Have you ever wondered if the nice smelling perfume you are wearing may be a poison? Or if the cream that makes your hands velvet-like might have carcinogens in it?
If you haven’t, me neither…at one time. I was healthy and happy, enjoying a good life and thinking that getting to be 40 years old was just a change in the number.
But life proved me wrong and shortly thereafter I developed a form of autoimmune arthritis, making most of my joints hurt and swell and rendering me miserable day-in and day-out. I knew my days of playing tennis or going skiing were over, but not being able to at least play with my 3 year old son, well, that broke my heart.
The other unpleasant part was that the course of my disease was very unusual—atypical, especially in the lack of response to medications or the extremely rare, but sometimes life-threatening side-effects from the most commonly used treatments.
And as if this wouldn’t be bad enough, after some time into this ordeal, my breast tests came back abnormal year after year, requiring biopsies and surgeries to remove all kind of lumps.
Relieved that none of them were cancers, I was still extremely frustrated that I couldn’t understand why all these are happening to me. Why? The medical specialists had no answers and were just as puzzled as I was.
I began to wonder if there were any environmental, dietary, or any other triggers, although I knew the medical literature had not clearly identified any specific ones.
Until the time when something very unusual happened: I noticed that my elbows were getting extremely swollen and painful within a day of using a moisturizer cream on them.
It was the same product I used on my hands, wrists and feet, but these were swollen anyway from the arthritis. I didn’t think the cream was responsible for my elbows swelling but when I used it again a few weeks later, the same thing happened.
The thought of a possible connection became really enticing when my mom developed swelling of her foot and my mother-in-law swelling of her finger, on two separate visits couple of months apart, after using the very same cream.
I was intrigued. What exactly in these creams were affecting us all? I checked out the ingredients of this cream and other moisturizers and even in prescription creams and found out that other than water, almost all components were synthetic chemicals, most being petroleum derivatives.
I looked up the information available about their structure and safety and I was surprised to find so much awareness about their potential toxicity. I was not insane! And they are used in some combination in almost all personal care items, laundry and cleaning products, foods, and medications. Joint pain was not described as one of the effects, but by removing all these components, my joints improved.
Among these chemicals, many were endocrine disruptors, mostly acting as foreign estrogens in our body. Being exposed to them day after day, can it be responsible for my abnormal breast tests? Could they contribute to my worsening migraines?
Yes, for me they definitely did and removing them helped tremendously.
That’s why my mission is to inform as many people as I can about these ignored substances, deemed safe, inert or inactive. Our constant exposure to them with numerous everyday products is likely detrimental to our health and removing them from our daily use has many great benefits.
