By: Tedi Sarah
JAN 13, 2015
I used to have bad seasonal and environmental allergies. Emphasis on the words used to, because I don’t anymore. I remember as a little girl going to camp at the local humane society where I got to interact with the shelter animals. I loved that camp so much but it was almost unbearable for me to be there because of my allergies. Within a short period of time being in the shelter I would develop congestion, runny nose, swollen, watery, itchy eyes and intense fatigue. At times it felt impossible to keep my eyes open, all because of my allergies. These allergy symptoms would repeat every spring and summer, and anytime I was around animals.
As happens so often for people with environmental allergies, I kept having to use stronger and stronger medications as I built up a tolerance to the ones I had used before. In college my allergies worsened and it got to the point where I was having to take over-the-counter allergy medication every single day in spring and early summer. The year after I graduated college my allergies worsened even more and the over-the-counter medication no longer relieved me of my symptoms. Then I had to move onto the stronger version of my allergy medicine that you have to ask for from behind the counter at the pharmacy. And it still didn’t help that much. My allergies made my daytimes hard to enjoy and my nighttimes restless and sleepless.
So, I sought help from my doctor. We discussed my symptoms, what medications I had already taken, and what my options were. She told me that my best option was strong, daily prescription allergy medication to manage my symptoms. But something didn’t feel right to me after that appointment. My best and only option was to take a very strong medication, that comes with its own slew of side effects, every single day for the rest of my life?!
And then, something *clicked* and my whole perspective shifted. I was an anthropology and evolution buff in college, and now that I was questioning what to do about my allergies, I realized from an evolutionary perspective it doesn’t make much sense that humans would evolve through natural selection to be allergic to our normal surroundings. I realized it made absolutely no sense that I would need a very strong medication each and everyday to just be in this world. The idea that I needed medication to just comfortably breathe the air around me all of a sudden seemed downright illogical. I wasn’t willing to accept this as a reality. While it does make sense that actual pollutants would cause allergies in healthy people, the fact that I needed to rely on a strong pill to literally just be around natural things like trees, flowers, grass, animals, and dust suddenly seemed absolutely flawed.
