Continuing on this controversial subject, I would like to posit another relatively outlandish notion, and that is that some people may be sensitive to cold, as an environmental factor, in the same way that some people are sensitive to wheat or lactose intolerant.
Now, before you dismiss me entirely, humor me for one moment and suspend your belief in Western Medicine and Germ Theory. You can come back to it later.
I must remind you of three basic theorems of Allergy Elimination. They are:
1. An Allergy, according to Allergy Elimination, is anything you are not in harmony with, and includes sensitivities, intolerances, and hypersensitivity reactions.
2. You can be sensitive to, intolerant of, or allergic to pretty much anything on the planet.
3. Allergy elimination helps your immune system.
Environmental factors are things like heat, cold, dampness, dryness, wind, and barometric pressure. Environmental factors can either cause sensitivity in and of themselves, or they can combine with other things you might be sensitive to and cause a stronger reaction.
So for the purposes of this article, let's focus on COLD as an environmental factor. Some people do better in cold weather. Some do better in warmer weather. If you are sensitive to cold, here are some symptoms you might experience:
runny nose
aching muscles
constipation
fatigue
nasal congestion
headache
joint stiffness
Now, the funny thing about these symptoms is that they look a lot like a cold! How do you tell the difference?
Think about the DURATION of the symptoms and what happened directly preceding the onset of the symptoms. Did your “cold” start when the weather changed? Do you get a cold that lasts all winter and disappears when it gets warm again? If so, chances are, it's not a cold! You might just be sensitive to cold.
From the vantage point of allergy elimination, cold can affect specific organs in your body. If it affects your colon, you might get constipated. If it affects your stomach, you might have stomach pains, or you might experience a loss of appetite. If you are sensitive to cold, it usually affects the lungs, because as the air temperature drops, your lungs are directly exposed to the drop in temperature. Hence, you might have a cough, or runny nose, or sore throat.
Treating your sensitivities with allergy elimination will boost your immune system in many ways. For one thing, it will prevent those symptoms from occurring. An allergic or sensitivity reaction is hard on your body. Eliminating the sensitivity will basically cut down on the number of things your body has to deal with on a daily basis. And you'll feel better, too.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
When A Cold Is Not A Cold, part 2
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
When A Cold Is Not A Cold
Recently a friend of mine told me that her daughter had been sick with a cold for two months.
“That's not a cold,” I told her. “It's an allergy.”
“Ridiculous!” my friend responded. “She doesn't have allergies.”
“If it was a cold,” I went on, “it would have been over and done with in a week, max.”
“Is that why she's not responding to the antibiotics?” my friend asked.
“That's not a cold,” I told her. “It's an allergy.”
“Ridiculous!” my friend responded. “She doesn't have allergies.”
“If it was a cold,” I went on, “it would have been over and done with in a week, max.”
“Is that why she's not responding to the antibiotics?” my friend asked.
Here's two important facts you need to know about colds:
If it's a cold, it is caused by a virus, not a bacteria. Therefore, antibiotics will be useless.
Colds only last about a week. If it lasts longer, it's not a cold.
So how do you tell if it's a cold or an allergy?
First of all, if you have nasal stuffiness, sneezing, or runny nose for longer than a week, start to look at patterns. Do you notice it at a certain time of day? Do you notice that you get a runny nose after eating a particular thing? Is it possible that this happened the last time you ate it?
I had a friend several years ago whose daughter's nose would run every morning after breakfast. She called it “The Breakfast Cold.” Basically, the child was reacting to the food she ate every morning.
Secondly, does your runny nose or sneezing happen at a certain time of year? Do you have what seems to be a month-long cold every March? If so, chances are it's allergies and not a cold. Environmental allergies often mimic colds in their symptoms. The only difference is the duration.
Third, do not underestimate the effect of emotions. If you find yourself in the midst of a month-long cold after the death of a loved one, it's probably your body trying to work out the grief you still feel.
And emotions can be tricky, too! I was treating a patient once for his mold allergies. “My mold allergy is always the strongest in the fall,” he told me. Interesting, I thought; in California, the fall is the dryest time of year, and mold is usually at an all-time low in the fall. I tested him, and found that he wasn't allergic to mold at all. So when I tested again to find out what it was that was triggering his allergy each fall, it turned out to be an emotion...and, long story short, it was in the fall that his father had died several years earlier. After clearing the emotion, his autumn allergy disappeared.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Winter: The Season of the Dreaded Cough
I'll never forget the feeling...being awakened at 11:30 pm, soon after falling asleep, by the sound of my son's cough in his room next to ours...that feeling of dread and fear because my son can't breathe.
Every mother of an asthmatic child knows exactly what I'm talking about. There's a certain sound that every child makes when they cough, when you know they're in trouble. For my son, it was when the cough (which had begun 36 hours previously) had pretty much exhausted his lungs. His voice shrank to a whisper. He began to wheeze. And the cough shook his small frame, sending spasms throughout his entire body, sometimes causing him to gag at the end. I knew there was no medicine that would get us through the night, no matter what the doctor said, and that it would be a long, scary night indeed.
Fortunately for us, I learned from our nutritionist that my son had food allergies that were creating copious amounts of phlegm in his small system. When we eat food that is undigestible—either because we're allergic to that food and it creates inflammation in our gut or because we're sensitive to that food and can't absorb it—the residue of the undigested food produces excess mucus. When we reach a certain critical mass, so to speak, of mucus that our body can't store any longer, the mucus is released as phlegm, usually through the nose, in a form that looks, for all intents and purposes, like a cold. This is what our nutritionist explained to us. Hmm, I thought, that sounds suspiciously like Chinese Medicine, which I myself had studied before having children. And, come to think of it, my son seemed like he was getting an awful lot of colds—sometimes he got a cold every two or three weeks! But, I realized, no one else in the family was getting these “colds,” which made me wonder. Maybe the nutritionist was right.
So we followed the nutritionist's advice: No eggs. No wheat. No cow's milk dairy of any sort, including butter. No soy. And much less sugar. It was a miracle—my son got dramatically better in a very short period of time. I was amazed.
Now, for those of you who have never attempted an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free, soy-free diet, let me share with you how incredibly difficult this is to do, especially with children, and especially with someone who is a very picky eater to begin with, like my son is. Basically, you can't go out to eat. Every kid's meal known to mankind is replete with wheat and dairy, not to mention things no parent really wants to know about. Basically, on an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free diet, you eat meat, chicken, or fish, and vegetables, which if you're interested in losing weight is a really great diet to follow but unfortunately my son, aged 5 at the time, was already too skinny. And basically, we spent a lot of time at the kitchen table amidst plates of (you guessed it) protein and vegetables, while my son cried and said, “Mom, when can I get off this boring diet?” Breaks a mom's heart.
What kind of a life is this, I ask you? Doomed, at age 5, to eat only meat and vegetables! Ask any parent whose child has had to follow this diet, and they will tell you it is very difficult, but better than pulmicort and albuterol, the asthma medicine du jour. And I seconded that every time we fell off the wagon after a bithday-party soaked weekend, or a visit to the grandparents, or when I gave in because I just couldn't listen to the whining anymore, and the dreaded cough came back. Yes, I sighed, life is a sick joke.
But then we discovered NAET, the greatest allergy elimination therapy known to man, the holy grail of alternative medicine. NAET is a combination of Chinese medicine, applied kinesiology (muscle testing), and chiropractic spinal massage. It actually change your relationship with any substance you might be reacting to. I treated my son for eggs, and the cough went away. Really—I'm not kidding. It resurfaced twice in two years—once after he ate salmon, and once after he ate rice pasta—but after treating him for those two things, he basically doesn't cough anymore. The dreaded cough is gone!!
Every mother of an asthmatic child knows exactly what I'm talking about. There's a certain sound that every child makes when they cough, when you know they're in trouble. For my son, it was when the cough (which had begun 36 hours previously) had pretty much exhausted his lungs. His voice shrank to a whisper. He began to wheeze. And the cough shook his small frame, sending spasms throughout his entire body, sometimes causing him to gag at the end. I knew there was no medicine that would get us through the night, no matter what the doctor said, and that it would be a long, scary night indeed.
Fortunately for us, I learned from our nutritionist that my son had food allergies that were creating copious amounts of phlegm in his small system. When we eat food that is undigestible—either because we're allergic to that food and it creates inflammation in our gut or because we're sensitive to that food and can't absorb it—the residue of the undigested food produces excess mucus. When we reach a certain critical mass, so to speak, of mucus that our body can't store any longer, the mucus is released as phlegm, usually through the nose, in a form that looks, for all intents and purposes, like a cold. This is what our nutritionist explained to us. Hmm, I thought, that sounds suspiciously like Chinese Medicine, which I myself had studied before having children. And, come to think of it, my son seemed like he was getting an awful lot of colds—sometimes he got a cold every two or three weeks! But, I realized, no one else in the family was getting these “colds,” which made me wonder. Maybe the nutritionist was right.
So we followed the nutritionist's advice: No eggs. No wheat. No cow's milk dairy of any sort, including butter. No soy. And much less sugar. It was a miracle—my son got dramatically better in a very short period of time. I was amazed.
Now, for those of you who have never attempted an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free, soy-free diet, let me share with you how incredibly difficult this is to do, especially with children, and especially with someone who is a very picky eater to begin with, like my son is. Basically, you can't go out to eat. Every kid's meal known to mankind is replete with wheat and dairy, not to mention things no parent really wants to know about. Basically, on an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free diet, you eat meat, chicken, or fish, and vegetables, which if you're interested in losing weight is a really great diet to follow but unfortunately my son, aged 5 at the time, was already too skinny. And basically, we spent a lot of time at the kitchen table amidst plates of (you guessed it) protein and vegetables, while my son cried and said, “Mom, when can I get off this boring diet?” Breaks a mom's heart.
What kind of a life is this, I ask you? Doomed, at age 5, to eat only meat and vegetables! Ask any parent whose child has had to follow this diet, and they will tell you it is very difficult, but better than pulmicort and albuterol, the asthma medicine du jour. And I seconded that every time we fell off the wagon after a bithday-party soaked weekend, or a visit to the grandparents, or when I gave in because I just couldn't listen to the whining anymore, and the dreaded cough came back. Yes, I sighed, life is a sick joke.
But then we discovered NAET, the greatest allergy elimination therapy known to man, the holy grail of alternative medicine. NAET is a combination of Chinese medicine, applied kinesiology (muscle testing), and chiropractic spinal massage. It actually change your relationship with any substance you might be reacting to. I treated my son for eggs, and the cough went away. Really—I'm not kidding. It resurfaced twice in two years—once after he ate salmon, and once after he ate rice pasta—but after treating him for those two things, he basically doesn't cough anymore. The dreaded cough is gone!!
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