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This year has been a tough one for allergy sufferers. It has both earlier and more severe than most. Pollen allergies cause runny nose, itch eyes, wheezing, swollen skin and rashes, cough, and insomnia.
The first step for sufferers is to stay inside whenever able. Airconditioning filters out the pollens, especially when the filters are changed regularly.
There are many ways which you can treat your allergies to pollens. To start with, over the counter medicines such as antihistamines are effective and cheap. 2 classes are used. 1st is the non-sedating loratidine(claritin). It is taken in the morning at 10 mg for adults and 5mg for children less than 8 years. At night, diphenhydramine(benadryl) can be used at a doseage of 25 to 75mg for adults and 6 to 12.5 mg for children over 2 years. It causes drowsiness within the hour and usually is out of your system by morning. It is the ingredient in most over the counter sleep aids. Children and adults can be very sensitive to the dosage, so start low and go up. It can cause jitteriness when the dose is too high, thus many parents say they it causes their children to not be able to sleep. This is probably related to an oversensitivity to the medicine.
If these measures do not provide adequate relief, a visit to your health care provider may be needed. At Emergicare, we treat many patients with severe allergies. Since they have often tried the above measures, we have many other effective treatments. For serious cases, our patients often are given an intramuscular combination of cortisone, long and quick acting in a single shot. This nearly always successfully treats all the symptoms within a day and lasts through the allergy season(several months or even for the full year). Although it rarely happens, it can cause the adrenal gland which produces cortisone to shrink up and not function properly. This seldom causes symptoms and we have never seen a case of this which caused life threatening problems. If you have wheezing from the pollens, nebulizer with a short acting and longer acting bronchodilator is safe and can give significant relief and can be used 4 to 6 times daily. Other prescriptions such as oral and nasal cortisone inhalers and singulair provide only moderate relief and are very expensive if you don’t have a prescription card.
Of course, allergy testing and shots for the specific allergens are effective over the long term, but this is expensive for the uninsured and underinsured and requires frequent visits to the doctor.
If you have questions about the treatment for allergies, google “Treatment Allergies” or come for a consult to your doctor.