!Allergy!
 

I've been on allergy medication for a month now, and the prescription has 4 refills. I don't think I've ever taken any medication this long, and the scary part is that I forgot to take it yesterday, and today my throat is already itching like hell. I'm thinking it hasn't even gotten ANY better. :( Is it normal to be on allergy medication for 4 months?!

Gulp. sorry to say, I'm on mine for life.

Yes its normal for that long, at least during Allergy season. But if you have an Allergy, you pretty much have it forever.

What does not kill you only makes you stronger.

Actually, I've never had an allergy before. This one seems pretty bad though. It's identical to my mother's allergy problems.

My wife's allergist told her that she could take pills indefinitely, or she could try shots, which had a chance of ubilding up a permanent resistance. She went with the shots for several years but is now off the shots and having no trouble.

As you age, you also can develop new allergies or become more sensitive. I suppose you could also grow out of them, but I've not heard many people doing that. I had a beloved kitty as a kid, and I could never do that now- Within an hour, I would itch, my throat would swell up and I could get no oxygen.

When we lived in the south, the cedar pollen (Cedar fever) would kick my spouse's butt. Not at first, it took like 2 years of living there, then when the trees would pop he would be miserable for weeks. For some reason that never got to me. With the plant life up north here, I am sniveling and he's not too bad.

When I was little, around age 5, I was allergic to all dairy products, most types of wheat and wheat products, chocolate, mustard seeds, 56 different types of grass/pollen/ragweed, animal dander, and dust. Ingestion of even a tablespoon or 5 minutes around the airborne stuff would trigger a massive asthma attack, occasionally only treatable by a shot of adrenaline and albuterol in a nebulizer for 15 minutes.

Needless to say, every meal was an adventure.

After many years of weekly "desensitization" shots, I am now able to eat anything I want. My only issues now are hayfever and cat fur. Taking a sudafed clears it right up, tho.

So you can grow out of allergies.

If your allergy is to pollen then you are affected by the lack of cold winters. I've gone from intermittent allergy medication to full-time in the past two years. I've also spoken with other people who never had allergies before and who are developing symptoms.

At least pollen is natural. I'm concerned about the whittling away of the clean air act and what that will mean for real pollutants in the air.

Has anyone ever measured the economic effects of air pollution (medicine, ER visits, lost workdays, people staying indoors and not shopping, etc) to balance the "If we ease up on pollution regulations we can stimulate the economy" rationale?

Yes, it turns out that before pollution people lived to age 40 and now they live to 75.

Increasingly, people suffer from allergies due to their indoor environments. Our bedroom is in the basement of our house, and I am virtually certain that there is enough foundation seepage behind the walls that, over time, we most likely have mold infestation. I have found that my wife and I have both had reduced symptoms since installing a HEPA filter in our bedroom.

Well isnt there the theory that if you are exposed as a babe to various irritants, critters, hay, dust, etc. you develop tolerance. We're just too clean and tidy these days. Maybe we need to camp more as infants, eat dirt, sleep with fur.

Everything that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger?

I don't believe that theory, if even out there, my dad grew up on a farm and suffers from some pretty bad hay fever. Both me and my brother have hay fever to some extent to and we both grew up on a farm. Still a good theory and I'd bet there actually is some credence to it.

I have the best anti-allergy medicine meds in the world:
my pack of Camels.
Smoking somehow acts as an anti-histamine. I don't claim to know why, though my guess is that it somehow has to do with me not being able to taste and smell as well, but it does work. No smoke == allergies bad. Smoke == allergies not bad.
Go figure.

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.