MULTIPLE SENSITIVITY: IF YOU WANT TO GO FURTHER

If you know that you react to many things and that basic avoidance has not helped very much, you will probably need specialist help and advice. If you need advice on medical treatments.

Skin and laboratory tests can help to identify what substances you are allergic to, although they will not help with chemical sensitivity or food intolerance. Which will also help you work out what might cause your problems in different areas of your life, and help identify patterns of symptoms.

If you want to take the process of elimination and avoidance much further, and clear your environment of the things that cause you to react, use the other sections of this Guide to help you with thorough avoidance. Choose either an area of life where you have the most pressing problems, or a type of allergen or substance that seems to be particularly troublesome. Only investigate one area or type of allergen at a time – you will get very confused results if you are eliminating many things at once and you do indeed have multiple sensitivity. You may find the process complicated in that your symptoms may not totally disappear when you remove only one cause from around you, but you should always notice some difference, and usually some improvement, when you avoid one thing, as long as it is something that causes you to react. If you notice no change or disturbance at all in your symptoms, then you are unlikely to be sensitive to the one thing you have chosen to avoid.

This phenomenon of ‘masking’, or the symptoms of multiple sensitivities hiding or blurring each other, is one of the most difficult things to untangle when you start avoiding things. Often, when you avoid and eliminate one allergen or substance, you find that another starts to bother you more intensely than before, as if its effects have been unmasked by the removal of the first substance.