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A BETTER APPROACH TO ALLERGY
Doctors employing the new approach to allergy take a complete medical history before they do anything else. In fact, they’ll probably ask more questions about your diet and environment than anyone else ever has. If necessary, they’ll also take tests and use immunotherapy. But most use different methods of diagnosis and treatment from those of traditional allergists. Above all, though, doctors taking the more comprehensive approach emphasize that you — the allergic person – must help to identify your allergens and then avoid them whenever you can. In this way, your sensitivities will tend to get better instead of worse.
Part of the success of this person-centered approach to allergy lies in the fact that it can help to uncover allergies that other doctors may not consider. After all, if you have five stones in your shoe and you remove only one, walking will still be painful.
But don’t rush to your regular allergy doctor with the good news that factors he or she hasn’t considered may be your problem. As we’ve already mentioned, these new developments in allergy constitute one of the most controversial areas in medicine today. Doctors advocating the broad approach, however, feel that it’s just a matter of time before the newer view is incorporated into conventional allergy practice.
As it stands now, many people who finally seek out a clinical ecologist have been to as many as twenty or thirty traditional doctors without finding satisfactory relief. The extended approach to allergy has come to the rescue of thousands of allergy sufferers who’ve tearfully parted ways with the family pet, cleaned the house from attic to basement and sworn off their favourite foods, only to feel miserable because non-traditional triggers were not considered. The approach has also helped – and proved right – many people whose complaints were previously written off as ‘nerves’ or hypochondria.
This new approach has also helped many clinical ecologists and other doctors who often have allergy problems themselves or have a family member with chemical sensitivities. In many cases, that’s what hooked them into the approach in the first place, explained Dr Wellington S. Tichenor, a doctor of internal medicine in New York City, who incorporates the broader approach to allergy in his practice. Dr Tichenor described clinical ecologists as ‘people who are observant enough to realize that when they eat beef, they become bloated … or when they eat chicken, they get diarrhoea … or when they eat honeydew melon, they get a sore throat. And their own experience may make them more sympathetic and supportive than other doctors.
‘If what the clinical ecologists are saying is true, it’s going to have a very significant impact on medicine in general and allergy in particular,’ Dr Tichenor continued. Scientific documentation, he told us, has only recently started to accumulate. But it’s going to have a significant impact on society, since the potential benefits in terms of health expenditures and economic costs are immense. Society and businesses will save money because allergic people will be on the job and functioning at their best. Tracking the cause of your fatigue or chronic discomfort to the office copy machine or commuter bus exhaust means fewer days missed from work due to illness – and doing a better job overall. In very sensitive people, it can mean the difference between earning a living or going on disability benefit.
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