks, or early death, yet reliable reference books are hard to find. What evidence is there for and against, say, allergy to various foods, chronic fatigue syndrome, or Gulf War syndrome?
Throughout civilisation people have been troubled by multiple symptoms for which, unable to find a physical cause, labels have been invented. In Hippocratic times it was the “wandering womb” or hysteria. By the late 19th century it was presumed to be caused by female genital dysfunction. Then it became “neurasthenia,” leading to the “rest cure.” Still later, it became “focal sepsis,” leading to removal of teeth and often other organs as well. “Glandular disorders” and “stress” followed. Then came “psychosomatic illness,” which patients didn’t like and doctors were embarrassed to discuss with them. Nowadays, in the view of many patients, alternative practitioners, and some doctors it is poisoning by common foods or chemicals or allergy to them. This book aims to assess such beliefs that the authors reckon are wrong.
Drs Barrett (a retired psychiatrist) and Gots (of the International Center for Toxicology and Medicine in Rockville, Maryland) are, we are told, “nationally renowned leaders in the fight against quackery.” The book begins with a list of “fad diagnoses” and current “scientific” judgments about them. For instance, candidiasis hypersensitivity, “multiple chemical sensitivity,” and toxicity from mercury amalgam are “not scientifically recognized.” Other conditions (adrenal insufficiency, hypoglycaemia, Lyme disease, and chronic fatigue syndrome) are “genuine” but overdiagnosed.
The later chapters give the “scientific” evidence for and against these statements. For each “disease” there are up to 50 references, taken from regular scientific journals, nearly all of them American. The text assesses the value of these and of research done into the condition. It also gives the “positions” of the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, and the Californian Medical Association, a number of court judgments, and a list of “reputable consultants,” all of them American. The references could not be complete in so small a book, but they are impressive. The book lacks a non-American perspective, but it will be useful to those interested in these bizarre “diseases,” as most of us need to be these days.
Footnotes
Rating: ★★