Another Person's Poison: A History of Food Allergy (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History) by Matthew Smith

Author:Matthew Smith [Smith, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: CKB106000, Cooking/Health &#38, Medical/History, Healing/Allergy, MED039000
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

ALTHOUGH THE COURT RULED IN FAVOR of the AAAI and the other defendants, the decision ultimately rested on a technicality—that is, whether clinical ecology was indeed “recognizable and identifiable” as an entity that could launch a class-action suit. Deeming that it was not, the court was never in the position to judge whether the defendants had conspired against William Rea and other clinical ecologists and their patients. John E. Salvaggio, president of the AAAI, may have described the result as “the best news I’ve heard all year concerning our field,” but the case ultimately failed to deter patients from turning to environmental medicine and from Rea.130 While Theron Randolph effectively retired from practice in 1986 at the age of eighty, he remained adamant that his approach to food allergies and other environmental illness was valid. As for allergists who insisted on the “immunologically restricted interpretation of allergy,” they were “stuck in a trap of their own making. There are numerous mechanisms in allergy. It’s ridiculous to limit the concept of hypersensitivity to the one mechanism of IgE. They’re trying to make it an exclusive practice. They won’t give up. Why? Because they are blockheads.”131 Other clinical ecologists and food allergists, such as Rea, William Crook, and Doris Rapp, continued to practice on the fringes of medicine; Rea was charged by the Texas Medical Board in 2007 for a range of malpractices.

In turn, the AAAI continued to monitor the claims and practices of clinical ecologists, making its opinions clear in position statements and in the media, and taking more aggressive action when it deemed appropriate. Despite fending off clinical ecology in the courts and despite the apparent immunological revolution ushered in by the discovery of IgE, clinical allergy remained somewhat static. According to Anthony S. Fauci (b. 1940), director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), writing in Annals of Allergy shortly after the Rea verdict, one of the questions that allergists had to ask themselves was “whether the rapidly evolving technology and fundamental breakthroughs in knowledge are being creatively and effectively translated into clinical applications.” Hinting that they had not yet done so, Fauci suggested that the discipline of allergy needed to “take stock” in order to “wisely avail ourselves of the extraordinary opportunities before us” and “improve therapies which will bring greater benefit to patients.”132 The continued demand for alternative, unorthodox, and even sham remedies offered by the wide range of practitioners cast under the banner of clinical ecology suggested that many patients continued to miss out on such benefits. That many such tests had been inspired by the discovery of IgE and the development of RAST, both underlying the idea that testing for allergy could be a simple, in vitro, mail-order procedure, also dimmed the glow of the immunological revolution depicted by Fauci.

Although the deeper significance of IgE was overlooked by allergists and caused clinicians as many problems as it solved, IgE’s ideological importance for orthodox allergists cannot be overstated. From 1966 on, it served

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