Food Allergy Testing being as Unreliable as it is, how do you even know you have a Problem?
If you battle with the bothers of a food allergy yourself, you're sure to be interested in this - doctors all around the country are engaged in serious debate now over how food allergy testing is to be done. Because they suspect that a large number of people who are diagnosed with food allergies don't actually have it. Food allergies in a child can be so expensive to deal with, that if you have a child in your family with it, taking care of him can drain a large portion of your family's income.
Think about the way most emergency-room stories go about how families discover that a child has an allergy. Picture your usual happy and friendly home scene. A child runs up to the mother and begs for a little treat of some kind. The mother innocently picks up something, a peanut butter jar for instance, and let's the child taste a little off her finger. The child's throat starts to swell in five minutes, he breaks out in hives. The family's life haschanged forever, as they rush to the hospital for food allergy testing.
Once at the hospital, parents discover through food allergy testing, that the child has all kinds of new food allergies as well - tree nuts,soy, shellfish. And you wouldn't believe the kind of reactions it is possible to have with a peanut allergy. A friend at school who's just had a peanut butter sandwich and wiped his hands clean on a napkin can have traces of peanutbutter still on the hands. If that friend touches a child with peanut allergy, that can cause quite a reaction. When a child has a whole spectrum of allergies, it becomes difficult to feed them anything. They have to be tube-fed at the school nurse's office.
But doctors are little suspicious now; food allergy testing discovers only about 10% or so of the population as having something. Why do three times as many people claim they have food allergies then? It's a shame that they have to do this; because taking care of the food allergy can be very expensive. You have to check every last thing in every product you buy. Most soaps are out of your life because they are made with some kind of nut oil, for instance. Your life becomes a whirlwind of shopping at specialty health food stores and Internet specialty food dealers. And often, there is so much to be done taking care of a child this way, that at least one parent needs often to quit a job.
Food allergy testing is not exactly an accurate science. With most doctors, the test involves pricking your skin, and injecting a microscopic quantity of the food being tested for, under the skin. They also use blood tests to see if dropping a bit of food the blood will make it react. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, it's very easy to go wrong with one of these tests. They come up with positive results for no reason. Doctors should begin using a food allergy testing method known as a Food Challenge. What they do is, they give you the foods they need to test, in small quantities over the course of a few days. They do this in an emergency room. Since it can take this long, it can be very expensive. But there are no real standards over how to define food allergies. You need to check with the Food Allergy Initiative or the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network for all the latest on what tests are reliable. The government is right now planning better standards for food allergy testing. But until then, you can expect that quite a number of children who are believed to have a serious food allergy, are in reality, actually quite healthy