Written by admin on 2009-04-20T09:29:35+0000">April 20, 2009 – 9:29 am
In the last 20 years the traditional picture of allergies has changed substantially, as conventional allergists have recognized that things are much less neat and logical than they originally seemed. Allergens do not necessarily cause their major symptoms at the place where they first encounter the body. They can enter the body by one route and then cause symptoms somewhere else entirely, because they are carried to that point in the blood. Thus foods can cause asthma or eczema, although they are likely to share the blame with inhalants or contactants respectively. Inhaled allergens can also cause skin reactions because they enter the bloodstream through the membranes of the nose or lung and are carried by the blood to the skin.
It has taken a long time – 40 years or more – for these new ideas about allergy to be accepted by orthodox allergists. This is largely because the discoveries were first made by the clinical ecologists in America and their counterparts elsewhere – they tended to attract those patients who had been declared incurable by more conventional doctors. Because of the long-running controversy over clinical ecology, the traditional allergists at first regarded their findings with great suspicion.
Even today, there are vestiges of the old ideas about allergy in the way conventional allergists think about food. The traditional concept of a food allergy is a severe reaction to food which is almost always immediate. The types of symptoms produced are fairly well defined and limited in number – the sort of symptoms seen in Jane’s case. Although most conventional allergists now accept that foods may produce slower and less violent reactions, with more varied symptoms, such as asthma and eczema, these are not what spring to mind when the words ‘food allergy’ are used. The same tends to be true of family doctors, and this is sometimes a contributing factor in the disagreements and misunderstandings over food allergy.
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