An Overreaction to Food Allergies
Years ago a fifteen month old infant girl was rushed to the emergency room with numerous allergic complications. Her stomach, arms, and legs were swollen while her hands and feet were covered in crusted dripping yellow scar tissue. Initially at the University of Texas Medical Center doctors indicated she suffered from a host of nutrition problems.
During the year that lead up to this event the mother told doctors upon previous visits that normal formula increased vomiting and caused rashes on her daughter. After further observation the pediatrician and mother came to a conclusion to switch the then 1 year old from the standard formula to goat milk. The switch didn’t do much to improve the child’s condition,
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She began to be fed intravenously and underwent extensive more complex medical testing. A second test showed no allergic response to the coconut, cow's milk, wheat, soy, egg white, fish, shrimp, green beans or the potatoes. A few days later she was released from the hospital and put on antibiotics to clear her skin and numerous infections.
In many cases just like this one the problem isn’t the baby, its the test that are proving to be inaccurate. Fifty to sixty percent of the time when a person isn’t allergic to an item test are showing false positives leading people to believe they are allergic to things they're not . Research shows 112 out of 126 children that were diagnosed with having an allergy were able to tolerate one if not more of the foods that warned would be deadly.
I chose this article because it relates to me personally. When i was younger i was told that i was allergic to sea foods. Since this diagnosis I've been exposed to and eaten seafoods with no reaction. I was always told if I ate fish it could possibly be deadly because of a false positive skin test i received when i was about 2 years old. This proved to be wrong when i was about 8 years old. I accidentally not knowing it was seafood injested shrimp and was rushed to the emergency room. When i got there i still hadn't had a reaction to the food and after a few test it was determined that i was not allergic to all seafood just