Transcript of Episode 70: Overcoming Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
With Dr. Daniel Pompa and special guest Cameron George.
Dr. Pompa: Folks, welcome. It’s Dr. Pompa. If this wasn’t edited out, you would see that Dr. Pompa is here starting the show by himself for the first time. They trusted me to run the show. David Asarnow, if you were here live, you would see what actually happened. If you’re watching the recording, you’re going to miss semantics on Dr. Pompa’s first show that he got to do by himself, but I assure you it wasn’t just my fault. Things happen. No, I’m here with an amazing client of mine, Cameron George, who you’re going to have the pleasure to meet and hear his story, and I had talked a little bit about Cameron’s story, I think, before when I talked about fasting and the need for fasting, and fasting saves lives. Fasting, really, is one of those things that dives deep into the innate intelligence and utilizes it, and the body just knows what to do. It shuts down often times our desire for food, and sometimes we force people to fast. And in Cameron’s case, his body, his innate intelligence, forced him to fast. I’ve seen this many times, but Cameron, welcome. And say hello to our viewing audience.
Cameron: Yeah, I mean, thanks for having me. I’m always excited for these conversations, for sure.
Dr. Pompa: Absolutely, and I said this on one of our flip-flopped failures there in the beginning of you coming on with the technology issues. I believe, Cameron—just I really do love you and appreciate you. Because, I believe, like myself, you got sick for a reason, and you’re called to something greater. You really are. You’re just a pleasure to work with. You’re a pleasure to coach because you’re such a bright young man, and it’s your story that is going to give you and already has your authority. Just like in my case. So with that said, Cameron, I just—I want to go back. I want you to tell them story. I could never do it justice, but I remember the first time that I heard your story. I mean, my jaw hung wide open. I mean, I took notes, copious notes. I mean, just pages of notes because I really wanted to capture—there were so many unique details. So take us all the way back. There’s a lot here, but let’s see if we can…
Cameron: Yeah, I mean, the depth and complexity of my story is pretty vast, and just thinking about this, I’m trying to just hit on the most high points. And if there’s anything that you want to elaborate more on, then we can just do that. But you know—well, I can just, I guess, start where I’m at now kind of and then go back. So, basically, my most complicated set of symptoms has to do with chemical sensitivities and severe autoimmune, hyperreactive to everything in my environment whenever I was at my worst, absolutely. And so it led me—my entire process cumulatively led me to the point just being incredibly, incredibly sick to where, for a very long time, I couldn’t leave my own home or anything, and everything under the sun reacted to it. So I think that it’s easy to—well, it’s relatively safe to hypothesize at this point in time that I—just going back. Because me and my parents, me and my doctors, I mean, everybody who I’ve actually gotten help from, and going with that upstream thing and investigating, we’ve just talked about it endless times. We’re trying to go back to my childhood. Trying to go back as far as we can and try to get a good picture of what my biggest stressors were, and how this—how I ended up here because it didn’t happen overnight, but it was a long process. So, I mean, it’s pretty safe to say, at this point, that I came into the world, right, at birth with a little of, probably, genetic susceptibility. It was obvious to my parents, really, from—well, I don’t know about day one, but it was obvious pretty quickly because I’m a family of three brothers. I’ve got two brothers, one older, one younger, and I definitely was the black sheep of my family. Behaviorally, everything was just something, and my parents always described it as—they didn’t know how to describe it. They just thought that I was a little bit harder to deal with and handle, but I was still in a functional range to where no average doctor, your family doctor down the road, is going to say there’s something bad wrong with you. But they started small, and it tended to have this snowballing affect over time. As a child, as a baby, I was just—I guess now we could say that I had the—I had an impaired ability to be able to adapt physically, psychologically, and emotionally to anything, really. So everything new, I was always afraid of. I was just sensitive, afraid. Psychologically, I was either doing really—I was either really happy, or I was really, really sad, crying, throwing tantrums. Every single thing that I would start in my life, whether it’d be learning to swim, whether it would be riding a bike, it always happened much later because I was just—I would get in these comfort zones, and I was very afraid to step outside of them. It was just—I was more of a fragile, and they saw that, which led to, actually, me having a lot of different behavioral pathologies and stuff too that just made me much more prone to impulsive behaviors. Because now looking back on it, now what we know too is that, obviously, susceptibility, and then, who knows, vaccines early in life, or all that kind of stuff, or whatever my mom had in her fillings and things like that, just that kind of stuff. Anyways, my behavior was such at an early age that I was incredibly impulsive. I was constantly looking to—and my belief at this point, kind of self-medicate to get to a certain feeling or a state, right, which I felt comfortable in myself and having imbalance, right, whether it be neurologically, obviously, biochemically, and stuff. There ended up, at a certain point in my life, because I was so scared of certain things, it ended up I just felt—I had this instilled sense that grew over time of inadequacy. Actually, the show—what, two weeks ago, you guys were talking about orthorexia. I really resonated with that on so many different levels.
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, I’ve heard.
Cameron: Yeah, I can tell you why too, but just an instilled sense of inadequacy at some point because there was something wrong to where I didn’t have the confidence to do anything. I ended up getting made fun of. I was all over the place in a lot of ways, and it started at an early age with me just subconsciously—not consciously, obviously, doing it at the time, but just when you look back at the behaviors that I did, everything was a dopamine chasing behavior, right? I would go after—starting from as soon as I could start choosing what I wanted to eat, and even before then, I was incredibly picky. But it started out with things like the—self-medication, things like the drug like foods, the super sugars. Everything that I wanted to eat and was so picky—and I mean, that’s kind of normal for a kid, but for me, it was to the extreme. I would cry. I would do anything that I could. I would just—I would only eat the breads. I would only eat the crackers, the cookies, all this kind of stuff, and that was really something that I just sought after. Not just as a fun thing, but then whenever I would eat too, I would binge eat, and the binges got worse as time went on. I remember just sitting and buying—once I got old enough to where I could actually—I was actually going places on my own, I was carrying around all the money that I had. No matter what that was. From allowance when I was a kid or wherever, and I was going out, and I would just go to places like the gym where everybody else was playing basketball. And I would buy—hang out there all day, and I would buy soda after soda after soda. I would drink sodas all day, and literally, just feeling like that I had no control over it, right? When I got to the end of that soda, I remember feeling absolutely depressed. Like what am I going to do now? It was that bad to where it was I really felt like I had to have it, and obviously—so those things obviously created more problems.
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, and just fast forward a little bit. It went from that addiction to running. I mean, running…
Cameron: Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Dr. Pompa: So talk a little bit about that because you really—the OCD behavior came out there. I mean, you were running—and again, I’m going from memory here. I mean, 100 some miles a week running. Am I right on that?
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. When I got to the point when I was in college, I was running about 140 miles a week, and that was—there were a lot of guys, a lot of athletes that do that that are able to find some way to create a homeostatic balance around their training. Where they understand stress, rest and they do certain things to do that. It’s very hard to do, and I certainly wasn’t doing that because, at that point, I was using running, basically, as a drug. I was using it to keep my head above water because I wasn’t functioning. I wasn’t feeling the way that I needed to. I had chronic fatigue at a very early age. Like I said, with the foods, the foods graduated into a little bit heavier things. Like becoming an insane caffeine addict at a very early age drinking sodas all day. I mean, for years, I drank soda more than I did water, for sure, hands down, and I would do anything for a soda. And I’d be mad when we went out to eat, I was kid right, and my dad would say, “Hey, you need to get water.” It’s just because I was constantly seeking—I was seeking medication on some level, and it’s safe to say now. And I never just felt right, and I didn’t really think about it. I just was—I just figured that’s the way that I was. And so that graduated to, obviously, worse and worse things, and I hit a point where, obviously, the foods and stuff became a problem. And I was a little bit obese, and so that created a lot of different problems emotionally because now I’m in the—I’m about at the age where it’s important, right, to look good, the junior high-ish type of age, right? And so now I feel even more inadequate and some of these emotional deals. And so then I go firing back, and I switch my addiction, which is always what I was doing. I was switching. I was always trying to find the right answers. I’m someone, I wanted to be healthy, but I just had no clue. So I said, okay, I’m going to switch it to something that is healthy. I found distance running, which I still love to this day. I think that there’s a healthy way to do it, a very unhealthy way to go about it, but I found that once I found that, I just rolled with it. I mean, I put absolutely everything into it, but because I didn’t really—I still was using it as a drug, if you will. I could never keep my training balanced, and I put so much, an enormous amount of effort into it. I mean, the way that I would train—overtraining was always my problem in that, for sure, hands down. I mean, it was just—I couldn’t stop myself.
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, and then you started to get injured after a while. Injuries started coming. You could’ve predicted that, right?
Cameron: Yeah, so there was always the highs and the lows when it came to that. I was either running really, really well just because I was putting out so much effort, but then I would just crash. I’d have three injuries at once. I’d have an Achilles, a knee, this or that, and then obviously, I was totally crap for months or even—and then I’d get extremely depressed based on that because I was putting everything into that, and that was my current level of self-medicating what was going on inside my body in order to feel a certain way. But, yeah, so that started sometime in adolescence, early to mid-adolescence sometime. Probably 12 years old or so, and then I did that for several, several years. But then in that time, I still was doing caffeine stimulants, and at some point, I switched to drinking Diet Cokes because now I’m concerned about my weight. So it’s like I was under the illusion, just like everybody else was, right, that okay, well, I’ve got to stay light for distance running, right? I’ve got to do that. I was so focused on it. So yeah, I just started drinking Diet Cokes.
Dr. Pompa: Let’s fast forward to what I believe is the tipping point. I do like to talk a little bit about—so you got the job. I guess distance running, I guess you should bring that to a close. I mean, you got injured. You weren’t able to do that, but you ended up working at Best Buy, I believe, right?
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: Well, then Best Buy, and I believe the tipping point was the apartment. So let’s get there just for the sake of time.
Cameron: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, so the whole distance running thing, obviously, it got to a certain point I crashed. Finally, it was just up, down, up, down, up, down. I ended up going and running in college at the University of Arkansas, and that stretch just became even more, and more, and more. And so I accumulated so much stress. Like we said, the 140 miles a week to where, all of a sudden, literally, I just crashed and, literally, had three injuries at once. So that was what I was—I was totally dependent on that to even function in things, to put a function, to feel good …
Dr. Pompa: That’s gone now.
Cameron: Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: So that’s gone because you couldn’t do it anymore. Literally, it got to where you couldn’t do it.
Cameron: Right, exactly.
Dr. Pompa: Is that when you started working at Best Buy? I mean, how did—where was that connect?
Cameron: Right, so I crashed, and all of a sudden, now I’m on the couch for weeks, months, and I dropped out of all my classes. I was in college at the time at the University of Arkansas. I just—now, whatever was masking my symptoms, which would have been, obviously, the insane amounts of working out and things, now it’s the veil was lifted, and I’m on the couch with debilitating chronic fatigue. I couldn’t force myself to do anything. I was so depressed, so everything. Months went by. I moved back into my parents’ house, and then that was the point in which they said, “Hey, we need to get some help.” And I wanted to get some help too because I didn’t know what was wrong. So what do I do? I go to the campus psychiatrist or whatever. I think we shopped around a little bit. And I ended up seeing a psychiatrist, and just put my total faith in them at the time because I was just desperate for something that could help me. And then, obviously, they said, well—they gave me all these labels for my symptoms, anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, this and that, and then attention deficit because I couldn’t focus and things like that.
Dr. Pompa: If they label you, then they’re able to medicate you.
Cameron: Right, exactly, so they gave me the label, and they told me, okay, well, but you’re in luck because we’ve got all of these great drugs that actually—I believe they refer to Adderall as a miracle drug, which now it’s a laughable thing, but, yeah, and so I ended up being put on Adderall. And that was really the big tipping point in which my life—yeah, I was already chronically sick, right? I was chronically fatigued. My body was giving all these symptoms, and I was just trying to control it wherever. But Adderall was a massive stress for just…
Dr. Pompa: Cameron, if I had a nickel for every call that I get with a damaged kid from Adderall and what it does to the brain. It always starts off pretty darn good..
Cameron: Right, right, yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: But anyways, yeah, so that was a tipping point for you.
Cameron: Oh, it definitely was because it’s like I’m susceptible. I’ve accumulated a lot of stressors. I couldn’t get off the couch, right? So I’m already sick as we know now, and now, we say, okay, well, they told me this drug can get you off the couch immediately, and it will get you back working and functioning. It’s a miracle drug. It’s just great. I mean, all these kids are on it, and it’s absolutely great. And obviously, for me, someone who is prone—my situation is prone—at the time, was prone to going after stimulants of any type. So obviously, Adderall was going to have me at hello. It was going to have me from the beginning, and it was just going to—I was going to be addicted to it. Because, obviously, yes, the first time you take it, when you’re debilitated on the couch and everything like that, instantly, obviously, it gives you endless energy, and you feel like Superman, and all of the things that—it’s this massive—it’s this illusion affect because we don’t really understand at the time, biochemically, how it creates that.
Dr. Pompa: You thought you found your answer. You became Superman again, right?
Cameron: Oh, absolutely, and so that worked in the beginning, or I thought it did. Even though it made me feel good but, really, my perception under the influence of a drug like that was never balanced. I just had massive rush of dopamine all the time. I felt good, but really, a lot of times I got less things done while I was on it just because I was all over the place. But sometimes I did. So I did that, and all of a sudden, I was able to go back out. And I had already previously worked at Best Buy, actually, that you mentioned, back three, four years before that. So I went back and was just trying to get back on my feet, and my goal was to get back into running, eventually, after I took care of my injury and stuff. So I got back, and I was working in Best Buy. And man, the longer that I was on Adderall, I lost my mind more and more. Just, it’s no different than a drug addict on the street. I mean, the kids…
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, no doubt.
Cameron: Adderall is an amphetamine. Okay? It’s speed, and whenever we say—it’s got the same mechanism of action that the meth does. And you see how it destroys people’s lives, and it does. It totally hijacked my brain, which that’s what drugs do, but hijacked it in a way that it took all of my preexisting impulsivities, and just put them on steroids. I mean, it put them on steroids to the point—once I was doing so many things. I was working at Best Buy and whatever. I just started doing things. At the end of the day, I didn’t even recall what I was doing. It’s almost like they were doing themselves, which this is the experience that you get if you talk to people on campuses who take Adderall. They say, “Oh, I love Adderall because I take Adderall, and I have a paper due, and it does the paper for me, and I don’t even remember doing the paper sometimes.” Yeah, so I was doing that, and before you know it, I was going on buying sprees, applying for credit cards, doing absolutely crazy things. And then once I was on Adderall more, and more, and more, I just became much more uprooted from this objective reality that a healthy person would experience on a daily basis. And that’s what happens to all drug addicts. That’s why drug addicts act in such insane irrational ways, but it appeared that it was working right because now I’m working 16 hour shifts, no problem. I’m Employee of the Month at Best Buy. I’m bouncing all over that place.
Dr. Pompa: You were Employee of the Month every month I think I remember saying.
Cameron: Right, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. Like month, after month, after month, and everyone was just like—I mean, I’d just be right from customer to customer, just jumping in their face, and they’re just like—and then I was very incredibly articulate because it’s a brain steroid. It’s an override to the brain, for those front parts of the brain. That you can just talk really quickly, and you can be really smart on your feet, whatever. But yeah, it just precipitated a whole host of different circumstances and events that unfolded after that, and I just continued to go farther and farther outside of my reality, massive buying sprees. Once you’re on a drug like that for a long time, you tend to start to connect with people who are in a similar unhealthy cognitive state or state of perception.
Dr. Pompa: Always, always.
Cameron: Always, it is. Because what’s going on in here, you don’t like to be around the people that aren’t necessarily like you because those people make you feel uncomfortable. You would rather—they don’t support your justifications. Because inside me the whole time, I knew that what I was doing was not fixing the problem, but since this was hijacked, there was always a justification every single day. So I continued to do that and continued to—as that unfolded, before I knew it I’ve got a whole host of incredibly toxic people in my life that before I was around all healthy guys, distance runners. It was totally 180°. And now I’ve got a whole new set of problems because where there becomes—once I was on Adderall for a period of time, my system was so jacked up. Now it’s brought my brain and my body out of balance enough to where now we have to add in other drugs to control the symptoms that are created by the imbalance, right?
Dr. Pompa: Always going, it’s always going.
Cameron: Exactly, which is why so many people end up on cocktails of drugs later on down the line when they go this route, and so before I know it, I’m on Adderall to get up in the morning. I’m on a benzodiazepine like Xanax, or a Klonopin to go to sleep, or alcohol was what I was doing at the time. I just turned 21, so I had to…
Dr. Pompa: It brings you down, yeah.
Cameron: Yeah, no, exactly. And it got to the point where, obviously, just like with any drug, you get tolerance, right? Receptive tolerance to where, all of a sudden, you need more of the same substance to get a same effect. I was doing that, but it just created an insane set of circumstances. So like I said, the massive buying sprees included everything from—I had a good employee discount, right, at Best Buy, and I was buying things, and then reselling them because I got them for cheap and stuff, and doing all this kind of stuff. And I had an apartment. I had a 700 square foot apartment that was full of just thousands…
Dr. Pompa: This is what I’ve been wanting you to get to. I mean, this is a major point.
Cameron: Just to paint the picture of where this insanity took me.
Dr. Pompa: All right, go ahead.
Cameron: I had a 700 square foot apartment that was full of, at any time, dozens of very expensive flat panel TVs, speakers, speakers that are $2,000 a piece. I mean, we’re talking, you’d walk in here, and it was like an electronic store. When I was just at work all day, and I was—I never left work without buying something, right? And I was constantly just on online. I was flipping things. I was buying things, all that kind of stuff, and then that wasn’t enough, and so I’m like, well, I’ve got to have something more interesting in my apartment. And so before I knew it, I was buying exotic animals. Well, I started with dogs. I got a couple dogs. I got a Great Dane and a German shepherd. Which 700 square feet, it shows you…
Dr. Pompa: For people watching this, this is for real. Okay?
Cameron: Yeah, this is absolutely for real.
Dr. Pompa: I’m pre-framing him for the next part. Yes, this is real.
Cameron: Obviously, when you’re in these hyper-impulsive states that are just so imbalanced, you can’t—there’s no control, and I’d just go higher, and higher, and higher. My behaviors do too, especially since I was already prone to impulsivity before this, and I ended up buying—so just cut to. I ended up having a 700 square foot apartment with thousands of dollars of electronics everywhere, high-end electronics everywhere in my apartment. It looks nice. Nice furniture. Nice everything, incredibly nice. I had three monkeys, two dogs. I had two exotic parrots, and I had some other things coming and going. There was some different small reptiles, things like that, even the—I actually had a fish tank that had some piranhas in it at one point, which was totally insane. You find these people who—had some breeder who was willing to sell me anything I wanted to. I mean, it was, but my apartment was just a direct reflection of the chaos and the imbalance that was taking place in here. That’s what I created. It was just—I mean, it was a cluster. It was absolutely just insane. I mean, it was absolutely insane. But not only that, the toxic people that were around me, endless life threatening horrible situations came with that, people coming over, people doing things. I was impulsive. I ended up just having so much money charged in credit, but also from buying TVs, and then reselling them, and doing all these kind of things. I ended up just buying things for people. At one point, I even—I was so out of it I just bought somebody a car, one of my friends. It was, hey, anyone need a car? But this is—never prior to my Adderall situation would I ever have done any of these behaviors, absolutely not, but I was, literally, just—I mean, for lack of a better term, I was tweaking on the stuff. I like to use that term because I can’t think of anything else.
Dr. Pompa: Fast forward just due to time. These animals, I mean, starts—I mean, they’re pooping and peeing all over the apartment.
Cameron: Yes, at least in the night. So one toxic maintenance, which would be the Adderall, precipitated deeper imbalance, which led to more unhealthy decision making processes, which were the animals and all those different types of things, and then now, I have—I’m way in over my head because I’m delusional, right? I’m straight up delusional, and I get all these animals, and have no clue what goes into taking care of these things. And so I end up with an apartment full of animals that there’s poop everywhere. I mean, the amount of poop, I had a room full of dog poop, literally. I mean, the amounts, you couldn’t even see the floor. It wasn’t even that just—it didn’t even register at some points because I was out of it, and I was all over the place. I was at work. I was doing a million things. I was out partying with this person or that person at this point, which it never was a part of my life before that. And I just would come back, and I was just, nah, I’ll deal with that later. Deal with that later. And yeah, I mean, there was animal feces everywhere, bird, monkey, everything. I had to have people next door, a girl next door, actually come and babysit my monkeys, and change their diapers.
Dr. Pompa: One of the big—another tipping point was the parrots died, right? Didn’t the parrots die?
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: I mean, it was like the bird—the canary in the coal mine was the parrots, correct?
Cameron: Yeah, exactly. Literally, canary in the coal mines.
Dr. Pompa: They’re getting sick, right? I mean, it’s if the animals start getting sick, hello? You’re living in a toxic environment.
Cameron: Exactly.
Dr. Pompa: So the parrots die and then tell—go ahead from there.
Cameron: Right, yeah. So that’s actually even worse than the canary because this is a parrot, an African grey that’s supposed to live 60 to 80 years. He was 5 years old. I come in one day, and he’s dead. Well, actually, one of my monkeys died first. It’s about as likely for one of these types of monkeys that I had to die as it is for a human child to die. That’s what I’ve been told. At least it’s not—it’s very close because they’re primates. He died first, which was devastating. I mean, that was just a horrendous thing to watch and experience and everything, for sure. And he just died. And I came back, and he was laying in his own vomit, and he was already gone. Then I got scared, and I re-homed the other two monkeys because I didn’t want anything else to happen. And I came in, what was it, the next day or two days later, and my parrot, like I said, he was dead. And so my animals were dropping like flies, and now I’m to the point where even in my amphetamine induced state I’m thinking, okay, something’s wrong here, obviously. So then I believe—I think I even asked my dad. We started talking—because at the time, they didn’t know about any of this stuff. My parents didn’t until later on down the line, but I remember going to him and asking him what—do you know anything about mold inspecting or anything like that? I don’t know, but there’s something in the air. I mean, there has to be. And I think it was a combination of a few things, right? You have all that waste product that you have that’s just accumulated everywhere, and only someone in my condition could justify that, first of all. So you have all that. Ammonia or whatever is coming off of that in a small, small enclosed space. Then you’ve got—well, then I got to a point where I couldn’t stand the smell anymore, so I was like, I’m going to clean it up. So I went and I just went to Walmart in the middle of the night and bought dozens and dozens of different cleaning products, Febreezes, and Lysols, and everything that I could find and just sprayed whole cans of things everywhere. I mean, I dumped a massive amount of chemicals to try and cover up that smell. At the time, I was just looking for that fix, that quick fix to it to get the smell away.
Dr. Pompa: It did impact your brain, right? It’s like with your body you did with the apartment, a quick fix.
Cameron: Right, exactly.
Dr. Pompa: The bottom line is your dad finally comes in, and oh, my gosh. What’s happened, right?
Cameron: Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: They saw the carpets in just an absolute—between the mold and chemicals, an absolute disaster.
Cameron: Absolutely, and he…
Dr. Pompa: I mean, he said he got sick for a few days, him and his friend that helped right after dealing with it, right?
Cameron: Right, and he just almost had a nervous breakdown seeing that. He was like, this is not my son at all. This is like something you see out of Hoarders, someone with severe psychological imbalance, or someone that you see out of—I don’t know. It was something that you’d walk into an apartment and see off of one of these TV shows, Breaking Bad. I don’t know. I mean, it was something…
Dr. Pompa: I saw that episode. I saw that episode. That is it. That’s exactly what I envision, right? When the party, the people sleep next to—so how can anyone live this way? Only because of what the drugs did to their brains that this was acceptable.
Cameron: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: Cameron, that’s no doubt the same experience you were having with the different drug called Adderall.
Cameron: Absolutely, I was living in a totally alternate—I mean, it’s like everyone around me, right, that is in a healthy range of functionality. We’re all occupying the same space, but when you are a drug addict, you cross a certain line, a certain level of imbalance. You perceive the world in an entirely different way, so you’re experiencing an entirely different reality. And suddenly, things become okay that they never were, and just, behavior is just absolutely crazy. I mean, there’s really nothing that you, I mean, that I can think of that’ll drive the brain in the perception of someone out of balance faster than drugs because that’s what they’re engineered to do. To create a quick…
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, and the tragedy is is these are legal drugs. Adderall is stronger than cocaine, really. I mean, and of course, this was an extreme, right? I mean, you were set up for it from the toxic childhood all the way through. But I hear multiple stories somewhere in between this, right? It’s doing the same thing where it creates this false reality. It creates this stimulation, and then they start using things to bring it down. See, when you give Adderall to a young child, it actually calms the brain. When you give Adderall to an adult, you get this amazing stimulation. There’s an opposite effect. Anyways, so just in the sake of time because I want to tell people where you’re at now, right? So your dad comes in. Of course, you’re sick. I mean, they—your parents are amazing people. They really are.
Cameron: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: I met both of them via Skype. That’s the way, the virtual world. You’re my virtual client. But they’re amazing people, and they’ve done everything for you. So they brought you into this healing. I mean, they got you into some serious therapy. But, really, fast forward because you end up with, literally, allergic to your world, right?
Cameron: Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: I mean, multiply chemically sensitive. And by the way, I hear this story day in and day out. Chemically sensitive, food intolerances, basically, now you can’t function.
Cameron: Absolutely, yeah, just to skim through a couple different things, after I was that sick, my life broke down very, very quickly. I had a lot of different things that had taken place. End up getting a massive amount of money stolen from me from my toxic group situation that’s going on. All that fell back on my parents who came in and saved my life. We were able to pay off my debt because they knew that I was sick at this point. And I had made the decision—we didn’t know what to do. We went back to the psychiatrists. They played musical medications with me and said, “Oh, well, no, you just need more of this, more of this. You need this, Prozac here to calm down this symptom,” and all that kind of stuff. And by this point, I was starting to realize—I had a very humbling experience, life changing experience at one point where I just had this moment or series of moments of clarity. Where I felt what was going on. I’d been brought down so low that I just—the ego dissolving thing where I really feel like that God was speaking to me at this time. I realized—I started to really understand what balance was, and that that was really the secret to health and the secret to life in general and that I couldn’t create balance with these drugs because they’re not part of the innate intelligence of the body.
Dr. Pompa: That’s right.
Cameron: Yeah, for short-term this and that but they will drive the body out of balance and create—and I just wanted my old self back, even though that wasn’t great, but it was—you know what I’m saying? And at the time, I didn’t know it was possible. So cut to we ended up going to—I took myself off of Adderall. I said this is absolutely enough. My parents weren’t sure what to do about it, and I just said I’m not going to be this person anymore, which is not an easy thing to do because there’s a denial. You want to keep taking it. I took myself off of Adderall, and that brought me into the most horrendous—when I took myself off, the masking effect was lifted, and now all the damage and dysfunction was now brought to the surface. All of a sudden, my brain completed crashed. I couldn’t function whatsoever. Didn’t know where I was half the time. What day it was. And at certain points, couldn’t even recognize my family. I was so, so bad. Perceptual disturbance, I mean, my brain had been totally fried, and we ended up going to a lot of different places. We went the first year doing the musical drugs things because I got so desperate. I actually got checked into a psych ward just because I was so suicidal. Because I was so—I had nothing going on up here. I needed some sort of stimulation, and I didn’t want to take drugs at this point, but I did until that didn’t work. And I ended up going to a few different places to try to get help, started out getting some intravenous nutraceuticals, which didn’t work out so well because, still, it was just throwing things allopathically at me still. Instead of drugs, it was the amino acids, vitamins, minerals. And then I went and did some hyperbaric oxygen for a while. That was beneficial in the short term, but now I know afterwards that, I mean, it was the wrong time and place. I was very toxic, neurotoxic, sick, inflamed. And that was whenever I—shortly after that, about the summer of 2013, one day things just switched. I mean, I was deteriorating, deteriorating, horrible brain fog, incredible fatigue, was on the couch for a year. Literally, was on the couch for almost every single hour of the day for a year, and all of a sudden, I was eating one night, and my throat started to close up. I never had reactions that I knew of, right, in the past or severe symptomatic reactions. My throat closed up, and through the next few days, everything that I ate or everything that I was doing, I was getting these massive adrenaline attacks that just came out of nowhere, and I could not breathe, and some of them even got to the point—they were so severe at that point where my fingers were hyperextend. Literally, I couldn’t move my body, and I was, basically, in a mild seizure. That is what it was. Because my—I would start to shake. I couldn’t even move anything. It was just absolutely horrendous, and it was a total adrenaline attack. And that led me to trying to figure out what was going on. Obviously, I went to—we ended up going to this place in Dallas, which is a medical research facility that a lot of chemically sensitive clients end up at because they do some things to help control these reactions, and they really educate you to help you bring together this information of the bucket theory. I had gathered bits and pieces of information. I was doing research throughout the entire time trying to survive, but I was able to really pull it together and see, look, this is how toxic I am. I knew that toxicity was a factor, but I didn’t understand that it was the thing that I had to remove. I mean, that I could never get well without. And this is why hyperbaric didn’t work. This is why some of these things I tried, more downstream things, didn’t work was because of that. But then, once I got down there, I really got educated to that. That’s whenever, really, I started formulating the plan of what to do. Unfortunately, at that point, I was so reactive that I could not—I crossed another line where, all of a sudden, I couldn’t put any foods in my mouth. I was allergic to all foods, literally. Any food I put in my mouth, I’d get a massive adrenaline attack where I felt like I was dying every time. The worst experience I can imagine. My throats closing up, I’m gasping for air, and this would last 24 hours.
Dr. Pompa: I want to point something out because I get calls like this weekly, almost daily, where I hear these stories, right? It starts with a food. Most people are down here where they’re reacting to a certain set of foods. Some people don’t even know, right? And then it becomes this symptom, that symptom, this—and they’re realizing that they’re allergic to all these foods, or at least intolerant to all these foods and have no idea.
Cameron: Right.
Dr. Pompa: Then, after a while, they end up, literally, intolerant to just about everything they’re eating. I have many, especially young kids today; this is more prevalent with younger kids, where they’re eating three to five foods without reacting. Oh, and then when they eat those for a while, then they actually start reacting to those, and they have to go back to foods they haven’t eaten in a while. I want our viewers to understand that this is becoming a massive epidemic.
Cameron: Oh, it is.
Dr. Pompa: Because of massive amount of neurotoxins that we’re exposed to, watch our previous show to figure that out. But this is a massive problem. This is not something that you—is exclusive to you.
Cameron: Right, and I mean, honestly, when it happened to me, I thought that it was because, obviously, no one in my particular environment here, my immediate family, or even friends, or anything, have. It was just so bizarre. All of a sudden, one day—which it didn’t happen in one day. I started becoming somewhat sensitive to supplements, but not anything like these, and then got to this realm to where I couldn’t eat anything. And now I’m sensitive to smells, and things just kept getting worse and worse. I thought that I was some sort of a crazy anomaly because, obviously, every single doctor that I went to either laughed at me, or they said that it’s impossible. You can’t react to everything. Of course, I mean, we’ve heard it a thousand times. I mean, it wasn’t until I found this place, and at least they understood that that’s what was taking place, and then, all of a sudden, I find myself in the middle of this community of people who are exactly like me, some even worse. They’re in wheelchairs coming in every single day and so bad to where it really—this whole situation has just totally expanded my perception of what’s possible, right? Because before, I mean, I’m sure I would’ve been one of those people who said, this guy says he’s reacting to his refrigerator or his iPod. Are you crazy kind of thing? I get here, and I’ve seen people, and I’ve met people, and spent massive amounts of time with clients that they’re living conditions are so horrendous. I mean, people could not imagine what these people deal with every single day. I mean, they get severe reactions that are what would be considered suicidal reactions. They’re getting them dozens of times, even hundreds of times a day. And I’ve met some people…
Dr. Pompa: They’re reacting to chemicals or a food. You go to an event. Someone comes in with maybe a lotion that has a fragrance on it. These people will go into convulsions. These people react massively.
Cameron: Oh, gosh, and so you end up being—absolutely, your freedoms are taken away one, by one, by one, by one. And then, all of a sudden, or maybe a lot at once to where all you can do is quarantine yourself in some sort of a safe housing trying to make your house as safe as possible. Rip up the carpet. Do air purifiers, air exchange systems, or whatever. Eat completely organic as much as you possibly can, and then you try to clean it up as much as you can. But some of these people, they can even react to their clothes. I mean, I’ve known people who have had to stay quarantined, and stay naked all of the time. They can’t leave their house, and they’re literally just reacting to almost everything. And the EMF, the EMF sensitivity is horrendous because…
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, that’s electromagnetic frequencies is what he’s talking about, folks. Like he said, people reacting to the refrigerator, I’ve had several of those clients that couldn’t stand next to the refrigerator. A moving fan, it puts off an amount of electromagnetic frequency that most people would be able to tolerate. God forbid they put a phone to their head. They literally—it sends their system into a reaction. Why? It’s one more stressor that a healthy body can deal with. They’re body can’t deal with one thing that causes any oxidative stress. Of course, an EMF does. So this became your reality. Just like so many clients.
Cameron: Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: Your way of getting there was different than some other people’s way, right? I mean, some people’s way is this massive—it was a combination, mold, chemicals, stressors. You’re right, genetics, toxins before you were born, I mean, all of these things come together. I call it the “perfect storm.” Each storm is a little bit different, but what you’re experiencing is a modern day epidemic of people at some level on the scale. Yeah, you’re out here, but I see people all the way across the scale of sensitivities. Most of them don’t know it. They don’t realize they’re reacting to smells. They don’t realize they’re reacting to their carpet, their new furniture, their new phone, the flame retardant on their new computer, but they are. And this is a massive epidemic. And so fast forward because of the sake of time, and there’s so much to tell, right? It is an amazing story.
Cameron: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa: Your body, just like so many of these cases that I see, finally brings you down to where you literally can’t eat anything. You literally went 14 days without food, and at least 5 days, even without water. You even started reacting to water. So quickly take us through that, and let’s tell them what you did. How your body came out of that.
Cameron: Right, and I think, at that point, I’d actually done some at least minor healing for sure because, for the first year, I spent time in Dallas, which is where this facility was. I live in Arkansas, but we just had to move down there, and stay in this safe housing. Stay in a different apartment that was safe, eventually. But the only things that I was able to do for a year were just very basic non-invasive modalities, things that work with the energy systems of the body, some chiropractic stuff to just try to get things—keep things moving. Get my body detoxing enough. A lot of grounding outside, things like that. Just to try to get my body strong enough to where I could actually do some things that truly do detox, right, obviously, and that was a year, a year and a half. And then, at this point, I probably, my guess—I got to a point where, I was, I was moving things around. Maybe I was detoxing something really heavily. Who knows? But I actually had gained back a lot of my—some of my foods, at least, couldn’t do supplements. No way, at this point. No way. I had a few foods that I was working with, for a long time I only had one. It got to this point, and then all of a sudden, I couldn’t—yeah, like you said, I couldn’t eat any food. I couldn’t even take a sip of water. I couldn’t put anything in my mouth, down my gastrointestinal tract without my throat closing up and having a horrendous adrenaline attack that lasted a day. I was just getting worse and worse. And so the big thing was the water. Because a lot of people do things, like fast and stuff, but the water, you deteriorate so, so quickly. So long story short, I ended up going five days without drinking water. Now, I didn’t go five days without foods in my system. I went three—almost three days without anything, once this happened. And on that third day, I was in an emergency situation, obviously, because I was already chronically sick, and yeah, I was on death’s door. And so we got some IV fluids into me finally, which I didn’t do right off the bat because I had reacted to them in the past. So I was afraid I was going to react, and I was going to be worse, and I was going to—so at this point, you start to get dehydrated, you’re even that much more hyperreactive. The more—because that fight or flight system. So I terrified of doing anything because I thought it was going to kill me at that point, when I was that weak. But it came down to that point where, on that third day, I had to get fluids in my system. I tried to drink. It didn’t work. I could not. So I had to, basically, go back to this facility, which is like an emergency facility for chemically sensitive clients. I’m really glad it’s there, for sure, and I just had to take a leap of faith. They said, “Well, you have to get fluids in your system today because your body is shutting down.” I mean, I looked absolutely terrible, and we did. Me and my mom were in there. I was trying not to be in tears to work up my system anymore. My mom was. I was wanting to call my brothers, my dad. I was wanting to call everybody and just—because I was at that point where I knew this could go either way. If I didn’t get fluids in my system today, then I possibly was going to die. And so I did it, and we just prayed right before. My mom and I, I think, held hands while we were doing it, and we just—they took—they brought out the saline, and put it in my arm. Started bringing it in, and sure enough, I didn’t react. It was the only thing in my environment that I wasn’t reacting to, and it was just like, oh, my gosh. That wasn’t the end of it. They were only able to do a liter that day. And that wasn’t nearly enough, but it was enough to keep me—get me to the next day. And for the next few days after that, they did that, and I actually continued to deteriorate because I just wasn’t getting enough to even come close to catching up to—because I’d been dehydrated in the weeks before that too. And so I—but the interesting thing was—so basically, a long story short, throughout this—I was already going out—I was going without food for a while before this five day water thing was going on. But basically, I went—through this whole process, I went almost 2 weeks without food, 12, 13 days without food at all, and during that process, golly, I was—some things I noticed. I was smelling. My tongue was turning all these weird colors, and there was this enhanced detox reaction that was going on. And I did, I stunk worse than anything. I was barely able to walk. I barely was able to walk, and I’m surprised that I was able to do that. But it hit a certain point. On that fifth day, it was down to crunch time where, yeah, I’d gotten some fluids in my system. It wasn’t nearly enough. I had to have more water. I had to be able to drink. All of a sudden, we were sitting in there, and they do these little skin testing antigens where they can get a reaction down by finding a particular endpoint. It’s murky exactly how it all works down to the T, but it does work for a lot of clients. Anyway, so they skin tested me, which I was afraid of doing bad because I was just—we were trying to get fluids in my system, and I was starting to react to the IVs now too. And I felt like I was about to die. I mean, I felt like I was—I was in full-fledged delirium at this point. I was saying things that were so out of—like crazy, so I had them skin test me on water. They had a skin test, actually, for mountain valley water. They made one up, and sure enough, there was no wheel. There’s no reaction. I’m just saying, whoa. There was a point where I felt like my body made a shift. It was within a couple of hours. It was like I’d been brought to a certain point of my lowest, and I was like, oh, my gosh, give me the water. Give me the water. And then they tested me—I had them test me on—because I wanted to get some calories in my system. They tested me on apples, and I had no reaction to that where I was welting like crazy and crazy. It was this massive hyperreactive circumstance, and I didn’t react to that either. Just all of a sudden, this switch went off. And I had my parents go grab me some apple juice, and I started drinking it, and I didn’t react. And I started drinking it, and I just started…
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, we’re running out of time, Cameron, so bottom line is the fast, like I’ve seen many, many times.
Cameron: Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: Things happen. Things shift.
Cameron: Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: Now all of a sudden the things you reacted to you were able to do, right?
Cameron: Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: You said 12 days without food, 5 days without water. The body went through this process, and sure enough, the body opens up again. And again, seeing that many, many times, I mean, that’s the power of the fast. And then you started—there was a product, ASEA.
Cameron: Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: You were able to take little amounts of, and of course, that was when you and I started working together and little bit more of that. And now we’re to the point, because we have to draw this to a conclusion, I mean, you’re absolutely—you’re eating almost everything. I mean, it’s remarkable. Yeah, I mean, we’re still all healthy foods, but you’re eating all these great foods. You put on weight. You don’t look like the same person that when I sat across the screen from you the first time, man, you still looked close to death, right? I mean, you look like a different person. And now, you’ve even started some detox. I mean, the ASEA product you’ve been detoxing to. But that little liquid product is often times one of the first things that people can tolerate. It’s redox molecules, and we don’t have time to get into that.
Cameron: Right, right, yeah.
Dr. Pompa: So you’ve been tolerating some different other supplements that we’ve been giving you, and you’re starting to take on some cellular products and even small amounts of detox. So you’ve come a long way.
Cameron: Well, that’s a huge—yeah, that’s a huge thing because I haven’t been able to tolerate supplements of any kind for years without severe reactions. And after I came through that fast, like you talked, just to touch on real quick, I was better. All of a sudden, I could do more things, and then we tried some of these things, obviously, in small amounts at first. Like the ASEA, like the cell detox drops, and I can tolerate them, and I can work with them. I have to work with them slowly, but it’s just amazing. I mean, I feel like all the things that we’re doing with the bacteria, I mean, everything, the combination, it’s just great. I mean, I still have a long way to go. I mean, honestly, I do, but just where I’m at right now, I’m just so grateful. Like we were talking about before, it’s all relative once you get to this point. Yes, I still experience hell to some degree on days, but absolutely, from where I’ve been and where I am now and the fact that we’re making progress. And I understand the concepts involved, and you’re so incredible at explaining. And I’m so blessed that you decided to take me on because I could see that you were worried whenever I talked to you the first time, for sure, because it’s hard, a very complicated situation.
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, no, no, I mean, I’ve been down this road enough times with enough people, and myself included. It’s somewhere on that thing. I became intolerant to my world as well. Food, chemicals, I couldn’t function. I couldn’t go out ever with comfort because of a smell, a cologne. You just become isolated in your own little world. The only way I can understand it, Cameron, is because I’ve been there, and that’s it. There’s no other way a doctor can understand. Just like anything. We tap into the innate intelligence, and often times, I said it in the beginning of the show, your body made you fast. Now, today, I’m doing fasting, different fasts with people, because that’s a way of healing. And then you bring in enough cellular function, and the body will heal. Really, you remove the interference. The body will heal. We got your cells functioning enough to this point, and now we’re able to start doing some light detox, and start emptying the bucket. But man, I could go on with a whole other hour even just of what we’ve done, and how we got there.
Cameron: I know. It’s so hard to condense.
Dr. Pompa: I have. It was a very—and having trouble at the top of the show with the technology put us back, but it’s just—really, it’s a remarkable story, Cameron, and we’ll have to bring you on in the future again because that way we can—people can watch the beginning of the show, and then we’ll talk about some things we’ve been doing. You know, Cameron, I want to do that because you’re not an anomaly. I mean, your story on how you got there, I think, is really unique with some of the things. I think the monkeys tipped that off, but really, it’s not unique at all. Kids on Adderall, kids eating the foods that they eat today, it really is a story that I hear again and again. And the story that I hear most often is I can’t eat these foods, and I’m allergic to this and that and this, and this story is being told again and again. And there’s a way out, Cameron, and you’re proving that. There’s a way out. You just have to be willing to do it. And so I hope you join us again so we can just see this progression. And I think many people are looking for answers, Cameron. And this show, they probably wanted us to go into these things that we’re doing even more. You know what I’m saying? But cellular healing, I mean, honestly, just the things that we’re doing. The fasting is really what gave the leverage even to get to where we are now, and cellular detox, I mean, that’s it. You remove the interference. The body can do the healing, Cameron.
Cameron: Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa: And again, so I hate to draw it to a conclusion, but we have to because of the sake of time. But we’re going to have you back on so we can talk more about some of these things, okay?
Cameron: Oh, yeah, definitely, any time.
Dr. Pompa: Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah.
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, absolutely, but you know what? It was worth running over because you have an incredible story. And I said it also at the top of the show. I believe God has allowed you to go through this because you are going to have major authority in this area. You’ve been called to something very great. Just with your story alone, you’re giving many people watching this right now a lot of help. You were on death’s door, and look at you now. I wish they could see the Cameron that I saw across the screen not that long ago, and how fast your body is really pulling it together.
Cameron: Well, yeah, and if—yeah, if you would’ve seen me too a year before that.
Dr. Pompa: Oh, yeah.
Cameron: Where it’s just, absolutely, knocking on death’s door there, for sure, and living in effect…
Dr. Pompa: Yeah, no doubt, so thank you for sharing. That’s an amazing story, Cameron, and I can’t wait to have you on again. Tell your mom and dad thanks. I saw Marion earlier.
Cameron: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Dr. Pompa: All right, well, thank you so much, man. And like I said, I can’t wait to see you again.