CASE STUDY: BRAIN-FAG AND SEXUAL IMPOTENCE

My original brain-fag case was that of Mr. Carrington. Carrington held a position of responsibility within the United States government. His job entailed a great deal of detail work and a profound knowledge of several unusual fields. His colleagues had looked upon Carrington as a kind of human computer in the days before computers had in fact taken over such arduous tasks.

Over a period of years, Carrington noticed that his capacity for work was diminishing. He kept a special file on his desk of difficult material. He found that he could only work on this material at the most once a week, when his brain was “in full gear.” During the rest of the time he suffered from what he himself dubbed “brain-fag”—a term he had come across in his wide reading. I was startled by his use of the term brain-lag to describe his illness. When I first heard this word, I thought it was pure slang, but on looking it up in dictionaries, I found that it has been in the English language for a century. 1 have continued to use it, because it is one of the few descriptive terms which has not been “redefined” in psychiatric dictionaries.

Associated with his brain-fag was sexual impotence and malaise. He had more or less lost his sexual drive. The only way he and his wife could have intercourse was if he took two stiff bourbons on a carefully timed schedule. The bourbon would restore his libido for a short while.

Carrington was in the Library of Congress one day, searching for a clue to his “brain-fag,” when he came across the book Food Allergy, which I had co-authored with Drs. Rinkel and Zeller in 1951 and in which I had described allergic fatigue. He went straight to a phone book, called me up, and within thirty-six hours had been admitted to the hospital under my care.

Carrington turned out to be violently susceptible to corn. This did not surprise me, since he was from the South and many of his fellow Southerners are similarly susceptible. This helped explain why he was stimulated by bourbon, in which corn is a principal ingredient. When Carrington avoided corn in all its forms, as well as a few other foods to which he was found to be susceptible, he underwent a transformation. Both his work output and his sexual ability improved immediately, and he was soon leading a normal and productive life.

Brain-fag may go untreated or unrecognized in those who lead a sedentary, noncompetitive life. For those in positions of responsibility, where they must compete with other relatively well individuals, brain-fag can be a disaster. Two cases will illustrate the course of treated and untreated ecologic illness.

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THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF ALLERGIES: FOGGING FOR INSECT ABATEMENT AND WEED CONTROL

We have spoken of insecticides as a source of indoor air pollution. They are also a source of outdoor air pollution, especially in the form of insect and weed abatement programs.

Many people who know themselves to be susceptible to chemicals move to the suburbs or the countryside to escape from the source of their problem. Having moved to what they think is a safe haven, they are sometimes presented with a worse problem: insect abatement. Sometimes rural or suburban residents are “abated” in the dead of night without any prior warning. Large chemical spraying rigs move through the neighborhood, applying poisons to trees, roadsides, and ponds.

Sleeping quietly in bed with the windows open, a susceptible person’s first warning of an abatement rig may be to awake with a strangling cough or even an epilepticlike seizure. I have been called out at night on a number of occasions to resuscitate such people.

Chemically susceptible patients living in areas where these programs exist have to take rather elaborate precautions to guard against such exposures. Some contact the local agencies and ask them for advance notice when their area is to be treated with pesticide sprays. Others flee the area when spraying starts or lock themselves in their homes until the toxic chemicals disperse somewhat.

Yet others attempt to move farther into the country. Sadly, this strategy usually fails, since the abatement programs are often enthusiastically carried out in the rural districts as well. New spraying agencies are continually being formed, or else the escapee runs into trouble with farmers who are spraying for weed and insect control or with foresters spraying their trees. A few of my patients have actually moved back into the city, in order to escape the indiscriminate spraying which is now practiced in the countryside!

It is a sad commentary when people must flee to the polluted cities to escape the even worse pollution of the rural areas. Even a drive in the country is now often perilous for chemically susceptible individuals. One may suddenly encounter roadside weed control programs at any time. If this happens, you are well advised to stop, turn the car around, and escape as quickly as possible. An alternative plan is to close the car windows and breathe through an activated carbon filter, if one is available. Even driving along a recently sprayed roadside or railway right-of-way or through a country area immediately after spraying may trigger reactions.

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CHILDREN’S HEALTH: FREQUENT ILLNESSES

Parents often become concerned that their children are ill too frequently. Sometimes the parents are right, and the child does have some underlying medical problem. But, normally, having many illnesses is not due to any particular problem in the child. Usually, how often a child becomes ill depends on the number of children in the family and the number of diseases each child is exposed to.

Except for accidents and allergies, 95 percent of all illnesses are caused by germs that live exclusively in humans. Most children’s illnesses are caught from other children. Whether a child will catch a disease depends on two factors: whether the child is exposed to the germ and how strong the child’s resistance is.

If your child is frequently ill with different minor illnesses, the illnesses are usually due simply to exposure to many people. As soon as a child begins going to daycare or school, the child is exposed to other children with illnesses. The number of children in a household also is a factor. Mathematically, a four-child family could have 16 times as many childhood illnesses as a one-child family.

A child frequently ill with the same illness may have a defect of local resistance (a lowered resistance to disease in one area of the body). For example, repeated pneumonia in the same part of a lung suggests an abnormality in that area.

A child with frequent major illnesses or frequent complications of minor sicknesses may have a general lack of resistance. This occurs with immune mechanism defects, which hinder the child’s ability to fight infectious diseases. For instance, colds that always end up as croup, bronchiolitis, bronchitis, or pneumonia may indicate an underlying allergy.

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