Allergy purdah revisited
Jun. 29th, 2007 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferBack in February, I wrote about the process of cleaning the house before my first low dosage allergy treatment, and then I never posted about the results.
The results were pretty damn good.
I've used Claritin every day for about ten years just to keep my allergies down to a dull roar. One of the oddities of LDA is that one has to stop using nearly all other allergy treatments or it won't work (LDA has a lot of other oddities, too, including the distinct possibility that it functions completely through the placebo effect, but we'll get to that later). I stopped using Claritin a week before that first shot in February and suffered the tortures of the damned, assuming that hell is paved with used Kleenex. A week after the shot, I was no longer suffering, and a week after that, I was in great shape, still without Claritin.
It was the height of tree pollen season. Alders were having sex in every nose for miles around, but I could still breathe. If Kimberley-Clark's stock price depended on my nose, it was in for a dive. Maples put forth their teensy little flowers, and Glenn was miserable, but I was fine. I went to various places full of chemical smells and had no throat-closing; I smelled fresh coffee and didn't gag. People wearing perfume walked by me, and I didn't lose the ability to think or breathe.
I gloried in my ability to walk around in the world without taking Claritin every day, without popping Benadryl every time I encountered a random smell or taste or touch that gave me problems. I didn't look for allergens to try -- it's not magic, after all -- but the ones I ran into just weren't a problem.
And the smell of the world was amazing! I have a fairly good nose, and I had no idea that I was missing so much! I know I miss some notes; there are flowers Glenn sniffs with great enjoyment that do nothing for me (and many more that I enjoy that he can't smell). Going off Claritin and on LDA didn't fill in those notes – their presence or absence is genetic, and if I don't have the receptors, I don't have the receptors – but it strengthened the smells I do perceive, for good and ill.
To get to that point, I have to eat a very restricted diet for a few days before and after the shot, and an only slightly less restricted diet for a week or two after that. I have to stay in as allergen-free an environment as possible for that same period, gradually re-introducing allergens to it (or rather, re-introducing myself to the outside). And I can't use anything to control my allergic responses except LDA and isolation from the allergens: no Claritin, no Benadryl, no vitamin C, no Alka -Seltzer, definitely no pseudofed. Nasalcrom is grudgingly permitted aside from the days right around the shot, but discouraged.
The shots happen at intervals of eight or nine weeks for two years. After that, the timing changes to every two months, three months, once a year, once every five years. Inappropriate allergic responses to pollen and common environmental substances decreases. Maybe anaphylactic response goes away; I doubt that I'll test that with a few bites of shrimp or cashews. Intolerances (not the same as allergies, but perhaps controlled and certainly influenced by the same physical systems) may be reduced as well. I'm unlikely to eat a piece of wheat bread to test this, but maybe next year.
Is it worth doing? So far, my answer is, yes. I normally walk around feeling slightly drugged all the time, between the effects of the allergies themselves and the effects of the things I do to alleviate the allergies. For the most part, I can avoid the very worst allergens just by not eating the things I know could kill me and by having Benadryl and the epi-pen in my pocket for the times when it turns out I've acquired a surprising new scary food allergy. The second worst allergens are certain perfumes, colognes, and after-shaves. Those are harder to avoid, because they're invisible as they approach me, and by the time I know about them, they've already affected me. I don't know for sure what it is about them that I'm allergic to. I don't know for sure if this reaction should be called an allergy or an intolerance, given that I don't think it can kill me, but a) that's a technical distinction of little importance in normal life; b) whatever the mechanism is, the result is difficulty breathing, difficulty thinking, and disrupted short-term memory for a period varying from a few minutes to the next two days; and c) I don't particularly want to find out if it could kill me.
Given all that, a two-year period of spending about a quarter of my time in seclusion with an immediate payoff of greatly increased resistance to allergies for about half the time and a delayed payoff of greatly increased resistance to allergies most of the time seems well worth the effort.
What's in that shot, anyway? The shot contains tiny amounts of many, many different allergens (the literature describing it carefully doesn't say "homeopathic amounts") and beta glucuronidase, an enzyme extracted from garden snails. How does it work in clinical trials? Here's where we get to the point of wondering about the placebo effect: it doesn't work in clinical trials in the US. It does work in clinical trials in Europe, or so I've heard (those clinical trials were on enzyme potentiated desensitization, EPD, which is the original, British version of this treatment; low dose allergy treatment, LDA, uses a slightly different set of allergens leaning heavily on American pollens, since it's used on American patients). It works in therapeutic trials in the US, where there is no control group. It works on me, so far, considerably better than anything else I've tried.
Placebo effect? Faith healing? Maybe the clinical trial participants weren't willing to go through all the anal-retentive cleaning and preparation and restrictive menus necessary to support EPD or LDA. The allergy tech who gives me the shot says she'd like to have the treatment herself, but she just isn't organized enough to succeed. I figure that either her allergies aren't as bad as mine, or she isn't as interested in breathing as I am.
That's my story, so far.
The results were pretty damn good.
I've used Claritin every day for about ten years just to keep my allergies down to a dull roar. One of the oddities of LDA is that one has to stop using nearly all other allergy treatments or it won't work (LDA has a lot of other oddities, too, including the distinct possibility that it functions completely through the placebo effect, but we'll get to that later). I stopped using Claritin a week before that first shot in February and suffered the tortures of the damned, assuming that hell is paved with used Kleenex. A week after the shot, I was no longer suffering, and a week after that, I was in great shape, still without Claritin.
It was the height of tree pollen season. Alders were having sex in every nose for miles around, but I could still breathe. If Kimberley-Clark's stock price depended on my nose, it was in for a dive. Maples put forth their teensy little flowers, and Glenn was miserable, but I was fine. I went to various places full of chemical smells and had no throat-closing; I smelled fresh coffee and didn't gag. People wearing perfume walked by me, and I didn't lose the ability to think or breathe.
I gloried in my ability to walk around in the world without taking Claritin every day, without popping Benadryl every time I encountered a random smell or taste or touch that gave me problems. I didn't look for allergens to try -- it's not magic, after all -- but the ones I ran into just weren't a problem.
And the smell of the world was amazing! I have a fairly good nose, and I had no idea that I was missing so much! I know I miss some notes; there are flowers Glenn sniffs with great enjoyment that do nothing for me (and many more that I enjoy that he can't smell). Going off Claritin and on LDA didn't fill in those notes – their presence or absence is genetic, and if I don't have the receptors, I don't have the receptors – but it strengthened the smells I do perceive, for good and ill.
To get to that point, I have to eat a very restricted diet for a few days before and after the shot, and an only slightly less restricted diet for a week or two after that. I have to stay in as allergen-free an environment as possible for that same period, gradually re-introducing allergens to it (or rather, re-introducing myself to the outside). And I can't use anything to control my allergic responses except LDA and isolation from the allergens: no Claritin, no Benadryl, no vitamin C, no Alka -Seltzer, definitely no pseudofed. Nasalcrom is grudgingly permitted aside from the days right around the shot, but discouraged.
The shots happen at intervals of eight or nine weeks for two years. After that, the timing changes to every two months, three months, once a year, once every five years. Inappropriate allergic responses to pollen and common environmental substances decreases. Maybe anaphylactic response goes away; I doubt that I'll test that with a few bites of shrimp or cashews. Intolerances (not the same as allergies, but perhaps controlled and certainly influenced by the same physical systems) may be reduced as well. I'm unlikely to eat a piece of wheat bread to test this, but maybe next year.
Is it worth doing? So far, my answer is, yes. I normally walk around feeling slightly drugged all the time, between the effects of the allergies themselves and the effects of the things I do to alleviate the allergies. For the most part, I can avoid the very worst allergens just by not eating the things I know could kill me and by having Benadryl and the epi-pen in my pocket for the times when it turns out I've acquired a surprising new scary food allergy. The second worst allergens are certain perfumes, colognes, and after-shaves. Those are harder to avoid, because they're invisible as they approach me, and by the time I know about them, they've already affected me. I don't know for sure what it is about them that I'm allergic to. I don't know for sure if this reaction should be called an allergy or an intolerance, given that I don't think it can kill me, but a) that's a technical distinction of little importance in normal life; b) whatever the mechanism is, the result is difficulty breathing, difficulty thinking, and disrupted short-term memory for a period varying from a few minutes to the next two days; and c) I don't particularly want to find out if it could kill me.
Given all that, a two-year period of spending about a quarter of my time in seclusion with an immediate payoff of greatly increased resistance to allergies for about half the time and a delayed payoff of greatly increased resistance to allergies most of the time seems well worth the effort.
What's in that shot, anyway? The shot contains tiny amounts of many, many different allergens (the literature describing it carefully doesn't say "homeopathic amounts") and beta glucuronidase, an enzyme extracted from garden snails. How does it work in clinical trials? Here's where we get to the point of wondering about the placebo effect: it doesn't work in clinical trials in the US. It does work in clinical trials in Europe, or so I've heard (those clinical trials were on enzyme potentiated desensitization, EPD, which is the original, British version of this treatment; low dose allergy treatment, LDA, uses a slightly different set of allergens leaning heavily on American pollens, since it's used on American patients). It works in therapeutic trials in the US, where there is no control group. It works on me, so far, considerably better than anything else I've tried.
Placebo effect? Faith healing? Maybe the clinical trial participants weren't willing to go through all the anal-retentive cleaning and preparation and restrictive menus necessary to support EPD or LDA. The allergy tech who gives me the shot says she'd like to have the treatment herself, but she just isn't organized enough to succeed. I figure that either her allergies aren't as bad as mine, or she isn't as interested in breathing as I am.
That's my story, so far.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 01:32 pm (UTC)I'm so glad to hear a positive story about these things.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 06:00 pm (UTC)Glenn had this treatment about ten years ago, although he didn't complete the whole two year regimen. One of the problems with the treatment is that it doesn't work if you're under major stress, and we were under major stress then. This is not as much of a weasel excuse for it not working as it sounds: stress response and allergic response both use the adrenal system, and there are a number of drugs used both as antihistamines and anti-anxiety drugs. Even though Glenn didn't complete the treatment, his allergies did improve quite a lot. Before EPD, he had much worse allergies than I do and had to quit his job. Afterward, he returned to work.
I go back and forth, back and forth. My science brain says that the treatment may be total quackery, and I may be an utter fool to think that I feel better. My experiential brain says that feeling this much better justifies itself, and I'd go for the treatment even if it involved bowing to an idol and chanting, Oh wa, ta foo, lye am.
I'd draw the line at lining a hat with tinfoil, though. For one thing, these days, you just can't get the tin.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-30 06:03 pm (UTC)b) I don't believe in sympathetic magic, but like most unsuperstitious people, I practice it, too.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 05:51 pm (UTC)Placebo effect is real...
Date: 2007-07-08 08:32 pm (UTC)