Randolph's Disease/Syndrome

During the August 2006 MCS Definition Workshop, Dr. William Meggs, one of the researchers responsible for the 142-page report "Scientific Progress in Understanding Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses: Report and Recommendations" and author of the book The Inflamation Cure, recommended that Environmental Illness/Multiple Chemical Sensitivity be renamed Randolph's Syndrome (an eponym like Parkinson's).2 Several other physicians/researchers in attendance agreed with him. I, Janet Dauble, wholeheartedly agree with him. In fact I had spoken about Dr. Randolph and his achievements at the Forum to Discuss the Change of the Name Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at the October 1998 American Association of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Conference.

Indeed, changing the name of MCS to Randolph's would solve a lot of problems associated with all the other names in use. And, as his actual work would become more well-known, it might induce people diagnosed with CFS, Fibromyalgia, and Irritable Syndrome, Restless Legs Syndrome, General Anxiety Disorder, etc. to recognize that what they have is Randolph's Disease. After all, he was treating all these named diseases long before they were treated as separate entities.

But, who is this Dr. Randolph? Theron Grant Randolph, M.D. is known in the chemical sensitivity network as the Father of Clinical Ecology or, as it is now known, Environmental Medicine. The author of An Alternative Approach to Allergies, he trained some 32 doctors and was the force behind starting the yearly conferences presented by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine in 1965. (The 2007 Annual Meeting and Conference will be the 40th held.) He died at the age of 89 years old on September 29, 1995 -- the afternoon of the first day of the AAEM's 30th Annual Meeting and Conference. A memorial service was quickly added to the program and doctor after doctor related his/her memories of Dr. Randolph's expertise, his battles for acceptance of Environmental Medicine by allopathic medicine, his extraordinary patience and kindness to his patients, and their, often humorous, personal experiences with him. All knew him as an exhaustive history taker and listener! Dr. William J. Rea, director of the Environmental Health Center - Dallas dubbed him the "Greatest Living Physician of This Century." Dr. Rea shared how Dr. Randolph had "saved his family and kids," and how Dr. Randolph had helped him to get the EHC-Dallas started.

The fascinating introduction to Dr. Randolph's book, written by Ralph Moss, Ph.D., tells of Dr. Randolph's childhood, his medical schooling and medical practice. Dr. Moss also tells how he found out that his one cup of coffee a day constituted a food addiction and how hard it was for him to break that habit. Here are some interesting excerpts to share with you:

The second patient of [Dr. Randolph] was a 35 year-old housewife with eighteen to twenty complaints. Ted took them all down and then spent forty minutes reciting them to his instructor. "To my abject astonishment, my instructor became progressively amused and apparently disinterested as I related this long story. The crowning insult was his crack at the conclusion of my history: 'The more numerous a patient's complaints, the less significant any of them.'" Ted bravely argued with him, but to no avail. Fifty years later, he still "harbored a dim view of this doctor's medical ability." In fact, patience and a closed-mouthed interest in a patient's complaints--all her complaints--soon became the hallmark of Randolph's interviewing technique. He also began taking medical histories on the typewriter, something almost unheard of in the early 1930s.

During his senior year in medical school, Ted went to the allergists' meeting in Atlantic City. He met some of the pioneers of the field at that time. What was more significant, was that the immunologists were meeting there at the same time. Ted wandered into their meeting and happened to hear one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the field: the dean of American immunologists, Arthur F. Coca, pleading with his colleagues not to adopt the redefinition of allergy in terms of immunology [IgE, histamine response], which was then becoming fashionable. Coca's speech as it turned out was the "last gasp of objections." Nevertheless, Randolph came away from that meeting impressed with Coca's arguments. And, in fact, all the subsequent difficulties of clinical ecology in gaining acceptance can be dated from this time, since the kinds of allergies investigated and treated by clinical ecologists are precisely the kind ruled out by the immunological approach.

His rounds involved the students in a quest to discover the demonstrable cause of an illness in the patient's environment. Common foods were found to be the most frequent precipitating factor in these illnesses, Randolph taught, but their effects were masked. [See the bottom of page 13 for Dr. Claudia Miller's definition of masked.] It was the physician's job to unmask "nature's medical coverup" and to teach patients to avoid those foods that were responsible for their symptoms. This approach was in sharp contrast to the usual medical instruction at the time [and now].

Randolph's work....incurred the displeasure not only of two of the most powerful industries in this country (the food and petrochemical interests) but of the medical profession as well.

In 1949, Randolph had begun to write copiously and to publish his views on food allergy in medical journals. In that year, he obtained an appointment to testify at the Food and Drug Administration's hearing on bread in Washington, D.C. Randolph requested that food ingredients, especially, corn, cane, and beet sugar, be listed on the labels of processed food products.

In 1951 he made what was probably his greatest discovery, and one that was to get him into even greater professional difficulties than his previous findings. After studying a number of patients, some of whom are discussed at length in this book, he came to the conclusion that man's increasing pollution of the environment with chemicals was a major source of chronic illness. By this he did not mean simply reactions to toxic chemicals, such as those that formed the "killer smogs," which wiped out hundreds of lives in England during the 1940's. Randolph had discovered something far more subtle, yet more profound: namely, that ordinary, seemingly harmless chemicals in use in our homes, offices, and workplaces every day in "nontoxic" doses were responsible for a wide variety of mental, "emotional," and physical problems. These ranged from headache and depression to multiple muscle and joint aches and pains.

Randolph's work...proposed an alternative explanation and alternative treatment [actually, he practiced mainstream medicine but thought "out of the box"] for numerous diseases, mental and physical. It thus incurred the displeasure not only of two of the most powerful industries in this country (the food and petrochemical interests) but of the medical profession as well.

What is more, Randolph was proposing a simple way of diagnosing and treating a host of diseases that modern medicine is conspicuously unsuccessful in treating. In the field of problems that appear to be mental or emotional, which Randolph had first successfully treated in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Chicago allergist offered a perfectly scientific, rational, and cogent approach -- and was almost completely ignored by the psychiatric profession.

Randolph's methods....did not rely on the sale of any drug, vitamin, or other commodity but, in fact, on the avoidance of such commodities.

The psychiatrists remained wedded to a purely psychological approach to mental disease until about 1950. In that year, two momentous discoveries were made. On the one hand, Randolph proposed his ecologic approach to mental illness, which is described in this book. On the other hand, the first mind-altering, mood-elevating drugs that were to be used for treating psychosis were put on the market.

Randolph's methods were individualized and time consuming for both doctor and patient. They did not rely on the sale of any drug, vitamin, or other commodity but, in fact, on the avoidance of such commodities. The pharmaceutical approach, on the other hand, was a mass-applicable program....American doctors wrote 120 million tranquilizer prescriptions a year in the late 1970s, enough for 12 billion doses....In 1986, American doctors wrote 131 million prescriptions for psychotherapeutic [psychotropic] drugs (excluding sedatives).

It is hardly surprising, then, that organized medicine took the path of drugging the patient, as opposed to the more difficult but more logical path of deducing the actual environmental causes of a patient's illness and then treating the problem by eliminating these causes. Despite opposition, Randolph managed to continue his full-time practice in allergy, run an innovative ecology unit in various hospitals, and, most important, publish 350 scientific communications in this field, making contributions to the treatment and understanding of numerous diseases. (3)

Regarding the antagonism of the medical field for his dependence on case histories for diagnosis and treatment, Dr. Moss said Where would we be if we eliminated such observations from medicine? From Hippocrates and Galen to Lind, Semmelweis, and Jenner, it has been the case study, as much as anything else, that has goaded medicine forward.

What Randolph is saying, in effect, is trust the patient.

Behind these objections to Randolph's method, however, one senses something deeper: a philosophical antagonism. What Randolph is saying, in effect, is trust the patient. The patient is not a liar, a braggart, or a fool. He usually is, in the doctor's words, an "experienced medical shopper" by necessity. Those who constantly harp on so-called placebo effects, on "hospitals," on "thick file cases" and "Baron Munchhausen complexes" betray a fundamental distrust of this medical consumer. Randolph, on the other hand, has developed a rapport with these patients, but sometimes at the expense of rapport with his colleagues.

The only way to know the ultimate value of clinical ecology to so-called mental, emotional, or physical ailments is to try this method....both physicians and patients will find that a surprising number of ailments are, in fact, caused by unsuspected environmental factors, especially common foods and "safe" chemicals.

Whenever this realization becomes general knowledge, it will be Theron G. Randolph, more than any other individual, who will receive credit for this major contribution to modern medicine.

Whenever this realization becomes general knowledge, it will be Theron G. Randolph, more than any other individual, who will receive credit for this major contribution to modern medicine.

Now, you have a little taste of why Dr. Randolph should be honored for his work with chronically ill people. And, while we are at it, there is so much more that you need to know to improve your health. His book An Alternative Approach to Allergies would make a good start. Dr. Randolph began his book with a chapter on Hidden Addictions. Here are just a few excerpts from his book to whet your appetite for more intriguing and vital information. This is especially important for those people diagnosed with CFS, Fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Restless Legs Syndrome, etc.

This new approach is based primarily on diet. But it must be emphasized from the start that the kind of diet advocated by clinical ecologists has nothing to do with any of the standardized, mass-applicable dietary programs you may have heard about. It does not advocate the use of any particular nutrient, vitamin, or mineral in the fight against illness. Nor does it summarily ban any food.

Rather, it explains how you or your physician can detect and eliminate those commonly encountered foods and environmental chemicals that may be responsible for your ill health. The emphasis here is on the word you: this is an individualized approach. It concerns the interaction between you and your particular environment, which is different from anyone else's. You must discover the foods and chemicals that may be making you feel sick without your being aware of their effect. You must eliminate them from your diet and environment or learn to control their intake in order to get well.

Usually, neither the patients nor their physicians have suspected food allergy as the root of their problem because most food allergy, by its nature, is masked and hidden.

I have practiced this approach to illness throughout my fifty years as an allergist in the Midwest. I have treated 20,000 people for food allergies and related problems and have dealt with virtually every kind of chronic illness on an allergic basis. About 7,500 of these patients were suffering primarily from so-called mental problems. The majority of these patients have been helped significantly, often after conventional methods of treatment have failed. Sometimes patients have come to me with a single well-defined ailment. Typically, however, patients have been polysymptomatic, that is, they have had a long history of many problems, physical and mental, which had left them in a general state of misery. The more symptoms they accumulated, the less their doctors believed their complaints.

Usually, neither the patients nor their physicians have suspected food allergy as the root of their problem because most food allergy, by its nature, is masked and hidden. It is hidden from the patient, hidden from his or her family, hidden from the medical profession in general. It is said that often the solution to a difficult problem is right in front of your nose, but you cannot see it. In the case of food allergy, the source of the problem is literally in front of you, in the form of some commonly eaten substance that is bringing on and perpetuating chronic symptoms.

Of course, some people do know that they are allergic to certain foods, but generally these are foods that are rarely eaten. A person who is allergic to cashews, for instance, may break out in a rash on the rare occasions when he consumes these nuts. He overcomes this problem by simply avoiding cashews, and that is generally the end of the matter.

Allergies to commonly eaten foods are not so readily detected or avoided, however. Let us say, for instance, that you developed an allergy to milk early in life. At first, this may have resulted in acute reactions, such as a rash or a cough. In time, if the allergy was not recognized and controlled, the symptoms may have become more generalized and less easily detected. Since you probably went on drinking milk or eating milk products almost every day, one day's symptoms blurred into the next day's. You developed a chronic disease, such as arthritis, migraine, or depression. It never occurred to you that your daily dose of milk was the source of the problem.

...any food can be abused by overeating it.

In fact, you were probably "abusing" milk. You had become a milk junkie, a milk-o-holic. It is in the nature of this problem, that a sudden loss of the craved substance can cause withdrawal symptoms. Since removal of milk brought on a particularly bad attack of the symptoms, you unconsciously learned to keep yourself on a maintenance dose. Milk in the morning with cereal, milk in your coffee, yogurt for lunch, a glass of milk with your dinner, and, of course, a platter of cheese tidbits before retiring.

Milk is just mentioned as an example. In fact, any food can be abused by overeating it. If a food is eaten in any form once in three days, or more frequently, it is being abused and may become a big problem for the consumer. Since it may take between three and four days for a meal to make its way through the digestive tract, the person in question is not free of that food before another dose is added to the stomach. Intolerance to this food may sneak up on the person who eats it after months, years, or even decades of day-in and day-out ingestion.

The chief reason these reactions to commonly eaten foods are not readily recognized is that they are part of a pattern of constant reactions in which periods of heightened stimulation may give way to periods of letdown, or "withdrawal" effects. In the beginning of the problem, eating the food has a marked, immediate stimulatory effect lasting up to several hours. Simply by eating a particular food, such as coffee, wheat, or corn, as often as necessary, the "up" effect may be maintained for a relatively long period of time. It is only when such foods are not eaten regularly that a kind of "hangover," or withdrawal reaction, occurs. Some people find, for instance, that if they sleep late on Sunday morning, they wake up with a headache, which usually goes away when they eat. The reason for this is a physical need for some food, such as coffee, which is normally taken early in the morning.

Since the delayed withdrawal effects can usually be controlled by eating some form of the same food, the whole cumulative process of reaction can be called a food addiction. A food addiction differs only in degree of severity from a drug addiction.

Dr. Randolph addresses chemical sensitivity, chemicals in our foods, indoor and outdoor air pollution, detoxification, hyperactivity, and alcoholism in his book. I want to take this opportunity to share some of Dr. Randolph's tidbits on alcoholism with you because so many people with chronic illness and environmental sensitivities have relatives who are alcoholics!!!

Through testing, Dr. Randolph found that alcoholics are unknowingly sensitive to a food ingredient(s) in their beverage of choice. Thus, the reason that they cannot stop their craving for alcohol is because they continue to ingest the same ingredient(s) in meals, snacks and nonalcoholic beverages. Therefore, no matter how hard they grit their teeth, pray, be prayed for, and be counseled, the cravings will not stop completely until they avoid the particular ingredient(s) in other foods. (Drug addicts, also, may be unknowingly food allergic and use drugs to overcome physical symptoms and emotional problems caused by the unknown food allergy.)

Dr. Randolph said that The only way to know whether one is actually sensitive to corn, wheat (rye, barley, malt), or other grains, yeast, grape, potato, or other ingredients of alcoholic beverages is to undergo extensive food testing.

One of Dr. Randolph's vignettes regarding alcoholism is about testing Ted Parsons, who was one of the founding members of Alcoholics Anonymous, in 1948. He carried around with him a pocket full of candies containing corn sugar, which he sucked whenever he had the urge to drink. This was, in fact, the standard operating procedure of his Alcoholics Anonymous unit. Through practice, these individuals had found that they could relieve their craving for grain-containing alcoholic beverages by sucking on another rapidly absorbed form of grain. They had, in effect, transferred food addiction in it highest form - alcoholism - to food addiction in a less severe (and from the addict's point of view, less satisfactory) form-addiction to corn sugar. When Parsons realized that he was actually perpetuating his problem by eating this candy, he stopped immediately and avoided all contact with wheat, corn, and related foods that had been implicated [by allergy testing]. By avoiding his positive allergens, Ted Parsons "found his headache and fatigue not only subsided, but, what is more, his craving for alcohol disappeared." And, no doubt, his quality of life improved greatly.

Dr. Randolph dedicated his book An Alternative Approach to Allergies:

This book is dedicated to all patients who have ever been called neurotic, hypochondriac, hysterical, or starved for attention, while actually suffering from environmentally induced illness.

Share, Care and Prayer sells his book, An Alternative Approach to Allergies for $16.00 plus $1.59 for shipping. California residents, please add sales tax.

We also offer free copies of his papers:

1. "Fatigue and Weakness of Allergic Origin (Allergic Toxemia) to be Differentiated From 'Nervous Fatigue' or Neurasthenia," Annals of Allergy, November-December 1945

2. "The Coincidence of Allergic Disease, Unexplained Fatigue, and Lymphadenopathy; Possible Diagnositc Confusion with Infectious Mononucleosis," Amer J Med Sci, 209:306-314, Mar, 1945

3. "Ecologically Oriented Rheumatoid Arthritis," Clinical Ecology, 1976

4. "Ecologically Oriented Myalgia and Related Musculoskeletal Painful Syndromes," Clinical Ecology, 1976. This chapter follows the preceding one on Rheumatoid Arthritis. Therefore, it helps to read both. It is very interesting that Dr. Randolph even wrote about the trigger points used to diagnose Fibromyalgia in this chapter: "Nodular or knob-like exquisitely painful firm areas within involved muscles or at their points of insertion are common occurrences."

5. "Environmental Incitants [allergens] of Chest, Neck, and Shoulder Pains," Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting, December 1962.

6. "Restless Legs-Brainfag Syndrome," Clinical Research, Vol. 22, page 644a, 1972. Dr. Randolph uses the term "brainfag" instead of "brainfog" because it is an actual term cited in psychological dictionaries to describe what many chronically ill people experience today. Fibromyalgia patients have since coined the term "fibrofog" and chemotherapy patients have coined the term "chemofog" to explain the same set of symptoms without recognizing that all are cognitive problems (reactions) caused by exposure to foods, chemicals, molds, medicine, etc. to which they have become sensitive.






1. In his medical column in the Pasadena Star-News March 20, 2007, Dr. Peter Gott answered the question What's the definition of "disease"? A reader had wondered why heart, kidney, cancer, etc. problems were now called diseases. She was under the impression that the word disease was only used to describe microbial/viral and contagious conditions. Dr. Gott answered: The term "disease" refers to any negative abnormality in the body, whether it is cancer, infection, heart problems, diabetes and so forth. I believe that it is entirely appropriate for you to abandon your limited definition of "disease" and subscribe to the broad, nonpolitical, newer generalization that is the current standard. We are all subjected to varying diseases, only a few of which are caused by bacterial or viral infections.

2. Lawrence Plumlee, M.D. told me that medicine is currently trying to use descriptive terms for diseases instead of men's names, such as hyperthyroidism instead of Graves' disease.

3. According to a letter from an archivist at the Countway Library of Medicine, an alliance of the Boston Medical Library and Harvard Medical School, published in The Human Ecology Study Group Third Quarter 2006 newsletter, Dr. Randolph's papers are about three quarters of the way through the archiving process. Here is an excerpt from the archivist's letter:

The papers have been arranged into three primary series: Individual, Organizations, and Topics, with some overlap between the series. To a lesser degree, Randolph's files also contain final copies of exhibitions and publications, as well as other related material.

The papers represent roughly 55 years of Randolph's work during a period of rapid change in medicine and within society as a whole, from the early 1940s to the 1990s, and the collection provide "in the trenches" medical practice covered by malpractice insurance, and to keep the procedures he used to treat documentation of this change. In Dr. Randolph's papers we can see how the individualized allergy medicine that he practiced fell from favor as the field of allergy became focused on IgE responses and mass applicable diagnostics transformed into "truths" by means of an ongoing narrative process, as well as the means by which a dominant viewpoint actively works to exclude other viewpoints. One example of this is the advent of managed healthcare, and the financial burdens placed on doctors outside of mainstream medical care as defined by the major health insurance providers. This relationship between medicine and finance is evidenced by Randolph's financial, rather than patient, records, as he struggled to keep his patients covered by health insurance, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. Many of these issues continue to be part of public discourse about medical treatment, not just in relation to an increasingly allergic population, but in areas such as mental health and antibiotic/anti-viral use. Especially interesting is Dr. Randolph's correspondence with other clinicians.

We owe our thanks for the preservation of these very important papers to financial contributions from Dr. Randolph's patients and his peers through the Randolph Archival Fund. We also thank Beatrice Trum Hunter for chairing this worthwhile project with Vilma Valentine Kinney's assistance. Vilma had been active in The Human Ecology Study Group which Dr. Randolph started for his patients in the early 70's. She was the first editor of the Human Ecologist which was then called The Environmentalist. We wish her well as she retired from editing and publishing The Human Ecology Study Group newsletter with the Fourth Quarter 2006 edition.

This article was published in the Share, Care and Prayer newsletter Vol 24, No. 1 Feb 2006-Jan 2007

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