Spring is in the air. The trees are budding, grass is growing, and you’re wheezing and sneezing with your nose streaming. The world is beckoning, but your eyes are itching and watery. You want to go back to bed because your immune system is having a maddening hyper-response to tree pollen that makes you feel like you have a head cold.
Or maybe you’re affected like this any time of year by cat dander or dust, or you break out in hives when you eat something you like but your immune system doesn’t, such as strawberries, peanuts or pineapple.
Join the club. Allergic conditions including food allergies, skin allergies (such as eczema) and respiratory allergies (such as hay fever) are among the most common medical conditions in Europe and the US. A whopping 150 million Europeans and more than 50 million Americans suffer from chronic allergies, and one in five of them live in daily fear of an asthma attack or life-threatening allergic reaction.1
Allergy epidemic
Children are especially prone to allergies, but the incidence of food allergies is growing in adults, too, according to a 2020 review of the medical literature (see box, page 30). “Worryingly, recent data indicate that food allergies may be more prevalent among adult populations than previously acknowledged, with many reported cases of adult-onset allergies,”the researchers concluded.2
The skin allergy eczema has been on the rise as well, according to researchers who found that it“increased worldwide over the past 30 years, to the extent that it is now one of the most common chronic diseases, affecting about a fifth of the population in developed countries.”
Among children, 15 percent to 30 percent have a skin allergy; among adults, estimates range from
0.3 percent to 14.3 percent, with most reports falling somewhere between 1 percent and 3 percent.3
Pharmacopoeia
The usual response from mainstream medical doctors to this pandemic of allergies is a tsunami of drug prescriptions—for steroid creams, antihistamines, injections, inhalators, EpiPens and so on.
For respiratory allergies, these drugs are generally divided into first- and second-generation antihistamines. First-generation include diphenhydramine (Benadryl) and chlorphenamine. The labels on these drugs warn, “Do not operate heavy machinery while taking this medication,”because a common side-effect is sedation.
Some people report feeling drunk while taking medicines like Benadryl and even losing consciousness. It is a central nervous system depressor, and some of its common side-effects are drowsiness, dry mouth, urine retention, enlarged prostate and double vision.
“The usual response from mainstream medical doctors to this pandemic of allergies is a tsunami of drug prescriptions”
But even scarier: a 2019 study from the University of Washington found that people who used these drugs long-term were more likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those who didn’t use them. The more that study
