Hardware That Literally Doesn't Stink?

gtaylor writes "You know that new computer smell? Some people (like me) get sick from it. Can Slashdot readers provide good suggestions for mice or keyboards made from ceramic, unlacquered hardwood, metal, etc, non-plastic headphones and microphones, screens like the new metal-framed cinema display from Apple, etc? (Wood is not necessarily right if it's glued or varnished.) I have a Sharp Plasmacluster air purifier that is very helpful but the fewer volatile organic chemicals released in the first place, the better. I'll also need a chair (leaning to the Herman Miller Mirra chair) and an adjustable metal/hardwood desk. High-density hard synthetics like polypropylene (a popular material at Ikea) or acrylic are also inert enough to be fine if they have no plasticizers - suggestions for a full office set-up welcome."

Comments

How to make the problem *better*

[Anonymous Coward]

My youngest son had many such allergies: plasticizers, peanut butter, and a few others. After dealing with the HMO quacks for over a year, we took him to a real doctor, who showed us that the only way to cope with these afflictions is to gradually increase your exposure to them so that you can build up a tolerance. DO NOT try to run from them like a sissy; they are everywhere, and you will ruin your life if you can't handle a little plastic or varnish here and there. These days, the symptoms are all but nonexistent in my son, and the treatment worked.

Just my 2 cents, from a concerned parent who's been there.

Re:Maybe the cat isn't the problem

[gl4ss]

do you think that somebody who decides 'it's the lightbulbs' would have properly ruled that out?

Re:Maybe the cat isn't the problem

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I dunno if I'd call it "stupid". I work in Healthcare ( respiratory as well, but mostly dealing with sleep medicine instead of allergies ), and people think they understand their bodies pretty well. I mean, they're around them practically all the time, so they sort of consider themselves to be an authority on the subject.

People form a speculative hypothesis on what might be causing their problems, and then their everyday experiences are subtly edited by memory to fit and reinforce these ideas. Not everyone has the understanding of proper eliminative testing, or the discipline, to correctly figure out their problem, or at least some kind of ameliorating behavior, unlike that chicken-dude who's floating around in this thread somewhere. This isn't just a medical problem - people do this in all facets of their lives.

Don't be too harsh on these folks. Nobody likes to feel sick, and even less to not understand what's happening to their body. Reaching out for a hypothesis that they can understand is natural in this situation - it's the job of healthcare professionals to reach through this barrier of uncertainty and provide correct diagnosis and treatment.

YLFI

Re:Oh, patients...

[Kaboom13]

Engineers with common sense? As an engineering student, trust me when I say you have no idea how wrong you are.

full-on...

[SethJohnson]

I used to hang out with a couple of these guys. Total hypocondriacs. Sometimes I think it's also a power trip. Like these people feel powerless over their own lives, so they attempt to exert some kind of influence over others to placate their special needs.

I have some distant relatives who claim environmental sensitivities. I had to stay at their house for a wedding. They went nuts because my girlfriend ignored their pleas and she used her own shampoo. We solved their problem by just never visiting them again.

Seriously. When these people get in your face trying to lay a guilt trip, they're trying to control you. Ignore them.

Re:full-on...

[DunbarTheInept]

I know someone who is allergic to just about every type of food. The list of bad foods includes all nuts, and fruits in which the seeds touch the 'flesh' if the fruit - like strawberries, watermelons, and banannas. (Fruits where the seeds are contained within by a thick hull or core are okay), Several beans are also bad, including Cocao, so chocolate is out. And on top of all that, he's lactose intolerant. And no, it's not a power trip, nor a case of hypochondria. Unless, that is, you believe he is so good at unconsiously controlling his body that he can cause his windpipe to swell and cut off his breathing, requiring a speeding trip to the hospital (in which adrenneline was used to kill the swelling (not sure how that works) so he could breathe again, and then the emergency room doctor advised him to never again go out and eat in public restaurants, and only eat food he'd cooked himself so he knows every ingredient that goes into it.)

I've seen it happen. It's really not pretty.

The problem is that the existence of people like this (real deadly multiple-allergy sufferers) gives ammunition to the whiny hypochondriacs. Because some people like that exist, Hypochondriacs think they might be one of them.

Given how allergies work, it makes perfect sense why someone with one allergy tends to have other ones too. An allergy is caused by your immune system having corrupt data on its threat-identification lookup table, so to speak, so it ends up labelling things as major threats when they really aren't. If the identification is badly off enough, it can even raise the threat level of the "intruder" to the point where the immune system "thinks" it's a deadly poison, and so it "thinks" it is authorized to react with everything it's got, even measures which could themselves kill you. And the thing is, this "lookup table" is something that gets edited over the course of your life. Your immune system starts with genetic presets from your parents, but then learns as it goes. If something makes you sick, your immune system learns to fight that something in the future. The nasty thing about some allergies is that they snowball. The allergy itself makes you feel sick, and so the immune system raises the threat rating of that substance and fights harder against it next time, making you even more sick, so it raises the threat rating even more, and starts getting really overzealous about anything that even looks remotely like the allergen - so what starts as an allergy to just walnuts ends up becoming an allergy to all nuts - anything which has a similar enough recognizable chemical pattern in it gets flagged as a problem.

Essentially, the immune system has a cascading snowballing effect that makes it so that more exposure to the allergen makes the allergy worse in the future. So that's why there do exist some people who really *are* that allergic to things - if their immune system is confused to begin with, it tends to cause itself to get even more confused.

Never underestimate psycho-somatic effects.

[Halo-]

I'm not a doctor. I can barely spell doctor. But, I do know this from personal experience:

It is definitely possible to make yourself physically sick if you are mentally convinced you are sick.

I spent years fighting near constant bouts of nausea. Saw a slew of specialists, had scans, tests, X-rays, pokes, prods, and pills. Nothing helped. After a few years I began to realize it was the situtations I was in that seemed to induce my nausea... gee could it be mental?

Short story: yes. I had(have?) "Social Phobia" before it was the cool thing (like ADHD that every third kid has). The damnest thing is that once I knew what was wrong, and was positive my feeling sick was purely in my head, I discovered it was still impossible to not feel "sick" sometimes. It's just like being scared of flying. You can be on a plane and rationally know that you are safer than in your car, but still be terrified at the same time.

My feeling is that a lot of these MCS people just freak out when they smell something "odd". I doubt there is a single treatment to snap these people out of their loop. Therarpy did nothing for my problem, but the slightest taste of an SSRI drug fixed me like flipping a switch. For other people, drugs just make them feel nasty, and talking things out helps.

The point is, I think there is something wrong with people who "have" MCS, and it can be serious, but no amount of avoid the "bad chemicals" is going to help them.

Take two, call me in the morning. Don't sue. No for use with certain sets, your mileage may vary...

Re:Oh, patients...

[CaptainCarrot]

I know what holistic means, thank you very much.

It's easy to complain that doctors don't treat patients "holistically", but mistakes in this area are unforgivable. You can thank our legal system for that. As a result, doctors dare not treat patients for conditions outside their specialized areas of expertise. Not if they want to stay in practice, that is.

You'll find that doctors generally have little say in who comes to them. In extreme cases they will refuse further treatment, but usually they make a good-faithg effort to treat a patient for the complaints they bring forward. But when a patient refuses necessary tests, refuses to acknowledge true causes for her complaints, and possibly even refuses a suggestion for psychiatric treatment -- what can a doctor do but throw up his hands over it?

It's easy to be cynical from where you sit, of course, but if you ever knew any actual doctors personally you'd know that by and large they'd be perfectly happy never to see another hypochondriac again. But they dare not turn them away just on the off-chance it's something real this time. You can thank our legal system for that too.