How I beat fibromyalgia

In 1996, Karen Charman and her fiancé moved into an apartment in Inwood, the northernmost part of Manhattan.

It was an old building that had been completely renovated, with all the wood floors redone. Karen had had allergies as a child, and in her twenties, back in the 1980s, she discovered she was allergic to gluten and dairy. For the most part, if she avoided those two things, the eczema outbreaks that signaled an allergic reaction remained dormant. But after the couple moved into their new apartment, all that changed.

“It was like everything was setting me off,” says Karen. “I was having the eczema, I was having difficulty breathing, my digestive system was way out of whack. If I ate certain things, my stomach would bloat out, and I would be gassy. I was experiencing terrible brain fog, and I was tired all the time. I just felt like my system was completely flipping out.”

An investigative environmental journalist, Charman was better informed than most, thanks to her job. “I had met some people at a pesticide conference in Washington, D.C., a couple of years beforehand,” she says, “and they were glue sensitive. That was the first I’d ever come across that concept. So when this started happening to me, I at least had a little bit of knowledge—enough to be pretty scared.”

Realizing she was probably reacting to the formaldehydes in the flooring and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in the paint in her new apartment, she knew she needed professional help.

Figuring a