While I wait for the major medical journals to pick up my paper on CURES for POLLEN ALLERGENIC RHINITIS condition, I thought I would float it by the critical eyes of the Blogworld to uncover flaws in my research.
It is interesting to see how little information there is out there on the subject of hayfever.
I personally think it is because of its name (which, by the way, has nothing to do with either hay or fever). The cultural associations with the word HAY (hayseed, roll in the hay, make hay, hey!) immediately put this disease on the back burner of medical research. (I have always believed that there is much more MONEY in finding the cure for baldness than there is in a cure for cancer, making vanity much more important than, say, human suffering.) It is difficult, for example, to even find out what hayfever is. The most common description is that it is an allergic reaction to pollen.
Six years of medical school and that's all you can come up with?
What I really want to know is why my treatment works and why nobody else has figured this out yet. Hayfever, for those of you who do not suffer so, is usually described by its symptoms: a combination of itchy and watering eyes, sneezing, sometimes coughing..... all kinds of disgusting things. If it were not for the itchy eyes, you might think you had caught a cold. But hayfever is NOT a cold, and symptoms are NOT the disease.
I like to look at illness as a body's way of repelling things which do not belong there. Germs, mostly. Sometimes alcohol. What is the deal with pollen? Is it really a toxin to the body? Why do some react and others not? What is the reaction? What CAUSES the symptoms?
What I know so far is that a substance called histamine is produced by mast cells which are concentrated in the eyes and nasal (and throat) passages. Histamines are interesting because they seem to serve a number of functions including being a neurotransmitter, assisting in digestion, and--the important thing in hayfever--increasing the permeability of capillaries which allow white blood cells to get to the site of an invasive... thing....
In our pill-crazy society, there are a battery of things you can take for hayfever. Most of them, however, have a few side-effects. The most notable of them is that they make you sleepy. And you are not supposed to operate heavy machinery (weighing over 100 lbs., one presumes). The reason hayfever medications make one sleepy, it turns out, is that they are anti-histamine, and histamines, if you were paying attention in the previous paragraph, not only cause the symptoms of hayferver, they are also a neurotransmitter which triggers a sleep response. So if you shut off one histamine, you also shut off the others. It is for THAT reason, I prefer not to take pills, heavy machine guy that I am.
A few years ago, however, I noticed something. In desperation, I would sometimes use eyedrops. Anything to get rid of the itchy-eye thing. And what I found was rather startling: the eyedrops not only cured the itchy eyes, they also relieved all the other symptoms of hayfever too. They relieved them so well, with no side effects that I can discern except, perhaps, verbosity. It did not even matter which brand of eyedrops I used... they were all effective. I have not taken any allergy medications besides eyedrops for over five years. (And by the way, there is a very interesting story about Claritin--the so-called non-drowsy allergy relief medicine--that shows the corruption in the drug industry, but that is another story entirely).
The main question I have is: why do eyedrops work? Most I know (including my most promising research subject) scoff at its effectiveness, but I KNOW. Here is what I believe:
Histamines, formed in the eyes and nasal passages because of the preponderance of mast cells in those locations, are easily dissolved by water. The dissolving, I assume, also renders the histamines less effective in the job they are supposed to perform. Why they work on all symptoms by merely putting them in your eyes is because TEAR DUCTS connect the eye to the nasal passage (the role of tear ducts is to remove tears, constantly produced, but apparently not enough to dissolve the histamines. They remove them by flushing them to the NASAL PASSAGE. That is why when you cry, your nose runs. The eyedrops, put into the eyes, also flow to the nasal passages and dissolve the histamines all along the route. See diagram below.
My next phase of research will involve testing whether I can achieve the same results using plain water.
Thanks for very interesting post. It will be useful for all who has problems with hay fever
Posted by: hay fever | 07/24/2010 at 06:51 AM