Do You Overreact To A Child Food Allergy?
It was once presumed that the only way to treat a child food allergy was to avoid any contact with that food for the rest of one’s life. For people who test positive for allergies to dairy, milk, chicken, pork, rice, oat, barley, eggs, beans and wheat, this diagnosis can seem like a death sentence. However, a new approach is being advocated in many allergy clinics across America. Some patients respond to a food challenge, which incrementally increases the patient’s dosage of the allergen until tolerance is achieved. “I thought it was pretty entertaining,” admits fifteen-year-old Alex Simko of Geneva, Illinois, who was able to eat eggs after 12 years of believing she had an egg allergy. Now she can finally eat donuts again!
What about food allergies in babies? When four week old Grayson Grebe got eczema on his cheeks, his mother began to worry. Two months later, he was diagnosed with every food allergy in the book, including wheat, dairy, egg, bean, oat, rice, barley, chicken, pork, corn and peanut. His mother stopped eating these foods, but her baby’s condition did not improve. By 10 months, the doctors had cut out fruits and vegetables and put Grayson on a special hypo-allergenic formula. His eczema was so severe he needed to wear special mittens, long-sleeved shirts and long pants to prevent him from scratching. Once treated at the National Jewish Health center that specializes in allergies and respiratory diseases, doctors gave Grayson food challenges — gradually exposing him to small doses of the foods he was supposedly allergic to. “We came home with 12 foods he could eat,” Amy Grebe recalls. “It’s made so much difference in our lives.”
Anaphylactic shock is one danger of this sort of child food allergy test. In rare cases, a child with a severe allergy may suffer low blood pressure, stop breathing, turn slightly blue, lose consciousness and suffer multiple organ failure. Even if a child has only suffered a mild reaction in the past, there is still a possibility the next reaction may be more severe. Unfortunately, there are no tests to determine whether a reaction to peanuts will be a mild tingle in the mouth, a moderate case of hives or anaphylactic shock. On the other hand, being in a clinical setting is much safer than discovering an allergy out in the real world, where medical equipment isn’t ready to administer treatment for food allergy emergencies.
More often than not, a child food allergy is little more than an overreaction. “I see it all the time. A family goes in for one thing and comes back with a laundry list of foods they are supposedly allergic to,” says Jodi Stokes, who runs a support group for allergic families in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I tell them to go to a board-certified allergist who knows how to interpret these tests.” Robert Wood, the director of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at John Hopkins, believes that blood tests for kids with food allergies are being possibly overused and definitely misinterpreted. “A lot of these kids truly have food allergies, just not to all the foods that they are being told they have allergies to,” he explains. It’s easy to dismiss allergies on foods kids have been eating for years.
Jeremy Larson is a foremost expert in the natural cures for acid reflux field. His work has been extensively published in various online publications in the areas of acid reflux. For more information on the treatment, visit RemedyForAcidReflux.com.