If you’ve tried allergy medication and eliminating allergens as much as possible from your life but continue suffer with allergies, you may want to consider immunotherapy.

Understanding Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is a process of receiving injections with your particular allergen(s) so that your body will produce antibodies to ward of your reaction to them. The doctor will start with a small dose and increase it until you start to show a reaction. This can mean that you receive two injections a week for a month. Once at the proper dosage, you may have to return for an injection weekly for a certain amount of months determined by your doctor.

The Benefits of This Allergy Relief

Immunotherapy can save you a lot of grief and money because once you have built up the antibodies; you will no longer have a reaction to your allergens.  You’ll finally find relief from the allergies you suffered with for years. However, for some people, a booster injection is required a few years later.

The Cost of Immunotherapy

Unfortunately, since immunotherapy isn’t considered pharmaceuticals, many insurance companies will not cover the cost. To pay out of pocket, you are looking at about $1,000 for the first year and the second year in which you only get a couple injections a month may run you about $350. If you are not able to afford immunotherapy, shop around because doctors vary in pricing. Also, you can contact your state’s allergy society for information on low or no-cost immunotherapy in your area.

Photo: Sarah G

I think I’ve mentioned before that I live in Florida? Where the state tree is (or should be) the pine tree. I’m not allergic, thankfully, but I’ve been thinking about how horrible it would be if I were. Let me illustrate with a few examples. During pine tree pollen season, my screened porch gets coated yellow. Not just the screen but the bench inside of it as well. By green truck turns yellow. Do you know how much pollen you have to put on green to turn it green? A lot. Finally, we are thinking about building a screened in pool and the pool builders have told us that during ‘pine season’ we’ll have to skim the top of the pool daily if we don’t want to swim in pollen even with the screening. One last example; a friend of mine left her windows open on a nice day. There were window screens and she figured everything would be fine. Oh no. The rooms with the windows open had to be completely cleaned because of the coating of pine pollen. All of these examples make me wonder, how does anyone with a pine pollen allergy live anywhere in Florida and maintain any kind of good health?(or any other state with lots of pine trees). Someone clue me in?

Photo Credit: Dbaron

Around 40 percent of allergy sufferers use different alternative and natural treatments to relieve allergies. These treatments are not approved by the FDA, but are sometimes recommended by doctor and allergists. Butterbur, honey, quercetin, stinging nettle, and sodium selenite have different advantageous benefits to relieving allergy symptoms.

A friend of mine has a kind of odd allergy. Well she calls it an allergy but it’s more of a chemical reaction I guess. She is allergic to chlorine. If chlorine touches her skin she breaks out into what looks like hives except they may remain for weeks instead of hours. She has to wear rubber gloves if she wants to use chlorine for anything and even being in a swimming pool for extended periods  can cause this horrible reaction. Sometimes if she is bleaching towels, she will even have a minor reaction. I can’t even believe how hard it is on her. So many cleaning products have bleach in them and she is something of a clean freak.

As in she’s the type of person who use to notice when I would go in and move her stapler a few nudges to the side on her desk. Before she realized what was causing the reaction she’d use bleach in everything. Since she’s figured it out her overall health has been much better. Although her happiness has decreased (after all nothing is really clean without bleach, right?) Do you have any allergies, or in this case chemical reactions that are less common? How do you cope with it?

Photo Credit: Ksionic

I was so glad that this article made the point that allergic conjunctivitis is not contagious. So many people hear the word “conjunctivitis” and they are afraid to go near you. My son gets seasonal allergic conjunctivitis and every year the school nurse wants to send him home! I hope she reads this article and develops a little more sensitivity!

My family health insurance doesn’t cover some..no make that lots, of the things that my doctor tells me I need. Yes, they cover my medication. Well, my prescription medication. Now that one of the meds I take is over the counter (and I h*have* to have it) my insurance doesn’t cover it. Nor does my family health insurance cover the pillows, filters, special vacuum, and covers that I’m supposed to use. Yowza. Let’s not even talk about alternative therapies that are reported to help allergy and asthma sufferers like yoga. No chance at all that I could get a partial payment on that. I have been told that it is theoretically possible to get a portion of chiropractic care covered, but the amount is very tiny and the amount of hassle is very huge. Kind of depressing. I mean, they are ok with drugging me but not with more natural remedies..odd.

Part of me really hopes all of these health plan reforms that are floating around will help people get better preventative cares (yeah, not a lot of preventing for allergies) and more natural options. If money were less of an object what types of allergy remedies would you want to try?

Photo Credit: Swim Parallel  http://www.flickr.com/photos/swimparallel/3174754333/

This article really helped me understand the philosophy of acupuncture. My boyfriend got excellent relief with acupuncture treatments. Unfortunately, he had to stop because it was so expensive he could not afford it. I don’t understand why health insurance doesn’t cover acupuncture treatments! They will pay for all kinds of dangerous and invasive procedures, but not something safe, natural and effective.

Athletic asthma is also called exercise induced asthma. This is different from ‘regular’ asthma because it is only triggered by physical activity. Although exercise can cause someone with asthma to have an asthma attack. Usually athletic asthma is found in children and current information indicates that these children may have very mild asthma that is only triggered by exertion.

Why does any of this matter to me? Because I’m beginning to think my child may have athletic asthma and as any parent can tell you, a child’s health is way up on the list of priorities. So back to my overly paranoid mommy brain. Whenever my son is playing and he gets all hot and sweaty (takes about 15 min of running) he gets kind of congested like a cough. Well that was how we found out I had asthma (cough etc, not typical wheezing although mine is allergy induced not athletic).

Fortunately, just like with any other form of asthma it can be treated and I will be taking my son to his pediatrician for a checkup soon. Do you or your children have athletic asthma? Do you have any advice you’d like to share? It’s amazing how comforting it can be just knowing others have gone through the same things.

Anyways

Photo Credit: Mattsip

I’ve only met one person whose health was effected by a weird food allergy. She was the science teacher at the same school where I was a history teacher. We were in the same grade level and had the same lunch time so we often ate together. We made life very difficult for our other teachers. She was allergic to bell peppers and I was allergic to onions. Her allergy was way more serious though, she couldn’t even be in the same room with someone eating bell peppers because she would have difficulty breathing. If she accidentally ate something with a pepper she’d puff up like a bull frog (that was her joke not mine).

The thing is teachers like to eat frozen meals (at least where I worked) because they were tasty, easy, and quick…all good things when you have a 20min lunch ‘hour’. She and I were only able to find a handful of dinners that didn’t have onion/pepper in them (they seem to go together most of the time). I swear, we came to the conclusion that the primary seasonings in frozen meals are onions and peppers.

Here is my advice to all frozen food manufacturers: diversify! Try basil, lemongrass, jalapenos, anything but bell peppers and onions. 

Photo Credit: Phigongoi

People who have dust mite allergies should also be wary of cockroaches. Apparently cockroaches are cross allergenic with dust mites, so if you’re allergic to one you might be allergic to the other. No one wants to think there are roaches in their house, but they’re more common than most people would like to think. Check out more info in this article: http://www.lungdiseasefocus.com/articles/about-asthma/asthma-pollution.php