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Case study: physical fatigue with headache and tachycardia CASE STUDY: PHYSICAL FATIGUE WITH HEADACHE AND TACHYCARDIA
An even more advanced case was presented by Frederick Eccleson, a student. Eccleson was on the Dean's List—the negative Dean's List for failing students. Although bright, he was flunking out of the scientific institution he had entered with such great expectations a year before.
In high school, Eccleson's heart would suddenly beat at an incredible speed—120 to 160 beats per minute. He was afraid he was about to suffer a heart attack whenever these speedups occurred. In the mornings, he was tired, weak, and irritable. He had perennial headaches, throbbing pains which increased if he even tried to shift position or move his head. Because of this, Eccleson missed about a third of his courses when he entered college. The dean and the school physician considered him a hypochondriac, since no "physical" problem had been discovered.
Eccleson himself was aware of some susceptibilities to foods, including pancakes, eggs, beef, and chocolate. He avoided these items whenever he could, although he had little conception of the degree to which such common foods as beef or eggs penetrate our food supply. He also believed himself to be susceptible to cheese, steak, steak sauce, apple juice, grapefruit, sorghum, and all foods containing baking soda. Eating such foods usually brought on a reaction.
When he was tested in the office with scientific procedures, it was found that he was highly allergic to pork, milk, eggs, potato, beets and beet sugar, and peanuts. Eggs, for instance, brought on severe coughing, shortness of breath, and even vomiting.
By avoiding these incriminated foods entirely, he underwent a transformation. His fatigue and headache went away quickly. One day he popped in to visit me and proudly handed me an official school certificate citing him for "having completed the work of the past quarter with high honors." He had obtained straight A's in all his courses, including those in Analog Computers, Feedback Systems, and Lasers. At the bottom of the photocopy he had handed me he had written simply, "Thank you, Dr. Randolph."
Brain-fag is difficult to describe to those who have not seen it close up. It is a form of mental fatigue, a much more serious and debilitating symptom than physical tiredness. Brain-fag is characterized by mental confusion, slowness of thought, lack of initiative and ambition, irritability, occasional loss of sex drive, despondency, as well as bodily fatigue, weakness, and aching.
Some brain-fag patients report a feeling of being slowly poisoned. This becomes grist for some psychiatrists' mill—the fear of poisoning is interpreted as typical "paranoid" thinking. Unconsciously, however, such patients are expressing a truth: chemicals in the environment are slowly poisoning them, as are their reactions to commonly eaten foods.
People with brain-fag are more obviously ill than those at the minus-two level. Often called "phobic," they are too dizzy to walk, cannot get out of bed, cannot express their thoughts or remember what they are told. They seem to have lost their desire for life, and sometimes even call themselves the "living dead."
Such patients are almost never properly diagnosed They have "graduated" to this condition through a number of previous levels of physical and mental distress. They therefore usually have thick medical files, filled with long lists of complaints, many of them seemingly mental in origin. In truth, their medical problems are basically physical in origin (responses to foods or chemicals), but no one realizes this. To their doctors, their family members, and sometimes even themselves, they are classic "hypochondriacs" and attention-seekers.
Such patients are among the prime recipients of mood-altering drugs, electroshock therapy, psychotherapy, and prolonged sermons from assorted well-wishers. None of this does much good, and as time goes by they tend to get progressively sicker. They may eventually graduate to the deep despondency of minus-four: depression, or "psychosis." Others linger at the minus-three level for years, sometimes experiencing temporary remissions. The general course of an untreated ecologic illness, however, is downward.
Since minus-three reactors often graduate from the minus-two category, which includes physical fatigue, the distinction between brain-fag and plain tiredness was difficult to make. The first clear description of both phenomena was made in 1930 by Dr. Albert Rowe, the father of the study of food allergy, who called food-caused fatigue "allergic toxemia." In an article which he wrote on the subject, he gave a good description of some of the mental symptoms which commonly are associated with physical tiredness.
Rowe observed that mental symptoms often alternate with physical symptoms. He quoted a sixteenth-century physician who noted, apropos of asthma, that "there appears a great dulness [sic] and fulness [sic] in the head with a slight headache and great sleepiness before the fit [i.e., asthma attack]."1 This certainly seems to be an old description of the "modern" disease.
In the 1940s, I was able to confirm many of Rowe's observations and put them in the context of environmental illness. In particular, I differentiated between physical (minus-two) fatigue and mental (minus-three) fatigue, or brainfag. Why hadn't other doctors seen the same thing? They had, of course, but had misinterpreted the phenomena because of their traditional separation of mental and physical problems. "The majority of allergic individuals with the fatigue syndrome," I wrote in the 1940s, "have been previously diagnosed as 'neurotics.' "
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