Millions of people suffering from a wide variety of conditions, allergies included, have benefitted from chiropractic care even though chiropractic is not an allergy treatment. Why? Because chiropractic is a method of health care that permits your body to function at its best. That is especially important if you suffer from allergies.

But first, let's find out, what is an allergy? Your immune system keeps you 100% natural, organic, unadulterated you! It recognizes and destroys anything not supposed to be in you: bacteria,* viri, pollutants, dust, pollen, drugs, tumors, dead pieces of your own cells, and even artificial hearts and donor organs.** (Metal and plastic, however, don't trigger an immune reaction). A healthy immune system means high resistance to disease and infection, better ability to deal with stress, and greater health and well-being.

Immunological Diseases
Your immune system is influenced by your nerves and hormones, by your diet and by emotional stress. If unhealthy, your immune system may fail to recognize and remove abnormal cells (such as cancers), may not overcome infection, may overreact to foreign substances (bee stings, penicillin, food or drugs), become depressed (as in AIDS), or even attack itself.

Allergens & Allergies
The most common immune disorder is the allergic reaction which occurs when the immune system overreacts to an allergen (dust, pollen, milk, dog or cat dander, strawberries, etc.) and produces too many neutralizing chemicals (especially histamines) to counteract it.

What Causes Allergies?
No one knows for sure, though according to some authors, childhood vaccinations are suspect. As writer Walene James has stated, "Vaccination lays the foundation for autoimmune diseases and other disorders of the immune system such as rheumatoid arthritis, rheumatic fever, lupus erythematosus, scleroderma...It is reasonable to assume that our contemporary 'epidemic' of allergies has at least some of its roots in the practice of vaccination."

The Orthodox Medical Approach to Allergy Treatment
Orthodox medicine has no cure for allergies, only treatment, and, according to Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., "You can depend on most doctors to largely ignore the cause...unfortunately, their treatment is often worse than the disease, especially since the relatively safe folk-measures of yesteryear have been replaced by the sophisticated, dangerous drugs of modern medicine."

Since runny eyes, irritation, redness, fullness in the sinuses and other allergy symptoms are caused by histamines, antihistamines are often prescribed to dry mucus membranes. However, antihistamines can cause serious heart problems and should not be used with alcohol, sedatives or tranquilizers.

More recently, Canadian researcher Lorne Brandes, in an article published in the May 1994 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, has produced research shwoing that certain antihistamines (Claritin^TM, Hismanal^TM and Atarax^TM) made cancerous tumors grow faster in lab rodents.

The Chiropractic Approach
By releasing stress on the nervous system, chiropractic permits the immune system to function more effectively - something all allergy sufferers need. A nervous system without stress functions more efficiently. Recent understandings in psychoneuroimmunology reveal that when the nervous system functions better the immune system benefits.

Chiropractors correct a basic cause of body malfunction to improve the function of your immune system. Please note that the chiropractic approach is to remove vertebral subluxations, a common spinal distortion that puts stress on your nervous system. Freed of nervous system stress, your body will work more effectively to neutralize the allergy-causing chemicals in your environment. As Dr. Kurt Donshack has said, "A healthy body is capable of neutralizing these toxic substances and a body which has malfunctioning defense mechanisms cannot. The emphasis on allergies must be on building a healthy body, not on trying to use evasive tactics by eliminating all the allergens."

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* Bacteria normally live in some parts of your body (i.e. your gut and skin). When bacteria travel to places they shouldn't be, then your immune system will attack them.

** Organ recipients must take drugs to suppress their immune system so these "foreign" organs are not rejected.

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