Damn. it's nice to know I'm not the only one. :D

Rationalization: It's not just for breakfast anymore.

No Juju, not rationalization or justification. Just an interesting side effect.
Oh...make that side affect...just to keep Dave interested.;)

Maybe it's the nicotine. I've noticed caffeine helps with my allergies, and they are both stimulants.

Or maybe you're just covering all the allergy-causing receptors with a layer of hypo-allergenic tar :p .

Actually, smoking stuns the cilia in your nose and throat, and so they don't wave, and thus don't stop things that make you sneeze and cough. When I have a bad cough, I smoke more, because it's the only way to stop coughing long enough to get to sleep...lol....


Sidhe

Well,
growing up I was allergic to every tree, plant and grass native to north america..horrible horrible reactions (especially living in Kansas) when I was about 11 my mother took to to an allergy doctor and I began the shot regimin... took a couple of years to have it's full effect.. but when I realized I wasn't really sneezing.. tight throat.. painfull eyes.. WOW! I damn near cried.. until recently the only time I would react was ruring the height of ragweed season.. until last year.. I jacked up some of my vertebre at work, and ended up going to a chiropractor (wait, wait don't dismiss it out of hand just yet) and pop.. crack.. snap... tap tap tap no allergies, none.. gone..poof not so much as a sniffle... freakin' amazing!

I know the field of chiropracty is regarded with a great deal of skepetcism (and just like regular doctors) there are good ones and bad ones.. I just happened to know of one whom a friend of mine had been going to for quite some time (fixed the carpal tunnel (sp?) in her arm) and he did wonders for me. so it may be an option, unless you want to be on the drugs for the rest of your life it may be an option worth looking into (also, you can check with your local state govt. to see if any complaints have been registered about a specific doctor and make a more educated guess about which ones might be 'good ones'

anyway.. good luck

It actually has more to do with the level of bacterial and viral agents we are exposed to while our immune systems are developing.

Lymphocytes that are not actively trained to respond to real threats often get re-assigned to inappropriate triggers like pollen, mites, pet fur, etc. This is called the Hygiene Hypothesis:

The North and North Western allergy clinic in manchester damn near killed me with their early experiments into the innoculation treatment for "Multiple or total allergy syndrome" At my worst I was down below 5 stone aged 13 and very tall with the wieght continuing to drop because of my inability to hold down food.....Even years later after I had survived and gotten better by trying not to live by the allergist book I still erroneously linked the consumption of certain food types to outbreaks of my condition ( extreme eczema with a host of related conditions ) ...After two very bad years a new doctor started at my GP's surgery who had a special interest in dermatological conditions ...

She didnt subscribe to the idea that my condition was anything to do with allergies. My constant illness she thought more likely to be the result of a combination of stress and infection.

The trouble had been that I was rarely free of outbreaks long enough to get clear signals. If I ate a chocolate bar and two hours later I was fighting not to tear myself up I would challk that up to chocolate...It's what my doctors had always encouraged me to do. There was always enough evidence to back it up in the territory if I looked for it....

Then my new doctor tried a totally different approach and it began to work...I still figured food may play a role so I tried to eat healthily. It was only after I had been clear for a little while i risked trying some of the key culprits and found they did nada.

With her help I managed to more or less disassociate the stress condition from my state of mind leaving me a little less at the mercy of my mood....

Now I rarely suffer from any of the "allergic" conditions which used to rule my life for large chunks of time. Though I do still find a slight flareup often accompanies real stress.

Many people suffer from allergies. Unfortunately more people are treated for allergies than need be and some people who do suffer from allergies are being overmedicated.

....of course this may not hold true for the hayfever type allergies.