The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean. When I first came to Mansmann in February 2011, the river was covered with ice, and bare trees stood silver sentry on its shores. I was 36. I\u2019d been sick for three and a half years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During that time, when I wasn\u2019t working as a writer and theater director or being a wife and mother, I visited doctors and had tests. I told few friends or members of my extended family how ill I was, because I didn\u2019t have any way to explain what was wrong. I had no diagnosis, just a collection of weird symptoms: tight, achy pain that radiated through my body and caused me to hobble around (my ankles, I\u2019d joke to my husband, Dan, felt like they\u2019d been \u201cKathy Batesed,\u201d \u00e0 la the movie Misery); burning rashes that splashed across my cheeks and around my mouth like pizza sauce; exhaustion; headaches; hands that froze into claws while I slept and hurt to uncurl in the morning; a constant head cold; nausea; and, on top of all that, severe insomnia\u2014my body just could not, would not, turn off and rest. I visited every doctor who\u2019d see me and tried everything they threw at me: antidepressants; painkillers; elimination diets (including a long eight months when I went without any of the major allergens, such as gluten, nuts, dairy, soy, and nightshades); herbal supplements; iodine pills; steroid shots; hormone treatments; Chinese teas; acupuncture; energy healing; a meditation class\u2014you name it, I did it. Nothing worked. After I maxed out the available rheumatologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, Lyme disease specialists, acupuncturists, and alternative-medicine practitioners in the Portland metropolitan area, I was sent to neurologists in Boston. All of my tests came back normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In late 2010, after a long and unhappy antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, my newest GP (who\u2019s still my doctor today), Chuck de Sieyes, MD, announced that he was referring me to Mansmann: \u201cBecause I have no idea what\u2019s going on with you, and he\u2019s one of the smartest guys around. And frankly, I\u2019ve had it!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mansmann had moved to Yarmouth with his wife and kids to be close to his parents, who\u2019d retired in Maine. A third-generation allergist, he worked in his father\u2019s allergy clinic, at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, during high school. While in college at Saint Joseph\u2019s University, also in Philadelphia, he helped his dad develop two asthma drugs. Later, he headed an allergy and immunology clinic at a West Virginia hospital for 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mansmann has a helmet of thick, graying hair and an intensely serious air. After escorting me into an exam room, he sat down across from me and promptly pushed aside my thick medical file. He\u2019d read through it all, he said, but he wanted to hear the story from me. He listened patiently, asking questions every so often: When did my rashes flare? Was the pain an ache in my muscles, or did it feel deeper? Was I worse after I slept or at the end of the day? He seemed, as we spoke, to have all the time in the world. Then, with no pyrotechnics, he offered his theory: \u201cI think it\u2019s possible you\u2019ve developed a reaction to genetically modified corn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Genetically modified corn? Everyone\u2019s heard of GMO corn, but I realized I didn\u2019t know what it actually was. Mansmann explained that starting in the mid-1980s, the biotechnology giant Monsanto began to genetically alter corn to withstand its herbicide Roundup\u2014the goal being to eradicate weeds but not crops\u2014as well as to resist a pest called the corn borer. These small changes in the DNA of the corn are expressed by the plant as proteins. It\u2019s those proteins, Mansmann believes, that can act as allergens, provoking a multisystemic disorder marked by the overproduction of a type of white blood cell called an eosinophil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He swabbed inside my nose with a Q-tip, then placed the results under a microscope. \u201cTake a look,\u201d Mansmann said. \u201cSee all those pink cells? Those are eosinophils.\u201d My nose, it seemed, was chock-full of them. When the immune system is working properly, eosinophils swarm certain invading substances, be they parasites or viruses, and work to eliminate them. Sometimes, however, an allergenic protein may prompt the immune system to release eosinophils. Then, it\u2019s as if a faucet gets turned on but can\u2019t be turned off\u2014eosinophils just keep coming. Eventually they begin to leave the bloodstream and may infiltrate and damage the GI tract, esophagus, mucous membranes, lungs, the fascial system (the layer of connective tissue that surrounds the muscles, blood vessels, and nerves), and the skin\u2014hence, the avalanche of symptoms. (Some allergists say that the best way to test for a true eosinophilic disorder is to look for the cells in the esophagus and GI tract with an endoscopy. But Mansmann thinks that once you have a preponderance of them in your nasal mucus, they\u2019re likely to be elsewhere.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mansmann\u2019s advice was to strip all corn, even that marked organic, from my diet. \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible to find a corn source in the United States that doesn\u2019t have the [protein] in it,\u201d he said. The U.S. government started approving GMO corn and soybeans for sale in the mid-1990s, and today, 88 percent of corn, and 93 percent of soybeans, are the transgenic varieties. Moreover, Mansmann and others contend that due to cross-pollination via winds, birds, and bees, there\u2019s no such thing anymore as a GMO-free corn crop. He estimated that it would take from two to four months of living without corn for the eosinophils to cycle out of my body, and almost a year before I\u2019d feel entirely like myself<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean. When I first came to Mansmann in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamaradiointer.com\/stream\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}