– MCS 101.1: The Name Game
MCS 101 – Part 1
What’s in a name?
“Personally, I am absolutely convinced MCS is real, that it is serious and probably just the tip of the iceberg.”
– Dr. David Suzuki in communication with the South Australian Parliament’s Commission of Enquiry into MCS.
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WHAT’S IN A NAME
The disease I have, and am writing about here, goes by a number of names. In medical literature, researchers are fond of dubbing it with all kinds of sobriquets and acronyms that aren’t in common use in order to encapsulate their own hypotheses about it, but only a few names have taken hold. Because this is a relatively new disease – at least, its recognition and understanding are relatively new – a single name has not yet been adopted. Both the names in the medical literature and the ones in common usage reflect differences of opinion about the illness, its causes and symptoms. One discussion I invite here is on that topic: we still have to find the right name and people are welcome to write their thoughts about that. In the meantime, here are the most common names in use in English today:
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity - MCS: simply describes the symptoms and is probably the most common name used today because of that virtue. But it was put forward by a Yale scholar who denied the physiological basis of the disease– a fundamental error and a fundamental issue in debates about it. Consequently, some practitioners refuse to use the term, despite its popularity.
Environmental Illness – EI: many long-practicing clinicians who coined the phrase favour this name, especially in the U.S. and it is used interchangeably with MCS. This illness is environmental, without any doubt, and this term was coined many decades ago to describe the way in which people got sick from environmental incitants. However, today we know that there are many environmental illnesses so it seems to me not the best name to use.
Environmental Hypersensitivity – EH: this has become the official nomenclature of the Canadian federal government and is used in its documents and proclamation.
Another common term that’s similar is Environmental Sensitivity, ES, which seems very popular in some jurisdictions, including in Ontario where I live.
Chemical Sensitivity – CS; and Chemical Hypersensitivity — CH –– also used, also accurate, preferred by clinicians who just hate the term MCS because of their long standing battle to assert toxic injury as the causation of the disease, but still not inherently a particular improvement on MCS.
Toxic Injury — (TI): This is a broad term that refers to just what it says –toxic injury that causes ill health. TI is implicated in many different diseases, and is primary in MCS.
Given this multiplicity of names, despite its ignoble origins, for simplicity’s sake in this blog, I will use the acronym MCS. I will refer to TI where it is appropriate to speak of toxic injury either as a cause or as a broader category of illness. But readers please take note of all these names, for other contributors may use them interchangeably, and I will not edit contributions for nomenclature.
