Until last month, treatment of food allergy outside of academic medical centers was either avoidance or an attempt to desensitize by oral immunotherapy--known by the shorter acronym OIT. Research and increasing use of sublingual (i.e. under the tongue) desensitization--known as SLIT--by some community-based allergists has...
Standard teaching of health care professionals for decades in the United States has been that those individuals who have more than rare instances of asthma need one medicine to use daily to prevent symptoms and a second medicine in the form of a bronchodilator inhaler to be available to stop, or rescue from, symptoms. The daily...
Until this month, I only associated the word ‘bootleg’ with the era of ‘Prohibition’ (of alcohol) during the ‘Roaring Twenties’ (1920s) and with a quarterback play during football games. However, historians and those with allergies and asthma will record and remember this month for the ‘Bootleg Fire’—named for the location in...
Earlier this month, a physician whom I’ve known since our high school days called me to ask my thoughts about a chronic bumpy rash on sun-exposed areas of one of his co-workers. Besides quoting the phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ (which, by the way, is attributed to an early 20th century American advertising manager),...
In my experience, this month’s grass pollen counts in the Chicago area have been quite unusual. There was a two-day burst of grass pollen on April 28th and April 29th, and then nothing…………. until low levels on May 27th and moderate levels on May 28th. During 2016-2020, sustained levels over many days that included a moderate...
Our immune systems are--like every organ system in our body--subject to the aging process. The term used in the medical literature to describe these age-related changes is immunosenescence. Perhaps no time is more important in understanding this than the past 14 months when the responses to (a) being infected with the COVID-19...