Allergic by Theresa MacPhail

Author:Theresa MacPhail [MacPhail, Theresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

THERE ARE NO EASY ANSWERS TO ALLERGY CAUSATION, JUST DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

At the end of our exploration into the possible underlying causes of the dramatic surge in allergies over the past two centuries, what have we learned? We’ve discovered that while genetics plays a significant role in our immune system function, it does not adequately explain nor predict who will develop allergic conditions. We saw that while the environment we live in—the natural and man-made world around us—is most definitely contributing to the problem, it isn’t the sole cause either. And our habits and behaviors matter greatly to our overall health and immune function, but they, too, cannot fully explain what is happening to our immune systems. What is happening to us is a result of all the things we’ve been doing differently over the past two hundred years and their effects on the environment and on our own biology. It’s that simple and that complicated.

The eczema expert Peter Lio of Chicago would like for people to stop looking for a root cause for their conditions. He argues that it’s the wrong question to be asking, especially since there probably isn’t a simple root cause. But often, his patients don’t want to hear the truth—that the cause of their symptoms is much more complicated than any one theory might suggest. But he tries to be honest with them anyway.

“I tell them it’s a big mess,” he said. “There’s a skin barrier thing, an immune system thing, and there’s something about the nerve endings, and then there is a behavioral piece….”

The food allergist Pamela Guerrerio wanted me to underline that, ultimately, it is wrong for researchers to even look for a single cause. It sends an inaccurate message, she argued, that we just need to figure out what the problem is and then we will solve all of this. If the general public thinks that allergy is a simple problem, then they will just get more and more frustrated as the decades roll by without a straightforward solution. And, as we’ll see in part 3 on treatments, most of the solutions we have for allergies are imperfect at best.

“My message would be that there isn’t one cause,” Guerrerio said, “and that we need to understand that there is probably a genetic susceptibility, and on top of that is environmental exposures, and what’s true in one group to account for their increase in allergy may be different for another group. There are just so many different changes in environmental factors.”

At Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, in a discussion about pollution’s effect on asthma, Dr. Neeru Khurana Hershey summed it up best: “There’s no one thing. If there were one thing, we would’ve found it and we would’ve figured it out. It’s a combination of things and it’s different for different geographic areas and different genetic backgrounds of people. Sometimes it’s easier to put the blame on something than it is to take a hard look at what we’re doing and how we’re contributing to the problem.

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