In the preceding section, the basic concepts of food and chemical susceptibility were presented. In this section, we shall examine how such reactions actually affect patients with a variety of illnesses which are rarely helped by conventional medicine.
The chapters in this section are rather arbitrarily organized around particular diseases. This is, of course, the way conventional medicine, and most patients, think of their ailments. In actuality, however, most susceptible patients have a constellation of diseases, with few clear-cut distinctions between them. The headache patient, if questioned, may turn out to have many localized problems, on the one hand, and a tendency toward depression on the other. Or he may vacillate between periods of exuberance and energy and subsequent “hangovers.”
It is the orthodox, overly analytical medical system which insists on pigeonholing patients into disease categories, and, particularly, separating physical from “mental” or “emotional” problems. Whatever the practical benefits of such a scheme, it fails to describe these various complaints as part of an overall continuum of ill-health in the life of each individual patient.
What is meant by “headache” or “arthritis” below, then, is a stage of illness in which arthritis or headache is the principal, but rarely the sole, complaint. These levels of reaction were first described in 1956.1
The bulk of the cases presented here fall either into the plus-two, the minus-two, or the minus-three categories. In other words, they are intermediate between the least and the most extreme cases of both stimulation and withdrawal. The reasons for my emphasis on these conditions are as follows.
*53\110\2*
