Yes, you can have allergies

17 Medical Memes That'll Give You A Healthy Chuckle - Memebase ...

Irritation in your nose is called rhinitis and it leads to increased mucus production which can then go on to cause a runny nose, post-nasal drip, a nagging cough, and sinus inflammation and fullness. When it's due to allergies, it's called allergic rhinitis.

What is an allergy? Basically it's your body responding to what it sees as a foreign invader and is usually a very small particle. I want to focus on allergic rhinitis because we are having some really high pollen levels right now and probably will be for a while due to all the rains causing such good plant growth. And if you want to monitor it for yourself, here's one spot you can do it.

People tell me all the time "I don't have allergies". Well here's the thing - yes you do. We all will if the concentration of an allergen is high enough. Otherwise it means your body isn't doing it's job. There are some people who are much more sensitive to low levels of allergens and those are the people who we typically think of as having seasonal allergies, but depending on the season, it can affect all of us.

But, there's actually not anything too harmful for the most part about the pollens in the air and the reaction your body gets is a little bit of an overreaction so it's helpful to try to tamp that down a little bit with medications.

The ones that are probably most effective are nasal steroid sprays like Flonase (fluticasone) and Nasacort OTC (triamcinolone nasal spray), both of which are over-the-counter. The nasacort sometimes works better for people because it's not alcohol based. The other great easy option is an oral antihistamine. Zyrtec (cetirizine), Allegra (fexofenadine), and Claritin (loratadine) are the ones that aren't supposed to make you drowsy. I hear our allergists recommend zyrtec more than the others but in theory they all work about equal. Stronger stuff like Benadryl (diphenhydramine) is more effective but also more likely to make you sleepy and people over 65 can sometimes get confused and have bad falls when taking it.

As far as natural remedies, there is scant evidence that locally-sourced honey can be helpful, but it's mainly been studied in people also taking antihistamines and the amount you need to take is pretty high (about 1 gram per kilogram of your body weight) so I'm not a strong proponent of it.

Here is some more information for you about nasal allergies, a.k.a. Allergic rhinitis and how you can help control them. I encourage you to listen to the podcast on "Managing Allergies" as well.

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance. Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child. For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was. Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...

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