A hidden cause of allergies
Another good reason to use Allergy herbal medicine
instead of conventional medicine treatments is not just due to the obvious side
effects or drowsiness or mental dullness. There are sometimes hidden effects
of pharmaceuticals that are not well known at the time. An example is a medication
that decreases joint pain but might compromise the liver, or the controversial
birth control pill, which is thought to prevent some types of cancers and encourage
other types.
The benefit of Allergy herbal medicine is that the
herbs used are natural and come from plants, animals and nature. Because these
remedies are found in nature and work to simply tonify and balance the body,
the chances of finding detrimental side effects are slim.
The following article is an example of how one man-made medication used to treat infections can create other health issues that are not anticipated. The following article on how antibiotics have been linked to a rise in allergies is excerpted from the magazine, the New Scientist.
Antibiotics linked to a huge rise in allergies
"The increasing use of antibiotics to treat disease may be responsible for the rising rates of asthma and allergies. By upsetting the body's normal balance of gut microbes, antibiotics may prevent our immune system from distinguishing between harmless chemicals and real attacks."
" 'The microbial gut flora is an arm of the immune system,' says Gary Huffnagle at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbour. His research group has provided the first experimental evidence in mice that upsetting the gut flora can provoke an allergic response."
"Asthma has increased by around 160 percent globally in the last 20 years. Currently about a quarter of schoolchildren in the U.S. and a third of those in the UK have the condition, but pinning down the causes of the rise has proved difficult. Some researchers have blamed modern dust-free homes, while others have pointed to diet."
"Antibiotics have been implicated by some epidemiological studies. For example, the rise in allergies and asthma has tracked widespread antibiotic use. Furthermore, research in Berlin, Germany, has found that both antibiotic treatment and asthma were low in the east compared to the west when the wall came down."
"As antibiotic use has increased in the east though, so has asthma. This study
is particularly valuable because the politically divided populations were genetically
very similar and enjoyed much the same menu."
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Fungal spores
"Now Huffnagle has presented experimental evidence to back up the case. His team gave mice a course of antibiotics before feeding some of them with a yeast which is commonly found on human skin."
"With the natural gut bacteria suppressed by the drugs, the yeast became established in the mouse, with no side effects. Over the course of the following two weeks, the researchers treated all the mice with spores from a common fungus. Again, this does not cause disease, but fungal spores can trigger allergies in people."
"The mice whose gut flora had been manipulated, experienced a much higher immune response to the spores, suggesting that changes to the collection of microbes in people's guts following antibiotic treatment might also make us more susceptible to allergies. 'Suddenly, your ability to ignore a mould spore has gone,' Huffnagle told New Scientist."
"The team has repeated the experiments with a second strain of mice to show that the effect is not dependent on a particular set of mouse genes. They have also used a different molecule to produce the allergic response - an egg protein from chickens called ovalbumin that is commonly used in allergy research."
"'In this case, when the team looked at the animals' lung linings under a microscope the effect of the over-active immune response was striking." Their lungs are shredded, absolutely shredded. I'm sure they can't breath,' says Huffnagle."
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