I was reviewing someone’s care and they were discussing how amazing it is to not have to visit their GP and spend hundreds of dollars loading up on drugs at the start of allergy season. It turns out improved allergies as a side effect of regular chiropractic care is not uncommon and is evidence-based as well. My wife Suzie had a similar chiropractic experience. She had a childhood full of sickness, allergies and asthma. She was allergic to dogs and cats and moulds and all kinds of seasonal pollens, etc. She spent over ten years taking antihistamines daily during allergy season and inhalers for asthma regularly, not to mention regular bouts of strep throat, antibiotics, bronchitis, etc… With regular chiropractic care this changed greatly and she rarely has any signs of allergies at all except for cats and occasional seasonal allergies.
One of my good friends started getting adjusted for his back pain, after many months of care he realized his grass allergies were much better, and he wasn’t needing his inhalers. Over time he was tested and shown his food allergy to eggs was gone as well. He has been really happy to be able to eat eggs regularly for the first time since he was a child! He had not been tested for years before this, so most medical people would just say he “grew out of it”, at 40. A lot of people “grow out of their problems” when they start getting adjusted.
Hopefully you realize that chiropractic adjustments do not treat allergies or the immune system. In fact, adjustments are not a treatment for any specific symptom or condition, instead they remove interference to the nervous system to allow your body to function and heal like it was designed to do. Allergies, like many health issues, aren’t the problem, they are a symptom of a problem: immune system overreaction. Better healing and health from the inside out can improve the function of any system in the body, including the immune system. I have found that when someone’s allergies improve with chiropractic care it is typically after a year or more of corrective chiropractic care.
Saying that, the spine is not the major contributor to allergies for everyone. Overall inflammatory state of the body, nutrition, unknown food or environmental sensitivities, high stress or poor sleep can all contribute to increased allergic response, so getting adjusted does not solve everyone’s allergy problems. If you have been under corrective chiropractic care for years and still have severe allergy symptoms, you should ask for our handouts that focus on improving your lifestyle to reduce your body’s inflammatory state. This involves taking fish oil, probiotics and vitamin D as well as reducing dairy and grains amongst other things. This addresses the other causes of allergies for many people. If lifestyle does not change it, then naturopathic testing for sensitivities and use of supplements such as allprev, homeopathics, and Coenzyme Q10 are a good avenue to explore. When these are done for a month or two before allergy season this can help your immune system to not over react.
The reality is that the nerve system is a factor in many people’s immune system problems, including allergies. This is evidence-based with many studies supporting it. One study published in 2004 was done on 1,028 people suffering from allergies (the most common was atopic dermatitis and bronchial asthma). X-Ray evidence and physical exams proved that 98% of these allergy patients had remarkably similar vertebral misalignments. Over 88% of the people with dermatitis who received consistent spinal adjustments showed massive improvement in skin itching and over 71% showed improvement in overall skin condition. Compare that to 0% improvement of the patients who did not receive adjustments.
This conclusion comes directly from the study: “We can state that a treatment that cannot fundamentally treat spinal problems will not fundamentally improve allergic conditions such as atopic dermatitis, bronchial asthma, pollinosis, and allergic coryza. As a result people spend their life using detrimental drugs like cortisone creams and antihistamines to shut off inflammation and immune response but NEVER address the problem”. – Y Takeda, S Arai. Relationship Between Vertebral Deformities And Allergic Diseases. The Internet Journal of Orthopedic Surgery. 2003 Volume 2 Number 1
Many people around you, and maybe even you yourself, often believe the message from much of healthcare that we need to just accept our weak body and poor health and suppress the symptoms with drugs. The solution to many health problems, sometimes including allergies, already exists within the body IF we remove the interference (subluxation -lifestyle issues) and allow you to heal from the inside out.
What Else Can You Do To Help Stubborn Allergies
Research shows immune system improvements from chiropractic adjustments, as well as allergy improvements from chiropractic adjustments. As with most health issues, there can be many possible causes of allergies. What this means is that not everyone who improves alignment and posture with chiropractic care will see improvement in their allergies. In the same way that not everyone who has a knee surgery, or back surgery will see their symptoms resolve. That is normal in health care as many problems are complex and have multiple factors. However, unlike drugs and surgery, everyone will benefit from having less subluxations interfering with their nerve system whether or not it improves a specific symptom! An antihistamine reduces symptoms for most allergy sufferers because it is chemically blocking the end result of allergies: increased histamine production. But they do not help the cause of the allergic reaction. Addressing the cause is necessary if you want to stop the allergic response and its effect on our health, rather than just block the final stage of that response which is histamine production. Much like how pain killers block the end result of a problem: pain. They are not helping the problem at all. So if you have a headache from a subluxation, what good is blocking the pain and allowing subluxations to cause an area of your spine to break down? Finding out the cause is key. So what causes allergies? Essentially, it usually boils down to three factors: overall inflammatory state, “hyper-reactive” immune system, or increased exposure to allergens in your environment. Chiropractic care is proven to help normalize immune function which is why it helps with one of those three things. You will benefit from addressing these three things regardless of what other treatments you do:
1. Reducing Inflammatory State In Our Body
This is complex but the main steps involved for most people are cutting out all vegetable and other omega 6 oils, and increasing omega 3 intake through fish oil supplementation and healthy naturally raised meats. If we eat a diet consisting of mainly fruits, vegetables and naturally raised meats from healthy animals and take fish oil daily then our body’s inflammatory state is restored to a much better balance. Reducing gluten and sugar by reducing grains and processed foods goes a long way to achieving this. The most important supplement for reducing inflammation is taking fish oil daily, 1 tablespoon of liquid is the right dose when trying to reduce inflammation. Innate Choice is the best tasting, highest quality fish oil and we sell it for that reason.
2. Reducing The Hyper-Reactivity Of Our Immune System
This can be a more individual issue that depends on many factors. History with nutrition, lifestyle, chemicals from smoking, alcohol, etc… all will contribute to this. Generally the health of your immune system is the focus. Vitamin D and probiotics are shown to be depleted in most people and contribute to dysfunction in our immune response related to allergies and other immune disorders. Almost everyone is deficient in Vitamin D atleast from October until May from our time indoors. Probiotics in our gut provide up to 80% of our immune response so having had antibiotics EVER, or poor nutrition for years depletes this and requires supplementing. The low amount of probiotics in our food results in the need for lifelong supplementation. So taking both of these supplements is healthy for everyone, and more important for allergy sufferers. Innate Choice makes the best quality organic vitamin D and human strain probiotics. We carry all of their products and sell them with very little markup for our patients because they are only available from professionals directly. For Vitamin D taking 1 drop per 25lbs of body weight is the recommended dosage (blood test to confirm sufficiency). For probiotics 1 probiotic per day for maintenance, 2 per day for restoring your natural levels initially for atleast a few months. Other factors that can reduce the hyper-response of your immune system are supplements like Co-enzyme Q10, NAD, and homeopathics like “allergy-prev”. These are not required by everyone for health like probiotics, vitamin D and fish oil so they are best used in conjunction with testing from a naturopath so you aren’t just taking unnecessary expensive stuff.
3. Reducing Exposure To Allergens
It seems to me that when humans are exposed to a high level of something not historically consumed, the likelihood of our immune system reacting to it is high. The top 8 food allergens are Peanuts (peanut butter), wheat (modified high gluten strains), soy, eggs, dairy, nuts, shellfish, fish. 7 of the 8 relate to soy, nuts and “new” wheat or byproducts of animals fed those things unnaturally (eggs, dairy, farmed fish are all fed soy and grains). So again eating mainly fruits, vegetables, and naturally fed and raised meats is key to reducing exposure to allergens. Moulds in homes, toxic pesticides and herbicides, chemicals and other exposures can be the other factors on an individual basis needing consideration. Spring allergies may just be the effect of all of the above making our body more prone to reacting to normal weeds and grass around us because of our hyper-reactive inflammatory state.
Your body was created to be healthy and problems happen from the inside out. We must look at what is needed to restore normal function on the inside. Blocking symptoms is the opposite of that.