Do you remember agreeing to be part of a vast chemical experiment?

I sure don't. Yet I am, and we are, living in the midst of a vast chemical experiment that none of us ever agreed to.

I was part of the first generation of kids to grow up in and around swimming pools. My family jokingly referred to me as 'the fish', because I spent as many hours as I could in the community pool each summer, being on a swimming team, learning how to dive, playing Marco Polo, and on and on.

At the age of 23, I was one of the first cases of what is today called Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (I was so early, it didn't even have a name). 10 years later, I was told by an MD, who was also trained in Chinese medicine, that "there's always an adrenal problem" in CFIDS.

25 years later, John Gray ("Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"), who is amazingly widely read, and very knowledgeable on many subjects, told me privately that adrenal problems are always the result of thyroid dysfunction (hypothyroidism), because when the thyroid doesn't work, the adrenals step in to do the work, work for which they aren't intended, and burn out. Further, he said these cases almost always have to do with exposure to chlorine (swimming pools), and/or fluorine (fluoridated water), which displace iodine, which is critically necessary to adequate functioning of the thyroid.

So did spending all that time in the pool create the CFIDS 15 years later? I'll never know for sure.

And now we have these two studies, which link air pollution to lower IQs:

Education Week: Kids' lower IQ scores linked to prenatal pollution

Smog Linked in School Study to Lower IQ Scores

Every time you gas up, heck, every time you time you drive, you're adding to the vast chemical experiment, since most of the myriad of compounds unleashed were never tested in any way for safety. Scrubbing Bubbles? That stuff goes down the drain and into our water. Hair spray? Goes into the air we all breathe. And the residue gets washed down the drain and into our water. Nail polish? There are fumes when you use it, and when you later clip your nails, the polish goes into the waste bin, which decomposes into who-knows-what that percolates into our soil and ground water. The drugs you take? I'd guess that whatever isn't absorbed by your body gets flushed down the toilet and into our water, too.

So think each time you use a chemical product: the brain you save may be your own -- or your kids'.

Info on thyroid/CFIDS

I was at a small seminar on brain chemistry and wellness by John Gray (yes, that Mars/Venus guy, and he is very cool, much cooler in person than in the books) last Sunday, and because it was at the hypnotherapy school where I teach, and because I know the woman who sponsored his talk, I got some time over lunch with him. He had mentioned that iodine is much more prevalent in the diets of Japanese women than American ones, which is why their children are so smart. Apparently, according to the WHO, lack of iodine in the diet of a pregnant woman is the cause of mental retardation in her children. He also talked a bit about how chlorine and bromine push iodine out of the body, and they are needed, particularly by the thyroid gland.

So when I asked him about CFIDS, he said that basically, your thyroid underperforms, and so your adrenals go into overdrive to compensate, until they, too, give out. And he said in talking with over a thousand people about this, every single one of them (yes, this is still anecdotal) had had significant chlorine exposure.

As if to underscore this, the woman sitting next to me in the seminar told me that she had a thyroid problem, and had been a figure skater (I do wonder about the chlorine in the Freon) and then on a swimming team for her childhood and teen years and continued to swim laps until the hypothyroidism happened, and her naturopath told her the lap swimming was over — without explaining why. When I got home, I called a friend, who I know had thyroid cancer in her 20’s, and asked her about chlorine exposure. She said immediately that she’d spent years playing in a garage where the chlorine for a neighbor’s pool was stored.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who spent a lot of time around chlorine who don’t have a thyroid problem — but apparently hypothyroidism is exploding in the population — and pools became greatly popular in the ‘50s, so baby boomers and later kids were the first to have a lot of chlorine exposure. Perhaps it takes 10 or 20 years to develop?

If you know an epidemiologist, you could bring this up and ask them if they might want to study it...

I am going to try large doses of iodine (called ioderal) and I’ll let you know what happens. And if you use kosher (non-iodized) salt, as I used to, you should switch to salt with iodine, preferably Himalayan or sea salt. At least that will increase the amount of iodine in your diet a bit. And obviously, stay out of swimming pools and hot tubs.

On another track, there is a school of thought that says that CFIDS is actually a neurological problem, more properly called RNA-ase enzyme deficiency disease (REDD) -- you can Google that.