IS THE 20TH CENTURY MAKING YOU SICK?

Clothes flap in the breeze, drying on lines stretched between trees and a group of small travel trailers and tin buildings, giving the grassy clearing a festive air, as if a troupe of itinerant gypsies has moved in overnight. But there’s little activity on this sunny Wednesday morning. An athletic young man absently dribbles a basketball on a small court nearby. A woman ambles by, a surgical mask held up to her face.

Ann Lloyd takes a break from her gem-cutting achine, set up on a sturdy steel porch in front of er trailer, to peer from beneath her straw hat cross the area that has been her home for almost four years-and likely will be her home until she dies. Lloyd, her short-cropped hair graying, resembles a small, fragile bird. The skin around her eyes has a translucent, pearly quality, giving her a haunted look.

At this spot in rural Seagoville southeast of Dallas, surrounded by ponds formed in old gravel pits, Lloyd has found a haven from a harsh world-a world she says has poisoned her, sending chemicals nd pollutants and toxins through her veins and aking her life a living hell-until she found the ne man who could deliver her from her torment.

loyd’s journey to Seagoville began years ago. Several years after her husband died in a plane crash in 1970, she sold the successful scuba resort the couple had developed in the Bahamas. She invested in commercial real estate and, in the Eighties, began a career as a realtor. She was very successful, buying a new car and a new house.

But a peculiar thing began to happen. Walking into restaurants brought on attacks of anxiety and heart palpitations. “I couldn’t go into buildings or be around people wearing perfume,” Lloyd says. “From an efficient person, 1 went to nothing. I think my family thought I was having a nervous breakdown. My family doctor said, ’Pull yourself together.’ It was like a nightmare.” A trip to the shopping mall would end with her lying prone on a tile floor for days, trying to get relief from a migraine headache.

Lloyd went from doctor to doctor, trying to find out what was wrong with her, but got no answers. In 1985, she began going to a Florida physician who promised that with appropriate treatment, she could live a normal life. One year and eighty intravenous ozone treatments later, she left that doctor, sicker than ever. Spending the night in the motel rooms she rented to be near her doctor made her retch. “At fifty-five, I was sleeping on the beaches of St. Petersburg,” Lloyd says. She was mugged twice and picked up several times by police for loitering.

It wasn’t until she made the pilgrimage from Florida to Dallas, alternately breathing through an oxygen mask and hanging out the window of a motor home to suck in uncon-taminated air, that she found her salvation: Dr. William Rea, a surgeon regarded around the world as the leading guru of the clinical ecology, or environmental medicine, movement. Rea told her the world was literally making her sick.

In the world of Oprah, Phil, and Geraldo, the illness is often called “Chemical AIDS,” but Rea and others shun that description, with its obvious stigma, preferring 20th Century Disease, or environmental illness, Lloyd had read of the health movement in books by clinical ecologists.

After three weeks in Rea’s Environmental Care Unit at Bed ford-Northeast Memorial Hospital, where the air and water were filtered, where all pesticides and petroleum-based products were banned, where the food was strictly organic, Ann Lloyd was dubbed a “universal reactor,” allergic or sensitive to everything: clothing, food, carpet, wall-board, grasses, pesticides, pollens, you name it. Rea traced her “illness” back to I960, when Lloyd had doused herself with a pesticide to kill chicken lice. That and subsequent exposure to toxic elements in the world, he said, had depressed her immune and detoxification systems.

Rea prescribed daily injections of antigens-concentrations of the substances she was allergic to-including a shot every other day that enabled her to wear cotton clothing safely. She took intravenous vitamin C, magnesium, and calcium. She went on a highly restricted diet of organic foods, and for three years lived in an aluminum trailer in Seagoville, far from Dallas pollu-tion, as Rea recommended.

Last year, Lloyd bought a specially designed thirty-eight-foot trailer for some $100,000 and parked it a few feet away from trailers owned by others similarly afflicted. Inside, the floors, walls, and ceiling are lined with white porcelain on steel; at one end is a raised porcelain platform topped with several cotton blankets.

It’s a room that might be found in a space station.

“I’ve retired here,” Lloyd says. “I don’t want to go out and do battle with pesticides anymore. Once you face this illness, it can be a beautiful life. In a way,” she says, smiling, “maybe we’re the chosen few.”

With concern about pollution on the increase, 20th Century Disease is an idea with an appealing logic-that unseen enemies are ganging up on us, creeping and seeping into our bloodstreams, causing maladies that seem far removed from their source. The symptoms include a host of vague ailments ranging from headache to bloating to fatigue, an endemic complaint in a stressful world. The idea that they are being caused by the host of petrochemicals and synthetic substances that permeate our lives is becoming increasingly popular, and with good reason; it has long been recognized that toxic materials can cause everything from hives to cancer.

Hundreds of patients come to Dallas from all over the country, indeed the world, to Dr. Rea’s Environmental Health Center. Unlike Lloyd, most are not deemed “universal reactors,” but almost all are given a diagnosis of “chemically sensitive” or “environmentally ill.” They pay $500 for initial testing at the clinic, two doctor’s appointments, and two sessions with a nutritionist, and that’s just the beginning. Many go on to rip up their carpets and throw away their beds to create an “oasis” of safety in their homes. They take hundreds of shots, IVs of vitamins and minerals, change their jobs.

And they sing Rea’s praises, crediting him with saving their lives. To many, Rea is a brilliant man ahead of his time, a genius far beyond the petty squabblings of “traditional” medicine. Rea has a considerable following in England, where he holds the “First World Professorial Chair” in environmental medicine at a university and hobnobs with the aristocracy, who often are avid followers of alternative medicine. Around the U.S., Rea says, there are about 4.000 physicians practicing aspects of clinical ecology, and their ranks are swelling-often with doctors who, like him, claim to have the disease themselves.

But not everybody is complimentary of Rea or enamored of clinical ecology. Controversy has plagued his associations with local hospitals. Several of his patients have sued him. accusing him of misdiagnosing their conditions. One. Gayle Kirk, a forty-three-year-old Arlington woman, says that Rea told her she had “toxic brain syndrome.” His treatment, she charges, nearly killed her. Another was filed by a man who attempted suicide by slitting his throat after Rea took him off antidepressant medication.

Medical organizations around the country have adopted position papers that claim that environmental medicine as practiced by Rea and his colleagues is, at best, unscientific, and. at worst, potentially dangerous. They claim there is no such thing as 20th Century Disease or chemical sensitivity and that its proponents often prey on the mentally ill. creating emotional cripples and ripping apart families. Medicare and many insurance companies refuse to pay for some of the clinical ecologists’ treatments.

Rea himself is regarded by many of those mainstream physicians as nuttier than an organic fruitcake, a man who once slept in a tent in his back yard and drove around freeways wearing a surgical mask in a car with its interior stripped of all “synthetic” materials. Says one Dallas internist: “He had a meter that measured out-gases from your clothes.”

But despite widespread skepticism. Rea has prospered, and many traditional physicians are wary of publicly criticizing either him or the clinical ecology movement. “People who try to stop them end up getting shredded,” says the internist, who refused, like many physicians interviewed about Rea, to be identified by name, fearful of lawsuits. “Going after someone like this can be dangerous. It’s like attacking a religion.” Clinical ecology is not science, he says. “It’s a cult.”



LOW GRAY CLOUDS LOOM MENACINGLY outside the large window of the conference room at Dr. William Rea’s Environmental Health Center. His offices take up most of the second floor in this medical building across the street from Presbyterian Hospital: examining rooms, laboratories, treatment rooms, offices, and a store run by the nonprofit American Environmental Health Foundation, where patients can buy organic rice cakes and environmentally safe laundry detergent.

“People on cloudy days right before a storm get depressed,” Rea says from his chair at the head of the glass table. “Arthritis flares up.’” The clouds, he explains, contain predominantly positive ions, which suck up negative ions. That leaves the earth with an abundance of positive ions, making some people feel bad. In some European countries, Rea says, doctors won’t do surgery when positive-ion winds called “foehns” are blowing, because of patients’ increased bleeding.

He says this all in a matter-of-fact tone, as if these are things known by everyone. It’s noon, one of the few free periods in his day that Rea can take to talk to reporters. Lunch has been ordered from a health-food café. He talks amiably as he eats an avocado-and-sprouts sandwich. Thin, with an angular face and graying hair, the fifty-five-year-old Rea walks with a pronounced limp, the result of a childhood bout with polio.

The subject of elec-tromagnetic fields comes up. “People have drop attacks,” he says. “They just fall down-boom.” Electromagnetic sensitivity can bring on seizures, headaches, fatigue, an inability to concentrate, and heart irregularities, Rea says. He claims he treated a woman from Washington, D.C., who began having symptoms after she got a computer at work. He asked her where she felt the worst.

“At the National Airport because of the radar, and every time I drive by the Russian embassy I get so sick I can’t function,” she told him. He laughs, retelling the tale, at the way her sensitivities picked up the electronic frequencies emitted by the Soviets’ surveillance gadgets.

With Rea at the table are Kim Rice, his community relations director, and Dr. Gerald Ross, a clinical ecology disciple. Both have suffered from environmental illness. Rice says her illness was caused by “Tight Building Syndrome”-a phenomenon seen when a building is so airtight that vapors from building materials, cigarette smoke, and other pollutants are not removed.

Ross, a forty-three-year-old Canadian physician, came to Dallas for Rea’s treatment four years ago after he was exposed to dry-cleaning fluid spilled into the water system at his home in Nova Scotia. When he was able to return to work. Ross did an internship with Rea, then stayed on. “All these things illustrate that we are really at the mercy of our personal environment,” Ross says.

Ross gives a tour of the clinic, which would bring grimaces from any interior designer. The operative word is stark. Signs on the door warn “No Pesticide Spray,” “No Perfume,” and, of course, “No Smoking.” The waiting room walls are porcelain on steel-not wallboard, which he says can contain formaldehyde.

In one exam room, an elderly woman curls up on a table beneath a blanket, waiting for a doctor. In another, a matron peers into a complicated piece of high-tech machinery called a binocular iriscorder. Her enormous pupils appear on two video screens, as a visiting Japanese researcher charts her “pupil response time’” in an experiment that Ross says will determine whether her autonomic nervous system has sustained damage from chemicals. Rea says he is collaborating with researchers at Kit-asato University in Japan, which developed the machine.

Ross says the average patient off the street comes in complaining of fatigue. He or she is still working, but is “tired, with no endurance.” Other complaints range widely- constipation, diarrhea, cramps, bloating, sneezing, runny eyes and nose, eczema, heart palpitations, chest pain, joint pain, asthma, depression, anxiety, tingling arms and legs.

Most of the patients treated by clinical ecologists-apart from industrial workers-tend to be white women. About half are thirty to fifty years old, and most are middle- to upper-class or professionals. One study estimates that most of those who go to clinical ecologists have been to six traditional physicians without finding answers to their complaints. They’ve been tested and screened and scanned, only to be told that doctors can find no reason for their symptoms.

it’s long been known that high levels of exposure to many toxic substances can cause health problems, even death. Breathe asbestos for a long enough period and you can develop lung disease. Living near a lead smelter that belches the heavy metal into the air can cause brain damage. Public health and occupational medicine have extensively studied these fields. And the public is increasingly concerned about such exposure, as evidenced by the alarm raised over the pesticide Alar on apples.

But Rea and other clinical ecologists espouse the controversial “total load” concept, which grew out of work on chemical sensitivities first presented in the Forties by Dr. Theron Randolph, who advocated, among other things, injection of a patient’s own urine. Imagine a cup. Rea says, representing each individual’s immune and enzyme detoxification systems. “Everybody’s cups are different sizes,” Rea says, but each will hold only so much.

When that cup is not full, the person’s body can fight off the effects of the many environmental toxins-foods, pollens, molds, chemicals, electromagnetic fields, bacteria-to which it is exposed, he says. But illness results when the cup finally overflows, making the patient sensitive to numerous things he or she before could tolerate.

Physicians don’t disputethe fact that toxins in the environment can affect health. But Rea’s techniques go far beyond established areas of environmental medicine studied by doctors in the fields of public health, occupational medicine, allergy, and toxicology. The total load theory is interesting, doctors say, but there is no evidence to prove it. There are no objective tests that indicate a patient has “toxic brain syndrome.” a malady that doesn’t appear in medical textbooks. There are no definable symptoms for “chemical sensitivity.” Neither Rea nor his colleagues have published peer-review studies that support the theory according to the strict standards of scientific reporting. Clinical ecologists most often publish in their own journals, dismissed by most scientists as propaganda.

Nevertheless, patients who believe themselves to be disabled by environmental toxins abound. Dona Shrier, an architectural designer, discovered her illness about eleven years ago. She encased her home’s insulation in aluminum foil, ripped out most of her carpet, and got rid of much of her furniture. She bought a cotton mattress but still couldn’t sleep on it. Shrier finally found a farmer who grew organic cotton, then made a mattress from it. Her home has filtration systems for air and water, even the water she bathes in.

Today, she runs a business from her home, selling organic cotton mattresses and other products. She also helps the chemically sensitive renovate or design homes they can live in. Shrier still sees Rea, her doctor and guru; after she suffered a reaction to a tooth crown, she says, he advised her to take hydrochloric acid. The treatment helped, she says, but she still has not been able to have the crown replaced. For the most part, she lives a normal life, though she avoids shopping malls.

Others-told by Rea that they are universal reactors, unlikely to ever fully recover- sell or abandon their homes, living in tents in their back yards. Rea sends some to the trailer camp in Seagoville, where they pay up to $1,500 a month to live in cramped trailers or one-room cabins.

Still others move to mountaintops or deserts in search of clean air, retreating from the world that suddenly has become menacing, a cesspool of pollutants and microscopic monsters out to get them. They eat bear or antelope meat shot in unpolluted forests. They inject themselves with antigens mailed from Rea’s clinic in Dallas and carry oxygen tanks wherever they go. Many alienate themselves from friends and family, spending their life savings on therapy that is often not covered by insurance, refusing to see people who do not meet their exacting pollutant-free standards. Sometimes, they sue their former employers, alleging that a pesticide sprayed for roaches or plastics used in a manufacturing process triggered their sensitivities, rendering them totally disabled.

The syndicated TV show “Inside Edition” sent a reporter to check out such claims in 1989. Matt Meagher visited Rea’s clinic after a physician had verified that he was completely healthy and had no allergies. He described his symptoms as “tired, occasional headaches that go away with aspirin, irritated eyes; shoulder hurts from an old bicycle accident.” Rea ordered a brain scan and suggested an X-ray of Meagher’s shoulder. Then the doctor raised the possibility that Meagher was allergic to airports because he traveled a lot. He recommended allergy tests to begin immediately.

After numerous skin tests (not uncommon in allergy diagnosis for pollen and molds), Rea declared that the reporter was allergic to ethynol, unleaded gas, formaldehyde, dust, molds, and diesel fuel. Meagher said that whenever he Jailed to report symptoms from a shot, the nurse simply increased the dosage until a welt would form.

Though Meagher quit and went public with his story before treatments could begin, Rea might have prescribed any number of antigens made up by his own laboratory. Patients inject themselves daily or every other day with their personalized “vaccine,” which includes various antigens as well as substances like seratonin, a chemical released by allergy cells during an allergic reaction.

For some with chemical exposure, an exercise-sauna-massage program-called “heal depuration/physical therapy”-is prescribed, to rid the body of toxins. A muscle twitch or spasm could be the body’s attempt to excrete toxins, Rea says, jerking his shoulder to illustrate. “The body deals with pollutants by walling them off,” Rea explains. “If you get a spasm, that may be what’s happening.”

Another part of the treatment is avoiding foods that may be bringing toxins into the body. While some foods that cause severe reactions are banned outright, most are acceptable if eaten only once every four days. Organic foods are encouraged. Rea says that the foods a patient craves are frequently the ones he or she is most allergic to.

Medical experts who have studied claims made by Rea and other clinical ecologists say they have little quarrel with harmless prescriptions like saunas and rotation diets. But the wider view that “chemically sensitive” patients’ immune systems are damaged, creating “allergies” to everything, is hog-wash, Rea’s critics charge. “You can make great double talk with this,” says a professor of allergy at Southwestern Medical School. “The truth is people with allergies have too strong an immune response.”

Doctors like Dallas allergist William Lumry say that many of the clinical ecologists’ theories go against everything we know about the immune system and allergies, which result when one’s immune system overreacts to normally harmless materials such as pollens. “It’s like an angry middle linebacker looking for something to hit,” says Lumry. If the immune system was damaged and therefore suppressed as Rea claims, chemically sensitive patients would suffer potentially fatal infections, as do AIDS patients.

Some people do have allergies to foods, Lumry says, commonly eggs, milk, soy, peanuts, and shellfish. But he adds that there is no evidence that people crave the foods they are allergic to. And reactions to chemical substances, such as cigarette smoke, perfume, and air pollution, Lumry says, are not true allergies at all, but simple irritations.

In his years of practice, Lumry says, he has never seen anyone disabled by allergies or intolerances to foods or chemicals. “There are people with significant sensitiv-ities,” he says, “but I’ve never seen anybody completely debilitated by it. I have seen people debilitated because they were told they were.”



WILLIAM REA WAS ALWAYS CONSID-ered somewhat peculiar by his colleagues at Veterans and Baylor hospitals, where he did his surgery residency after completing medical school at the Ohio State University College of Medicine in 1962. (He told several patients that as an intern he operated on John Connally when he was shot with JFK in 1963.) By the early Seventies, he seemed downright weird. He began living in a tent in his back yard. Rea told colleagues that he had become allergic to everything. He says that exposure to chemicals in research labs, anesthesia gases, and home pesticides rendered him environmentally ill.

Some of Rea’s former colleagues, those who remember him as a bright surgical resident in the early Sixties, say they believe that Rea latched onto the ideas of clinical ecology in order to explain why he was not a good surgeon.

A prominent physician-once chief of staff at a major Dallas hospital-who in-terned with him in the Sixties while Rea was doing valve operations as part of his residency at the Veterans Administration Hospital, says that Rea’s expertise as a surgeon was questionable even then. ’’It became an ethical issue for us to entrust our patients who needed the operation to him,” says the internist.

“He was not a good surgeon and it became quite well known,” adds a cardiologist who has operated with Rea. “He devised the whole thing as an excuse for why he can’t operate.”

For his part, Rea says that he became interested in environmental toxins while doing research into artificial lungs and hearts at Southwestern Medical School and Veterans Hospital in the late Sixties. He says he noticed that eliminating some home toxins for his patients with thrombophlebitis (inflammation and clotting of veins and arteries) improved their condition. He then exposed them to small doses of phenol and other chemicals, reproducing their symptoms. That led him to suspect that toxins in the environment were causing their disease,

Rea created the Environmental Health Foundation and the Environmental Health Center in 1974 to begin treatment and research procedures. What grew was not just a clinic but a group of corporations catering to the needs of the environmentally sensitive. These include a lab for blood tests and another to make antigens. He was a co-owner of Esprit de Cure, a store (hat sold organic food and “unpolluted” wild game. That store went out of business; Rea now raises “organic cattle” in East Texas.

Rea’s earliest papers on environmental effects on disease were published in peer review journals-a sign that he was being taken seriously by his colleagues. But apparently, as his theories grew more unusual, scientifically sound publications began to reject his work. The controversy over his research intensified in the mid-Eighties, when Rea continued to identify himself on papers as a “clinical associate professor” at Southwestern Medical School. His association with the school ended in 1981.

In 1974, Rea pulled off a great coup: the opening of the area’s first environmental care unit (ECU) within a local hospital. It was located at Brookhaven Medical Center (now called RHD Memorial Hospital). At the time, Brookhaven was primarily a facility for family practitioners, and it was looking for innovative ways to compete with the newly opened Medical City. The prospect of a center for patients whose hospital stays ranged from three weeks to four months was financially appealing.

From its inception, the unit provoked controversy. Patients entered through an air-light entrance to a contamination-free environment of porcelain and ceramic. The facility had its own water and air filtration systems. Patients wanting to read books or magazines did so only with the aid of a glass reading box with built-in gloves.

But by far the most provocative treatment method employed at the ECU was the “booth challenge test,” wherein patients would be exposed to various foods and chemicals to test for sensitivities. The booths took testing patients for allergic sensitivities to new extremes, and other physicians didn’t know what to make of it. “He would light a pilot light and people would feint or get constipated” from the effects of natural gas, says one doctor. Indeed, reporting to a group of Texas allergists about one such experiment. Rea astonished his audience when he told of sticking patients’ heads into an oven and turning on the gas. If they reacted, he told the doctors, they were sensitive. When one physician asked if the patients could have been reacting to the mercaptan (the substance added to give gas an odor), Rea looked puzzled; the question was repeated. Then Rea quickly said that some were allergic to mer-captan and some were sensitive to the gas. “Within seconds, he didn’t know what they were, and the next minute he had people who are allergic to them,” says a doctor who was in the audience.

If Rea was attracting the skepticism of his , peers, he was a hit with patients. His business boomed. Then in 1982, several large insurance companies began refusing to reimburse some of Rea’s patients’ claims, citing an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that his treatments were “unscientific, unproved, and not accepted in the medical community.”

In 1984, Rea and eight patients filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology and the Aetna and Prudential insurance companies. According to the suit, patients’ claims for reimbursement for educational literature, reading boxes, ceramic masks, and other paraphernalia were being refused. The suit was dismissed as a class-action suit by Judge Barefoot Sanders, who ruled that Rea had no standing in the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, some doctors and administrators, increasingly embarrassed by William Rea’s bizarre practice, were attempting to maneuver the ECU out of Brookhaven. Says one orthopedic surgeon who was practicing at Brookhaven at the time, “They put naked patients in these booths and squirted essence of carrots at them. I took it as a personal affront.”

Brookhaven was successful in closing the unit in late 1981, moving it to an affiliated facility in Carrollton, which is now also closed. Rea caused an uproar in that same year when he targeted the Dallas/Fort Worth Medical Center in Grand Prairie for a new location. A number of doctors there protested, and the board voted to keep him out.

Eventually Rea ended up in a small facility in Tarrant County, Northeast Community Hospital, where he and an associate, Dr. Alfred R. Johnson, were admitted to the staff; by early 1984 their patients dominated the hospital’s seventeen-bed ECU.

But controversy followed them there as well. In September of 1986, Rea and Johnson were informed that a Medicare inspection had found deficiencies in their antigen therapy. Medicare requires that all antigens be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. They were ordered to stop booth testing and refrain from using non-FDA-sanctioned antigens. Several months later, a committee was formed to investigate the pattern of medications prescribed by Rea and Johnson to some longer-term patients. The prescriptions seemed to show, according to one source, “alarming levels of narcotic and psychotropic drugs, sometimes in unusual combinations.”

In February 1987, Rea’s and Johnson’s staff privileges were suspended. Shortly thereafter, the corporate owner of the hospital closed the ECU, citing the enormous effort it took to administer it and the tact that most insurance companies were not paying for their claimants’ hospitalization there.

In 1989, Rea and Johnson filed suit against the hospital, four doctors and administrators, charging them with anti-trust violations, restraint of trade, and slander, and asking $8.1 million in damages. Neither Rea nor spokespersons for the hospital would comment on the still-pending litigation.

In the meantime, Rea faces legal troubles of his own. Gayle Kirk, the Arlington woman diagnosed by Rea with “toxic brain syndrome,” charges in a lawsuit that surgery performed by Rea on her renal artery nearly killed her. Kirk, then thirty-seven years old and a manager for Southwestern Bell, had gone to Rea suffering from exhaustion. Rea prescribed a two-hour IV of vitamin C and told her she had high blood pressure and needed arterial bypass surgery on her kidney. Though he gave her small doses of hypertension medication, Rea said that drug therapy was not a good option because she was chemically sensitive. She remembers that Rea preached against the American Medical Association, saying they were “trying to poison people with pills.”

To Kirk, frustrated with her chronic problems, Rea’s theories sounded good. “I was so sick I couldn’t reason,” she admits. Kirk was admitted to Morton Hospital-where Rea had surgery privileges-and operated on. Rea never explained why she could withstand anesthesia but not medication for high blood pressure.

But the surgery didn’t improve her condition. Kirk’s blood pressure wouldn’t come down, and she got sicker and sicker. Rea discharged her from the hospital, giving her no medication. Five days later, she was admitted to Richardson Medical Center in what one doctor described as “grave mortal danger.” At one point, she had no vita! signs, but doctors resuscitated her. Kirk and her husband Tom say that Rea visited her there after hours and pleaded with her to leave the hospital, saying, “You’re going to make a lot of trouble for me.”

Two months after Rea’s surgery, Gayle’s atrophied kidney was removed at Presbyterian Hospital. She filed suit against Rea, alleging fraud and negligence. The Kirks believe that Rea performed surgery because he needed the money, not because her condition required it. Rea, who later declared bankruptcy, citing $40 million in debt, says Gayle was properly diagnosed and treated, adding that the kidney was removed because the graft clotted off. He says she was never near death, and her blood pressure returned to normal after her kidney was removed. The Kirks, he says, were aware that the loss of her kidney was a possible complication.



CLINICAL ECOLOGY IS JUST A REPACK-aging of medical mysteries that have been around for 3,000 years, says Dr. Stephen Barrett, a psychiatrist who studies and writes extensively about medical quackery. A member of the board of the National Council Against Health Fraud, Barrett spent a year investigating the claims of clinical ecologists at the request of the American Council on Science and Health. “There have always been people who have a wide variety of symptoms for which no cause can be found,” Barrett says, and the causes are primarily psychosomatic. “Most of these people don’t get any better when they go to a clinical ecologist, but they develop a fierce loyalty,” he says.

Many patients just want a physical explanation for their ailments, according to Dr. Carroll Brodsky, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco. “These patients search for healers who will provide them with an explanation…that makes sense to them and that fulfills a number of psychological needs,” he writes.

Dr. Larry Dossey, the former chief of staff at Medical City who has written numerous books about the link between the mind and body, says that many illnesses, and allergies in particular, have a well-established psychological component. “People can be hypnotized into and out of asthma attacks,” Dossey says. “One patient came down with an allergic attack when he was shown a picture of a hayfield.”

A number of clinical ecology patients have improved significantly when treated with medication for panic attacks, which afflict up to 10 percent of Americans and cause symptoms similar to so-called “chemical sensitivity,” says Dr. Thomas Kurt, medical toxicologist for the North Texas Poison Center and a professor at Southwestern. “That accounts for about 30 percent of the patients,” Kurt says, adding that the others may be suffering from “learned Pavlovian behavior” or “compensationitis,” an attempt to get insurance money for real or imagined illnesses.

Not surprisingly, few of these patients want to hear that “it’s all in their heads.” A Southwestern Medical School doctor says that sometimes former patients of Rea’s show up at Parkland Hospital, having exhausted their finances, demanding to be treated for environmental illness. “We have the most unpleasant task of telling them that we don’t believe in this therapy,” the allergist says. “When you suggest they see a psychiatrist, they recoil.”

Allergist William Lumry cites similar frustrations. He says his initial tack was to tell people that they had been duped, but he had little luck. “I try to point out the discrepancies in what they’ve been told and what the reality is,” he says.

Still, Rea is undeterred. “What do they mean by scientifically proven?” he asks. “Environmental medicine fits that better than anything else; we prove cause and effect. That’s just a play of words. Ninety-six percent of all medicine is not scientific. It’s an art.” He says that six years of studies since the 1984 suit have proven that chemical sensitivity is a valid diagnosis.

A lot of it boils down to economics, Rea says, claiming that allergists have lost 15 percent of their patients to clinical ecologists. And pharmaceutical companies selling drugs with toxic preservatives and polluting industrialists would like doctors of his ilk to go away. Besides, he says, the California Medical Association withdrew its negative position on clinical ecology last year. (A spokeswoman for the CM A says that all of the organization’s “medical practice opinions.” including the opinion on clinical ecology, have been withdrawn for legal reasons while the program is being reviewed. However, she said adamantly, the CMA’s “informational report,” which reviewed the scientific literature and found that there was no scientific basis for clinical ecologists’ claims, has not been withdrawn.)

Rea says that he hopes to open another ECU in Dallas within the next six months, though he declines to say where. But his big focus is on Great Britain, where he was recently appointed to the “World Chair” in environmental medicine at the University of Surrey’s Robens Institute. He visits England eight to twelve times a year. He says the initial funding of two million pounds will go toward research to define the nature of chemical sensitivity and what total body load it takes to trigger it.

William Rea’s work is being hailed by British aristocrats fascinated with alternative health care. Photos of Rea with the Duchess of York (Fergie to you) and Princess Anne have been published in British newspapers. A member of Parliament has praised Rea on the floor of the House of Commons and House of Lords, calling for more government research support. Currently, the British medical system does not pay for clinical ecologists’ treatment.

Clinical ecologists are also gaining political clout. In January 1988, Rea’s associate Alfred Johnson was appointed to the Texas Board of Medical Examiners, despite howls of protest from other physicians.

Rea sees the horizon for clinical ecology as brighter than ever. He plans to give a talk in Poland next spring. “I lecture worldwide,” Rea says. He flashes a satisfied smile. “It’s overwhelming, the interest in this.

“They even have an ECU,” Rea says, “incommunist China.”