Look. You go off to the gulf war. Later you get sick. But does that mean that one caused the other.
I don’t see how you can accuse the gov’t of “stonewalling”. They investigated, others investigated. No one can explain “Gulf War Syndrome”, or even be sure it exists. How can you expect doctors to treat a disease that may or may not exist and has no known cause or cure?
GWS seems to me to be related to Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. People with MCS get sick in response to “chemicals”…or do they? If you expose sufferers to doses of chemicals they claim make them sick, they don’t get sick. They do get sick when they know they have been exposed to the chemicals. I’m not saying that people with MCS aren’t really sick, they are. But their problem has nothing to do with chemicals, it seems more like obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Humans are pattern seeking creatures. This often works well, and we discover a hidden cause of events. But we sometimes discover patterns where none exists. So we see faces in clouds, or believe in astrology, or “luck”. And sometimes we believe in diseases that don’t exist. There are two types of errors here. One is not believing that a disease exists, when it really does exist. The other is believing in a disease when it does not exist. And a simple reading of medical literature reveals thousands of proposed diseases that did not, in fact, turn out to exist. And the so-called treatment of these non-existant diseases caused very real harm. The fact that people didn’t believe in Toxic Shock Syndrome is interesting, but so is the fact that they believed in migrating wombs.
So it is not enough to say, “I am sick, I think this is the cause.” That is a starting point. But all the doctors investigating GWS can’t find a common element, they can’t find anything that all GWS sufferers were exposed to that all non-GWS people weren’t. We can’t say, “My husband is sick, there must be a cause.” We don’t know that. Maybe GWS is a real disease, but we are very far from deciding that, let alone explaining the course of the disease, let alone finding a cause, let alone finding treatment, let alone finding a cure.
It is possible that some people became sick after being exposed to something in the gulf, others became sick after they returned from the gulf for other reasons, others are suffering from psychiatric problems, and others are not really sick. Or any combination of any of these explanations. Which one of these is the “real” gulf war syndrome?
In the case of AIDS, it was decided that HIV was “real” AIDS. But, we know that some people with HIV don’t get sick, while other people who are not HIV positive have compromised immune systems. But most HIV+ people develop AIDS, while very few HIV- people do. So, we say that the people who develop compromised immune systems for reasons other than HIV infection have something other than AIDS, even though they develop the same symptoms HIV/AIDS patients do. So, this is really somewhat of a semantic question…but it is also a way of organizing thought. If we say that AIDS is caused by HIV, then we know what to do…prevent HIV infection and treat HIV infection with anti-viral therapy.
So, if GWS is to be recognized as a “real” disease, we have to find a common cause. This is not to say that people who end up not having “GWS” weren’t really sick, but recognizing that they are sick with something else. Treating the wrong disease is not the answer. And it may turn out that no disease will ever be recognized as causing GWS. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t sick, just that what made them sick is different from what they thought.
