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.