An Open Letter to Allan Rock

While you are re-organizing the health care system, please also organize accessibility for those disabled by multiple chemical sensitivity. The situation at present is that those disabled by chemically-induced illness have virtually no access to medical practitioners, even for something as simple as a broken leg because of chemical pollutants in doctor's offices and hospitals.

All medical clinics should be required to provide an area within their premises that is safe. This would require attention to construction and selection of renovation materials, as well as to personal and equipment chemicals on site. It also requires more than what is presently acceptable for required ventilation for sealed interiors. Windows that open are the best insurance that a space can be rendered safe for the hypersensitive. All hospitals should be required to provide safe space as well.

The current trend towards knocking down older hospitals (which were largely built using much less toxic materials and had windows that open) will ultimately prove to be the greatest mistake ever made in the re-organization of health care. As a greater proportion of the population increasingly succumbs to injury by chemicals and as the number of unregulated and untested chemicals and environmental pollution increases, so too will the need for chemically "clean" recovery. If we have only newly-constructed hospitals, clean spaces will be largely unavailable.

Doctors should be required to educate themselves about chemical illnesses with varying symptom patterns. Similarly, medical schools must be required to address the condition thoroughly. The great majority of physicians are either totally uninformed or misinformed about the reality of multiple chemical sensitivity.