Environmental Allergies and Relocating: How to Make Your New Home Easier to Breathe In

Recently I’ve had a few patients who expressed concern about moving.  Moving can be anxiety-provoking for those who have environmental or multiple chemical sensitivities, because landlords (bless their hearts!) try to make apartments and homes look fresh and updated for their new residents, but (damn their eyes!) they use the cheapest, smelliest paints, flooring, and carpets known to mankind!  

The last time I moved, my landlord very generously put in a new (faux) wood floor, painted the whole place, and put in new fixtures in the kitchen and bathroom.  Yay!  Right?  No!  BOO!  A couple of weeks after I moved, the floor started off-gassing the most atrocious chemicals, and I was sick for weeks.  

So what’s a sensitive person to do??  

Well, the good news is that there are some relatively easy solutions.  Regardless of what could be off-gassing in your new place—flooring, carpeting, whatever—you can quickly and inexpensively do a couple of things that can help a lot.

Let’s start with paint.  Regular paint is super-smelly, and tends to off-gas for much longer than people realize.  Furthermore, the stuff it off-gasses, called VOC (which stands for volatile organic compounds) is unbelievably toxic—not as toxic as having a running automobile in your living room, granted, but not that far behind.  Luckily, there is a type of paint you can buy called Low VOC.  Low VOC paint (available in stores like Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore) will not only release far fewer toxins in the air, but it will also help absorb odors from other sources in your home.  So if you had new carpet, painting the walls would actually absorb some of the toxic off-gassing from the carpet too.  Low VOC paint is a little more expensive than regular paint, but not that much more.  And if you’re on a really tight budget, one alternative would be to just paint one wall instead of all four.

If you would like more information on Low VOC paint, here’s a link that I found to be very informative:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/construction/materials/low-voc-paint.htm

The other thing that will help tremendously is an air purifier.  Especially when you can’t open the windows (because it’s too cold or hot outside), having a good air purifier can make breathing a lot easier.  The one thing I found was to beware of air purifiers that said they released ozone (like that was a good thing—because it’s not!)—ozone is one of the things released by paint that you’re trying to remove, and it’s why you are getting the air purifier in the first place.

Here’s a link to an informative web page about air purifiers:

http://www.achooallergy.com/air-purifier-buying-guide.asp

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!!

www.quantumlinkwellness.com