What do your allergies say about you
What are allergies anyways? Cue spring — pollen in the air, new growth happening, increased levels of dust, more time around nature - why does this wonderful time have to aggravate so many of us?
Sneezing, watery eyes, sniffling, hives.. ugh!
Allergies occur when your immune system reacts to a foreign substance — such as pollen, pet dander, grass, foods etc that isn’t necessarily harmful.
As your immune system reacts to this seemingly harmful substance, it is making antibodies that label this thing as “dangerous”. Now, when you come into contact with the allergen, your immune system's reaction can inflame your skin, sinuses, airways or digestive system.
Wonderful huh? We want our immune to do its job AND we want it to identify actual harmful substances, not grass as a threat.
There are also different levels of reactions. We can have a sensitivity to something which is an IgG reaction - mild irritation. An IgE reaction is typically what we identify as an allergy which the typical allergy symptoms.
Then there is the life threatening allergy which can result in anaphylaxis and these people generally have an epipen with them just in case. We will be primarily focusing on the first two.
Whose to blame
From the above section it would seem that our immune system is to blame. And partly it is. Most of us functional docs would categorize allergies as an autoimmune condition.
There is likely an imbalance between the arms of the immune system causing dysregulation.
However there are more systems we may need to look at before we point the finger solely at our immune system.
Other systems to look at
The liver can also play a HUGE role in allergies. The liver is mainly in charge of detoxification - when the liver is “full” so to speak, of toxins, chemicals, emotions, trauma, infections like parasites + viruses, heavy metals etc it just honestly gets overwhelmed and can’t process much else. Then we start reacting to harmless substances.
As we treat and cleanse the liver we generally see a HUGE improvement in allergies. Cue my liver webinar here.
We also need to look at the gut - yep you probably guessed it. Leaky gut and dysbiosis can also result in allergies. Woof! Whats dysbiosis again? An imbalance in the bugs in your gut. Over growth of bacteria or fungus, maybe not enough of the good guys.. parasites etc.
As we heal leaky gut (which can be caused by SO many things) we also see a major improvement in allergies
Emotions. What? Yes. You heard me correctly. In fact a good amount of my personal seasonal allergies disappeared once I started working on repressed and unresolved stress. Its a good story - listen here
Turns out that unresolved stress creates proteins and those proteins cause imbalance. Sound crazy? I thought so too until my personal experience and now I see miracles with patients everyday.
so what do we do about it
I have chatted about the triad of health in a past blog post that you can access here: lets look at allergies through the lens of the triad.
EMOTIONALLY
Emotionally we would want to support the body and make sure one of the root causes isn’t unresolved stress or trauma.
I love supporting the body emotionally through NET (Neuro emotional technique), EFT (emotional freedom technique), meditation, flower essences, homeopathy and more.
CHEMICALLY
This would be ruling out which system might be out of balance and then supporting the root cause. Is it the immune system, liver, digestive track etc and maybe its supporting all of them and then some.
Some questions to ask yourself: How is the air in the environment you are in? The air quality at your school, home, work, gym etc? Do you need additional support for your system, cleaner air, maybe an air purifier?
Are you living in mold? Construction? How about the chemicals you use to clean? Burning toxic candles or air fresheners? a lot of these things clog up the liver and create allergies.
There are homeopathic, herbs + nutrients that we can give to help support allergies as well as a more general approach. Some of my favorites are in my discounted pharmacy here.
I love quercetin, NAC, bromelain, beef liver, and more. check out the section favorites — then allergies. you’ll see a bunch.
So many different things to think about when it comes to our environment. And while there may not be a lot you can control lets say if you live in a city (pollution) or your gym is struggling with mold - we can support the body to deal with the toxins in many many ways.
STRUCTURAL
Alright this one could be more complicated. Things like lymphatic drainage and massage can help eliminate extra “garbage” in the body creating more coherence and less allergies.
Chiropractic adjustments, especially upper cervical, can be so helpful with allergies.