I used to have severe environmental allergies to cats, dogs, and the outdoors. As I child, I woke up crying most mornings because of my allergies, and I would occasionally wake up with croup and difficulty breathing. Once I had to be taken the hospital.
Eventually, my mother enrolled me in a study for an experimental treatment called sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT). For the next two years I took under-the-tongue drops, and I presume the drops were formulated with small amounts of the allergens I was reactive to.
My allergies have been –95% ever since.
I’m sharing this post because I keep telling people about sublingual immunotherapy and they’re very surprised. No one seems to know about this treatment!?
Maybe my improvement was unusual? I don’t know. A few random studies. Please share additional information in the comments here.
To be clear, I still have a few mild symptoms:
- If I pet a dog and then rub my eyes, my eyes get slightly itchy.
- If a dog licks me, I get mild hives in that area.
But that’s all! (And I haven’t observed any side effects, either.)
FWIW, I might also go back on sublingual immunotherapy at some point so I can pet dogs without worry. (Because maybe my treatment was stopped too soon?)
Other details:
- My mother says the particular drops I took costed $25 a week. They weren’t FDA approved, but they were still available for purchase.
- From a quick brief search, I found a few that sell sublingual immunotherapy in the US: Wyndly, Curex, and Quello. I looked a few months ago and I couldn’t find any significant reason to prefer one brand over the others. Please comment you have a recommendation.
- Note: SLIT has been available for longer in Europe than in the US, so the European brands might be better if you have access to them.
The medical consensus is that sublingual immunotherapy is inferior to the injected immunotherapy that has been used for a century. Did you try that as a kid? If there's reason to believe sublingual is better, that's good to know, but it sounds like you just don't know about injections.
Sublingual immunotherapy has an obvious advantage because people don't like shots. And it doesn't require a prescription. Indeed, one should be suspicious of a conflict of interest in the medical consensus. But injected doses are more precisely controlled, so there is good reason to believe they work better. And the doses are smaller, so the material cost is smaller.
Compliance to the schedule may be the main obstacle. It is not obvious whether doctor appointments make this better or worse. This probably varies between people.
That sounds pretty similar to sublingual therapy. I think it is likely that sublingual therapy is better because of the denser dosing (weekly vs monthly), but the difference is small enough that it can only be assessed with a head-to-head trial. (If the difference is compliance, it would be difficult to measure, though potentially very large.)
The headline that environmental allergies are curable is a decades old. If this news has not spread, it is good that you promote it, but we should ponder why it is not common knowledge.