From that article:

> Blinded clinical trials show that people with MCS react as often and as strongly to placebos as they do to chemical stimuli; the existence and severity of symptoms is seemingly related to perception that a chemical stimulus is present.

This reminds me of the people moving out to the middle of no where because they claim to be sensitive to wifi.

While not a physical thing, it can be ""real"": https://youtu.be/O2hO4_UEe-4

I don't believe this study for a second based on personal experience. It sounds about as trustworthy as tobacco-is-harmless and fat-not-sugar studies of the past.

This is why people don’t take your claims seriously. If you aren’t even willing to consider an opposing viewpoint, why should anyone consider yours? What’s the point in having a discussion?

Clearly you have some kind of hypersensitivity to indoor environments. I’m not convinced it’s VOCs. They’ve been with us for a long time now, spanning a few generations, and life expectancy is only increasing. Maybe I’m wrong; I’m open to that possibility.

On the hand, the only other people I’ve met with issues similar to yours have allergic histamine reactions to particulates that are benign to everyone else. Like dust and grass. I have a friend that gets a shot every few months for it, and doesn’t have a problem when treated. Have you considered speaking with a doctor?

Yep antigen shots worked for my grass pollen allergy

I don't have allergies, and I am not sensitive to indoor envornments by themselves. I just get very tired and a migraine-like reaction when exposed to synthetic cleaning products and new furniture, as far as recently.

I don't need scientific consensus to prove it to me, I live it myself.

People I am close with do take me seriously, and the problem is fixed when the VOCs are taken away.

You aren't receiving pushback from people who are attempting to deny your experience. I don't think anybody here doubts the experiences you have mentioned.

Instead people are questioning your analysis of the root cause. You can be meaningfully and honestly impacted and also be wrong about why you are having trouble. Even in the most extreme case where somebody wants to claim you effectively experiencing the placebo effect, that does not detract from the realness of your issue.

I think many people have trouble really groking this separation. Questioning the root cause can often feel like questioning the problem. Additionally it is easy to become attached to an explanation that may be faulty. Humans are not well-evolved to be perfectly rational and completely detached observers of their own lives. And faulty explanations don't necessarily cause faulty solutions, which can make things even harder to disentangle.

However I think it's important to try to keep in mind that all of these aspects are distinct in important ways despite being related. It is possible to question or even refute these aspects individually without casting aspersions on the other aspects. You can have a real problem, and a working solution, and still be completely wrong about why. That's fine, and actually pretty normal.

VOC's aren't all man-made. You'd need to live in a vacuum to avoid them altogether.

The nice smell after a rain storm? VOC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound#Biol...

What are you saying, that because some VOCs are found in nature, any man-made VOC is OK too, just because it is part of the same chemical compound family?

I think the appropriate conclusion would be your sensitive to something more specific than just the very broad class of VOCs in general.

So... the ones I am not sensitive to, are they not harmful?

Just for the record, VOCs are literally "anything organic that boils at less than 250°C" (in the EU).

Farts are full of VOCs. No, seriously, every time I fart the TVOC sensor in my air purifier goes nuts, as does the one in my air quality meter. It's almost like the thing is shaming me for it :)

I would encourage you to learn more about the different types of VOCs, and at which concentrations they are known to be harmful. You might be having true allergic reactions to some harmless VOCs. You might be having psychosomatic reactions to other VOCs. You might not be having reactions to some harmful VOCs at all. Lumping it all together into "VOCs" is not helpful.

Wait a minute, so you're telling me when I was laughing with my husband about how we should fart in front of the new air purifier and see if the sensor went off and he dismissed me, rolled his eyes and called me juvenile THAT I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG?!?!?

I,m using a more restricted definition of synthetics which we didn,t evolve with.

I don't know that we know enough to know that. It's certainly true that there are "natural" VOC's that can be harmful, and man-made VOC's that are not known to be harmful. I wouldn't necessarily presume that sensitivity is directly correlated to harm.

The study may be true on average but not in every particular case. The way we do most medical studies today, with relatively small samples and coarse aggregate statistics, isn't well-suited to detecting rare but genuine issues with a high false positive rate.

There are also two major issues with science today.

The first is that a lot of studies are simply careless. They use a "placebo" which has a scent to give the indication that there is something there, but then the "placebo" unintentionally contains VOCs. Or the lab's janitor uses them to clean the lab, things like that.

The second is that a lot of studies are funded by people with agendas. It's all too easy to get an invalid result by accident, much less on purpose.

See also replication crisis.

So then you either have to know and trust the authors of the study or spend the time to go through it with a fine toothed comb and find replications from independent scientists before you can trust it. Which nobody really has the time to do, so the default position becomes to dismiss anything the reader disagrees with.

It's a problem.

> I don't believe this study for a second

You don't get to throw away opposing evidence because it does not agree with the point you're attempting to sell. You don't actually want to have a conversation, you just want to push an agenda.

I call it the canary system. Some people are more sensitive than others, but we're all being harmed with it.

For my part, I pay attention to what others are sensitive to and avoid it as well.

If someone else has trouble coping with a substance but I'm "fine", that probably means that underneath my constituents are still struggling to deal with it and just not telling me.

Ssome people are allergic to peanuts, doesn't seem like a well grounded theory.

Peanut, Egg, and Milk protein (CMPA) allergies are common in babies. My understanding is that the digestive system is not mature enough to process them, so it rejects them. Some of these allergies develop even while breast fed (baby colic). I take that some allergies stick once developed. But you should consider that something that creates an allergy response in a baby may be not harmful at all for an adult. And sometimes, once the allergy is triggered it sticks.

I wonder why they weren't common 30 years ago. Not a single person in my entire family from my generation and before has a single allergy, nor was it ever a big thing in school I attended in various US states in the 90s and early 00s.

It's like between the time I went to college and my own kids started school, they exploded and now all of the sudden a PB&J sandwich isn't allowed in school. That would have been unfathomable to me in my youth.

Its untrue, peanuts and milk allergies were very common 30 years ago, probably more than now in percentage. My genetic grandmother can't eat most of processed food without having an allergic reaction. Probably people were a bit ashamed of their non-threatening food allergies (most food allergies just give a lot of gas and small stomachaches).

Also related, Distilbene did not only wreck fecondity, it gave a lot of children food allergies, and i'm pretty sure distilben distribution stopped in the late 70s, so maybe we should just get the numbers and compare, but i'd bet food allergies were more prevalent in the 80s.

Interesting, I might have been in a bubble then. My parents and their generation immigrated to the US from a developing country, much poorer, but in all of our family gatherings, there was never a concern for allergies. And we use basically everything in our cooking.

I specifically remember weddings and whatnot when snacks were given out to everyone that there was no hesitation in offering anyone else's kids food for fear of them having an allergy.

I wonder then what the catalyst was for schools banning nuts and airlines no longer serving peanuts. Assuming people were always allergic in similar or higher proportion with similar severity, was it simply changes in the political winds?

It's because

(1) the internet and social media means you know about far more people with allergies than before,

(2) you are a adult and not a child, so you know more people now

(3) institutions have adopter broad inclusionary policies even if no one with an allergy is present

(4) institutions are being far more careful now (you eating a your granola bar poses no significant risk to someone with a peanut allergy, but it's still banned sitewide).

I asked my parents about this, and they said that peanuts weren't common back then - they were expensive and a luxury so as a result we didn't have such widespread visibility of the problem.

Allergies where common 30 years ago, but you are right about the percentage of people that have allergies is raising and getting more severe. You can even find references to allergy going back to Aristotle's time, so not exactly a new thing. I haven't got a link to it, but did take a webinar on allergy some weeks ago.

None know exactly why where are getting more allergic, but since allergy most often is the immune system attacking harmless things some theories is that we have to clean an environment in our homes.

I think that the immune system "correlates" them with other harmful substances which are sometimes but not always present. The number of possible culprits is long: pesticides, random cleaning products used on the processing equipment, sometimes mold can grow on peanuts if they're stored improperly, the list goes on.

Our immune systems are in many ways similar to police forces, and if they hear "a problem being reported" often enough while peanuts are around, they may just bunch them together with the offender.

The problem is compounded by a dirty baseline environment. In the early stages, the immune system is "primed" with a "baseline" of what should and shouldn't be there, but if the VOCs and such are already there, it just learns that they are OK and doesn't react to them.

I attended school in the late 90s early 2000s (in canada).

It was a big deal then, there were kids i knew who were deathly alergic to peanuts.

Severe allergeries seem to be on the rise but i think your timeframe is wrong.

I went to to 8 different schools between K to 12th grades in 6 different states, and I don't recall meeting anyone who was deadly allergic to anything. I'm pretty sure I didn't even learn about epipens until maybe later in high school or possibly college.

The only ailment in kids that I think I had heard of was asthma, for which people had inhalers.

Of course, my data is weak and anecdotal, but based on the fact that a staple American food isn't allowed in schools anymore, I assume something must have changed.

Attending K-12 in the late 80's/early 90's I didn't know anyone with a serious allergy in school. There was never any concern about peanut butter food/snacks, or anything like that. A few kids with inhalers, that was it.

Allergy != Intolerance. When you have an allergy, you suffocate, when you have intolerance to something, it'll be unpleasant to be around you and you may spend some time on the toilet. This is an oversimplification, but one is an immune reaction and the other isn't. Inability to digest something to me sounds like neither of those cases.

This is an oversimplification. An allergy will not necessarily cause anaphylaxis (suffocating, etc). I'm allergic to a lot of types of pollen/mold/dander (skin prick test) and also two food items, also identified with a skin prick test, and I've never yet had anaphylaxis. When I eat oatmeal/rye (my food allergies) I get a runny nose, fatigue, and mild GI distress.

Forgot to mention, I also have lactose intolerance. I think I have a bit of gluten intolerance too, but that might be psychosomatic and I haven't yet had a family member help with a blind study on myself. Sometime I intend to.

The main point was that failure to digest something doesn't mean that you are allergic or intolerant. My impression was that this was what the example with babies' bodies "rejecting" some foods that they cannot process implied. Humans can eat stuff they cannot digest (fiber, corn kernels without chewing, anyone?) without adverse effects, stuff will just pass through. Unless you're eating nails or glass, but that's a mechanical damage...

Peanuts are a great example. I am not allergic to peanuts myself, but I avoid eating them.

I don't know why people become allergic to them, but there must be something in some peanuts which sets off their immune system.

The true irony of this statement, and I want to emphasize I am not a doctor, is that you are more likely to cause a peanut allergy by avoiding it!

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/01/10/peanut-allergy-earl...

Similar to germ theory, some exposure is actually good.

From my understanding, some types of exposure promote allergy while other types of exposure prevent it.

That's not how allergies work. People with allergies get an immune reaction to a harmless compound.

This assumes that if your immune system reacts negatively to something, it is guaranteed to be actually harmful to the body.

If our immune systems and bodies were all-knowing and perfect, then sure, that would be a valid assumption, but they're far from it.

How far do you take that theory? People have allergies to many (normally) benign substances. Melons, natural latex, ibuprofen, pollen, etc.

Generally speaking, if it wasn't in my ancestors' environment, I avoid it. Otherwise, approach with caution.

Nature can be dangerous, too, but at least it's likely that someone in the past has dealt with it and lived to reproduce.

With new synthetic substances, you're essentially doing alpha-testing with your irreplaceable hardware/software system...

Pollen in particular is weird because simply being outside should expose you to some level of pollen, compared to foods like melons or peanuts that may or may not be part of your diet. I'm mildly allergic to dust mites and they're literally everywhere.

Right. I'm currently undergoing allergy immunotherapy, so back in October I had a battery of allergy tests.

Turns out I'm allergic to some trees, some grasses, pollen, mold, dust mites, and a bunch of other things. And yet my childhood from a very young age was filled with playing outside in the yard and and in the woods.

Also my family had (indoor-only) cats since before I was born. My parents were allergic to them, and my sister and I are also allergic. (Wanting to get a cat is what prompted me to start the allergy shots.) So I've been exposed to cat dander since I was an infant. And yet: allergic. Some things are just hereditary, I guess.

I'm sure there are some cases where not being exposed to something when young can cause you to develop allergies, but that's definitely not the only cause. Seems like there is definitely a genetic component that can moot any amount of childhood exposure.

Yes, peanut proteins.

That's pseudo-science. There are lots of things that can kill some people and are harmless to others.

Better safe than sorry, don't you think?

Would you say VOCs are harmless to people who are not sensitive to them?

I am not commenting on VOCs specifically, just pointing out that the logic is flawed.

We should ban or control the substances for which we have strong suspicion, I think most sane people would agree. But where to put the line is difficult. Some trees have pollen that causes asthma attacks and several deaths every year; should we cut them all?

So we need more nuances than black or white.

Now if you want my opinion, I would agree that reducing volatile substances is good; we still need to be careful about the things we put in their place.

I see your point, but I think that you're most likely being overly careful when regulating your exposure to substances. As the person responding to your point about allergies stated, individual's bodies respond to (or don't respond to) substances in different ways.

Peanut allergies are an example of this: a person with allergies is having an immune response to the substance, while most humans don't experience this immune response. This doesn't necessarily indicate that peanuts are always inducing a low level "bad" reaction in people without allergies, just that those with allergies have an immune system that isn't properly reacting to a non-threat. Do you also not eat eggs, shellfish, every kind of tree nut, strawberries, or red meat? Because these are all possible allergies.

This isn't to say that VOC's aren't harmless, because I believe they are. But your assertion that sensitivities in one person indicate something about the entire human population is scientifically false and is most likely casting too wide of a net. You've essentially defined a process with high sensitivity (which means you catch all of the possible bad chemicals/substances), but very low specificity (you often identify substances as harmful when they are not). This is fine for ensuring safety but is unnecessarily restrictive.

I think that all those things are "approach with caution" territory.

Immune system can become sensitized not just to harmful substances, but also to ones "correlated" with them, meaning it's likely they've been exposed to e.g. peanuts which had something bad in them and associated it with the peanuts themselves.

Of course, there's also the fact that when a child is growing up in this VOC environment, their immune system never gets a chance to establish a good baseline for what should and shouldn't be in the system, and that is another reason allergies develop.

Life as a whole is balancing risk and reward. My desire to experience life outweighs my desire for safety.

If I could live infinitely long but never experience anything, what's the point? Safety is the largest danger.

I've done many dangerous things, but where is the experience reward for breathing VOCs?

Certainly riding in a new car is not worth it, is it? Or having a "fresh-smelling" house with nice-looking furniture?

Everything listed there is very enjoyable. New car smell has a name because people like it so much.

Sure, but I can find other enjoyable things which are not proven harmful.

Not to mention the insane amount of "biocide" which happens in the process of producing a new car.

I consider animals and plants to be my close relatives (and dependencies, meaning I won't live long without them), so if I can avoid money-voting for stuff which harms them, I choose that.

Dumb answer, but it's simpler to not have to worry about this stuff. How you balance that with the risk is subjective, but it's not true that there is no downside to avoiding VOCs.

With the existence of lactose intolerance and gluten intolerance, that seems like a difficult policy to live with.