So Many Allergy Medications, So Little Time

Any time you approach your doctor or your pharmacist for help with the symptoms of an allergy, they'll offer you your pick from among a bewildering range of possible treatments. They have several antihistamines, corticosteroids, decongestants, combination drugs, natural remedies and so on for you to try at home. And yet, none of these allergy medications is a cure. They are just a way to control the situation and make your life livable. You just have to keep trying something until it works, and then stick with it for aslong as your body decides to have the allergy.

Most people will only take their allergy medications only when they actually have a problem. Experts these days though, feel that pretreatment is a much better way to go about it. When you know that you have an allergy and that your body reacts in a certain way to certain kinds of environment, there's really no reason to wait for everything to swell up and become itchy. You can just take the medicines you need before the symptoms begin to bother you.

Let's quickly run through a couple of the most popular allergy medications there are.

Antihistamines are just about the oldest and best-known allergy medications on earth. You even get them over-the-counter sometimes. Antihistamines, nasal sprays and eyedrops, for instance, are available without prescription. Several kinds of popular names for over-the-counter antihistamines - names like Allegra, Benadryl and Claritin, are ones everyone knows about.

Antihistamines work by making it difficult for your body to let those bothersome histamines loose on you. If you're wondering what histamines are, they are substances that your immune cells produce for no reason, when there's an allergy. The funny thing is, that if you are bothered by how antihistamines make you sleepy, you have to go to a doctor for a prescription for antihistamines that don't make you sleepy. You would think that they would regulate the sleepy stuff and not the stuff that just does its job.

It's hard to make your mind up about what kind of allergic reaction is the most bothersome. When you're all itchy and your eyes and nose won't stop running, it often seems like nothing could be worse than those. But when you have trouble breathing because your airways are all congested and constricted, it feels like you're fighting just to stay alive. Decongestants are some of the most important allergy medications around.

Decongestants work by shrinking swollen tissues in your airways. They also help your body produce less mucus. They can be really useful when you're in the middle of a full-blown liturgy attack. Doctors sometimes recommend that you take combinations - decongestants together with antihistamines, for instance. You don't have to take two pills though. They sell combinations over the counter - with names like a Allegra-D or Claritin-D.

Does Fertility Acupuncture Help?

You mustn't think that acupuncture is just something that dodgy practitioners in back alleys in Chinatown offer you. In some cases, acupuncture is accepted by mainstream medicine, too. Fertility acupuncture is one of those rare cases.

Now this is not to make you think that the medical community has tossed all traditional medical knowledge out the window in favor of acupuncture. Fertility acupuncture to the medical establishment, is only something that works in an assistive role. No doctor at this point believes that you can just accept acupuncture and it will help you get pregnant even if you're not using traditional fertility methods.

If you want to go with a few obscure studies, they do say that acupuncture can help on its own. Mainstream medicine though, only accepts acupuncture in a supporting role.

The science of acupuncture obtains its results in a rather unconventional way. According to the belief system in acupuncture, the body is filled with a kind of vital energy that they call Qi. Many diseases, they believe, merely occur when the body loses the plot on how to balance its energy. To help the body do this, acupuncturists locate energy hubs on the patient's body and try to redirect energy flow with those little needles.

It was only in the year 2002 that researchers discovered that acupuncture could quickly help in cases where women suffered from infertility. The research was done in Germany. Scientists there took up a group of 160 women who were in the process of getting treated with IVF, and tested them with fertility acupuncture. The results of the test were unequivocal. The research concluded that the women did get more easily pregnant with IVF, when they received, fertility acupuncture.

Ever since then, there's been quite a lot of research done on fertility research. They believe that acupuncture might help you relax your muscles, and that it might help the body send more blood to the uterus. The stress-relief benefits of acupuncture might help too, they say. All of these can certainly help a woman's attempts to become pregnant.

Even more surprising, they've found that fertility acupuncture can actually help with male infertility too. Of course, men don't have IVF or anything. You can't help them as they try to get pregnant. You can only treat a man in a general way to perhaps help sperm production,or motility. And this, acupuncture is said to be able to do.

Researchers have found that with regular acupuncture, men with fertility problems are able to produce better quality sperm – sperm is less damaged and more alive.

Do Old Time Remedies Really Work?

As an educated man, I sometimes cringe when my grandmother trots out some of her old time remedies for ailments and sores, because I don't believe they really do anything. I could be wrong, and after all, there is a reason that people did some of the things that they did back in those days, but there is no scientific evidence to back up those remedies, and some of them actually seem quite dangerous. I guess it all depends on who you ask.

One of the old time remedies that actually works is gargling salt water for a sore throat, and I have used this on a number of occasions. My grandmother told me about this when my throat was sore, and I could not believe how much better it felt. There again, however, there is an actual explainable reason that this method works, which is that the salt dries out and eventually kills off the bacteria in your throat that cause the infection. There have been times where that was all I did, and did not take any medication at all, and it eventually got rid of the problem.

On the other hand, one of the old time remedies that my grandmother swears by that I am absolutely terrified to try and categorically refuse to do so is use bleach to whiten your teeth. I remember a few years ago, I told her that I wanted to go and get my teeth cleaned, but was concerned because it had been a while since I had it done and I was worried it would be painful. My grandmother informed me that I should just use bleach, as that will get them even whiter than if I went to the dentist. I informed her that bleach was toxic, but this did little to dissuade her from her position.

Another one of her favorite old time remedies was using baking soda to treat a rash. As a little boy, I had a very severe rash under my arm and she mixed baking soda with water into a paste, and then brushed it over the rash generously! I screamed out in pain, and then rushed into the bathroom and turned on the shower and ran it under the cold water for about 10 minutes before it finally stopped burning, and the rash was worse than before when I came out!

I do not trust old time remedies for the most part, because as I said, there is not scientific proof in most cases that these things work. I have learned the hard way on a couple of them, and I think from now on, I will just avoid them entirely!