Doctors have a duty to understand environmental illness

14 June, 2012

If one story struck a chord with me this week it was a report from the University of Haifa in Jerusalem which revealed that doctors in the Europe, the UK and Israel are getting little or no training in environmental illness.

Our website is dedicated to natural health – that means choosing natural methods where appropriate to prevent and treat illness but it also means avoiding unnatural substances in our environment that can make us ill. Our news pages regularly feature research detailing the way environmental pollutants can make us sick.

We all come not contact with a variety of pollutants and toxins each day; we carry dozens of chemicals in our bodies that were never meant to be there. These can interact with every body system and, according to the US National Institutes of Health, cause a wide range of problems from allergies and rashes to birth defects, infertility heart disease, immune system chaos, nervous system disorders osteoporosis and cancer amongst others.

Chances are if you…

Have consulted a GP who has not been able to explain the cause of your symptoms
Are popping pills to relieve headache, digestive or muscular pain that isn’t responding to treatment
Feel inexplicably run down and depressed, and have been to see one or more doctors, who have offered little more than a referral to a psychiatrist to treat your ‘psychosomatic’ problems
Feeling increasingly worse with no ‘logical’ explanation

. . . you may be suffering from environmental illness.

Unfortunately, if you choose to take your symptoms to a conventional practitioner, you will need to be prepared for a) the denial of any environmental links to your condition; and b) a struggle for recognition and treatment and for answers to your most basic questions about environmental exposures. It’s not good enough.

As the author of the report reminds us: “The public relies on primary care physicians to improve their health and well-being it should be of the utmost importance that the education of these individuals is all-encompassing”.

Pat Thomas, Editor