How Your Clothes and Their Materials Can Shape Your Health
I feel one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that it’s become so disconnected that patients often can’t form a meaningful therapeutic relationship with their physician
Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me (e.g., through comments).
Unfortunately, due to the size of this publication, that’s no longer possible.
To address this, I’ve done monthly open threads where I cover a brief topic and then provide an open forum for any questions readers wish to ask me about .
In this month’s open thread, I wanted to discuss a fairly under-appreciated aspect of health—how your clothing can affect your health for the better or worse.
Note: over the last few weeks I’ve had to switch from two articles a week to one. This is because I have been trying to complete a synthesis of all the existing DMSO literature as quickly as possible and after starting that three months ago, I gradually realized there was much more to go through than I initially anticipated. That said, I am now quite close to finishing it and looking forward to returning to the normal schedule and the other topics I’ve been waiting to cover!
A Chance Plane Ride
Years ago, a friend of mine was seated on a plane next to a chief executive of a major American chemical company that was notorious for polluting the environment and sickening large numbers of Americans with its products.
After building up a friendly rapport, my friend asked the executive what he considered to be the most important piece of advice he had to share. The executive immediately responded:
Always wash new clothes before you put them on.
I’ve never forgotten that story, and over time my patients have helped me to appreciate just how many nasty chemicals end up on our clothing that most of us never notice.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
Birds tend to be much more sensitive to environmental toxins than humans (e.g., I’ve heard numerous stories of birds dying while in the vicinity of someone cooking with a teflon pan).
This principle in turn was utilized by coal miners who were always at risk of a lethal toxic gas buildup (particularly of carbon monoxide) occurring in the mines. Since carbon monoxide is odorless, they would bring canaries with them and if the canaries suddenly died, they immediately got out as they knew they eventually would too.
One of the fundamental principles in statistics is that variable phenomena tend to follow a bell curve distribution, with the average value (e.g., adult American men being 5’9—which is a bit above the global average) being by far the most common, while values become exponentially rarer as they move further away from that mean (e.g., only 15% of adult American men are at least six feet tall).
Sensitivity to pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins (e.g., synthetic chemicals) follows a similar pattern, with there being a minority within the population that is extremely sensitive to these things (and conversely, on the end of the bell curve, another minority exists on the opposite end which has a very high tolerance to them).
I’ve always felt genuinely bad for the sensitive people as the medical system frequently dismisses their symptoms (as the majority of patients do not share their sensitivities) and they are often left alone to struggle with a variety of things most people can’t relate to let alone empathize with.
Note: I’ve tried to use this Substack to bring attention to their situation (e.g., this article discusses the unique sensitivities patients in this constitutional archetype experience, this article explains the frequent association between ligamentous laxity and pharmaceutical injuries along with how things like manganese can be used to treat hypermobility and this article reviews the dysfunctional mitochondrial danger response many of them are stuck in). For additional context, I consider myself a “somewhat environmentally sensitive” individual, but I have been close to numerous “highly sensitive” individuals and witnessed what they go through each day firsthand.
One of the major challenges with all of the environmental toxins we are exposed to is determining how much our exposures to each of them actually matters, as there are so many of them it borders on impossible to identify which ones are actually directly responsible for the chronic illness an individual experiences.
That said, a few individuals like Joseph Pizzorno have done a remarkable job of quantifying the evidence that demonstrates the harms these toxins have created, and in clinical practice, we periodically see a complex and debilitating illness resolve once a comprehensive detoxification protocol is administered which addresses toxin exposures that occurred years if not decades ago.
Note: in a previous article I shared our observations which substantiate that a massive decline in the health of the human species has occurred over the last 200 years and listed what I presently believe to be the key culprits.
The highly sensitive individuals frequently refer to themselves as “canaries” under the logic that the same environmental toxins they experience severe reactions to are also affecting everyone else on a more subtle and insidious way (e.g., by giving them cancer ten years down the road).
I’ve taken this point to heart, and both used them as an early warning sign something is dangerous and a guidepost for all the things in the environment I should be avoiding, under the logic that if I mostly avoid all the things the canaries are sensitive to, I probably won’t have any major health issues (which has so far held true).
The COVID vaccines in turn help to illustrate many of these concepts
For instance, since they are a highly toxic agent, once they hit the market, immediately I began to have numerous patients show up who had severe reactions to them (which suggested their average injury value was very high) and hence was not surprised as I began to hear more and more stories of sudden death following their use, and later numerous insidious chronic complications of the shots that onset in the years after the injection.
Likewise, while I was hearing all of those injury reports (which I compiled here), I noticed within them there was also a smaller number of unvaccinated individuals who were developing similar symptoms (e.g., menstrual abnormalities) after spending time with someone who had been recently vaccinated.
This prompted me to begin reaching out to the sensitive individuals I knew (along with looking for online reports such as the video I included in this article).
Once I found a few sensitive individuals who could immediately tell if someone had been vaccinated from being around them, I concluded shedding was a very real thing and began looking for a way to explain it (as mechanistically it seemed impossible the mRNA vaccines could shed).
Since that time, those mechanisms have been identified, and through working with Pierre Kory (who has many patients whose labs show they are affected by shedding) I’ve collected over 1,000 reports of shedding injuries which occurred in a fairly consistent and reproducible manner (and likewise could be treated in a fairly repeatable manner).
Clothing Toxicity
One of the frequent points I raise here is that our regulation of pharmaceuticals drugs is woefully inaccurate due to there being so much money in medicine there is inevitably enough to pay off a bureaucrat to approve and then often mandate dangerous and ineffective products (e.g., like remdesivir, all the data showed Paxlovid was useless but the government nonetheless spent billions giving it to America).
However, while the pharmaceutical regulatory situation is abysmal, it’s actually much better than the cosmetic industry, as very few resources are devoted towards ensuring those products are safe.
In turn, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve met who discovered they reacted to specific chemicals in their shampoo, makeup or soaps and were forced to gradually shift to all natural products to get through life.
I hence avoid most of the products on the market and try to either make the ones I use at home (as that way I can guarantee what’s in them) or buy very specific brands we believe are clean.
Note: as many natural skin care products contain biological proteins in them, every once in a while I come across a case of someone who developed an allergic reaction to a natural product. Fortunately this is quite rare.
Sadly, while some regulation exists for cosmetics, almost none exists for fabrics or the chemicals put onto them (other than things like mattresses needing flame retardants—many of which are toxic). Because of this, we wear a lot of things we just should not be wearing.
With clothing, because of how I react to synthetic fabrics like polyester (they just don’t feel good on me—for example when it’s hot and I sweat it often feels as though plastic fibers are coming into my skin), I’ve long suspected there are significant issues with the fabrics.
Likewise, the tendency for feet to sweat is why I believe having socks made from a natural (and relatively dye free fabric) is fairly important.
Note: one of the most intriguing models I’ve come across to explain why synthetic clothing causes issues arises from the fact that unlike natural fabrics, they generate positive ions around the wearer, which I believe is due to them removing negative charges from the surfaces they contact (which for reference is the mechanism behind static electricity). Excessive positive ions (or a lack of negative ions) in turn have been linked to a variety of health conditions, many of which I believe are reflective of them weakening the (negative) physiologic zeta potential in their immediate vicinity (e.g., most of the existing data demonstrating their adverse effects is in regards to the respiratory tract—which makes sense since positive ion exposure is typically through inhalation). In certain cases, the skin is also extremely responsive to changes to zeta potential (e.g., much of the data on negative ion therapy was gathered from burn units—a challenging condition known to be heavily influenced by blood sludging [which in turn results from impaired zeta potential]), so the positive ion from synthetic fabrics may account for some of the reactions these fabrics cause.
Since a few of my colleagues have had similar experiences with clothing, we’ve made a point over the years to ask our highly sensitive patients how they respond to clothes and have found the following:
•Quite a few of them learn on their own that they need to wash new clothes before wearing them. Furthermore, some find they need to wash them 3 or so times before they can wear them without reacting to the clothing. Additionally, they must almost always use a clean and fragrance free detergent, and one of my own struggles is to make sure my clothes never get cleaned in a toxic detergent because the smell will often linger with the clothes for a long time. Finally, I completely avoid using dryer sheets (although I find they are not as problematic as detergents).
Note: more sensitive patients have difficulty being in large stores that have a detergent section, because even while sealed, they still emit an odor which can be smelled from quite far away. Likewise, I’ve heard of cases where they had to move out of their house because someone used a typical detergent in the house’s laundry machines and of them having difficulties being around people wearing clothes which had been cleaned in a typical detergent.
•Reactions to synthetic fabrics is quite common.
•The option to buy organic fabric exists (e.g., clothes made from organic cotton). Given how cotton is produced, I thought that this would be important but it comes up fairly rarely and typically only in cases where they have prolonged exposure to the fabric (e.g., we had a patient who we eventually discovered needed to sleep on organic bed sheets to stop the significant symptoms they were being plagued by).
Note: a certain subset of sensitive patients have issues with the dyes often used in clothing.
•Many of them find they cannot tolerate the labels on their clothes (e.g., the tag at the back of the neck of most T-shirts) contacting their skin and have to cut it off.
Note: we are still not sure if this reaction is chemical or physical (from it rubbing against the skin) or both.
•Many of the reactions our sensitive patients exhibit resemble mast cell reactions.
Note: mast cell disorders are frequently seen in the sensitive patient population and are one of the most common chronic spike protein injuries. In this article, I discuss how mast cell disorders are often linked to blood stagnation.
Additionally, I’ve also met numerous people who react to scented products others are wearing (e.g., colognes, body sprays, or perfume), but sadly the wearers rarely consider how that choice will affect their target audience.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here midwesterndoctor