Allergy Treatment

Summary: If you suffer from allergy related symptoms of itchy watery eyes, runny nose, nasal congestion, frequent sinus infections, eczema and asthma there is a fairly new, safe and very effective treatment to get rid of your allergies, called sublingual immunotherapy or allergy drops. Allergy drops work similar to allergy shots, but instead of receiving a shot you just drop the serum under the tongue and hold it for 30 seconds.

What are allergies: Allergies are the result of an overactive immune system.  The immune systems job is to recognize foreign invaders and attack them. Normally when you breathe in the pollens, you should have turn-off switches that tell the immune system that the pollens or dander are natural environment and to not activate the immune system. People with allergies lack these turn off switches and the pollens activate the immune system causing symptoms similar to cold symptoms of runny nose, sneezing, coughing, and fatigue.

What is Immunotherapy: Immunotherapy works by taking minuet amounts of the allergens then slowly increase the amounts each day, teaching your immune system that the pollens are not invading infections but natural environment.

The Allergy Easy Program: This program was put together over twenty years by some allergists in Arizona. They realized that allergies can change and it is difficult to find out everything a person is allergic to. With the allergy easy program the serum contains the two hundred most common allergens in the area.

How the program works: A person comes in and we do a three skin test to see how allergic the person is, to know what dilution to start on so that the serum does not flare up the allergies. (If the person wants we can also test to find out specific allergens.) The person does the drops every day for two months and twice a week after that for six months. If at six months they are improving they then continue the drops twice per week for two years.

Effectiveness: Studies on the allergy easy program show that after two years 70-80% of the patients have no more allergy symptoms, the other 20-30% of the patients are very improved, but will have an occasional flare up to usually an unknown allergen.