How Your Clothes and Their Materials Can Shape Your Health

Years ago, a friend of mine was seated on a plane next to a chief executive of a major American chemical company that was notorious for polluting the environment and sickening large numbers of Americans with its products.

After building up a friendly rapport, she asked the executive what he considered to be the most important piece of advice he had to share. The executive immediately responded:

“Always wash new clothes before you put them on.”

I’ve never forgotten that story, and over time my patients have helped me to appreciate just how many nasty chemicals end up on our clothing that most of us never notice.

Canaries in the coal mine

Birds tend to be much more sensitive to environmental toxins than humans.

This principle was utilized by coal miners who were always at risk of a lethal toxic gas buildup (particularly of carbon monoxide) occurring in the mines. Since carbon monoxide is odourless, they would bring canaries with them and if the canaries suddenly died, they immediately got out as they knew they eventually would too.

One of the fundamental principles in statistics is that variable phenomena tend to follow a bell curve distribution, with the average value being by far the most common, while values become exponentially rarer as they move further away from that mean.

Sensitivity to pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins (e.g., synthetic chemicals) follows a similar pattern, with there being a minority within the population that is extremely sensitive to these elements (and conversely, another minority exists on the opposite end which has a very high tolerance to them).

I’ve always felt genuinely bad for the sensitive people as the medical system frequently dismisses their symptoms (as the majority of patients do not share their sensitivities) and they are often left alone to struggle with a variety of side effects most people can’t relate to let alone empathize with.

One of the major challenges with all of the environmental toxins we are exposed to is determining how much our exposures to each of them actually matters, as there are so many of them it borders on impossible to identify which ones are actually directly responsible for the chronic illness a person experiences.

That said, a few people like Joseph Pizzorno have done a remarkable job of quantifying the evidence that demonstrates the harms these toxins have created, and in clinical practice, we periodically see a complex and debilitating illness resolve once a comprehensive detoxification protocol is administered which addresses toxin exposures that occurred years if not decades ago.

The highly sensitive people frequently refer to themselves as “canaries” under the logic that the same environmental toxins they experience severe reactions to are also affecting everyone else on a more subtle and insidious way (e.g., by giving them cancer ten years down the road).

I’ve taken this point to heart, and both used them as an early warning sign something is dangerous and a guidepost for all the elements in the environment I should be avoiding, under the logic that if I mostly avoid all the elements the canaries are sensitive to, I probably won’t have any major health issues (which has so far held true).

The covid vaccines in turn help to illustrate many of these concepts

For instance, since they are a highly toxic agent, once they hit the market, immediately I began to have numerous patients show up who had severe reactions to them (which suggested their average injury value was very high) and hence was not surprised as I began to hear more and more stories of sudden death following their use, and later numerous insidious chronic complications of the shots that onset in the years after the injection.

Likewise, while I was hearing all of those injury reports (which I compiled here), I noticed within them there was also a smaller number of unvaccinated people who were developing similar symptoms (e.g., menstrual abnormalities) after spending time with someone who had been recently vaccinated.

This prompted me to begin reaching out to the sensitive people I knew (along with looking for online reports such as the video I included in this article).

Once I found a few sensitive people who could immediately tell if someone had been vaccinated from being around them, I concluded shedding was a very real aspect and began looking for a way to explain it (as mechanistically it seemed impossible the mRNA vaccines could shed).

Since that time, those mechanisms have been identified, and through working with Pierre Kory (who has many patients whose labs show they are affected by shedding) I’ve collected over 1,000 reports of shedding injuries which occurred in a fairly consistent and reproducible manner (and likewise could be treated in a fairly repeatable manner).

Clothing Toxicity

One of the frequent points I raise here is that our regulation of pharmaceuticals drugs is woefully inaccurate due to there being so much money in medicine there is inevitably enough to pay off a bureaucrat to approve and then often mandate dangerous and ineffective products (e.g., like remdesivir, all the data showed Paxlovid was useless but the government nonetheless spent billions giving it to Americans).

However, while the pharmaceutical regulatory situation is abysmal, it’s actually much better than the cosmetic industry, as very few resources are devoted towards ensuring those products are safe.

In turn, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve met who discovered they reacted to specific chemicals in their shampoo, makeup or soaps and needed to gradually shift to all natural products to get through life.

I hence avoid most of the products on the market and pursue to either make the ones I use at home (as that way I can guarantee what’s in them) or buy very specific brands we believe are clean.

Sadly, while some regulation exists for cosmetics, almost none exists for fabrics or the chemicals put onto them (other than objects like mattresses needing flame retardants – many of which are toxic). Because of this, our bodies are in contact with a lot of chemicals.

With clothing, because of how I react to synthetic materials like polyester, I’ve long suspected there are significant issues with the fabrics.

Likewise, the tendency for feet to sweat is why I believe having socks made from a natural (and relatively dye free fabric) is fairly important.

Since a few of my colleagues have had similar experiences with clothing, we’ve made a point over the years to ask our highly sensitive patients how they respond to clothes and have found the following:

• Quite a few of them learn on their own that they need to wash new clothes before wearing them. Furthermore, some find they need to wash them three or more times before they can wear them without reacting to the clothing. Additionally, they need to almost always use a clean and fragrance free detergent, and one of my own struggles is to make sure my clothes never get cleaned in a toxic detergent because the smell will often linger with the clothes for a long time. Finally, I completely avoid using dryer sheets (although I find they are not as problematic as detergents).
• Reactions to synthetic fabrics is quite common.
• The option to buy organic fabric exists (e.g., clothes made from organic cotton). Given how cotton is produced, I thought that this would be important but it comes up fairly rarely and typically only in cases where they have prolonged exposure to the fabric (e.g., we had a patient who we eventually discovered needed to sleep on organic bed sheets to stop the significant symptoms they were being plagued by).
• Many of them find they cannot tolerate the labels on their clothes (e.g., the tag at the back of the neck of most T-shirts) contacting their skin and have to cut it off.
• Many of the reactions our sensitive patients exhibit resemble mast cell reactions.

Additionally, I’ve also met numerous people who react to scented products others are wearing (e.g., colognes, body sprays, or perfume), but sadly the wearers rarely consider how that choice will affect their target audience.

Author: A Midwestern Doctor

 

yogaesoteric
February 1, 2026