Trying Something New

I think I understand why the allergist says that he doesn't think food allergies have anything to do with my asthma, but there's a reason I disagree. It's true, I don't typically have anaphylactic-type reactions to foods. Soy milk (not edamame or tofu--just soy milk) makes my throat swell and my mouth itch, but other than that, I don't have acute reactions to things I eat. What I have noticed is that it is not uncommon for me to be breathing pretty well before a meal, and then to be gasping for air shortly after eating. To me that says there's something going on with the food.

Because I want to figure out what's going on that is making my body so mad, last week I went to a naturopath. Actually, I went to the teaching clinic affiliated with the major natural medicine university located outside of Seattle. I met with two advanced students, supervised by a naturopathic physician. The students were great. They spent an hour and a half with me, got a really complete medical history, asked about my symptoms, how long they had been occurring, what else was going on in my life at the time and what my home and family life were like. They explained what they call the bucket theory, that you can think of your body as a bucket with a spigot at the bottom. Stressors fill up the bucket, and your body eliminates them through the "spigot" of your lungs, skin and digestive tract. If you take on more than your body can eliminate, things get out of whack. That made sense to me and seemed like it could be consistent with what I'm experiencing. Even if I'm not "allergic" to certain things by the allergist's definition, maybe I'm sensitive to things and my body is overloaded and staging an immune response unnecessarily. The students and their supervising physician prescribed me a couple of things to help bring down inflammation and asked me to keep track of what I ate for a week and then to come back for a follow-up visit to figure out what's next.