The History of Total Load

Total Load Theory

This blog was written by Beth Lambert and originally published on epidemicanswers.org; you can continue reading after the excerpt below by clicking on the button at the bottom.

“Total Load Theory” is a widely used engineering term that, for decades, has been applied to explain why a bridge might collapse. Who or what is to blame? The truck driver? The trucking company? The engineer who designed the bridge? The weather? The ship captain whose tanker bumped into the moorings endless times? Obviously not any of them is a single cause, even though each stressor contributed to the outcome. An accumulation of dozens of stressors caused the bridge to collapse.

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM), founded in 1965, is generally recognized as the first to apply the “total load” to explain the multi-factorial, complicated root causes of chronic health conditions. According to the AAEM website,

“The “total load” concept postulates that multiple and chronic environmental exposures in a susceptible individual contribute to a breakdown of that person’s homeostatic mechanisms. Rarely is there only one offending agent responsible for causing a diseased condition. Multiple factors co-exist, usually over a prolonged period of time in bringing about the disease process.”