Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Allergy Injections

How Much Do The Allergy Injections Really Help?

You must have heard about the fast acting allergy injections and you might be led into believing that this is a great way to relieve you from the pain caused by your often repeated allergy. However, this is in fact a myth. There are no magic allergy injections that would counter all the allergies that plague people; actually these injections would be meant for only one particular type of allergy and would therefore be totally ineffectual for another type.

How Can One Profit From Allergy Injections?

The medical remedy that uses allergy injections is known as allergen immunotherapy and it is used to combat specific allergies. In order to find what type of allergy you are suffering from the doctor would prescribe a long battery of tests; these would include blood tests, skin tests and the like until they zero in what exactly causes your allergy.

Before your doctor prescribes any allergy injections for you the allergen that impacts you adversely would need to be identified one hundred percent. Once this step is completed, you would be set up for a series of allergy injections starting from very low dosage to a certain level which is determined by the medical practitioner.

Every time these injections are administered, the doctor would have you under observation for about 30 minutes to check whether you get any severe reaction from the shots. The injection would be given every week over a period of six to seven months which would gradually make you immune to the allergen. When you reach the highest dose (that compares it the level of the allergen in the environment around you) the weekly injection would be replaced with a monthly booster, which might continue for one to ten years depending upon the need.

As you can see, the allergy injections are indeed a great way to fight an allergy – but in order for it to be effective, you would need to identify the allergen. Unless you know what the allergen is, this therapy would not work because the injection are prepared just like a vaccine, i.e. it would infuse small doses of that exact allergen until your body accepts it and thereafter helps to prevent its adverse reaction..

These injections are best used against insect bites or stings, such as bees, mosquitoes, red ants, wasps, etc. Though these could be and are used against inhaled allergens as well, the latter are more difficult to cure. Anyway, this is a small ray of hope that you could check out – who knows, it might get you rid of your pet allergy after all.

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