Remembering Dr. William Rea
With sadness, I offer a tribute to honor William Rea, MD (1935-2018), a brilliant and forward-thinking physician. Dr. Rea was kind enough to serve as a volunteer advisor to our organization since its inception and he will be greatly missed.
For decades, Dr. Rea worked on developing new methods of identifying and treating detrimental results of environmental issues that impact health. Patients from around the world flocked to his Environmental Health Center in Dallas seeking answers to chronic medical problems that no one else could solve. He often saw the “sickest of the sick” and was able to restore health to so many.
Dr. William Rea’s funeral service gives a wonderful and inspiring overview of who this physician was, how he touched the lives of others, and where his work will ultimately lead in the future. I encourage you to watch it. See here on facebook.
At 83 years of age, Dr. Rea was still treating patients at his specialized medical facility. On August 16, he informed his office staff that he was not feeling well. He headed home, and that day he passed away in the presence of Vera, his wife of 58 years.
A gentle exit for a remarkable man.
His friends, grateful physician and patients, are left without having had the chance to offer one last “thank you” for his contribution to the field and for his dedication and heartfelt care. But, he will surely be remembered often. I have listed some of Dr. Rea’s accomplishments and honors at the end of this page.
A personal remembrance
Though never a patient of his, I can speak to Dr. Rea’s generosity of spirit and his passion to teach. For years I attended conferences of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. Most often I was the only attendee who was not a physician or even a medical staff person. I not only listened to his frequent lectures, but also approached him one-on-one to pick his brain. Dr. Rea’s interactions with me were sometimes humorous, always gracious, and truly informative. He gave me permission to use material from his monumental text books on Environmental Medicine whenever I wished.
As often occurs with medical visionaries, Dr. Rea drew strong criticism from mainstream medical groups. He was most attacked for recognizing “multiple chemical sensitivity.” He knew it was real. His patients knew it was real, and they responded to his treatments. The condition is now, at last, gaining recognition as a legitimate diagnosis, but he bore the barbs and criticisms that came his way for many years. It should be noted that he won every case lodged against him by medical boards.
Dr. William Rea is remembered by me with awe for his accomplishments and with gratitude for his guidance.
- In 1988, Dr. Rea was named to the world’s first professorial chair of environmental medicine at the Robens Institute of Toxicology at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England.
- Author of the medical textbooks, Chemical Sensitivity, Vol. 1-4
- Co-author of Reversibility of Chronic Degenerative Disease and Hypersensitivity, V. 1: Regulating Mechanisms of Chemical Sensitivity, Optimum Environments for Optimum Health and Creativity, and co-author of Your Home, Your Health and Well-Being
- Rea has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers.
- He was awarded the Jonathan Forman Gold Medal Award in 1987 and the Herbert J. Rinkel Award in 1993, both by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine.
- Rea was named Outstanding Alumnus by Otterbein College in 1991.
The Environmental Health Center Dallas is still in operation and accepting patients. Dr. Rea would have wanted it that way.
Dear Sheila,
Thank you for your beautiful and informative tribute. I, like you, was never Dr. Rea’s patient, but I met him one day on the grounds of his Dallas EHC, the store of which I’d traveled to from another state so that I could peruse
his landmark Chemical Sensitivity volumes, intending since I could only afford ONE, to buy the “best” (best as I could determine from leafing through them on site) of the three for providing me insights that might help me to
figure out how to heal myself (since I could not afford to see HIM) of what I think might best be “updated” to be called “Chemical Injury/Multiple Chemical Sensitivity” (CI/MCS).
I write “best” because, with a “CI/MCS” rather than just “MCS” label, the SYMPTOMS (i.e., signs of “sensitivity” to multiple chemicals such as chest pain, debilitating brain fog, and many other upon exposure to even small
amounts of “everyday” chemicals, or the “MCS” part of the label) are explained by naming in the disorder’s very name, right BEFORE the symptoms/MCS part of it, the CAUSATION MECHANISM likeliest to have been the original cause of those symptoms (namely, the Chemical Injury/ies that set into motion the processes that result in “sensitivity” to multiple chemicals/metals, i.e., the “MCS”). More on my rationale for an effective “rebranding” of the disorder by use of “CI/MCS” (or along those lines), below.
Dr. Rea’s manner in that glancingly brief meeting I had with him at his Environmental Health Center, seemed to me as gentle as you describe. I had almost the exact same impression upon meeting (also briefly) William E.
Colby at a conference attended by U.S. patriots (my fellow nonviolent activists) where we met because we were working toward having some of our U.S. Government’s grossly bloated military budget to be diverted FROM
thousand dollar toilet seats, etc, TO meeting basic human needs (an arena in which I tried to help before I became disabled by CI/MCS).
This was around the time of the Clinton Administration, after Mr Colby had retired as CIA head, and his presence at that conference was a confirmatory sign that he supported such efforts (in fact, this article https://bit.ly/3OkP6BL states that Mr Colby outright said in 1992: <>).
My impression of both men: that they were caring people with a deep knowledge of facts that most “experts” in their particular respective field(s) are blind to, who wanted to help set right what had been so badly trajectoried
in our country, and were courageous enough to stand up for TRUTH against those whose were not open to seeing those truths. Dr Rea, of course, amanifesting these qualities not only with his dedication to healing the individual patients he treated, but also in the writing of his landmark books and papers (his online papers that I read in the early days of my own CI/MCS — papers that, as I would summarize in a nutshell, described cardiovascular effects of impaired chemical detoxification — are, or would be, invaluable for establishing that CI/MCS in its later stages is a life-threatening condition), in his winning court cases where he had been (unsuccessfully, as you point out) challenged as to the validity of the “chemical sensitivity” paradigm he had
meticulously set forth in his books and papers, and in his establishment of a medical center that remains to honor his service and to continue to help untold more patients who can afford to pay for the assessments and treatments that his Environmental Health Center offers.
I love the purity of both these men’s spirits and how that led them to put their lives on the line for humanity — in Mr Colby’s case, particularly in his later years — and am grateful to you for posting not only your memoriam but
also Dr Rea’s photo that reminded me so vividly of Mr Colby the day I met him at the conference I attended, as to stimulate my own tribute, above, to both of them.
Now back to why I think the official name of the disorder Dr Rea dedicated his EHC practice to addressing, should be called CI/MCS. It’s my humble opinion that the CI/MCS UPDATE to the label we affix to the MCS disorder, is necessary as part of an effort to correct chemical industry malfeasance such as that as described in this essay by MD Ann McCampbell http://www.getipm.com/personal/mcs-campbell.htm .
In short, society-wide brainwashing (aka “gaslighting”, both my words, not Dr McCampbell’s) by the chemical industry as well as due to ignorance of the MCS process by most conventional MDs, have together combined to produce a reflexive scoffing –when the term “MCS” is used all by itself without the preface of “CI/”– in those who are uninformed, to the effect that CI/MCS’s sufferers are just (overly-) “sensitive” snowflakes, and/or are “mentally ill” (which can denote anything from being thought to be afflicted by a “delusion” that “smells” are “harming” them, to “anxiety”, or perhaps worse”).
Formal adoption of an updated name that makes more explicit that the “MCS” disease/disorder process is a strictly PHYSIOLOGICAL one that has been caused by a concrete injury or injuries, and that said initial injuries then can become perpetuated and intensified by additional chemical exposures that the body can no longer handle due to the CI/MCS condition that has resulted from the initial and/or continuing chemical injuries, would help clarify why it is that the MEDICAL SAFETY of those who suffer CI/MCS, depends upon their not being subjected — at the very LEAST in their own residences! — to the seeping into their indoor air, of secondhand smoke and other chemicals of other tenants and management operations (or even their own family members in some or many cases!) that cause immediate physical suffering and long-term continuing and worsening damage to their bodies.
A name being given to the disorder that links physiological causation mechanism(s) to the physiological effects/symptoms suffered as the result of said mechanism(s) making it more clear that MEDICAL SAFETY requires that those with CI/MCS must have CLEAN AIR HOUSING as a condition of their well-being and even preservation of their very LIFE — would best facilitate the necessary changes in housing that would preclude tragedies of people afflicted by the twin evils of (1) the CI/MCS disorder itself and (2) no place to live where they do not get exposed to never-ending ongoing exposures to chemicals such as those in secondhand smoke (that KILLS 42,000 nonsmoking Americans a year), vaping, and various fragranced (e.g., air “freshener” plug-ins in hallways) and other maintenance-applied chemicals, who in extremity of pain and deepening illness from these chemicals entering the confines of their own homes in multi-unit dwellings, end up committing suicide, either directly upon themselves, or by way of the “assisted death” the Canadian government has been making available to such CI/MCS sufferers as https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/health/2022/4/13/1_5860579.amp.html
I trust that Dr Rea would smile upon my using the occasion of this tribute page, to introduce these thoughts, hope that you will as well, and thank you again for your contributions, Sheila.