Hi Anah and thank you for your comments. You take this conversation in a fascinating direction.
“I’d say that 95% of allergies are emotionally based.” There’s quite a bit of history behind that hypothesis! That topic deserves a separate article on the history of science.
During several decades of the mid-twentieth century a prevailing medical hypothesis proposed that allergies were psychosomatic ailments. In a technical sense that means the body’s response was real but the root cause was as you describe: emotional factors.
Experts within the field of allergy rejected that hypothesis for two reasons.
- Within clinical medical research there’s a technique known as “double blind testing.” In this context it means administering an ingredient or a placebo, while neither the test subject nor the person who does the administration knows which is the ingredient and which is the placebo. When double blind tests produce consistent results it rules out psychosomatic hypotheses.
- In 1967, scientists isolated a human antibody called Immunoglobulin E (IgE). IgE is involved in life threatening allergic reactions in humans.
For further reading there’s a review article published in 2017, which makes a fascinating read if you don’t mind jargon:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5332128/
Basically there’s a difference between the way nonscientists sometimes use the word “allergy” and the way twenty-first century physicians use the same word. The general public may refer to any type of food intolerance as an allergy. Professional allergists define it more narrowly.
The tagline for this blog is “Science based writing about food allergies.” Content here refers to that narrow scientific sense. The major focus at this blog is a subset of IgE food allergies: people who suffer life threatening anaphylactic reactions to foods that slip through the cracks of regulatory laws.
As you surely can appreciate, that target audience has a great deal at stake. They place a high value on medical research because they don’t have the luxury of taking many risks.
So if you have the courage of your convictions — and I respect that premise — here’s what you can do to make a difference. Medium is not a medical research journal and I am not a physician. The conversations we have here won’t move the needle of scientific consensus. Yet fortunately science is open to everyone who follows its standards. There are two paths you could take:
- Offer yourself as a case study. That means someone who treated you writes up the diagnostic methods they used, plus the treatment methods, and reports on the results in a scientific manner. You would be anonymous in the resulting paper. If that paper passes peer review it could become part of the scientific literature.
- Encourage the people who treated you to conduct clinical trials on NAET. So far there haven’t been any clinical trials published on the NAET protocol.
I would be delighted if NAET works as well as you say. The sticking point is this blog relies on scientific evidence, so without any clinical trial results the burden of evidence just hasn’t been met yet. You have my sincere pledge that if and when new scientific evidence changes the balance this blog will publish updates to reflect those new findings. I always welcome new options for food allergy sufferers, with only one caveat.
The new options have to meet the same standards of evidence as everything else in medical science.
