Allergies suck. They range from mild to living in a hermetically sealed bubble with Intel-like air filtration. Many seek natural allergy relief with no luck.
You may be familiar with allergy shots, but few are aware of using special drops for allergies. Or if you are aware of drops for allergies (also known as sublingual immunotherapy), your allergist told you there wasn’t any research on its use. Of course, if this was the answer it’s possible your allergist is not keeping up with the current medical literature.
Traditional immunotherapy involves subcutaneous injections of small amounts of antigen (the substance you are sensitive to, such as ragweed). This needs to be done on a regular basis over a time frame of not less than 3 years. It is believed to work by basically driving your immune system to bind up the antigen before it can become a bigger problem. This also takes some of your circulating antibodies out of commission. It is not really fixing your reaction to the allergen; rather it is overwhelming your body’s ability to overreact to the antigen.
Drops for allergies (referred to as sublingual immunotherapy) works differently and has been in the medical research for many years. Some examples include:
- Studies relating to the mechanism and safety profile of sublingual drops for allergies.
- Sublingual immunotherapy improves quality of life in asthmatics.
- Safety and effectiveness of sublingual immunotherapy for respiratory problems.
The list is much longer, but these are just a few of the studies I have reviewed over the years.
I think my understanding of drops for allergies began when reading a study on rheumatoid arthritis and the use of small amounts of Type 2 collagen. You see, 2/3 of the body’s immune system is centered around the gut.
This is because the bulk of what we are exposed to comes from the food we eat. Some 2,000+ pounds of food per year has to be sifted through molecule by molecule to determine if what we eat is friend or foe to our immune system.
If our immune system detects something it doesn’t like, it can send an alarm system throughout the body, essentially preparing our immune system for an assault. This is why food allergies can wreak such havoc–the continual eating of food that our immune system does not like primes our immune system to overreact to other things (such as pollen in the air).
On the flip side, give the immune cells around our gut (called the “GALT” or gut-activated-lymphoid-tissue) just a small amount of an allergen and the reverse can happen–the immune system actually tones down the response. This is what happened in a 1998 study on using very small doses of Type 2 collagen given orally to patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
So, if oral sublingual immunotherapy can work for something as devastating as rheumatoid arthritis, what about allergies?
Well, this particular study looked at how well drops for allergies could work for house dust mite allergies.
Researchers found a 44% decrease in symptoms in the group using the sublingual drops and a reduction in medication use of a tad bit over half. Not too shabby.
So, the next time you ask your allergist about using drops for allergies and he or she states that there just isn’t any research on it, you can rest assured that he or she is not reading allergy medical journals…
Have you tried using drops for allergies and, if so, how effective was it?