Sans Fig Leaf
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"Snuffles"
8 May, 2008
“Every time I talk to you, you have a cold,” an acquaintance said recently. That wasn’t true. What I actually said several of the times was, “I’m either coming down with a cold or the allergies are being really bad.”
I often fantasize about is what my life would be like if I didn’t have hay fever. If my immune system hadn’t decided, at some point early in my life, that every single pollen and spore that ever wanders nearby required a full-scale counter offensive? Because I have a hay fever reaction of all of those things, and since I live in the extremely mild climate of Western Washington, hay fever season for me typically begins in early February with tree pollens and continues until the middle of the following December when the fern spores and mold and mushroom spores finally stop.
That’s if I’m lucky. When we have especially mild winters, it’s even longer. Such as this year, when some of the roses had still been trying to bloom in late December, and the crocuses were fully in bloom by mid January.
One time when I grumbled about the situation a bit too much to my doctor, he sent me to see an allergist, whose reaction after testing me, was, “You don’t have a severe reaction to any given allergen, so there isn’t necessarily much we can do beyond the prescription you’re already taking.”
He’s right that my symptoms typically aren’t horrible, but they’re unrelenting. And they vary wildly, so I can’t simply get used to them. The intensity of some symptoms rises and falls with the pollen count. Other symptoms come and go seemingly at random. Some appear only when a particular species is just hitting maximum pollination. But some don’t have any pattern I’ve been able to discern.
Among other things this means that I’m often not sure whether I’m coming down with a cold or the allergies are just changing gears. Which means that when I decide that a particular malady is a cold or the flu, I can’t give a simple answer to the question of how long I’ve been feeling sick. Some people look at you very strangely when you say, “Well, it’s either been four days or twenty…”
Not unlike the look the guy gave me when I tried to explain about my allergies. He felt compelled to lecture me about how to stay healthy. I wouldn’t have minded much, except he was the sort of person who can’t tell pseudoscience from actual medical research. I had thought, originally, that he just wasn’t listening. When I said, “either a cold or allergies” I thought he was only remembering the cold.
But it was soon clear that he didn’t understand what allergies are. Just as he didn’t really understand what a cold was. Sure, he knew words like “virus” and “immune system” and so forth, but they were just magic combinations of sound to him. He didn’t understand what they meant. He didn’t understand the most basic aspects of biology or chemistry that I learned in high school. And when I tried to correct his misperceptions, he got all defensive—he wasn’t a medical student. Why would I expect him to know the difference between an allergy and an infection?
Even people who do know the difference can get confused about health issues; particularly if they pay too much attention to news reports about medical studies, without doing any background reading. A recent study about the effects of mega-dosing on vitamins (where people who were taking doses already known to be near-toxic were monitored for long periods of time), was reported in such an over-simplified fashion that it sounded as if the study proved that taking any vitamins was harmful.
Just as I can’t wave a
magic wand and make my allergies go away,
there’s no simple answer to a lack of understanding. I used to think
that ignorance was the only real enemy, and the best remedy was an
informed populace. Now I’m realizing it’s more insidious than that.
Many people are drowning in facts, while starving of understanding.
And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
If you trust Google more than your doctor then maybe it's time
to switch doctors.
--Jadelr and Cristina Cordova
.