Allergies (trees trying to f*ck your nose)

This week, we discuss allergies - what causes them, how we figured out what causes them, and how we treat them.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to an hour of our time, the podcast where
we pick a topic, research it and come back to
tell you what we've learned. This week, we're discussing allergies,
what causes them, how we figured out what causes them,
and how we treat them. I'm Dave and I'm Joe.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
We're in for a treat and by we, I mean
mostly me because Dave and I don't record this in
the same room, but we are recording this episode near
enough to Saint Patrick's day, and ironically I was having
some allergy kind of symptoms or maybe it was cold,

(00:49):
I'm not sure on Monday. So I'm making myself a
black and tan here live on air. So here we
go for ASMR kind of weak. Sorry, that was the harp.
If you know what a black and do you know
what a black tennis Dave I do? Or if you
had one? Do you like them?

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yes? I do.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
So that's the So you use a light lagger traditionally
a harp, which is also made by the Guinness Company.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Oh, I didn't realize they make that.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, that's their other that's there, like far less famous
in the US beer. It's a light light logger like
that color.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Oh yeah, very light.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
And then obviously you on top that with a stout.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
You don't just pour a bunch of bronzer in there.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
No, that's the nitro can. So you kind of made
a hurl. So this is like if you listen to
our beer episode. I think we discussed this, but how
some beers are on a nitro tap system, so they're
nitrogenated instead of carbonated. So now I am gently pouring
into this control option.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
The hell is that looks like some sort of a filter, Joe.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
It is made for making black and tan. It's cheating.
So if you pour it slow enough, the guinness will
float on top of the harp because of it, or
you're stout. I guess it could be any stout that
you prefer. If I'm honest, I like a Murphy's better

(02:24):
than Guinness.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Sorry, shit, I've never had a Murphy's, but I do
like Guinness, and I had one on Saint Patrick's Day.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Oh I love Guinness, don't get me wrong, I just
I do think Murphy's. This is probably the superior product,
after being a snob about it. So what that does
is then it will so the beer, the dark beer
will float on top of the light beer, And that's
obso of what you would think would happen, because you think, like, oh,
the dark beer would be like heavier, but it's actually

(02:52):
while dark in color, is actually less dense, so it
will sit on the top and so you get it
could be better, but you get as good a nice
little gradient. So now I've got this. Now, Yeah, we're
going to talk about something unlike alcohol, which is not

(03:12):
a toxin but does make your body go haywire.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah. Well, you know, I thought it might be a
good place to start to talk about our own experiences
with allergies. And then I have a bunch of about
about allergies, and it might be interesting to kind of
know our own experiences and then probably know how common
those experiences are.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
So yeah, we usually talk about what we usually start
each episode for, perhaps if you've just found us about
what we already knew about this topic, This is.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
One I think we always intend to do that.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah, I know we don't always just get excited, but yeah,
Dave and I know a thing or three about this topic.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, when I was a kid, I had
a number of food allergies and they are things that
I now love, which means that I grew out of themchocolate, eggs,
red food, dye, wheat, and then I had like a
pollen ragweed, which is pretty common. But yeah, a lot
of food allergies. And I loved eggs and obviously loved
chocolate and those things. I can you know, I don't

(04:14):
have those allergies anymore. I grew out of them, probably
around age seven or so, seven or eight. But my
allergies were very you know, I didn't have like like
a skin rash or anything like that. I would be
become very nasal. It was like, you know, it would
like affect my sinuses. Your body starts to produce mucus
and they're swelling and whatnot. But yeah, that that was

(04:37):
my allergy as a kid.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Okay, So do you have allergies now or did you
like grow out of it.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
The only allergy I have now is penicillin, oh okay,
which I can tell you is not an awesome thing
to have an allergy too, because I recently had a
sinus infection. And if you have a sience infection, they
give you penicillin. It helps it real fast. The same
thing with like stre throat, I've got to take like
diicloss cyclic Look what it's called. It's it's, you know,

(05:06):
an antibiotic that is not penicillin.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
And doxa cycling.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, and it works well, but sometimes it works a
little slower. But I discovered that after I had my
wisdom teeth out. I was taking penicillin for a few
days and then I broke out in a rash from
my neck to my waist. Oh yeah, it was bad.
So uh and that was that was when I was
maybe I don't know, maybe twenty so so I you know,

(05:33):
and it's funny, my wife has the same allergy. So
a penicillin allergy is incredibly common. In fact, I read
that the most common medication allergies are too antibiotics, especially penicillin,
and some end sets. So if you have a medication allergy,
that's a very common one to have.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Okay. I think those allergies to end sets are a
non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs like your you know, some
of your pain advil over the counter pain medications. I
think some of those allergies can be pretty pretty bad
because you don't know you have it, and then you
the reaction could be kind of severe, like you take

(06:14):
you know, some pain medicine and have some pretty pretty
traumatic effects.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
But well, it's funny because I think that's what happened
to me with penicillin. Like, I mean, I assume I
had had pound oficcillin in my life before, but maybe
I hadn't. I mean, I used to get strapped throat
a lot as a kid. I never had my tonsils out,
so I imagine they gave me penicillin. But usually with allergies,
and we'll talk about this, you have to have some
sort of exposure event. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
And then also you can get sensitized to an allergy
in And so I think about this because I am
actually not allergic to the rush all oil that is
in poison ivy, and so I don't get poison ivy,
which is like obviously great for me on the one hand,
But on the other hand, I if I were to like, like,

(07:01):
I don't know if I've been through a patch of
poison ivy and in order to like let other people know, like, hey,
don't go in there because there's poison ivy. This is relevant.
When I was working for one of my crappy summer
jobs in college doing landscaping, and I was an allergy
to poison ivy, so I'd be kind of like blase

(07:23):
about it. But the other guy that I worked with
was like extremely allergic to it, and he wouldn't like
we We we didn't share like work gloves ever or
anything like that. But you can become sensitized, so I
don't go around like rubbing it on myself.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, yeah, I mean it's funny you say that because
I have very sensitive skin like I. You know, you
asked if I have any other allergies.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
Now.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
I can't use stick deodorant. When I was probably about
fifteen or sixteen, stick the odorant gave me a horrible ration.
Since then, I have used just an aerosol deodorant, and
a couple of years ago, I like used a different
body wash or something I can't remember. We were home
or somewhere and it was like scented and I got
sort of rash from that. So I do a very
sensitive skin. But oddly enough, I've never had poison ivy.

(08:06):
I only point that out because I used to play
in the woods a lot as a Yeah, I know
I've run through poison ivy somehow, I've never gotten it.
But I do a very sensitive skin. So I point
this out also to say that I did have an
allergy test probably about seven or eight years ago, and
they told me other than penicillin, like I don't have
any other allergies, but they did say you are very

(08:29):
sensitive to lots of things like like on the edge,
and so they recommend that I take like a daily allegro,
which I do. So I didn't have any specific allergies,
but I was like just generally sensitive as how they
described it.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Interesting, Well, I'll get in a little bit. I'll go
into some detail a little bit later when talk about
like how they test for allergies. But for me, I've
got up until fairly recently when I've been getting treatment
for it aminotherapy, which I we'll also talk about later,

(09:02):
which is where I go to get allergy shots. I
actually just got one today. I've got it looks and
if you, uh, well this is great podcasting, but.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
Take off my I'll take a look at it.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Take off my shirt. So we're getting we're getting the
for the for the patrons. We got the video feed
of this. You might be able to see like it
looks like I got a mosquito bite.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, I see that. It's subtle.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
It just looks like a mosquito bite. And that's and
I used to you know, obviously get like a lot
more you know, reaction to it, but now it's it's
not so bad. I'm at the tail end of getting
allergy shots. Maybe October I will actually go back for
another allergy test that hopefully will be my my last one,

(09:55):
which is nice. So fingers crusted there.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Where you what are you treating your allergy to?

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Well, since as a kid, I've been really allergic to
like the outside like this time of year is kind
of why we're doing this episode now, because we love
the plants.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Then you don't you say that the trees are fucking
in your nose.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
The trees are trying to fuck your nose.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, we fucking in your nose. That would be amazing.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, we are in Ohio and in the like the
Midwest or this part of the US, we are starting
to get into peak algues and for a lot of people,
I'm allergic to tree pollen. I'm also allergic to dust,
which is clever listeners will notice as an inside thing.

(10:44):
And I'm also actually allergic to dogs, even though I
have been a lot longtime dog owner although I am
not allergic to dogs anymore.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
And how that works is that because of if you
had shots for that as.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
The immune there. But yes, I'm an allergy to murderch
murder and I are on good terms now. But yeah,
and when i'm when I say that the trees are
fucking your nose, is you are allergic to the tree pollen.
Pollen which is the basically the sperm of the tree
gets in your nose and it makes you sneeze. So

(11:19):
now now when you sneeze when you go outside in March,
that's that's what's happening. So you're welcome for us. But
what I wanted to do, Dave, Oh sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
What I was gonna say. I know we're gonna get
into some very you know, there's kind of intense biology
here to talk about, and I thought it might be
helpful for me to interject once in a while with
a statistic or a fact about allergies. So let me
start us off with one of those, and then I'll
make it over to you.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Lay it on us.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Let's talk about food allergies. And I'm pretty sure that
this is a let me see, this is a CDC statistic,
So we're talking about the US here. Most common food
allergies and children is is different than the most common
food allergy and adults. What do you think the most
common food allergy is in adults?

Speaker 2 (12:06):
Is it milk?

Speaker 1 (12:08):
It is not milk? Milk? Is milk? Is number two?

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Is it peanuts?

Speaker 1 (12:17):
Then that's number three food allergy eggs, shellfish?

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Oh okay, okay, yes, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Nine percent of adults in the US have a shellfish allergy,
one point nine percent milk and one point eight percent peanuts.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Okay, if you have a shellfish allergy, those can be
pretty bad, Like if you you accidentally eat shellfish, which
I feel like it's kind of hard to do, but
like if you don't know that you're allergic, and then
the first time you eat like shrimp or something, I
think it can be like can possibly be like nphyal axis.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, what about children? Most common food allergy? Uh, it
was one of the ones. You said, Yeah, has it egg,
no milk, no peanuts. This is in the US. It's peanuts.
In the United States, it's peanuts. It's not the if

(13:13):
you went to Israel, it would not be that way.
And I only bring that up because there was a
doctor who was studying this, and everywhere he would go
he'd say, hey, raise your hand if you know a
child in your life that is allergic to peanuts. All
the hands go up. He goes to Israel and no
hands go up. And he discovered just because there's a
common food, like a treat they give to young children
that is peanut based, it's like this. Yeah, it's like

(13:34):
an immersion therapy. Basically, we don't do that in the US.
We got scared of peanut allergies, so we stopped giving
kids peanuts at a young age. Therefore peanut allergies increased.
We made the problem worse.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, now that trend is kind of reversed. I was
fortunate that that study, that research came out around the
time that we were having our first child, and so
we did expose and our doctor was supportive of this.
We did expose them to small amounts of peanut butter.
You can get bambas in the US, and my cousin

(14:07):
gave them to her kids and I apparently really liked
them a lot.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
I'll keep that in mind. Which seems like a good
time to tell our listeners a that my wife and
I are expecting our first child in October. So this
is all pertinent information for me.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Get them bombas. I think this is excited to by
some people as an example of like people are that
we are like two concerned about allergies in the US,
and this is why we've actually made the problem worse,
like you said, and I think that is this is
this true, Like we we've learned some things in an
hour changing direction. But like I mean, pen analogies can

(14:46):
kill a kid.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
So like, yeah, it's not that it's not serious, but
there's a reason why there are more peen analergies in
certain parts of the world than in others. Yeah, this
is this is a nurture thing more than it is
a nature thing.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah. So so that's a good like level set of
like what are the most common allergies. We will talk
about food allergies, We'll talk about other kind of allergies.
We're kind of gonna kind of lump them together in
a lot of this. But David, wouldn't be an hour
of our time if I didn't go back in time

(15:21):
to God, to ancient history.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Okay, ancient ancient Mesopotamia or no, it's like the North
America in the fifteen hundreds where the native people were
allergic to white people.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
I am going to go back further in time than that.
I'm actually going to talk about the ancient Egyptians. Okay,
but yeah, anyway, I'm going to breeze through like some
kind of history of allergies because people have been noticing that, like, hey,
that guy sneezes a lot in a certain time of
the year, you know, for a while we're trying to
figure out what it is. And then I'm going to

(16:02):
inject some science and you can inject some facts of
figures and other things periodically. But the study of allergies
to figure out where they come from coincides with also
people trying to figure out how the immune system works.
So I'm gonna startify talking about long before we knew

(16:24):
like what that there was such a thing as the
immune system, all right, So the earliest possible mention of
an allergy, it's actually an ancient egypt the pharaoh Menez,
who might be one of the same of Narmur, who

(16:45):
is famously like the Egyptian pharaoh who united the upper
and lower kingdoms to become a unified Egypt. So like
one of the first pharaohs we're talking like over five
thousand years ago. He supposedly was killed by something. Now

(17:12):
the problem is the hieroglyph KEB, which can mean a
hornet or a wasp. So this could be the first die,
first example of someone dying of ana of l axis
from a beasting, or it can also be in hippopotamus oh,
which means you know, kill, which you do to are

(17:33):
very dangerous and kill people.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, but they're not going to kill you by allergy.
They're gonna kill you by just straight fucking you up.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
So it's unclear. But if it is, if that does
refer to a wasp, then again this would be like,
you know, first case of someone dying from an allergic
reaction that was recorded. Obviously, this has been happening to people.
We've been co evolving with things like bacteria and viruses

(18:03):
and parasitic worms for the entirety of revolution, and our
immune system evolved to deal with them, and probably allergies
go back deep into human history. Okay, there is a
papyrus called the Papyrus Ebbs, which is one of the

(18:25):
first medical documents and it dates back to the nineteenth
century BCE. So a little bit about a thousand years
later after Menez or even more of a time jump,

(18:45):
the author gives some tips for treating ezema. That's not
referring to it by that name thing something that sounds
like asthma and the common cold. Now again it's hard
to figure out, like what that that's exactly what they

(19:06):
were talking about, but it does seem to be the case.
And also the author talks about conditions that could be
related to strong odors like flowers. So this is the
first idea that maybe something related to odors might have
to do with this, this thing that we would later
call allergies. Kind of interesting. Then we got to get

(19:29):
to Hippocrates, the famous ancient Greek doctor, you know, the
father of medicine. In his Treatise of Airs, Waters and Places,
he coins the term idiosyncrasy, which is actually the term
that was used for allergy up until pretty recently, when

(19:52):
when I get into some of the more modern history,
and people were still prone to calling food allergies in
particular idiosyncratic into like the nineteen fifties, because people thought
that they were like a made up fab like well
into the fifties, even after we kind of knew what
caused them and He also noticed that like there was

(20:17):
like certain like occupational allergies like blacksmiths and Stonemasons tended
to get respiratory problems. And they also noticed food allergies,
like people having reactions to dairy product. And then later
the ancient poet Lucretius told us food for most, poison

(20:39):
for some. So again another ancient philosopher, who is our
ancient scholar who is talking about food allergies, probably.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Was that the Lucretious of Borg.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Did it. I thought, you're going to go for Lucretia
the Megadev song off of probably their finest album.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
And these are some nerdy ass jokes man just.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Rust in peace anyway. Yeah, So the kirker Roman period,
it seemed that, like you know, they were getting this idea,
although Hippocrates didn't get everything right because he thought that
asthma had to do with phlegm, which is one of
the four humors, and he thought that phlegm would get

(21:32):
into your brain and get into the nasal cavity and
into the lungs and clog your lungs, and so they
would cure this by blood letting. So this is that's
a pro a prop sorry a process that would continue
into the medieval period. There's been some famous people from
antiquity who possibly suffered from allergies. The the First like

(22:01):
family of emperors uh Octavian, H. Claudius and his son Britannicus.
They seem to have what we would call allergies. Britannicus
famously like couldn't touch horses.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
Oh okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
And horses are common allergy today, although many of us
don't come into contact with horses. My wife happens to
be allergic to horses, but we don't, you know, interact
with them.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
Oh okay, yeah, I mean I guess I would never
know if I was allergic to horses because I I
don't know if I've ever competed a horse.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
When I when I go places where there's an option
to touch animals, I usually don't. I love animals too,
but like I don't know where they've been.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
One thing was like when I so I used to
work at the zoo, and it was always really interesting
because when working at the zoo, and like if you
were one of the on one of the teams that
would get to like touch animals, sometimes those people would
find out that they were allergic to like an exotic
animal that you would never know that you were allergic to,
Like how many people would find out that they were

(23:18):
allergic to a bin to rong or, which is a
bear cat unless you yeah, like happy to work at
a zoo.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Right, Oh, I'm allergic to kimono dragon seeman like who
who knew?

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah? Oh, good lord, And that's how Dave got fired
from the zoo.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
My hands and face are just broken out in the rash.
I don't know what happened.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
Oh God, good lord.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
I upset myself with that joke.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
I think reptiles are relatively hypo allergenic. That's why they
recommend them as pets for people who have allergies to
things like dogs, cats and nice. But but you do you,
you do you? Dave?

Speaker 1 (24:00):
That was the bed I was I was doing, you know,
like a zoo keeper.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
But yeah, okay, if you say so. The first Emperor,
Octavian slash Augustus Uh, he also seemed to have problems
with He was famously kind of sick a lot, and

(24:24):
had famous and had seemed to have like skin condition
which might have been like skin allergies. And then like
his his grandson our great grandson or gosh, great grandson
Britannicus would would also have like the horse thing. So
it seems like there was a whole family of allergies.
Analogies do tend to pass through families and might have

(24:50):
a genetic component.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, I read that like one at least some commonly
held idea of ow Jesus, that you have like an
incomplete genetic sequence, like there's something in your genes that's
just like missing an element, missing a portion. But I

(25:13):
probably didn't understand something that I read.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
There are a lot of ideas about why allergies exist,
but that is still an active area of research, so
I don't want to tread too much into like, yeah,
why do I have allergies? But ultimately they they are
an overreaction of the immune system, So I will get

(25:38):
later to explain like what the immune system does. But yeah,
so now we get into like kind of the Middle Ages.
We're talking about mainly Europe and mainly Europe and the
air world. So it was it was actually the in uh,

(25:58):
the Arabian Peninsula and in Persia where they started to
realize that allergies were linked to the season. So UH,
an Iranian scholar razz who lived in the ninth and
tenth century U A D or uh? Yeah A D right,

(26:18):
No way was it? What do we do use now?
We use BCE and C C C E common era. Yeah, yeah,
tenth century CE. He described the symptoms of his teacher
and they sound a lot like seasonal allergies, like running, running, nose,
stuffy nose, sneezing, things like that. And he also described

(26:43):
that his teachers symptoms were worse in the spring. There
you go, which is something that that Papyrus had kind
of talked about earlier. He also recommends avoiding strong odors,
especially roses and basil, and this is the part the
first time that roses are associated with with allergies, and

(27:06):
later on another a word for allergies that would be
hay fever or actually rose fever.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
Oh okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
So in Muslim Spain in the twelfth century there was
moisy Mimonides who wrote a treatise on asthma, who described
as a disease that only happened at a certain time of
the year, and some people think that he was describing

(27:37):
allergic asthma. So asthma is a severe allergic response that
caused you to not be able to breathe.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Just to be clear.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
If I may interject with a fact about asthma. Well, yes,
let's see where's this.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Sorry, didn't mean to mess you up.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
No, it was about maybe it's in adults allergies. Hold on, sorry, shit,
It was something about the statistic of like the commonality
between having an allergy and also having something like ah.
Children who have food allergies compared to those without are

(28:23):
two to four times more likely to have other related
conditions such as asthma. So that's another CDC statistic I believe.
Oh okay, so yeah, this is in the United States.
But it does make sense.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Yeah, because it's all the same or they they are
related systems. The food, food allergies, and things like asthma. Sure,
all again related to the immune system, because you're something
is being introduced into the body, be it a food
or something like a pollen grain, and it's causing a

(28:59):
reaction of the immune system that is akin to what
would happen if a a parasite gotten into your body. Okay,
so now we kind of skip ahead to England. There's
the King John Lackland, who apparently was allergic to peaches.

(29:25):
I have talk to people who like when they eat peaches,
like they said, like their like their throat gets itchy.
It's really too bad because I love I love peaches.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
I love peaches too in England.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
They would I think have been imported.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
Yeah, I was gonna say anyway.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Peaches are one of the I think peaches are native
to I'm probably gonna get this wrong. They are native
to Asia, I believe, and.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
I know that they are part of the pecan family,
which kind of explains why their pits look the way
they do.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Uh yeah, I think they're uh northwest China. I was right. Okay,
I did have to google that. Hell yeah, but I
but I was right without googling.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Just want that's true. We're confirming your rightness.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Uh da. David had become like acutely like sensitive to
like googling things while we're podcasting, because we don't we
don't want to be like the the the Joe Rogan guys.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Oh no, I mean we come in with with information
and then sometimes we have to you know, it's okay
if we stumble upon that, Oh I wonder if if
that's true.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, I don't want to say some shit and then
I like was actually just like spouting off out of turn.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
The bigger thing is that when we do google things,
we are looking at credible sources. You know. I tried
to listen to a podcast today while I was doing
ard work about allergies and.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Not good.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
A lot of fucking bullshit out there. Oh oh yeah,
there's a lot like how do allergies work? And it's
like how to heal your gut?

Speaker 2 (31:00):
Oh Jesus, there is a lot of misinformation about allergies.
I'll get into like one thing later, but we don't
want to, Like, this would be three hours our time
if Dave lets me rant about he misinformation.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
So John Lacklin, he's the king of England. He's really
very unpopular. He married a thirteen year old, which is
real gross.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
And then this is about the year twelve hundred. He
had to flee after he pissed off the nobility his
Uh what's that?

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Was it because of this marriage that pissed off the
nobility or were they at that time kind of just
like fine with it.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
I don't know. But Isabelle, his child bride, hated him
so shit. Well yeah, supposedly she assassinated him by make
but she knew that he couldn't eat peaches, so made
a like a concoction of peaches with adding cider and

(32:01):
sweet wine to it, and then he had an anaphylactic
episode and fucking died.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
Good.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah, that's not the only time that alergies were used
in England for political purposes in the fifteenth century. King
Richard the Third, famous made extra famous by Shakespeare.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Is Richard the Third, the one who they found his
bones like ten years ago under a parking lot in London.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
I don't know that. Actually that sounds right because I
think he.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Was the last last king of England to die in battle.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
That sounds right.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
See, I can look this up. This is okay. Yeah,
so they found his bones in London or near London,
like under. I'm going to give you this actual information
because I think this is interesting. There's a really good
documentary about it. He his remains. Let's see. Well, I'm

(33:01):
not gonna find this information, but yes, this continue.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Up anyway. So King Richard the Third he apparently had
like urticaria, which is where you get like like itchy
red bumps when you eat something. He got that from strawberries.
So he served strawberries and a meal with his his haters,

(33:28):
including Lord William Hastings, and then he King Richard like
ate some of the strawberries and then started breaking out
and accused Hastings of trying to poison him and have
him executed, which it's really fun and funny.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah. Well, he apparently was farently sickly too. He had
scoliosis very badly, which is one of the ways they
would help identify his remains. They also could find it
descended and his body was actually found in uh like
it sure, okay, not in London, and it was under
a car park.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
A car park. Yes, I did hear about this, h I.
Richard the Third is one of the Shakespeare plays that
I know. I think I I think I actually performed
Richard the Third. He was a giant piece of shit
in the play, and he does have like he is.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Like a quote unquote hunchback as described here in this
image that I'm going to send to you, because when
you're talking about the scoliosis being obvious, look at his
spine in the way that the remains were found.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Apparently people like noticed this obviously at the time, because again,
like in the in the play, excuse me. In the play,
he has depicted as like an evil, fucking hunchback.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
It would be hard to note not notice. Do you
see this picture? Look at his spine, Holy macarooney, I
mean it, it looks like a sickle.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, bro was I mean, I guess i'd be a
dickhead too if I have that going on to me.
Who could blame him?

Speaker 1 (34:59):
Yeah? Well, yeah, I want to think he also like
supposedly died of like getting hit in the head with
an axe or something in battle, and so his not
only was that a defining feature, his head was also
like bludgeoned and they could see that in the skull. Anyways,
we could do actually we should do a whole episode
about Richard the Third because I think his life in
general is very interesting, but this adds like a very

(35:22):
interesting wrinkle into it.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Uh huh, Yeah, I'm into it, and I'll do a
little selective reading from it.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Yeah, okay, So anyway.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Let's kip ahead a little bit too, like the Renaissance,
like we talked about. Oh no, well that wasn't a
recent episode, but I recently re listened to our episode
about Leonardo da Vinci because I it's talking about him
at work at the Science Museum of the day of
night work up.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
About somebody whose remains are mysterious.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, fifteen thirty Jerome Cardan, who was a doctor and philosopher.
He was invited by the Primate of Scotland. Do not
not the the monkey of Scotland, but the like the
leader of the bishops. He was uh and the primate

(36:17):
apparently was had been suffering from asthma, and Kardan recommended
that he that the primate get rid of his feather bed,
and this allegedly cured him of his asthma. So that
some that has led some people to think that the
primate was either allergic to dust mites, So when you're

(36:37):
allergic to dust, you're actually allergic to the tiny mites
that eat the dust, right or or feathers, which is
another thing, but dust my allergies are very common. So
people were kind of starting to at this is like
like figure out like some of like what might cause
or prevent allergies. The history of allergies is of people,

(36:58):
like some brilliant people kind of getting close to figuring
out it out and then that information kind of being
forgotten or lost to history or not widely like adopted.
Ambras Paree so now we're in France, he noticed that

(37:19):
some people couldn't breathe well in the presence of cats.
Around the same time, Leonardo Botallo, who was a royal physician,
observed illnesses and some members of the court at the
time of flowering roses. So again there's this idea of
rose fever, and so in his book in fifteen sixty
four Des Catarro Commentarius, he explained, quote, pleasant smells have

(37:45):
healing properties for disease of the heart, brain, and liver.
Stimulating one of the five senses stimulates the whole being,
and the pleasant smells that drive away the discomfort soothe
the heart, brain, and liver, or sorry, soothe the mind itself.
Yet odors favor too many are unfavorable to one. I
know healthy men who react to the smell of roses
with sneezing, headaches and such itchy nose that they cannot

(38:08):
help but scratch their noses for two days. So somebody
pointed out that that sounds an awful lot like the
lucretious thing of food for most poisoned for some mm,
So roses seem to be like a thing that kind
of like really like clue people in to what caused allergies.

(38:34):
But again, like some of this information like really was
like kind of forgotten and so it really wasn't in
until the eighteen hundreds that people started to figure out
what caused allergies. But I like to break from the
history to talk about the briefly the immune system. Okay, So,

(38:56):
or did you have any other fast facts you wanted
to toss with us, Dave while we're.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Oh, I transition to hit you with a fast fat cheer.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Trying to break up the I think if you listen
to this podcast, you probably are down with the history lesson.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
But yeah, seasonal allergies. You mentioned adults in the United States.
How many do you think, uh suffer from seasonal allergies.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Of like a raw number or a percent?

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Uh give me, give me a percent.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Okay, it's it's gotta be like twenty percent of the
population or more.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Uh. Yeah, actually it's estimated that it's it's almost almost
a third.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Okay, yeah, yeah, I mean you know you gotta like
just like go to your office like this time of year,
you know, you see like I hear everyone like sneezing
and stuff.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Well, it's funny, it's funny, Like it's it's a it's
a it's more than a a quarter of US children,
but almost a thirty US adults. It makes me think
about how my dad claims he never had problems with
season or allergies until he hit forty and then boom,
I definitely have some issues with it. So, yeah, you're

(40:16):
very common.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
You can kind of grow out of allergies. You also
can kind of like grow into them. The allergies are
very idiosyncratic, is one of the things that people notice,
Like I said, way way way long ago, and that
is what made it kind of difficult to figure out
what was causing them. And also like even when people
are starting to figure out, it made some people think

(40:39):
like you're just being like you're just being a baby.
And even to this day on food allergies, like some
people like just think that you're making it up. I
will say some people are just making it up because
of the like social media influencers.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Oh you mean, like gluten intolerance, Well.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
I want to be careful, like that is a real thing,
but then there are also some people who like aren't
actually allergic to it.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Right, And we should also explain that like lactose intolerance
is not an allergy allergy that is not an allergy.
I'd also say other thing about seasonal allergies. Immunotherapy, As
you mentioned, allergy shots helps reduce the symptoms adults with
hay fever allergy. It's effective at about eighty five percent
of people with that allergy.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
So it has made a night end day difference.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah. Yeah, Now it has to be pretty severe, Like
I don't have it nearly as severely as you do,
and so I don't do immunotherapy, but yours is very
severe and you're plagued by sin disinfections, especially in the
spring and summer.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
So uh yeah, and that's been better. It basically like
I would like pretty much be clawing my eyes out
starting in a couple of weeks here just from the
like my eyes itching, and I just basically don't. I'd like,
I don't think about it anymore. I barely have to
take allergy medicine, so there's like, like I don't have

(42:04):
to take it every day. Okay, So talking about the
immune system, So what is the immunem does it? It's
basically it protects the body from harmful substances. So this
can be we're thinking about viruses, is the thing that
most people think about, but also thinking about things like bacteria,
and also thinking about things like multicellular parasites like worms,

(42:26):
which are a I think us in the developed world
or the industrialized world. I want to I want to
make sure I'm using the proper term. I don't really
think about this, but diseases caused by things like uh,

(42:48):
by like worms and by worms, I don't mean earth worms.
There are a lot of different kinds of organisms that
are worm shaped, like nemarutines or what you would uh
the scientific term are an apse blight for large swabs
of humanity around the globe, and our immune system is

(43:08):
built to fight them. Also, our immune system does fight
things like cells that have changed in some way, like
cancer cells. I think people don't realize that. Like when
you actually like get cancer, which is not one disease
but a a a kind of disease, a lot of

(43:30):
things have gone wrong and have and those cancer cells
have bypassed many different layers of defense.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Cont sell mutations happening that your body eliminates.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Yeah, they're either corrected or if that cell isn't functioning,
then the immune system might remove it cause it to
self destruct. Yeah, So things like that. Okay, So how
does the immune system work? So you've got basically the
immuses is how your body recognizes self from not self,
so all of your cells.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Did you ever watch The It Crowd?

Speaker 2 (44:05):
No? I didn't.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
There's a bit in that show where like the one
guy makes an app that can identify food, or he
claims it it can like you put you like you
show your phone food and it'll tell you what it is.
And it's just like he has a hot dog, so
he puts his camera to the hot dog and it
says hot dog. And then he does it to a
slice of pizza and it goes not hot dog. And
that's all I can do is identify whether something is

(44:29):
or is not a hot dog. Rare. Sorry.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
So the body does this by recognizing types of these
what we call them. These are components on the surface
of cells called antigens, and so we have molecules is

(44:58):
the word that I was looking for, on that side
of our cells that help the body recognize that as
that's part of us. This is why you can't donate
blood to someone who has a different blood type. Because
of these antigens on the surface of the red blood cells.
Your body will reject them because they recognize it as

(45:18):
not self. This is the same reason why you you know,
organ donations or transplants, you have to suppress the immune
system of the organ acceptor because of this, that makes
sense self versus non self system. Okay, right, so so yeah,

(45:39):
so this is using these antigens. So there's two components
of immune system. There's the innate or the non specific
immune system and the adaptive or the specific immune system.
They work together. It's important to think, I'm not going
to get into all the layers of the immune system.
We could do an entire episode about it and would

(46:00):
be really complicated. You'd need pictures, because the thing is
the immune system is a really great example to me
of I don't think how I don't understand how you
can look at the immune system and think that is
something that was created from scratch by some kind of engineer,

(46:21):
like a divine architect, a god. This clearly is something
that evolved over time layer by layer. There are redundant systems,
there are systems that kind of conflict with one another,
and there are layers upon layers upon layers, and it's

(46:44):
kind of like some scientists to try to figure out
like which components of the immune system evolved first, which
is really which is really fascinating. And we do have
some insight into that by looking at other organisms, by
looking at like how by looking at the the genes
that code for that part of the immune system. But

(47:06):
that's really like I can't get into that too much.
So talking about the innate immune system. So the innate
immune system is that is like fast and broad. So
that is your skin is actually part of the immune

(47:28):
system we should point out because like it keeps stuff
from getting in.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Oh, okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Yeah, so you've got your skin and your mucous membranes,
and then you've also got your immune cells and proteins
that are like in your tissues and also in your blood.
So saying like something gets in though past your skin
or past your your nose and you know your mucus tears,

(47:54):
all these things are actually like have anti microbial properties.
But say something gets in, your innate immune system fights
it using cells proteins. So the inani immune system is
cells and proteins. The adaptive immune system is antibodies, which
is involved in allergies. Okay, try to go through this quickly.

(48:16):
So you say you get like a bacteria something he
gets into the skin. You get inflammation is the first thing.
So what happens is the blood vessels become whiter and
they start to leak fluid into the surrounding tissue that
surrounding to so that's inflammation. That tissue becomes warm, it

(48:38):
swells up, it turns red. This is what happens in
your sinuses and that's what makes you congested. Is inflammation.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
This is that's called rah sorry rhinitis right.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yes, that's just like inflammation of the of the nose. Yep.
You can also get a fever involved in this too.
So then you get cells come in from the blood
to fight the infection. There are the fagosites, which would
be the cells that they just come in and they actually.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
Like those are the ones that paint their faces like
a clown.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
They come in and they say we're family.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
They don't understand how magnets work at all.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Someone I had questions I had afraid to ask me
yesterday she was like, Joe, please back me up on this.
Does the phrase fucking magnets how do they work? Meaning anything? Too?
Because I feel very old because youth don't know what
that means. I was like, oh, I know what it means. Yes,

(49:42):
because we used to joke at the museum to take
the the activity of mad magnets out if you found
any juggalos in the building.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah, oh yeah, uh.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Yeah, okay. So these phagosites are phagocytes. They basically like
chomp and consume bacteria and durum and things like that
pretty important. Or they will also like find and eat
up cancer cells and then their remains form something called
puss so pusses that is the like dead bodies of

(50:14):
these phagocytes and the things that they've eaten. Then there's
a lot of enzymes that float around and they help
with the immune system. And then there are these things
called natural killer cells, which is like really the natural
born killer cells their natural born killer cells, so their
their main job is to identify cells that have been

(50:37):
infected by a virus or potential tumor cells and they
kill them. These are also called cytotoxic t cells. They
kill them, they basically make them blow up.

Speaker 1 (50:52):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
Now, then there's the adaptive immune system, so these are
the things that are like fighting the germs directly. So
and this is also the immunity that will happen. Like
if you get an infection and then later you get
the same infection, it'll fight it off quicker. But adaptive

(51:14):
immunity is specific. It uses T cells, B cells, and antibodies.
So T cells are called are also called like T lymphocytes.
They're made in your bone marrow, and then they go
into your thymus, which is in your throat to sort

(51:34):
of train. Yeah, Like they go to boot camp there
and then they learn how to do their.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
Job, like seriously in your lymph nodes right.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
In your thymus. They do kind of hang out in
your lymph nodes though, mm.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
And this is relevant to how vaccination works too, right,
like the way that the T cells get involved and
help deform antibodies.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
T cells and B cells are both involved in the
response to getting a vaccine. The vaccine primes both of
these kinds of cells so that they can recognize that
virus when it comes back.

Speaker 1 (52:15):
Yeah, which one of them has the microchip?

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Though?

Speaker 1 (52:18):
Both actually go good? You're ready for a fat Joe base.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Yeah, please do save me for myself.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
If one parent has allergies, their child is fifty percent
more likely to have allergies. If both parents have allergies.
The child is seventy five percent or up to seventy
five percent more likely to have allergies. That's why I'm
talking about a genetic component. My kid will also have allergies.
Leanna's allergic to dogs very very mildly because obviously we

(52:53):
have a dog and it doesn't really bother her that much.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
But for Walter, he's fine. Yeah, that makes sense, and yeah,
that's the genetic component. Well, the instructions to make all
these kinds of cells, they are encoded in your genome,
which you obviously inherit from your parents, So it just
makes sense that there would be a genetic component's allergies.

(53:16):
So anyway, I'm sorry. You've got these T cells which
I mentioned. They they kill these cells that are they
detect cells that are infected with viruses. Some of them

(53:37):
become things called memory T cells. They remember the germ
if it comes back, and they're ready to activate this
adaptive immunity. Later, they have receptors on their surface that
the germs attached to, and then they hold onto that

(53:58):
and then multiply and more copies. Then there are also
B cells, which are made in your bone marrow, so
they're named B four bone marrow. There's a lot of
different kinds and they are each kind matches to a
different kind of germ. They're activated by the helper T cells.

(54:19):
They send signals to the B cells that match the
germs that they've latched onto, and then the B cells
make a bunch of copies in themselves and then those
turn into things called plasma cells, and the plasma cells
start pumping out antibodies. Antibodies are these little tags that
attach to the the attacking germs or whatever it is,

(54:43):
and they make and they only attach to that specific
kind and then that allows the body to clear those pathogens. Okay,
so that was a very and we could talk more
about antibodies, but that's like a very you know, broad

(55:05):
stroke of like what what the immune system does. So
that gets us back to the the story of allergies
and kind of how we kind of started to figure
things out. So in the nineteenth century, people were starting
to figure out what allergies were, not drawing on some

(55:26):
of that earlier history that we talked about, because people
had largely forgotten that. But in eighteen nineteen, John Bostock
wrote a description of hay fever, and he he published
it talking about his his subject of his study, who
was named JB. Well, JB stands for John Bostock. He

(55:47):
actually experiments done himself.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
Okay, good, Yeah, I guess that's the honorable thing to do.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
I know that's that's kind of cool. Actually, I think
it's like pretty interesting. But uh but yeah. So then
later a few decades later, Charles Harrison Blackley figured out
that pollen was the cause of some allergies, although we

(56:14):
didn't like to figure out like basically what to do
with that information. And then it was really like the
nineteen the early nineteen hundreds where things started to kind
of turn around. In nineteen oh five, Clemens von Perkett
actually won a Nobel Prize. Noticed that people who have
been vaccinated for smallpox, so they used horses that had

(56:39):
been affected with like a horse pox. They took blood from,
then made a serum from and gave that to people.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
So I'm going to say the word horse serum, and
that's why i did that explanations. But when I say
horse serum, you know what I'm talking about. You know
what I'm talking about. And to make sure I really
enunciate that.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
I gotcha. Yeah, you don't want a kimono dragon situation.
Uh huh, I was taking notice your hands.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Yeah, the people have been vaccinated using horse serum reacted
very strongly. If you gave them a second dose shortly thereafter,
I'm gonna go this.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
With if it were horse seemon, you'd also have a
pretty intense reaction.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Soide serum sickness is what they called it, and so
Perquette realized that so people had just recently learned the
basics of the immune system around this time, and he
realized that the immune system was producing antibodies. In nineteen

(57:49):
oh six, he coined a term for this relationship between
antibodies and antigen. So antigen is like the thing that's
getting into your body. Antibodies are the things that your
B cells make that it's attached to them and make
your body like attack it, okay, launch a immune response.

(58:11):
He called this term allergy, which comes from two Greek
words that I don't remember what that comes from, but
it doesn't matter. That comes from two Greek words. It's fine, yeah,

(58:34):
I believe yeah, So over the the now. After that,
like people started to realize that this system was also
the cause of what people called hay fever or summer
fever or rose fever, skin diseases, and anaphylaxis, which is

(58:55):
the whole body allergic reaction that can kill you. And
then also people then made a connection between asthma and anaphylaxis.
And then also people started to realize the role at
this point of a compound called histamine, so part of
that immune response that I didn't mention because I wanted

(59:18):
to talk about, Now where are these cells called mast cells,
and then which live in your tissues. And then another
kind of cell that are in your blood, a kind
of white blood cell called bezophylls. These are both kind
of cells they call granulocytes, and they're called that because
if you look at them under microscope. I used to

(59:39):
teach people how to recognize these because I for a
time I taught something called histology, which is cells and tissues.
So this is where I've a little bit of a ringer.
They called them granulocytes because you see all these little
granules like packets of stuff, yeah, inside the cell. And

(01:00:01):
what happens is those are like what happens is the
mass cells are the baso fills. They basically rupture themselves
and release these granules. Well, one of the things that
they release is something called histamine. Histamine causes this inflammation response.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
Oh okay, and which is why you take an antihistamine.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
Antihistamine that is one of the main components. There's a
lot of other ones involved. And like I said, this
is like it's actually it's a concept called a chemical cascade,
which is so much of the immune system and so
much of what happens in your body where this cell
releases this kind of compound and then that causes this

(01:00:45):
compound to get released, and then this causes another compound
to get released, on and on and on, like a
branching sort of chain. But histamines are very important. Other
ones that are really important for like asthma, are things
called leukotriene, and then another important class compounds of things
called sighted kinds. But these are all the things that

(01:01:05):
are basically like mounting the immune response. They're saying to
the body, this is a pathogen, something that's attacking. We
need to get rid of it, right, And the way
that the body does that often involves inflammation and other
things that are like kind of like suck. Yeah. So

(01:01:28):
people started to realize like the role of histamine. Okay,
So by the time you get to like World War two,
people were starting to realize that like allergies were responsible
for like a lot of things like that there were
food allergies and some people were alerted to different kinds
of cosmetics. Then also but also this is again there

(01:01:48):
was some resistance at this time, like it was actually
like considered to be a fad, especially food allergies. Sure,
but nonetheless a lot of people start to realize the
importance of this, and drug started to become develop in treatments.
In nineteen forty eight, the first cortical steroid was reduced

(01:02:11):
cordical steroids or a kind of drug that reduce inflammation.
And so these can actually like keep people from having
asthma attacks.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Is that what's in an asthma inhaler and the hailer some.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Of them, Yes, there are more advanced ones now, but
the most like still a lot of rescue and hailers
are our cordico steroid. So then also some food labels
started to appear. In the nineteen fifties or early in
nineteen fifties, we discovered massed cells, which I also mentioned

(01:02:45):
are what are releasing this stuff called histamine nineteen sixty seven,
researchers identified immunoglobin E or IgE. So that's the antibody
that's responsible for allergic reactions. So when you say, like
you eat a peanut, your body produces a lot of
IgE antibodies that bind specifically to the peanut UH antigen

(01:03:13):
and people start making too much of this IgE of
their B cells or what are making this, And so
then when you eat a peanut, your immune system goes nuts,
no pun intended.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
And because that first, that first time, you need that
like that first react, like your body needs to get
primed to that reaction.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Yes, and then the next time you ate the so
you might eat something, or you might get sung by
b or you might touch poison ivy and have a
pretty minor response or no response, but then the next
time you have the allergic response, so Poomably.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
At some point in my life I had penicillin uh huh,
and then years later I had it again. In my
body was now primed for this reaction that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
Is called sensitization. And in the meantime, in between those
two events day that you mentioned, like your body, your
B cells part of that adaptive immune system him in
producing too much of those immunoglobin E so I think
we should talk about at this point. Oh, I'm sorry.
In later in the eighties, seventies and eighties, we developed

(01:04:25):
the EpiPen, which is epinephrine which saves you from anaphylactic shock.
I get allergy shots and something I actually it's not
an EpiPen. It's a different product, maybe a different company,
but that's kind of the same thing. It's called ABQ autoinjector.

(01:04:48):
I legally have to have that on my person. Actually
keep it in my laptop bag that I bring to work.
I must add that on my person when I go,
oh to get.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
My allergy shot in case you have a reaction, in
case I.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
Get anaphylaxis and die.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
I mean, they don't have one there.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
I can't suit. No, it's for you. Yeah, I can't.
So I can't sue the uh, I can't sue the allergist. Well,
you need to have it clear, You got to have
it quick. You have it on you.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
And actually, when I go to the allergist, I used
to have to wait in the office for twenty minutes
because of COVID. They didn't want you hanging out in
the office, so they started letting you sit in the car, Okay,
And I'm gonna be really honest with you. When I
went to the alergist today. I went and they got
my allergy shot, and then I got in the car
and I left. Yeah, because I'm not really worried about

(01:05:46):
an flexes.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
Well, the same thing that happens when like you get
a new vaccine, like even now, if you've had the
COVID vaccine for a long time, they still tell you like, oh,
why don't you wait in the car or wait here?
And you know I don't do that. I've had it
in times.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Yeah. So yeah, so the last big development will be Yeah.
And then in nineteen eighty two, the Nobel Prize was
awarded for work on this other kind of part of
the immune response that I mentioned luco triens, which are
really important in asthma. They're less important for things like

(01:06:24):
just like like allergic rhinitis. And yeah, and so that's
basically gets you to today. I wanted to briefly mention
how we do allergy testing or did you.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
Have some facts for us, Dave Ah, I could maybe
hit you with one more. One in five Americans are
diagnosed with an allergy. I actually would have thought it
was much higher.

Speaker 2 (01:06:55):
Wait, how does that relate to with the like one
third figure from earlier it was allergies or is that
food allergies?

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
One third of US adults have seasonal allergy seasonal allergies.
I I don't, Well, this just says one in five
Americans are diagnosed with an allergy. I don't know if
it's making a distinction about.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
Oh diagnosed that means they've actually gone to the doctor.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
Right, because it says over fifty million people in the
United States have allergies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, CDC, So it's
not I don't know the way it's written on the no.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
I understand now. So basically, so I didn't get analogy
until I was like thirty four, which is like probably
something I should have done. But I clearly knew I
had an allergy, as I had been getting like treatment
for allergies since then. I had just never actually gone
in and got diagnosed with this is what you're allergic to.
It brings me to actually that was really prescient, Dave,
because like, how do you figure out whether you get

(01:07:56):
allergy or how do you figure out you are allergic
to things? So typically there's a few different things you
can do. You could do something called skin prick test,
and let me tell you this fucking suckss It sucks.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
If you want your back to fucking itch or your
armed fucking itch, this is what you do.

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
It's not one of the best things that you can do.
So you start with little tiny amounts of the things
that they think you might be allergic to. And there's
like kind of like you know, like the usual suspects
so speak. When I went in, they were like, well,
we're gonna test you for rats, and I was like,
I'm definitely not an allerger to rats, and they're like, ah,

(01:08:38):
you can't know that, but I work with rats at work.
So basically, like they label your back with a sharpie
and into little squares, and then they prick you with
a little needle that's coated in a tiny amount of
the different allergens, and then they wait and see if
a bump develops. They also do two so one is

(01:09:01):
usually like saline or glycerine, so that's something that is
not gonna elicit an allergic response, but if that were
to like give a reaction, then something might else be
going on that's not just allergies. And then they also
have the positive control, which is just straight up histamine,

(01:09:23):
and then they stick your back with it and then
you just sit there for an hour. My back lit
up like a fucking Christmas tree. It was incredibly uncomfortable.
Then usually what you'll have to do is then they
often compare that, or they often pair that with a
an injection test where they'll inject your arm. You can

(01:09:47):
also do a blood test. Yeah, and these blood tests
are testing for reaction of immunoglobin e antibodies. And this
is where we get into the one thing where I'm
gonna mention quack medicine. A lot of people will go
to not medical doctors, but various different kinds of quote

(01:10:10):
unquote alternative medicine practitioners and things like that, and they
will provide a sensitivity test. I don't think they are
legally allowed to call an analogy test, but it will
be a sensitivity test. And I want to be like
clear here, there is such a thing as different kinds
of sensitivities. But that's not what these people are doing.

(01:10:31):
They are testing immunoglobin G Now, why is that relevant?
That sounds like the same thing. And then they'll so
they'll give you let's say milk, and you'll do the
IgG tests and it'll say like, oh wow, you react
like really strongly. You have a lot of IgG antibodies

(01:10:52):
for milk. That's a different part of the immune system.
When you eat a food, your body produces IgG. Okay,
that does not mean you're allergic to it. That is
a natural response to ingesting that food item. So an
IgG test does not tell you whether you're allergic to something.

(01:11:14):
In fact, it often is like you often will be
diagnosed with a sensitivity for foods that you tolerate very well.
It irritates me, but it does. Is they give you, well,
they give you a blood test and then they get
to show you like the line that says, look, this
line goes up a lot. You're clearly reacting to this. Well, yes,
you are reacting it to it because you've probably recently

(01:11:36):
ate that food.

Speaker 1 (01:11:38):
Oh well, that's incredibly misleading and stupid.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
Sure is that, like I said, And there's like blood testing,
then there's other things. There's something called challenge testing where
they actually give you some of the thing and watch you.
That has to be done in a doctor's office because
you could die. Yeah, And then there's also something called
elimination test, which is just like especially for food allergies,
where you just stop eating a lot of different foods

(01:12:05):
and slowly reintroduce some of them to figure out, like
what it is that's giving you the allergy, and then
that might be paired with a challenge test to confirm
that like, yeah, that's the thing that's giving you reaction.
There are a lot of different kinds of tests that
have been used in the pasts that have been found

(01:12:25):
to be uneffective. And then how do you treat allergies.
We've already kind of mentioned this. There is immunetherapy, which
would be giving people a small amount of the antigen
that they are allergic to, right, and then exposing people

(01:12:49):
to larger and larger amount to modulate the body's immune response.
It's the thing about and like I said, it's very
well regulated, like you have to go into the office,
especially initially, like they actually like watch you, and it's

(01:13:11):
very effective and I would say it's actually changed my life.
But usually after you do immunotherapy, you don't have to
like keep doing it forever. Some people may, but you
can just like stop doing it now you're huh quote
unquote cured. Interesting and we've been doing We've been doing
this for like, this is a credibly well established treatment

(01:13:34):
that we've been doing for over one hundred years.

Speaker 1 (01:13:37):
Sure, and how like how long did you have to
do it before you notice the difference?

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
A couple of years, Okay, And that was getting a
shot every like five days or five to fourteen days,
and then eventually now I based on once a month.

Speaker 1 (01:13:54):
I go in.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
And it's interesting, barely have much of a reaction anymore
because I'm almost at the end of my treatment.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
Other things, Oh, is that pretty like in your case
it's covered by insurance or no.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
It's covered by insurance. There's a cope or pay like well, sure,
it's actually like it is relatively expensive because we live
in the US of America. Well, yeah, it's covered under
my insurance, so I still have to pay twenty five
dollars each time I go in for a shot. So sure,
but if you didn't have insurance, it would be wildly expensive.
So this is what it does. Yeah, medications, So, like

(01:14:33):
I mentioned, epinephrine are what it's called, what's in an
epi pen And that's like you are going into anaphylaxis,
you are going to die. You get a shot of epinephrine,
and if you don't know what epinephrine, that is also adrenaline.
M Then there are other kinds of gluco corticoids, mast

(01:15:02):
cell stabilizers, which are a group of drugs I think
like a mast cell mast stell stabilizer. A good example
that would be catatafen, which is the eye drops that
you use if you get like itchy eyes related to allergies.

Speaker 1 (01:15:24):
Oh and I I do. I have never used anything
for them, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
They block the mast cells from degranulating, which is releasing
their histamine into the bloodstream. There are like I mentioned, glucocorticoids.
Those are a cork asteroid which I mentioned earlier that
they reduce the inflammation. So an example of that would
be the stuff that you sprain your nose like I

(01:15:52):
do flownaise and those those treat not just allergies but
also like other like kind of like sinus symptoms. I
do use that every day of my life because in addition,
analogies also have like fucked up sinuses.

Speaker 1 (01:16:07):
I thought you weren't supposed to use that all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Uh, that you're supposed to use those every day because
they don't thinking of like afron Oh yeah, no you
oh no, you can get addicted to those, don't don't
do that. Yeah, So things like but the thing that
I mentioned would be or the like, the main class
of alergae medications that most people interact with are antihistamines, which,

(01:16:33):
just as the name suggests, antihistamines are things that interact
with histamine directly. So what they do, there's a different
kind there's different kinds of ways that this works, but

(01:16:53):
basically they oppose the activity of histamine receptors. So generally
what they're doing are blocking the receptor, the thing that
the histamine molecule fits into. There's actually two different kinds
of histamine receptor. There's H one and H two, and
if you are into this stuff, there's actually other ones

(01:17:16):
there's but those are the main ones. These would be
called an H one agonist, but I digress. That just
means that they sit in the block so that the key,
which is the histamine, can't get into it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:33):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
H one agonists are usually used for like things like allergies.
H two agonists are are used for things a lot
of other things, like acid reducers, like if you have
like acid reflux.

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
Like a burlaid thumbs, no tombs is just.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
Like a base thing, just like like yeah, it's just
interact kind of counteract your stomach acid directly. But anyway, Yeah,
so there are many, many differfferent kinds of antihistamines, and
we we actually have like continued to iterate on antihistamines.

(01:18:12):
You might hear about things that are like generation one antihistamines,
generation two antihistamines, and things like that. It's basically like
they've gotten better and better. The earliest antihistamines would be
things like fucking benadryl, which just like it will make

(01:18:34):
you not sneeze, but it's because you're asleep.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Yeah, I can't. I can't take ben adryll.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
Some of the newer antihistamines are like they're not they
don't make drowsy like they're they're effective at a much
lower dose. And so this is this is something that obviously,
like the drug companies are continuing to like iterate on
that actually, like I know, we hate the drug companies,

(01:18:59):
but these are things that like benefit a lot of
people around the world. Sure, yeah, so yeah, I guess
the last thing I would say is that if it's
taken us a long time, to figure out what causes allergies.
But as soon as but basically as soon as we
figured out what was causing them, or actually even slightly
before we started to figure out like how to treat

(01:19:20):
them right, and now there are a lot of treatments
to make people's lives easier. If you think you have
allergies and like are like have a bad time come
March April every year, consider going to an allergist.

Speaker 1 (01:19:39):
Yeah, no, I would agree. I mean, I'm definitely glad
I went, and you know, I don't know that I
learned a ton, but it definitely ruled some things out
for me, which was helpful.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
But yeah, you can at least know that you're not
allergic and then maybe something else's causing your maladies.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
Yeah, or in my case, like who, you seem to
be really sensitive to things and a daily allergy really
just kind of generally level set for me.

Speaker 2 (01:20:08):
You're just a sensitive guy, Dave. I knew that about
you apparently.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
Yeah. Yeah, but apparently I needed to have a bunch
of like needle pricks in my back to know for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
It's not great. I I won't sugarcoative for you folks
out there in TV land it's not fun.

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):
Yeah, yeah, it's not great, but I do think it's
worth it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:31):
So I've had less fun times in my life, I think.

Speaker 1 (01:20:34):
But yeah, oh for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
So so yeah, anything else you wanted to say, Dave.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
No other than I I think this was extremely thorough
hopefully we h It can get a little bit technical
when you get into the biology of it. But I
do think that's really interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
I promise. I tried to keep it as succinctes that good.
The immune system is like ridiculously complicated.

Speaker 1 (01:21:05):
Oh absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:08):
Yeah, so oh, I'm sorry the last thing I didn't mention.
It does seem like the immune system does seem to
be related to the immune system, the part of our
immune system that is specifically related to dealing with parasitic worms.
I think I mentioned that you did, but wanted to

(01:21:29):
clarify that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
I'm looking for like a good statistic to end on,
but I don't know that I have one.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):
Well, did we mentioned about the allergies cost Americans around
eighteen billion dollars a year is actually the sixth leading
cause of chronic illness.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
Yeah, yeah, I saw that. I also read a statistic
that keep this entered or don't but it seems like
it's backed up here that allergies, and namely this has
pointed out in like hay fever and respiratory allergies more
common in people of I don't know a better way

(01:22:23):
to say this, but of mixed races, specifically if you
are you know, have parents are black and white.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
Well, there is I don't know this relates to this,
but that there is this idea called the hygiene hypothesis,
which I guess I wasn't going to get into, and
now the episode is getting along, but very briefly, it's
this idea that our body co evolved with these different

(01:22:57):
kinds of pathogens, and because we live in in industrialized societies,
we live in a relatively clean environment, and because of that,
we aren't being exposed to as many of these pathogens,
and so we our immune system isn't trained, and so

(01:23:19):
then it's attacking more readily like other harmless things like
pollen grains and things like that. There is and people
are still studying this.

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
This theory is used to explain by some people to
explain appendicitis right, that we're drinking so much purified water,
then that's why there's an increased rate of appendicitis in
children in the last couple decades.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42):
I think it's related. They're they're related to one another.
So one one observation that kind of like people point
to with this is that when people migrate from the
developing world to an industrialized society. And I know those
terms are not great, but I I don't know another

(01:24:05):
term to you, So if you could provide that for me,
then please get at us.

Speaker 1 (01:24:09):
Yeah, let's not get down the semantics to cloud the
point here.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
I know when people migrate within one generation, they tend
to develop higher incidents of things like allergies and autoimmune disorders,
so that has lend evidence to this hygiene hypothesis. The
problem is when people have gone looking for specific mechanisms
for this hygiene hypothesis, they haven't really been able to

(01:24:34):
find them. So it does seem like something is going on,
but it's more complicated than we think and it probably
doesn't work the way that we thought it did maybe
in the eighties when this idea was hypothesized.

Speaker 1 (01:24:52):
Sure. Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):
Yeah, so I guess that's where we could end. There's
still a lot to learn still about the subject. Baby, Yeah,
you have gotten curious to learn more of yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:25:07):
Hmm. Absolutely all right. Well, on that note, we'll be
back to talk to you soon. Yeah, I gonna tell
you I kind of want to talk about Richard the Third.

Speaker 2 (01:25:22):
Yeah, yeah, I'm into it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:23):
Sometime soon.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
We've gotta go take my I'm gonna go take my
allergy nose for the taste real bad.

Speaker 1 (01:25:31):
Yeah, have fun with that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:32):
Let's see, y'll later see it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:37):
Thank you for listening to An Hour of Our Time.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
If you like what you heard, explore our catalog of
over two hundred episodes and rate and review us on
your platform of choice.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
And if you'd like to support what we do, visit
patreon dot com Slash an Hour of Our Time podcast