Dr. Horwitz shares the most common integrative medicine techniques used to treat allergy symptoms.
Dr. Horwitz:
With allergies there are many, many pharmaceuticals out there and a lot of people are looking for more natural controls for their nasal symptoms or eye symptoms and there are alternatives that work very well.
There is alternatives for every pharmacologic agent you can think of, so for antihistamines stinging nettle works very well, quercetin, which is a normal component in onion skin and tomato skin you can buy as a supplement, works very well. Those two are very helpful.
For nasal symptoms there’s of course nasal steroids, but a lot of patients don’t want to start a nasal corticosteroid. So you can use NASALCROM®. NASALCROM® is a product that is cromolyn from a natural plant, a callow plant, and what it does is inhibit the beginning of the allergic reaction. So it’s prophylactically useful. It prevents the allergic reaction in the nose.
So these combinations, fish oil can be very helpful, it’s a general anti-inflammatory. These can all be very helpful in attenuating the allergic response whether it’s in the nose or even in the asthma response.
About Dr. Randy Horwitz, Ph.D., M.D.:
Dr. Randy Horwitz, Ph.D., M.D., received a B.S. degree in biochemistry from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at University Hospitals (Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland.
Visit Dr. Horwitz at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine