Health
The Agony and the Allergy
People with allergies don’t have to live in a glass bubble. They just wish they could.
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That’s her choice of course, but avoidance is the soundest—and cheapest—method of treatment. If that’s not possible, a person suffering from severe allergies should consider taking desensitizing shots, even though they come with no guarantee of success. Allergists maintain that, contrary to popular belief, people rarely “outgrow” allergies, except the mild food allergies of childhood. I told my doctor that for the first 25 years of my life I had violent skin eruptions after contact with poison ivy. In the last few years, however, I have had only mild cases of poison ivy, leading me to hope that I am not as sensitive to the plant as I used to be. My doctor said he had heard similar stories from patients about outgrowing their allergies, but there is as yet no scientific evidence to explain such cures. It is more common, he said, for untreated allergies to get worse. And medical research indicates that allergies may be implicated in the development of major chronic diseases like arthritis and rheumatic fever, kidney disease, and even infertility. Some researchers indict allergies to some degree in the human aging process.
We tend to think of allergies as a contemporary affliction, but the symptoms are as old as recorded history. One of the earliest recorded allergy casualties was the Egyptian King Menes, who died of a hornet’s sting in 2641 B.C. Pythagoras, the philosopher and mathematician, was—at least indirectly—the victim of an allergy. He was being pursued by Greek soldiers when he came to a dead halt and said, “I wil not cross this field of beans.” Historians think it was probably cultivated broad beans, which are very troublesome to allergy sufferers. The soldiers caught Pythagoras at the edge of the field and killed him.
Although modern allergy treatment owes a primary debt to nineteenth-century immunologists, immunizing treatments for asthma and hayfever were originated early in this century and are used with only a few modifications and refinements. Grants for research into allergic diseases have increased considerably during the last thirty years, but allergy research has never been a generously funded branch of medical science. The basic questions that allergists are still trying to answer include why some people develop allergies and others don’t, the importance of hereditary factors, why certain parts or organs of the body are more predisposed to allergies than others, the importance of emotional factors in allergy attacks, and the importance of pollution and other environmental factors. The role of allergens and antibodies must be further defined, and a great deal more work should be done on specific allergens. Current research into immunology, organ transplants, and skin grafts should further the understanding of allergic reactions.
For those who want to try some of the more experimental methods of treating allergies, there’s acupuncture, although it’s difficult to find qualified acupuncturists in Texas. Some allergists are teaching their patients self-hypnosis as a means of controlling asthma and even hives. I know people who insist that vitamin C and/or pantothenic acid helps allergies as well as colds. My allergist won’t endorse of condemn the vitamin route. He says that vitamin C certainly isn’t going to hurt anyone, but there have been no double-blind tests proving its efficacy.
There are those who recommend eating local raw honey as a means of desensitizing allergies to local flora. A doctor I know insists that he has seen honey work in cases where nothing else would. One of my allergy reference books mentions honey as a possible aid and another discounts it, pointing out, among other things, that people are usually allergic to drab wind-pollinated plants rather than to the brilliantly colored, highly scented, insect-pollinated plants to which honeybees are attracted.
The only treatments I am confident have helped me are antihistamines and cedar shots. In seasons past, I could tell precisely when cedar season arrived, because I would be devastated by paroxysms of sneezing and a devilish tingling itch in my throat and ears. But bolstered by three months of cedar inoculations, I have experienced none of these special cedar symptoms this season. The doctor says that I am responding unusually well to the shots. I will continue a typical program of two shots weekly until the end of the season (usually around the first of March), and then the doctor will cut me back to one shot a month, just enough to keep up my immunity. Next season I’ll probably be increased to one shot a week. After three years of this routine, I will stop the shot treatment altogether. The doctor says the odds are about 20 per cent that I will be immune to cedar pollen for the rest of my life, and about 60 per cent that I will have partial immunity. About 20 per cent of his patients continue to have allergy reactions despite inoculations.
Of course, cedar is just one of my allergies. I still have headaches and itches and sneezes and the blahs, but not so often. The knowledge that I am allergic to my cat, feathers, dust, etc., has been as valuable to me as the cedar shots, because I now know what I’m up against.
One curious thing: now that my home environment is cleaner, I seem to suffer more pronounced reactions when I spend an evening in a dusty, cat-dandered house or in a smoke-filled club. The next morning I awaken with what feels like a hangover, even though I’ve had little to drink. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Oliver Wendell Holmes once prescribed the only sure cure for allergies. “Gravel is an effective remedy,” he said. “It should be taken about eight feet deep.”
A Sneezer’s Guide to Texas
Don’t bother moving if you have allergies. If cedar doesn’t get you, then the dust storms will.
Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie suffered greatly from hayfever in Austin. While a professor at the University of Texas in 1947, he requested a leave of absence for health reasons because of his allergies. The school’s Regents turned down his request, and when the controversial professor took his leave anyway, they fired him.
Dobie would probably have found some relief in dry West Texas. A few years ago researchers did a ragweed index of ten Texas cities. The only place they recommended for persons allergic to ragweed was Big Spring in West Texas, which has a bargain basement pollen count of 5 (Dallas was 115 on the index, Houston 68, and San Antonio 16). Alas, Big Spring, like most of West Texas, has terrible dust storms. “March and April are almost unbearable because of the dust,” a Big Spring nurse told me. Dust, like pollution, is an irritant rather than a genuine allergen. Doctors trying to discover why dust storms wreak such havoc on the sinuses have found that the storms do not import bacteria or pollen, just your basic ground-up rock.
There is no proven scientific basis for believing that plastics or diesel fumes, natural gas, cigarette smoke, or any number of other pollutants are true allergens. But as residents of Dallas and Houston and other cities with heavy industrial and auto emissions know from experience, pollutants are devastating to people who are already afflicted with allergies, especially asthmatics.
Every area of the state has its downside for allergy sufferers. The Gulf Coast gets lovely pollen-free breezes off the ocean, but the accompanying high humidity provides a perfect breeding environment for molds. And thanks to our temperate climate, no part of Texas freezes hard enough to kill molds. There’s nowhere in Texas free of weed or grass pollens, which can travel on the wind for at least a hundred miles. Flee as far as El Paso and you’ll tickle your sinuses on the tumbleweed or the Russian thistle.
Come spring, East and Central Texas teem with a dizzying variety of tree pollens—elm, oak, pecan, cottonwood, ash, mulberry, hackberry. Mesquite causes problems for the sensitive in Central, South, and West Texas from February to November. Fortunately, the fragrant pines of East Texas rarely—if ever—prompt the sneezes, because pine pollen particles are too big to be soluble in the bloodstream. (A true allergen must be soluble.)
The heaviest pollen discharges are usually in the early morning. There may be no discharges at all on damp or rainy days when the humidity is more than 80 per cent; rain washes pollen from the air. Hayfever attacks are normally the worst, of course, when the wind is blowing.
Cedar (actually Juniperus ashei) is the most infamous tree in Texas. It does its worst work within a 200-mile radius encompassing Austin and San Antonio. The dread cedar fever descends upon sufferers about Christmastime and lasts through March. The male trees turn fire brown and release great puffs of pollen. At times these early morning emissions are so extravagant that from a distance they resemble a small fire or explosion. Cedar pollen causes such misery that one Austinite wrote to a local paper proposing that all the male cedar trees in Austin be eradicated.
Remember the old saw about taking your sinuses to Arizona? The arid West was supposed to be especially beneficial for persons allergic to molds. But as Easterners migrated to Phoenix and Tucson for their health, they recreated their allergenic environment by landscaping with hayfever-causing East Coast vegetation that required frequent watering, which, in turn, encouraged the growth of molds. And besides, Arizona has plenty of pesky indigenous flora, the flowering sage to name one.
Allergists cannot accurately predict what sorts of allergies a patient might develop in new surroundings. Research indicates that the tendency to be allergic is inherited, but the specific allergies are not. With proper treatment, though, an allergy sufferer should be able to tough it out in any location.
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