Thinking Outside the Box: Unconventional Triggers of Asthma, Eczema & Allergies
Finding all the triggers for your or your child’s allergies, eczema, and/or asthma can seem like a daunting task. Well, that’s because it is. My best advice is to keep a daily journal of reactions, foods consumed, exposure to things in the home/outside the home, and anything at all new. After a while, go back and read past journal entries. You may start to see some items repeat themselves and a pattern may form, thus identifying a trigger. This has really helped us on Tristan’s journey.
Take a look below at some unconventional ideas for identifying possible triggers. Please give a warm welcome to Linda Wallace!
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Bio: Linda Wallace is a mom, author & Energy Health Practitioner. Her current book ‘You Can Heal Your Kids ~ a Mom’s Guide to Reversing Disease & Creating Health in Your Children – Safely & Naturally.’. Learn more about Linda: Twitter, and blog.
The Stuff Outside the Box
If you’re a parent of a child with health issues, I’m sure you’ve had your child tested for allergies somewhere along the course of their medical treatment.
The standardized medical testing procedures for determining food allergies are amazingly helpful tools – but do they encompass the 
whole picture?
The world is full of a lot of ‘stuff’, so if you’re not seeing the changes in your health condition that you expected to by eliminating the foods you tested reactive to, you might just need to think outside of the box:
Food Combinations
Traditional allergy testing can tell you if you are reactive to individual items, but unfortunately, we don’t ingest one food per day. It is my experience that the reaction that needs to be addressed, is the reaction between everything you’ve eaten and drank that day. The contents in your stomach, as a whole, is what your body is working with. Not just a tomato or just gluten or just an egg. You might not test reactive to citrus or dairy, but maybe the orange juice you had at breakfast combined with the cheese you had at lunch — together in your stomach — create a sensitivity.
Other Food Issues
People can be reactive to vitamins, minerals, proteins and such. I have found this to be the case when food elimination doesn’t seem to help matters. If you’re reactive to chlorophyll, then all of a sudden those healthy greens aren’t healthy anymore!
Check all of your ground spices – again, you need to keep combinations in mind and uncooked/cooked.
Environmental – Natural
Airborne allergens can travel up to 500 miles from their point of origin. Imagine all of the unidentified substances you’re breathing in on a daily basis – any of which could wreak havoc on your immune system! If there’s a fire at a rubber factory 375 miles from your home, chances are you’re breathing what was incinerated at that site.
Most medical allergy tests include cats and dogs. I have found that it’s the animal food/treats that are the underlying cause of the allergies. One example: I’ve had cats for over 20 years and when we got Darla, I had my first cat allergy attack. Finding that weird, I thought about what was different about her than my other cats. I had bought Pounce for the first time. I stopped giving her Pounce and my symptoms went away. You could also be sensitive to the pet’s urine, feces, saliva, blood or bedding. If you have other pets, check them out as well! (even reptiles, spiders, hermit crabs and such – every animal gives off something!)
I’ve had clients with breathing issues test reactive to oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide (air going into and out of the body) and oxygen sensitivities tend be the foundation of water sensitivities.
You can be reactive to anything – including your own bodily fluids (tears, mucus, sweat, etc) or the bodily fluids of another.
Environmental – Man Made
I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve worked with that have a sensitivity to plastic! A substance they are surrounded with their entire lives! Other significant causes of reactivity are:
- Soaps, shampoos, deodorants
- Mouthwash, Toothpaste (the fluoride in toothpaste is a known poison – read the label)
- Fabric softeners (at least 2 known carcinogens in every brand of fabric softener)
- Cosmetics & Perfumes (the FDA has no jurisdiction over the cosmetic industry!)
- The air in the home / school / business / car any other frequented places
- Household Cleaners (even if they’re natural, they could be causing reactions)
- Dishwashing soaps, carpeting (lots of formaldehyde in new carpets!)
- Eye contact solutions, Creams, lotions, salves
Basically, just check your bathroom & kitchen!
When checking for allergies or substance sensitivities, the world is full of ‘stuff’. I hope these suggestions help expand the box of what to look for!
In Health,
Linda Wallace
FROM: Allergies, Asthma, Contributors, Eczema
Hello Linda
..I have posted already the story about my daughter Irene´s ezcema, since she just turned 23, has endured all her life with enviromental allergies, it is so hard to do the right thing, She is and has been allergic to everything you mentioned, we bought a apartment and had to make it for her, washeable survices, no curtains, only cotton, anti alergic bedding, her shower filters, water filters, air filters, no stuffed animals and everything she wore or used washed in hot water and changed very often, Even so we could not control everything around her. So her life was a rollercoster. In nursery school the teachers tried to give her all the experiences the other kids had, but it was a nightmare for her, and us, putting creams on her made her so sore she would barely move. In her primary years, everyone instead of helping they questioned why she was allways scatching, and that I was not taking care of her enough or properly, I would send her to school, with her skin o.k. and she would came back so irritated that it was a lost war, no one cared if she was allergic to everything, if she wanted to go swimming we had to negociate two days o.k. one or two weeks off. If she had p.e. in school, the teachers will never understand that grass, sand, dirt, plants made her sick, irritated, itchy. Art classes were worse. If it rain she came home so irritated that it took days to get her better, and she went back to school and back to square one. It would never end, her scratching, the itching, the red soars all over, she feeling bad, slowly the kids stopped playing with her, made sure that she knew she was different, so did the teachers, she fell behind in everything, she could not conscentrate, and so her learning difficulties stepped in,and with all the effort to let her grow up like her sibblings, at the end it turned out that see dicided not to try, and not learn. She finished high school, mostly alone, missing weeks off school at a time, with few friends… and so insecured of herself. She survived. Went to college and dropped out after two years because like school, her allergies kept her back. Now she works with small kids in a nursery school, she is loved by the kids because they do not judge her because of her skin, and we as parents have tried everything in a country that has seen very few cases like hers. Did it scared us, yes, school can turned into a real hell for the child and her parents and sibblings. Did we regret putting her in that school, yes, we should have searched other alternatives. But life is good, she managed to make it through, atleast with a smile and willing to keep on trying.
Carmen Carrión