I know I've mentioned this story before, but it bears repeating here with a few more details.
When I completed my internship and residency training and returned to Tennessee to open my first medical office, I knew nothing about hidden food allergies.
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| Allergies And Yeast Infections |
I continued to be a food allergy ignoramus until the mid-1950s when Aileen, the mother of a 12-year-old boy, opened my eyes. Here's what happened: Her son, Tom, was so tired she could hardly get him out of bed for school each morning. Tom also complained of headaches, belly aches and muscle pains, and often was so irritable, Aileen said, "You can hardly stay in the house with him."
Because Tom had experienced problems with milk in infancy and had been drinking a lot of milk for several months before these complaints developed, Aileen took him off milk for a week. At the end of the period, she said, "Tom is like a different child. He bounced out of bed this morning whistling. No headaches, muscle aches or belly aches."
I was astounded because I had learned something that I hadn't known before ... intolerances, allergies or sensitivities to common foods could provide systemic and nervous complaints.
A short time later, I read several articles in the medical literature in which Physicians reported that many of their patients improved - often dramatically - when they avoided wheat, corn, milk, eggs and other foods.
I collected and summarized my findings on 50 of these patients and published them in a major pediatric journal more than 30 years ago. Here's how the diagnosis of food allergies/sensitivities was made: Symptoms and signs were relieved by eliminating suspected foods from the diet for 5 to 12 days and then reproduced by giving the food back to the child, and noting the child's reactions.
Over the years, I discovered that carefully designed and properly executed elimination diets helped many of my patients. I've also found that such sensitivities can affect almost every part of the body, and they occur commonly in women with yeast-related disorders.
Unusual reactions to substances in a person's diet or environment have been recognized for thousands of years. Yet, it wasn't until 1906 that the term "allergy" was coined by the Austrian pediatrician Clemens yon Pirquet. He put together two Greek words, allos - meaning "other" and ergon - meaning "action." To von Pirquet, allergy meant altered reactivity.
Some doctors feel the term "allergy" should be limited to those conditions in which an immunological reaction can be demonstrated using allergy skin tests or more sophisticated laboratory tests. But other knowledgeable physicians feel that the allergic and hypersensitivity diseases are much broader. For example, Elmer Cranton, M.D., a Yelm, Washington, past president of the American College of Advancement in Medicine, said:
The assumption is often made that we fully understand the immune system, which is not true. Although these published scientific discoveries add to our knowledge, it's quite possible we still only know a small fraction of the whole story.
SYMPTOMS
Most of us are familiar with the itching, sneezing, stuffy-headed response some people have to irritants of all kinds, ranging from pollens to mold spores to animal dander to foods and medications. Allergies are often characterized as a hypersensitivity to certain substances. Here are some symptoms:
- watery, itchy eyes
- sneezing
- running nose, stuffy head
- hypersensitivity pneumonitis, usually caused by exposure to organic dusts like bird droppings, feathers and contaminated grain
- eczema
- dermatitis
- hives
- itching
- anaphylactic shock, the most severe and life-threatening, causes swelling of body tissues, including the throat and a sudden drop in blood pressure, that often occurs in cases of extreme sensitivity to penicillin, stinging insects, shellfish or nuts.
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| Allergies And Yeast Infections |
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