The Devon Allergy Clinic

Dr. Dylan Watkins (LEATSIDE SURGERY TOTNES)

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Review of Allergy Clinic post

I was pleased this week to discuss my blog on the Devon Allergy Clinic this week with its lead clinician, Marlene.
It was refreshing to have a mature chat with someone leading an alternative clinic that didn`t just settle into a pointless argument and I was impressed by her approaching me to discuss it.
I feel that in my blog I was mainly critical of the Med-Tronik (not Medtronic) machine she uses, the RM10.
She was concerned that this criticism might detract from the more mainstream approach she uses to food allergy and intolerance. On balance I feel that the blog was targeted at this machine and that the conventional approaches she uses weren`t explicitly criticized.
Her training and diploma in Allergy are entirely mainstream.
The area of food intolerance is however an area where many people who suffer do feel the need to go seeking help. I do recognize that in medicine we are not well equipped at all to advise or help people with food intolerances and that we do not have the answer a lot of the time. (I worked in 1993 in MartinStern`s  Allergy Clinic in Leicester and understood from that time some of the difficulties see MAARA and the older, pretty much out of date site of his now, AAIR). This is therefore an area where people will seek help in other directions an I feel they must be careful in judging the qualities of the alternative help they seek.

Food allergy sufferers `worst served` by medicine

People who suffer from food allergies get some of the worst service from doctors due to misleading test results, wrong diagnoses and poor quality research.  ByNick Collins
Published: 9:00AM BST 17 May 2010

A review of research into the affliction found that up to three in ten people claim to have a food allergy of some sort, but blind testing reveals that fewer than ten percent actually has one.

People were found to be avoiding certain foods because they incorrectly suspected they were allergic to them, while many parents refused to give their children certain foods even though most will overcome their allergies as they grow older.

 The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first step in a plan by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to set out criteria for the diagnosis and treatment of patients next month.

The most common allergies are responses to cow`s milk, egg, peanuts, fish and shellfish.

According to the review, 3.5 per cent of people claim to be allergic to cow`s milk, while testing suggested the figure was just 0.9 per cent.

However, with peanut allergies, the number who claimed to be allergic, 0,75 per cent, was exactly the same proportion revealed by testing.

Results showed that part of the problem was a lack of understanding of the difference between a food allergy – a response to food by the immune system – and a food intolerance, which may be caused by substances within the food or by a psychological trigger.

Dr Pamela Ewan,consultant allergist at Addenbrooke`s Hospital, Cambridge,told The Independent: "The chaos is massive in the UK. Doctors untrained in allergy are having to pick up cases in gastroenterology clinics,asthma clinics, dermatology clinics.

"People get the wrong advice because the tests are not understood. The key problem is that we haven`t got enough people who understand allergy. There are 30consultants nationwide and just 12 training posts, not even enough to replace those who are leaving."