How the Total Allergen Load Impacts You

For those with allergies, symptoms can come at any time. But have you ever noticed how one day, you love the smell of a perfume, and the next, it makes you congested and sneeze? Or how you’ve never reacted when going into a moldy basement, but suddenly feel symptomatic? This can all be due to your Total Allergen Load.

What is the Total Allergen Load?

The Total Allergen Load is kind of like “the straw that broke the camel's back.”

So many factors – like environmental allergies, food allergies, allergic conditions, chemicals, stressors, illnesses, hormonal changes, and more – can impact your body at once. When the imaginary bucket of these factors gets too full, it overflows and leaves your body in a reactive mode. This is when you may react to things that normal don’t cause an issue.

While you may normally battle environmental allergies, food allergies, and hormonal changes – adding an illness to your system, on top of a pretty full bucket, can make you react unusually to other substances. Your Total Load can vary by day, week, or month, and can bring underlying allergy issues to the surface.

How can you control it?

Providers at Allergy Associates of La Crosse (AAOL) diagnose and treat patients with the Total Load in mind, understanding that without treating the patient as a whole, they may still be sick and struggling.

This starts by using three key elements to determine what’s contributing to each patient’s rising bucket: detailed history, thorough exam, and allergy testing. These help your provider uncover stressors adding to your allergy symptoms that you may not even realize impact it.

Treatment doesn’t focus on the allergens that make you the most miserable – it incorporates all allergens that show up positive on your allergy testing. Providers know that even though ragweed shows up as severe and you’re only slightly sensitive to Bermuda grass, both are important to treat. By treating all problematic environmental allergens, you’re releasing a little bit of the water from the bucket, preventing future overflows.

AAOL treats allergies using custom allergy drops following The La Crosse Method™ Protocol. In each allergy drop vial are tiny doses of the allergens identified in allergy testing. The allergy drops are customized to each patient’s level of sensitivity – high enough to help build tolerance, but not too high to cause reactions. Over time, the amount of allergen in each vial is slowly and safely increased so that the body learns to accept the allergens, not react to them.

Your provider may also recommend allergy drop treatment for food allergies, lifestyle modifications, alterations to your home, changes to the products you use, additional medications, or other suggestions to help reduce your Total Load. Being proactive can help keep the Total Load low so that when other unanticipated factors drop into your bucket, you don’t have a big reaction.

If you’re ready to start feeling better and lightening the load, schedule an appointment at AAOL today.