лечение депрессии

Skin allergies go far beyond a simple summertime clash with poison ivy. Add up the cosmetics and grooming aids, soaps, detergents, clothing, jewellery, hobby and office supplies we run up against every day, and you get a pretty good idea of the number of things that can cause skin allergy. But figuring out your problem and finding relief can be easy once you know where to start.

If you have a skin allergy, you probably know it. But just in case you don’t, the symptoms are easy to spot because they always follow a variation of one general pattern. (The following description of the pattern includes medical terms in parentheses so you’ll be able to understand your doctor when he or she talks to you about a skin allergy.)

Reddening (erythema) is the first sign of trouble, sometimes accompanied by bumps or pimples (papules) or blisters (vesicles) that may weep and ooze. Then the itching starts, and after a few days the red spots and bumps give way to crusting, scaling and thickening of the skin. Should the problem persist – if you continue to use the cosmetic, soap or apparel you’re allergic to – the scaliness and thickening take over completely, and itching becomes more unbearable than ever. The whole business is customarily called eczema, or atopic dermatitis, especially if it’s caused by something you ate. If the culprit is something you’ve touched, it’s called contact dermatitis.

The face – particularly the eyelids – is the most sensitive area. Not only are the eyelids prone to react to chemicals applied to and around them (mascara, eye shadow and the like), but they also react to anything near them, hair dye or shampoo on the scalp, perfume on the neck, poison ivy or not-quite-dry nail polish on the hands can precipitate puffy, inflamed or scaly lids.

The backs of the hands and the fingers also waste no time in letting us know that they’re ‘in touch’ with a troublemaker. But the scalp, palms of the hands and soles of the feet are remarkably resistant to allergy in most people.

Skin reactions aren’t limited to these areas, of course — but they don’t always crop up where you expect to find them. Jewellery allergy, for instance, generally shows up on earlobes, neck, wrist and fingers. But a loose bracelet can affect the skin anywhere from the wrist to the elbow, or detergents can splash above the tops of gloves. And the offending substance isn’t always obvious, either. The trunk, underarms, forearms and inner elbows all react to clothing and perfumes. Eczema on the thighs could be from garters – or from coins or keys in a pants pocket.

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At times, the allergy isn’t to a drug itself but to one of various additives. Artificial colours and flavorings are routinely added to drug compounds to make them both more palatable for consumers to swallow and easier for doctors, nurses and pharmacists to identify. Preservatives, fillers and coatings all show up. And an additive in a drug is just as likely to cause allergy as one in a food. For example, in his book Why Your Child Is Hyperactive (Random House) Dr Benjamin Feingold tells of two young women taking birth control pills who developed wheezing and coughing, watery eyes and laboured breathing. They were afraid they’d developed asthma. As it turned out, however, they were simply allergic to artificial colouring in the birth control pills. (Incidentally, the hormones themselves can cause allergy like symptoms – stuffy nose, itching, hives – even asthma.)

Many antihistamines, antihistamine-decongestants, corticosteroids, bronchodilators and theophylline (a muscle relaxer), among others, often contain the yellow dye tartrazine. Ironically, those drugs are the mainstay of medical treatment of asthma and respiratory allergy.

A capsule or tablet can also contain non-chemical additives you could be allergic to – for instance, starch derived from corn, potato, sorghum or other food. Or medications can have a binder made from pork, beef or lamb fat, a potential problem for anyone allergic to those meats.

Allergies to illegal drugs

Most people take drugs that are either prescribed or bought over-the-counter in a supermarket or chemist. Some drugs, however, are bought on the street – they’re illegal. Aside from ruining health, abused drugs produce their share of allergic reactions. Barbiturates can trigger not only rashes but overall shedding of the skin, and can also raise large blisters around the mouth and at pressure points such as the hips and ankles. Amphetamines can cause rashes and asthmatic attacks. Cocaine, too, can cause serious asthma.

Marijuana harbors some of the very moulds that trigger allergy in asthmatics. If that’s not bad enough, smoking marijuana releases some of the same nasty chemicals (such as benzopyrene and hydrocarbons) as regular cigarettes, making marijuana as abrasive to an asthmatic’s lungs as tobacco. Even if a person doesn’t have asthma, marijuana can cause red, inflamed eyelids (conjunctivitis), diarrhoea, dryness of the mouth, hypoglycemia, muscular incoordination, nausea, respiratory depression, spasms and urinary frequency.

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That futuristic vision is now reality. Plastic and synthetic furnishings and building materials are rampant. So are plastic clothing and accessories – under the guise of words such as polyester, vinyl, Styrofoam, acetate and so on. Certainly, they’re cheap and they last forever. But the problem for chemically sensitive people is that plastics, like formaldehyde, tend to ‘outgas’ – dispersing tiny molecules of whatever they’re made of into the air, especially when they’re heated. If you’re surrounded by a lot of synthetic material – such as carpeting, clothing and furniture – you can eventually be overwhelmed by the insidious buildup of fumes, and not even know what’s happening until you start to feel ill.

But there are simple ways to get round the problem – starting from the floor up.

‘Next to getting rid of gas heat and gas-powered appliances, avoiding use of synthetic carpets and sponge rubber is the most important thing you can do to relieve chemical allergy,’ says Dr Randolph. Next to go would be vinyl upholstery, tablecloths, curtains and polyester clothing.

As it happens, many people – and manufacturers – are returning to natural building materials and furnishings: brick, wood, stone, clay, ceramic tile, terrazzo, quarry tile, stoneware, earthenware, terracotta, hemp, wicker, burlap, wool and cotton rugs, metals such as brass, copper and iron – all of which don’t outgas. And all-natural fibres such as cotton, linen, silk and wool are once again giving polyester a run for the money.

As you shop, scout around for non-plastic versions of whatever you need. If you must occasionally buy plastic, avoid new items. Outgassing tends to diminish after about two years, especially for hard plastics. Soft plastics, on the other hand, tend to outgas indefinitely. The harder the plastic, the safer you are.

‘By all means, buy used wooden furniture rather than new synthetic material when you’re trying to create a chemically clean room at home,’ says Dr McGovern.

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But a highly sensitive person can’t cope. A small amount of those same particles can put him in the hospital with a life-threatening attack of bronchial asthma. Other, moderately sensitive people will suffer lesser degrees of misery. In some cases, allergic people can breathe small particles, but other particles such as dust and pollen make them sick. Other people only react to airborne chemicals. A few react to everything.

Apparently, allergic individuals just can’t handle all the debris in our air, minuscule as it may seem. And more people than ever are suffering from these ‘inhalant’ allergies – for a number of reasons. To begin with, converting forests and grasslands to fields of concrete has removed natural means of air filtration for pollen and dust. That, in turn, has fostered growth of more primitive vegetation such as moulds, yeasts, fungi and bacteria – all highly allergenic. Added to that is the chemical free-for-all generated by home and industry: vapours from household cleaning products, furnaces, and solvents in furniture – to name a few sources.

If there were plenty of fresh air to dilute the load on their lungs, allergic people would stand a far better chance of tolerating it all. But high oil prices have led us to tighten up homes and office buildings, piling on insulation and sealing cracks with weather stripping. In these energy-efficient buildings the total volume of air in a room – pollutants and all – is completely replaced only once every several hours; in a ‘leaky’ building without loads of insulation, the air is replaced every hour or two. So if you live or work in a tight building, you spend a lot of time in a place peppered with pollutants – which provoke itchy red eyes, coughing fits, swollen joints and various other health complaints.

‘Indoor air pollution is eight or ten times more troublesome than outdoor levels of air pollution in causing chronic illness,’ says Theron Randolph, author of two books on environmental illness.

Three possible avenues of relief exist. One is to clean up the environment as a whole. That’s a task we can’t even begin to address here. Equally important – especially for allergy sufferers — is to create a clean environment indoors, where most of us spend the majority of our time. Third, you can create an unpolluted room in your home – a personal ‘oasis’ where you can take refuge from allergens, be they dust, pollen or chemicals. Combining the last two steps will help you to tolerate better the outside world.

‘If we take an allergic person and put him or her in a clean room at home and clean up his or her office as much as we can, we can diminish his or her allergy by an enormous degree,’ says Joseph J. McGovern, Jr, an allergist in Oakland, California, who specializes in environmental illness.

The more pollutants you can avoid, the better you feel. So along with an in-depth focus on several of the most troublesome allergens in the air, this chapter will offer useful advice on how to clear them out of your personal environment. We’ll also show you how to increase ventilation and purify the air (without wasting energy). Keep in mind that whether you’re allergic to one inhalant or fifty, the key to relief is to reduce your overall exposure as much as possible, using the most practical and effective means available.

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One doctor tells of a member of her family who experienced sudden weakness, extreme fatigue and a swollen throat whenever eating cornflakes or instant potatoes. The problem was neither corn nor potatoes, however, but BHA and BHT (E320 and E321), two common preservatives.

Needless to say, a food such as cornflakes is apt to contain not one but several additives, any or all of which can cause the problem, Dr Bernard J. Freedman, of King’s College Hospital in London, found that 30 out of 272 of his asthmatic patients reacted to orange drinks, even though they weren’t allergic to oranges. As it turned out, most of those people were actually reacting to a triad of additives commonly found in yellow-hued, acidic beverages: tartrazine (E102), sodium benzoate (E211) and sulphur dioxide (E220) {Clinical Allergy, September 1977).

A lot of people are in the same predicament. The late Dr Benjamin Feingold, author of Why Your Child Is Hyperactive and The Feingold Cookbook for Hyperactive Children, believed that additives are the most common cause of all adverse reactions, affecting not just childhood behavior but every system in the body. ‘Any problem can result from exposure to additives,’ Dr Feingold told us. ‘Hives are common. Nail problems. Asthma. Rashes of all kinds.

‘Food chemicals are no different from drugs,’ Dr Feingold said. ‘If a youngster takes a drug and reacts, no one is surprised. But if he or she eats a food chemical and reacts, why be surprised? What’s the difference?’

As a matter of fact, food-additive allergy is often linked to drug allergy. Eggs dipped in penicillin, to retard spoilage, can be a problem for people who are highly allergic to penicillin. And people who are allergic to aspirin also tend to react to tartrazine, one of the most common artificial food colourings. Tartrazine is present in thousands of foods, beverages, cosmetics and drugs. Distressing reactions to tartrazine commonly include asthma, coughing fits and difficulty in breathing, facial swelling and purpura (broken capillaries beneath the skin, such as bleeding gums and bruises). But you don’t necessarily have to be allergic to aspirin to react to tartrazine.

To alert fellow doctors that the yellow dye causes many problems among allergic people, two physicians from the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania reported the case of a young man who landed in a hospital emergency room every time he swallowed anything containing yellow dye. It all started when the twenty-five-year-old medical student – who had a life history of allergy and asthma – ate some cauliflower with yellow cheese sauce at dinner. He hadn’t even finished his meal when he became short of breath and felt his throat tighten up. Before he knew it, he broke out in hives and couldn’t swallow at all. His wife, a registered nurse, gave him a shot of adrenaline, to no avail. In the hospital, doctors brought him around with more adrenalin, oxygen and emergency medication.

Five weeks later, the young man ate three yellow jelly beans. A little while later, during his regular hospital rounds, he felt lightheaded, his scalp itched and his throat began to close up. Again, hives appeared and his blood pressure dropped severely. Adrenalin and medication once again put things right. Two days later – while still hospitalized – he reacted once more, to a drug containing yellow dye.

Now, of course, he knows better and stays away from anything he suspects of containing yellow dye. Robert E. Desmond and Joseph J. Trautlein, the two physicians reporting the story, wrap up the article by alerting other doctors to the ubiquitous nature of yellow dye and its potential for both life-threatening and milder reactions, especially in allergy-prone people (Annals of Allergy).

Tartrazine may be the most notorious food dye, but it’s only one of several additives with allergy-provoking potential. Any of the food dyes can trigger an allergy. That’s because many artificial colours (like so many other food additives) are made from coal tar, a substance with a special knack for making people ill. But additives not made from coal tar aren’t any better; they’re made from petroleum. Bananas, apples, pears, oranges and tomatoes, for instance, are usually picked before they’re ripe and gassed with ethylene, a petroleum-based chemical that hastens ripening. Now, you might expect to encounter coal tar and petroleum in car exhaust, printer’s ink, dry-cleaning solvents, carpeting, clothing dye and even perfume – explaining any reactions to fumes from those items. But as food ingredients, the same chemicals can catch you off-guard. And if you’re allergic to petroleum in the air -any kind of air pollution for that matter – you’re also apt to react to the chemicals you swallow.

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