I went to the supermarket yesterday about 3 PM, wearing my facemask.
I started to feel slightly off when I was there.
So when I was checking out, I asked the grocery clerk if there had been a dog there earlier.
She said yes, there was a dog there about 10 AM.
And I did get an allergic reaction to it ...
Five hours after a dog was in the supermarket - ceilings 20 feet high or so. And I got sick from that, it seems!
I bought a respirator on…Continue
Last spring I went to get a haircut. I'm sort of pals with the woman (her name is Awura) who cuts my hair, and this time she was enthusing about how she'd gone (sort of) gluten free, and how amazingly much better she felt.
I ran down a long list of symptoms of celiac disease, and she said she'd had all of them.
Also, she has Graves, an autoimmune thyroid disease. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease - it's an immune reaction to dietary gluten that triggers an autoimmune…Continue
I had another dog allergy reaction yesterday.
I had stopped on my bicycle by the side of the road to give someone directions, and I was chatting with them a bit, while wearing my allergy mask.
Someone turned in near me with a large dog in their car ... and even though I was wearing the mask, it made me sick.
So I do still have to worry about dogs in cars :(
But, even though I'm still extremely sensitive to dogs, my allergic reactions are less severe.
I have been getting allergy shots at a local group allergy practice, headed by Dr. R.
I actually have an ugly history with this place.
In 2002, I got allergy shots for awhile from Dr. T. I get somewhat sick for several days after each shot, but Dr. T finagled me up to concentrate on my non-molds vial - the one with dog in it. He felt that people tend to have worse reactions to the shots with mold allergens, so he was keeping the doses from the molds…Continue
I dreaded signing up for the health insurance under Obamacare, because I figured it wouldn't cover the very expensive drug Xolair, that I'm getting for an off-label use. The drug costs me almost $10,000/year. I complained that with health insurance, people like me who have unusual problems fall through the cracks, and health insurance does everything it can to pay as little as it can and has caused me a lot of headaches and stress in the past.
I did sign up for health insurance,…
In an article on Medline, the authors suggest that
widespread and uncontrolled use of elimination diets for atopic dermatitis may have played a role in the increase of allergy and anaphylaxis.
They are talking especially about children with allergy problems.
The treatment has been avoidance of the foods responsible, once they're identified.
But the authors think food avoidance may…Continue
I've been reading a lot of research articles, trying to get an idea of what's going on with my delayed food allergies.
By "delayed food allergy", I mean an allergy that doesn't show up in blood tests for IgE food allergy, and is similar to the food reactions I have.
My food reactions start about 1/2 hr after eating the food and last about 4 days. Mostly, it's a groggy sick feeling, but I've also had belly pain, back pain, frequent urination, joint pain, mild itchiness all over my…
Drama with water pipes frozen this morn. It's a rented mobile home. I was worried the owners would blame it on me because I turn the heat off overnight - but it turns out the owners had forgotten to turn on the heat tape that's wrapped around the pipes! Luckily they're plastic pipes and they seem OK.
With classical food allergies, the kind that show up in IgE RAST testing, the old model is that you just avoid the food. But gradual desensitization by taking tiny amounts of the food, has been shown to be promising in research. See for example http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/711404_6
So could desensitization work for delayed food allergies, of the kind that might be an IgE-mediated reaction localized in the gut, but don't…Continue
Peter Boghossian's book A Manual for Creating Atheists is a crucial and original book, not just for atheists who want to propagate atheism, but also for nonbelievers in general. It gives nonbelievers a way to interact with religious people that is respectful and not antagonistic – yet confronts believers with something they often wish to avoid: the weirdness of believing without good…Continue
Zana was a "wildwoman" who was captured in 1850 and spent decades in captivity in a village in Russia.
Zana was believed to be an "almas", a Russian cryptid. Almases are typically described as human-like bipedal animals, between five and six and a half feet tall, their bodies covered with reddish-brown hair, with anthropomorphic facial features including a pronounced browridge, flat nose, and a…Continue
Added by Luara on November 17, 2013 at 7:00am — No Comments
I question what I'm told, a great deal - so I could be called a skeptic. I'm not a devotee of any pseudoscience and I agree with a great deal of what is said by skeptics.
But the skeptical blogs and skeptical commentary online, and magazines like Skeptical Inquirer, are very far from the skeptical ideal of rational questioning. There's a lot of ridicule. For example, Orac on the…Continue
A well-known geneticist, Bryan Sykes has been studying DNA from the Siberian Yeti (Abominable Snowman) and Sasquatch in North America.
In a preliminary report, he says the Yeti samples he has matched an ancient polar bear, from when polar bears and brown bears were diverging. So the Yeti might be a previously…Continue
I was incensed to get a flyer in the mail from a pharmacy, advertising "alternatives" to the flu shot.
These include Guna Flu, a homeopathic remedy with ingredients diluted by a factor of a billion or so;
Citomix, a similar homeopathic remedy;…Continue
I went to a local atheist meetup group for awhile. I didn't have a good time there, partly because there was a dogmatic pathologist there who gave me grief with his derogatory comments.
I was chronically somewhat sick and I didn't know why, and I spent a lot of time online trying to figure out how to make myself better.
This pathologist basically informed me that I was foolish to try to understand or solve my own medical problems, since I don't have medical…Continue
Here, Debra and others, is how you can put a lot of blog posts in one space and avoid cluttering the main A/N page.
Just copy the HTML of this, and edit it to suit yourself.
Try clicking on a link below:
Armadillos have very thick skin.
Badgers get what they…Continue
Added by Luara on June 27, 2013 at 3:00pm — No Comments
I developed an amazingly severe dog allergy, through living with dogs nonstop for 17 years. If I'm riding my bike and a car pulls up next to me with a dog in it, and the window's open, I'll get sick. If I'm anywhere near a dog and I breathe any of the air around it, I get sick. The allergist I see has an office in a building where dogs live, and people sometimes go through the door that opens into the rest of the building, although the door is usually shut. When I go there, I have bad…Continue
Like a lot of women I'm uncomfortable with legalized prostitution. Mostly because a lot of prostitutes have a history of sexual abuse and being a prostitute seems degrading.
All the same, I think laws against prostitution and other victimless crimes have to go. The laws against prostitution make it dangerous to be a prostitute and increase the power of pimps and probably help trap women in prostitution.
The victimless-crime laws are perhaps a consequence of religion. …Continue
I saw an interesting 2001 study that showed a benefit of nystatin vs placebo, for people with presumed "Candida" symptoms.
The study subjects were selected from volunteers, because of their answers to 7 questions supposed to indicate a "Candida problem":
Have you, at any time in your life, taken ‘broad spectrum’ antibiotics?
Have you taken tetracycline or other broad spectrum antibiotics…
Added by Luara on March 31, 2013 at 4:30pm — No Comments
For a long time, alternative medicine doctors have told patients they have a "Candida overgrowth", sometimes based on a stool test, sometimes only a guess based on various symptoms that an excess of Candida is supposed to cause. And they diagnose "dysbiosis", meaning the microorganisms in the person's gut are of the wrong kind. They prescribe probiotics, prebiotics - which are substances like inulin and fructooligosaccharides that (hopefully) primarily feed good bacteria - they prescribe…Continue