The 2024 book, The Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide by Neil Nathan MD, is a great resource to assist patients with multiple sensitivities understand what’s going on with their body in addition to finding a path to healing. While Dr. Nathan has focused much of his practice on patients with Lyme Disease and Environmental Toxins, I’ve found that his understanding of the manifestations of symptoms of extremely sensitive patients (such as myself) is very affirming. I’ve been told by well meaning doctors and nurses that there’s no way anyone could be as sensitive as I am. Not helpful!
His book, Toxic: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness, introduced me to the concept of Cell Danger Response, which I wrote about in a previous blog post.
Dr Nathan is on the forefront of understanding what no western medicine doctor that I’ve seen understands – that the symptoms I experience aren’t “all in my head” and that it is possible to be extremely sensitive to scents, chemicals, foods, pollens and more. For me, even the smallest amount of a new food can send my body into a mast cell reaction.
By reading this book, I’m getting more of a vision of what’s going on in my body with the various systems and cell reactions – the limbic system and the vagus nerve affect the messages that my brain and my gut are sending and receiving; the mast cells are releasing chemicals believing my body is under attack (even when it’s not) and needs to be defended. All of these mixed up communications create a firestorm inside my body that continues to create more and more sensitivity. No western doctor has ever offered me anything other than a medication. This book offers many more paths to try to get the communication corrected between systems and cells including frequency specific microcurrent (FSM) and other new devices to help appropriately stimulate the vagus nerve and quiet the autonomic nervous system.
This book is comprised of chapters written by experts on a particular topic. For example, Annie Hopper, the founder of DNRS (Dynamic Neural Retraining System) writes a chapter on the Limbic System and Stephen Porges, PhD writes a chapter on Polyvagal Theory. There is a great and VERY thorough chapter on Mast Cell Activation Syndrome written by Beth O’Hara who created Mastcell360.com. Getting detailed descriptions from these expert’s research and findings added to my understanding of these topics. Also, each expert gives a long list of potential modalities that they’ve found have helped their patients to heal. Also, Long COVID is mentioned frequently in the book, since it was just written last year. As I continue to pursue new modalities to try, it’s wonderful to get more options.
The book also goes into the various triggers that can create sensitivity such as emotions, genetics, viruses such as COVID, hormones and more. If you’ve been trying to get a diagnosis of what’s ailing you, I’d highly suggest reading this book. Many of the chapters also have a list of symptoms to assist you in discovering what could be at the source of your illness.
P.S. I did not receive any remuneration for suggesting this book. It is suggested based upon my experience of it being a valuable source of information.
