Decoding Allergies

Speaker 0 00:03 Hey, I'm dr Bidel and we're going to talk about allergies today. I have our new patient coordinator, joy Lambert here to help me out. <inaudible> how are you doing? Doing well. How are you? Good. Good. I have not succumb to the Corona virus. Excellent. Myself included. So far, so good. Let's hope it stays that way. But you know something else going on right now is amidst all of this, the trees are blooming, the trees are blooming. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. I noticed the pine trees, I, I have three Oak trees in my yard and everything is covered with green, so I have to clean off the outdoor furniture and Oh yeah. It's always nice to see the return of green. But that brings us to today's topic. Allergies, allergies, the Polynesia. It's about to happen. And so I thought maybe we could start by talking about what is an allergy? Speaker 0 01:02 An allergy is an inappropriate immune response to something that is otherwise harmless. So if you do not have a ragweed allergy, you can throw a blanket down in a field and have a wonderful picnic. And if you have a terrible ragweed allergy that can put you in the hospital with a severe asthma attack, or at least make you miserable with watery eyes and runny nose and sneezing and brain fog and fatigue. And I know when I have allergies flaring up, I feel really antisocial. I don't want to be around anybody and I want to talk to anybody. I felt irritable. I feel stupid. It's really makes it, you know, a histamine brain is a real thing. It makes your brain feel all inflamed. So what do you mean by histamine brain? What does a histamine reaction? This isn't that the reaction of the allergy, right? Speaker 0 01:53 Well, histamine is a chemical we make in our body and it causes her tiny blood vessels and our membranes like your nose to become, uh, more permeable so that we leak fluid, we call snot. And that's our body's way of trying to get rid of that stuff that we're reacting to. Try to wash it away. Just, you know, dilution is the solution. Try to flush it out. Uh, and we release that histamine when our white blood cells deep granulate, especially ones called eosinophils. Uh, when our antibodies called IgE antibodies generally, but sometimes IgG antibodies, but especially when the IgE antibodies hook onto something that they've decided is alien, dangerous like ragweed bone. Uh, then they get our white blood cells to release all this histamine and it starts to cycle. Huh? Well, what creates these allergies in the first place? Why do we react to some things but not others? Well, there's two levels to that. The is, pardon me, is myself, uh, some molecules are shaped such that they're more irritating to our immune systems. This is why you get more allergic. More people are allergic to ragweed than are allergic to Rose pollen. Uh, even though Rose fever was the original word for hay fever, huh? Speaker 1 03:25 Uh, but <inaudible> Speaker 0 03:28 in food allergies, for example, more people become allergic to eggs and wheat and dairy then, and nuts then become allergic to broccoli and sweet potatoes. And that has to do with just the shapes of the proteins and how irritating they are to our immune system. But in the bigger picture allergies, we're really unheard of them in the medical literature before the industrial revolution. Really. So if you look at the ancient Greek in Romans, if you look at, uh, ancient, uh, Indian Ayurvedic text, if you look at ancient Chinese, uh, there's really not a mention of allergies and well, I believe that's because the, uh, origin of allergies is from toxicity. So the first place that Rose fever was first identified was in the belt buckle of the industrial revolution in Liverpool, England, where they were burning massive amounts of coal, uh, you know, for shipyard building and things like that. Speaker 0 04:32 And, you know, factory production. And, uh, coal is kind of our Pandora's box. We looked inside there and released it. And inside the coal is all this lead and arsenic and mercury and cadmium and other toxic metals, especially mercury that, you know, when there was great rain forest upon the earth and giant beast called dinosaurs roamed the earth for hundreds of millions of years, there was a lot more volcanic activity and the atmosphere of the earth contained a lot more toxic metals. So these are reptiles, uh, of dinosaurs, uh, are not as susceptible to toxic metals as we are, cause they evolve with them. Speaker 1 05:19 But Speaker 0 05:21 over hundreds of millions of years, a lot of those toxic metals were captured, you know, captured by the forests and then buried in the crust of the earth. And we have not come along and dug them up and we're burning them. And burning coal is the leading source of putting mercury into our environment. I had no idea. Yeah. So shocking. Yeah. The mercury goes up into the atmosphere from the smoke stacks of the coal burning power plants and gets distributed across the world. So, you know, on a bad day when it's not the coronavirus shut down factories, but on a bad, you can actually have pollution coming into the West coast. United States from China burning coal for example, travels a long way. Uh, but all that mercury deposits into the Pacific ocean deposits into uh, the silt and then the microorganisms eat that. And then the tiny fish eat that and the medium sized fish eat those. And the larger fish eat that. And then we eat the tuna. Speaker 2 06:19 And so that's where mercury in big fish comes from, is from the toxins that were released from burning coal, which trapped the toxins in the first place. Speaker 0 06:29 Exactly. Wow. Right. And then it concentrates up the food chain. So a large fish like a tuna is going to have them equivalent of mercury. Cause once he goes in there, they don't get rid of it just stores. Right. Cause this isn't the half life of that very long. Well for us, the half life of mercury is 25 to 50 years, which means 50 years later you still have half of what you started with under your own ability to detoxify it depending on how good you are at that. Speaker 2 06:54 So was it our exposure to plants absorbing toxins that creates the allergy or is it an association if we're exposed to a toxin around a certain plant or other substances? Not the plants. I mean it's the Speaker 0 07:09 micro plants like the algae, you know, and plankton, uh, that are, you know, picking all these up from the silt of, of wet lambs and such. But like, like I said, a large fish will have, you know, concentrated bio concentrated mercury from the equivalent of tens of thousands of small fish. So it really gets a substantial level and where that fish is and that fish is swimming around, for example, an oil drilling rig in the Gulf that uses mercury to extract oil, then it's going to have it. You can have one fish that's extremely higher and mercury than all of its cousins. Wow. Uh, and then what happens is those, uh, it's been well shown and this is also true for the other heavy metals, but I like to focus on mercury cause a lot of research has been done. There is a strongest correlation that for me that it, um, take a break, clear this out that's getting closer and better. Speaker 3 08:16 <inaudible> Speaker 0 08:26 all right, so with mercury irritates our immune system. So mercury does a lot of bad things to us. But one of the things it does is it confuses and irritates our immune system. So it's been shown to dramatically increase our allergies. For example, this is even true in heart disease. So if you're higher in mercury, not only do you oxidize your cholesterol more and our size, cholesterol is bad for heart disease, but you become more likely to make antibodies against your own oxidized cholesterol. And that increases the inflammatory reaction in the artery wall that causes the plaque formation of heart disease. So heavy metals are one of the strongest risk factors for heart disease that's incredibly because of this. So it's in some ways an almost an autoimmune phenomenon of a having this reaction going on in your own blood vessels. And that same sort of irritation to our immune systems then makes us allergic to other things. Speaker 0 09:27 So allergies been going up at about 5% per year. That's a lot for decades. Yeah. So I mean, it's great for business if you're an allergist. Sure. But it's horrible for the community. And you know, when we were kids, you'd never heard much about peanut allergy, you know, and when you went on planes, they gave you peanuts, right? But now you have all these, you know, peanut free, nut free, you know, and that's just one thing, you know. Then there's the growing rate of gluten sensitivity. And our theory about that is the, uh, the glyphosate around, up, you know, in the foods is causing gut irritation and leaky gut syndrome. And that our immune system starts to see these molecules that they don't usually see in tack and starts to attack them. So there's this relationship between inhalant allergies like mold and Paul in dogs and cats, and then the food allergies also. So they're both going up and they, they kind of drive each other. Speaker 2 10:31 And I'm wondering, um, getting back to focusing on the inhalant allergies since all the flowers are starting to burn now, um, do you have any thoughts as to why environmental allergies seem to manifest with the stuffy, congested, snotty kind of head cold symptoms as opposed to things like the hives or the throat swelling that one may experience, say with a peanut allergy or something like that? Just the route of exposure. I mean, that's, it's, it's up your nose and your sinuses, Speaker 0 11:01 you know, in your mouth from breathing this stuff in here, but you're not swallowing it so much. You're not eating a pine pollen. Speaker 2 11:10 No, not usually. Not usually. Uh, so that's just the, where the <inaudible> Speaker 0 11:16 those are that are seeing the, the allergen and having the reaction and that's your body trying to try and get rid of it. You sneeze it out. Could you Speaker 2 11:26 now are inhalant or seasonal allergies, are they just annoying in general and then not something to be concerned about or, or is there something going on on a deeper level that is potentially hurting us? No, that's a great question. Speaker 0 11:40 It's just annoying for the individual, for most people. However, if you go on to develop asthma, which has a strong correlation that can be life threatening or at least take you out of the game, literally like if you're playing soccer and your asthma comes on, you pull out of the game. Yeah, that's it. You know, my four year old girl has had a type of asthma called reactive airways disease where she gets asthma only when she's sick with a virus or something. So normally she doesn't have asthma. Uh, but when she's sick she does this. And this is really common. I had that when I was a young child also. And grew out of it. Um, but that's the really scary when you're up in the middle of the night with a kid wheezing and you have to give them a nebulizer and you know, should I take this kid to the ER or not? Speaker 0 12:27 And you know, it's a, it's a scary thing. Uh, people die from it. When I was in the ER doctor, one of our nurses had an asthma attack and died right there in the ER, even though they had all the help right there. So I take asthma extremely seriously. When I see my own kid wheezing, I get pretty darn nervous. Absolutely. And that's the biggest thing. And then, you know, the, the food allergies then can show up as a wider variety of things. So like you said, it could show up as gut irritation. It can show up as eczema. It could show up as inhalant allergies. It could, it could look like you got stuffy nose after you eat food you're allergic to, it can show up as an autoimmune disease. We think food allergies are a big trigger for things like, uh, lupus and thyroiditis, Hashimoto's, you know, things like that. Speaker 0 13:20 And there's a lot of evidence to support that. Um, so I would say the, the food allergies have a much more diverse presentation and it can be almost anything like your great mimicker. Uh, and then Helen's allergies are usually a much more straight forward with the upper respiratory symptoms. And so what can we do about it? If we have inhalant allergies or we have food allergies and especially now with the pollinating about to happen, right? What can we do with the inhaled allergies? You certainly want to restrict your exposure, but you have to go outside sometimes. Sure. You want to live in a clean space. You know, it's nice to run air filters. It's nice to make sure you don't have mold. You know, here in Western North Carolina, we live in a temperate rainforest. There is a lot of mold, you know, a lot of houses that are over 20 years old got, got pretty bad mold problems. Speaker 0 14:10 Um, I, I see plenty of patients who are living in houses that are a hundred years old and then they come in with both mold and lead from all the leaded paint. They never got, you know, clean, cleaned up all the way. Um, so, you know, cleaning up your environment is one thing. Taking simple things. For example, vitamin C at a thousand milligrams twice a day will decrease the histamine response by 38%. So that gets you to a third of the way there. Just with something really simple it has really significant. Yeah. And then we use other natural anti-histamines like queer Sutton and butterbur. Um, so there's, you know, there's a whole list of nutrients that we give people to help with their allergies. Uh, but the best thing we can do is to desensitize, is to train the body that, Hey, these are good fellows, don't attack them. Speaker 0 14:58 And the way they do that in conventional medicine is they do skin testing. They take extracts of the different pollens and uh, Dustin dust mites and cat and dog and horse and all those things, uh, and put it in a little injection under your skin and see if you react. And that's sometimes people call that a scratch test. Does that the scratch test or the prick test or something like that. And we used to do that. It works pretty well. Uh, every once in a while somebody has a reaction, uh, and can go into anaphylaxis where they, you know, start to shut down the airway and their lips swell up and they can't breathe. And so that's very scary just from the testing, just from the testing. So a few people a year across the country die from the testing. Um, and then the way they conventional allergists treat the allergies is take the extracts that you reacted to and put them into a shot in your arm usually once a week, sometimes twice a week. Speaker 0 15:51 And then over time, my stretched it out to every other week and then even once a month. Uh, but that's usually a three to five year process, maybe seven years. Um, and it is also risky because, uh, whenever they raise the dosage to get to the next treatment level, you can again react with the antibiotic reaction. There's a few people, not huge amounts, but when it's your kid, it's, it's everything. Absolutely. It doesn't matter if it's just a, you know, a few in the country per year, it's still really scary and it's also inconvenient. You have to go to the doctor's office for that just in case you react. It's relatively expensive. Something like $50 a week generally who wants to get a shot and you got a needle. And especially if you treat and young kids that's not attractive and even the skin testing is not attractive. Speaker 0 16:36 So we switched to is we switched to blood testing for the inhalant allergies and also for the food allergies. And, uh, we, I even use myself as an example. I've, I've struggled with allergies. I've been through the protocol several times and it's helped. And then I'm good for a few years and I had to go through it again. Uh, so I tested myself both ways and I found that the blood tests I thought were both more, they're more accurate in two different ways. They're more sensitive and they're more specific, which means that when you're doing a skin test, you look at the little wheel and you're using a judgment call about like how big is that? Is that three millimeters or five millimeters or seven millimeters? You're measuring it, but you know, is it just the fact that you stuck a needle in your arm, you even, that can swell up? Speaker 0 17:19 Right, right. Um, so with the, with the blood test, we found that it actually really nailed that down to what I was really allergic to and how allergic I was, and then we'd take those same proteins of the inhalants. And of course, my big one is ragweed. So I'm not having that much of a problem in the spring. I have a terrible problem in the fall. Right. And we put them into a little bottle and you squirt it under your tongue two or three times a day. Uh, and so it's the same stuff, the same what they call serum. Uh, of the proteins of the pollens and such or, or pet dander or things like that. And then you squirt it under your tongue to desensitize yourself and there's a cells under your tongue called answers in antigen presenting cells and they present it to your immune system and say, these are good guys, leave them alone. Speaker 0 18:07 They're part of the family. It's okay. You don't have to react to them and not dangerous. And you basically induce tolerance and, and frankly, nobody really knows exactly how that happens at the molecular level. Uh, it has to do with the cytokines and Lugo trains and turning some on and turning some off. Uh, but the fact is it works and it's been working, you know, with shots for I think close to a hundred years now. Uh, and people have been using drops for at least 50 years now. And the company we use, which is allergy choices up in lacrosse, Wisconsin, some called sometimes called the lacrosse technique, has been doing it for over 40 years. It's a long time. Yeah. They've been figuring out how to do it right, both on the testing and on the treatment side. Uh, and again, for example, my, my a four year old, she not only had the asthma, but she also has had terrible eczema, which is more related to foods and eggs were her big obvious culprit fish, but also wheat and dairy would cause it. Speaker 0 19:07 And she's been on both the inhaler drops and the food drops now. And not only is our, her lungs a lot better, but her skin is no longer rashing up. And that's wonderful. We finally, you know, work sometimes we restrict the most allergic foods for a while, um, but now we're able to add them back in and with food allergies, you know, I've never been a big fan of food allergy avoidance because what I've learned is just avoiding the foods you're allergic to gets rid of your symptoms, but it does not get rid of the food allergy. You still react to it if you have an exposure or an accidental exposure, which is even worse. The main Bay. And the way to make a food allergy worse is you, you avoid it for three weeks and then get a little exposure and you avoid it for three weeks and then get a little exposure and actually cranks up your allergy. Speaker 0 19:51 It makes it worse. And of course the way to make it less is to squirt it under your tongue two or three times a day. So you had this low level tolerance building exposure, just like getting the shot in the arm once a week. Right. And they're about equally effective, but the drops into the tongue are perfectly safe. Nobody's ever had an NFI to response to though. Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, sometimes you can get a little itchy in the back of your throat or something like that, but nobody's ever died from it. Uh, it's much less expensive. It's more like $70 a month rather than $50 a week. That's significant as well. It's significant. There's a, besides a blood draw, there's no skin testing and there's no shots and it's convenient not to drive to the doctor's office. You can do it from your home. Speaker 0 20:34 It is by a regional. So I don't try to test people who are living in Florida or Louisiana. They need to go to a doctor who's local to them. So we have a region, you know, a bioregional panel for the Southern Appalachia is here for all the things. And since the drops are made into a glycerin base, I would imagine that even children, you have a four year old, they don't mind the taste of it because it's going to be a little sweet. They actually look forward to it. Yeah. Good. Yeah. My daughter does her own drops. Oh, that's wonderful. That way she proves she's a big girl. All right. Uh, yeah, so I'm really happy with the drops. I can hardly imagine practicing medicine now without that as a tool because it's been such a great tool for both the inhalants and the foods. Um, and for myself included, I, you know, I've had dramatic positive results, uh, with the inhaled allergy drops. Speaker 0 21:26 So with the drops, how long would one expect to be on them? Three to five years generally. And, uh, you know, just like with the shots, about 20% of people you don't see a great response with. There's always non-responders in any program. And it's about the same, you know, not everybody you know, gets a response, but 80% of people get a response, uh, in our experience about about like a fourth to a third of people get great responses and after about three years they're done and, and happily going on their way. And then, you know, the middle group of people, uh, they get to five years and then, you know, they're better, but then when they try to stop the drops, you know, maybe they relapse and so we might retest and do another round. Uh, but they're still being held by the drums. And for those where it is effective to some level, how long should they expect to wait before they notice a difference? Speaker 0 22:19 Well, that varies too. You know, I've seen people have responses within a few weeks that soon. Yeah. Uh, but in general, I tell them to expect something like six to nine months before, you know, before we can really expect results. So it's a process. It's a process, but a process worth starting it sounds like. Well, I think so. Uh, because you're, you know, you're really calming down the immune system. And again, when we talk about autoimmune diseases, the three big things we look at, and I'm sure we're going to talk about autoimmune diseases and a whole podcast sometime. Oh absolutely. But we look at toxins like heavy metals. We look at chronic infections like Epstein BARR virus, which is mono or walking pneumonia or things like that that had been shown to cause autoimmune diseases, um, including things like Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And then we look at the, the, uh, allergy reactions because if your immune system is re attacking a lot of foods or inhalants, it's now over-reactive and that overreactivity tends to bleed over into also attacking your own cells. Speaker 0 23:27 And so the autoimmunity, you can attack any part of your body. Like there's a name for an autoimmune disease of my fingernails, you know, of my tongue of, you know, specific. Is that, yeah, I mean, it's just that, you know, your immune system can get confused and attack anything. Uh, and it's really pretty amazing that it doesn't have more often, you know, the immune system knows what to attack and what not to attack. Yeah. Uh, and what the drops do is give the immune system more intelligence and you can call an immune system down by giving steroids like prednisone, right? But then you're also taking away your ability to fight off infections or your ability to fight off cancer. I wouldn't want that. Cause if you think about the immune system and we're just doing a podcast, so we don't have a visual aid, but if you, if you make a graph and make it into four quadrants, and on the top is your immune systems to reactive and the bottom is not reactive enough and a one side it's reactive against yourself in those sites you're active against other things. Speaker 0 24:29 Then if you're too reactive against yourself, you have autoimmune disease. If you're too reactive against other things, you have allergies. If you're not reactive enough against yourself, uh, you get infections, you, you get cancer. And if you're not reactive enough against other things, you get infections. Uh, and all that conventional medicine knows how to do is basically turn that down by suppressing the immune system with steroids. And what we want to do is slide it all towards the center. So it's just the right amount of reactive, but it's intelligent enough to attack what it needs to and leave alone. What is not dangerous. It sounds like a really delicate balancing act. It's a really delicate balancing act, right? And so in doing that, we're also looking at, you know, cleaning up the toxicities, you know, cleaning up the diet, cleaning up the lifestyle, cutting up the stinking thinking, right? Speaker 0 25:23 Because of our thought patterns and our stress management. So now we're back to the, you know, the five pillars of health, of balancing the hormones, the nutrition, the exercise and stress management. Um, you know, all those things, uh, to get people into a good state of health so they're not having either allergies or autoimmune attacks and it makes a difference and it makes a difference, a huge difference. It's a really rewarding way to practice versus, you know, just throwing things at people that are bandaid the bandaid on the problem or inhibit their immune system so they down down the stream have, you know, worsening problems, you know, rather than gradually getting better. And that's what I love to see is people gradually getting better. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the information. This has been very informative. You bet. Thanks, joy. All right. Speaker 5 26:14 Okay, Speaker 0 26:19 26.