These differ from the conventional allergy as they are frequently exhibited in a masked form. For this reason, clinical ecology has been slow in gaining medical acceptance. However, these days the doctor specializing as a clinical ecologist is gaining recognition in Europe and the United States. Speaking on the situation in Australia, Professor Ian Lewis of the University of Tasmania says that the current medical training is not geared towards producing doctors that can solve problems. He feels that doctors should be taught to consider alternatives to drug therapy, rather than be over crammed with factual knowledge. This may lead, in time, to a resumption in use of the physician's greatest historical tool - a thorough investigation of the patient's diet and environment.

In effect, ecological illness is one large allergy. Most people today have it, to varying degrees. Within this general malaise, more specific allergies or sensitivities occur. Invariably however, exposure to the allergen does not produce an immediate or detectable response. Symptoms tend to be masked and therefore very difficult to trace back to a specific cause. For this reason most doctors are not able to diagnose a food or chemical sensitivity occurring as a masked allergy. Their lack of training, understanding and interest in this area compounds the difficulty in obtaining a correct diagnosis. Time and time again masked allergy symptoms are diagnosed as something quite different. The symptom is then treated by the doctor and the cause remains undetected. This approach will quieten the symptom for a while but it will continue to flare up regularly until the individual is classified as a chronic sufferer. The sufferer is then often placed on the strongest drug available, on a semi-permanent basis, and told to live with it. Meanwhile, the allergy remains undetected, and the build-up in toxins causes further suffering and damage to an already weakened system. In the words of Drs Kenyon and Lewith -

"Masked allergy may exhibit itself by a patient being exposed to a common food such as wheat, daily. No clear reactions to the wheat are shown in the patient's symptoms; for instance the patient does not exhibit an acute asthmatic wheeze after eating a slice of bread, or urticaria after eating biscuits. But a symptom complex which may involve asthma, accompanied by general malaise and depression, or osteoarthritis accompanied by headaches, may be the presenting complaints. The patient avoids wheat for a period of five days then, if the wheat is the major allergen, the symptoms will usually disappear. Re-exposure after this period of time will often induce an acute recurrence of the symptoms. This recurrence may occur immediately or twenty-four hours after re-exposure."

It is easy to see why masked allergies and symptoms continue to baffle the modern doctor. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that many doctors do not understand this process and, as a result, many of their patients are being treated for asthma, skin problems, lethargy, irritability, digestive problems and a whole range of symptoms whilst the real cause, the masked allergy, goes undetected.