Allergies

Allergies are a response from your body to things you breathe, eat or touch such as pollen, dust or dander. The symptoms that you experience are from the release of histamine. Histamine affects the following systems:

Respiratory – increased histamine can cause muscle constriction and affect breathing.

Liver – becomes weakened which causes its productivity to remove toxins to be hindered and the body’s response to invaders to be compromised.

Adrenals – if the body is stressed, cortisol is released to try and promote an anti-inflammatory environment. Long term stimulation of adrenals can lead to a host of other problems.

Immune system – to fight off invaders, the body will increase in IgE antibodies, which causes the blood vessels to dilate, the intruder to migrate further into the system and the system to react with more severe symptoms.

As you can see, the histamine response can be a vicious cycle. It breaks down the proper function of your nervous system and your immunity. This is the reason that you may have been introduced to a certain pollen before and never reacted, but introducing it this season has given you horrid allergic reactions – your nervous system is out of balance and sending histamine out improperly. Something has caused a shift in your threshold and now instead of being able to properly function, your immune system is on edge and overreacts to the slightest foreign substance.

Many people like to take allergy medicine to mask the symptoms. Pharmaceutical commercials tell us that histamine is the culprit and by covering up histamine, we are now able to breathe again and are totally healthy. To this, I ask, was your body in shortage of allergy pills before? Have you given your body what it was depleted in and now it is functioning fine? Or is it that the medicine/shots/inhalers are just keeping the symptoms covered up but leaving the real underlying problem at bay?

Here are alternative treatments:

· Get adjusted regularly! Chiropractic adjustments help shift your nervous system toward the parasympathetic state and away from stress mode. This gives your body a chance to increase its immunity. It also removes any interference in the immunity pathways so your body can heal more efficiently

· Make sure your lifestyle isn’t running you into the ground. Get rest, drink water, exercise, eat healthful foods! If you think one of the aforementioned things isn’t affecting your immunity, think again. Sometimes just changing those small things can make a big difference in the way we feel.

· Ask your chiropractor about the following supplements: homeopathic medications, essential fatty acids, probiotics, adrenal support and a good multivitamin with high anti-oxidants. One or more of your systems may be needing some extra support and taking a simple supplement until it can function on its own may be an easy fix.