Allergies can be a tricky condition when trying to diagnose. Many factors come into play, and they present themselves in different ways.
Whether coming from pollen, animals, insects, or food, your allergies can be treated, and you don’t have to avoid all the things you love because of them. Knowing your family’s medical history is always the first place we start.
Certain conditions can be inherited through your parents, and if we know that, it can give us insight into your situation and a head start on treating it. Allergies can affect all your senses and make even your most enjoyable hobbies unbearable; that’s no way to live.
To get to the bottom of your allergies, we first must examine your history.
Can You Inherit Allergies?
Yes, you can inherit allergies from your parents, but there’s slightly more to it than that. Unfortunately, there are always exceptions to the rule in the medical world.
It does run in some families. However, there are certainly families where almost everybody will have bad allergies, but there are also people who will suffer from allergies with no family history.
We think it’s probably some combination of our genetics and some organic new overreaction that’s going on.
Symptoms of Allergies
The most common complaints we see are:
- Runny nose
- Itchiness
- Sneezing
Several things can cause your nose to run or for your nose to feel stopped up. Sometimes that’s infections. One of the main ways we can differentiate between infectious causes and allergic causes is when people have sneezing and itching. Sneezing and itching are pretty specific to allergies.
We’ll undoubtedly see people that suffer from nasal allergies and irritation in their nose and can lead to headaches as a major symptom of their allergies.
Allergies can cause a sore throat, and it’s vital that we look into other causes of sore throat as well.
Best Allergy Treatments
The first step for just about everyone is to start with a nasal steroid or with at least a nasal saline rinse. Those are both really safe interventions.
They don’t have many side effects because they’re just topical treatments within the nose and don’t require you to be on an oral medication. We almost always will start with nasal saline rinse just to rinse the allergens out of the nose and then a nasal steroid such as fluticasone that will help the nose to be less over-reactive.
A lot of times, we also encourage patients to try an antihistamine. Many of the non-drowsy antihistamines are available as a generic and can be found over the counter and are relatively cheap.
How We Can Help
Our ENT specialists at ENT Consultants of East Tennessee focus our attention on determining the root cause of each patient to explore and develop the best treatment strategy that fits your unique needs.
If you struggle with allergies, we are here to provide education about your condition as well as relief. Contact us anytime with your questions as we are always standing by, ready to help.
