10/20/1982 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Dr. Hobart Feldman approached the Board and related that he had once been a City Councilman in North Miami and knew what it was like to try to make honest, fair and reasonable decisions. He advised them that he had confined his practice to allergy, but after hearing about ecologic illness, became interested in that field. Dr. Feldman explained that literature concerning ecologic illness was once difficult to find but now more and more information was appearing in the medical literature and magazines. Dr. Feldman stated that an unknown percentage of people seem to have increased susceptibility to things that do not bother other people. He added that it was similar to persons who were allergic to ragweed, house dust, dog hair, or to certain foods. Those particular_ people are allergic to those substances and would have symptoms, when people sitting right next to them would not have symptoms at all. Dr. Feldman continued that there was difficulty in attempting to prove the problem, if the analysis is limited to what the patient tells the doctor. Thus, there is a problem in accepting the premises of environmentally induced allergy in patients where the amount of exposure may not exceed the safe limit amount. He noted it was interesting that the government regulatory agencies have three different maximum limits of formaldehyde; there is not any unanimity of opinion as to what would appear to be a safe dose or amount of exposure. Dr. Feldman gave an example of a person having a splitting headache, which nobody could see, but that did not mean the person did not have the headache. This is the dilemma that people face when they are trying to make some sense of an illness such as Judge Stikelether and Mrs. Edwards have. He pointed out that he had other patients with this illness, and the substances capable of inducing variable symptoms- are not limited to formaldehyde and OCT 20 1982 91 rb.�7