The last two weeks have been a killer for all my patients with allergies. First it was the pine trees and then the oak trees that started dumping blankets of yellow dust on everyone’s cars. At first it is hard to tell if the stuffy nose and scratchy throat are just a virus trying to take hold, but once the itchy eyes and the tearing starts, then you know it is allergy season getting to you.
For some people the allergic response stops with symptoms in the nose and throat, but for many others everything feels icky, much like a flu. Why does this happen? What are allergies anyway, and how often are sinus problems due to allergies?
The simplest difference between allergies and sinus trouble due to some form of infection is generally considered to be the length of time you have the symptoms. If things are miserable for more than 10 days, the usual assumption is that you are dealing with an allergic reaction to something. There is a special situation in chronic sinus cases as discovered by the Mayo clinic – 96% of chronic cases have a fungal infection in the sinuses and the patient can be having an allergic reaction to the sinus fungal infection. So really in chronic situations you almost always have both an infection and an allergic reaction.
One of the most important things to remember about sinus infections is that antibiotics do almost no good at all. The reason is simple – antibiotics only affect places that are directly adjacent to the tiny capillary blood vessels, like within 1 or 2 cells away. Even though your sinuses are inside your head, they are a big open space without blood vessels running through the center of it. That space where all that mucus hides out is thousands of cell widths away from the blood vessels that carry the antibiotic around. So skip the antibiotics unless the infection travels into the facial tissue causing bleeding.
To get rid of a normal sinus infection you have to wash out the infection and treat the surface area of the sinus with something that will kill the bacteria. Many essential oils are good for killing bacteria, like thyme, rosemary, and oregano, but you must be very careful as these are very powerful and can easily burn your sinus tissue. We used to sell a thyme solution to use in your sinus rinse bottle called “A Good Thyme” and we still carry the ready made spray called Boggy Buster. Recently I upgraded the thyme product with a more complete product of my own design that includes not only three different essential oils, but aloe vera for inflammation and real salt + baking soda for making the saline solution with which you use to rinse the inner sinuses.
That’s all well and good for infections, but what about pollen allergies? Since pollen allergies are a direct contact type of response, staying away from the pollens by keeping indoors with an air cleaner keep the pollen count down is a big help. It also helps to rinse the pollens out of the sinuses with normal saline solution – preferable made with real salt and not the chemically poisoned
typical table salt. Classically this is done with a Neti Pot – something that looks like a tiny teapot. Personally I find that a NeilMed sinus rinser is much easier to use. Just squeeze the bottle and let the rinse flow up one nostril and out the other. Tilt the head forward to rinse the upper sinuses. Get one here.
Most everyone knows that allergies are caused by our immune system overreacting to things in our environment, but that doesn’t say why. Well there are lots of reasons – mostly the same reasons that also create leaky gut, like toxic exposures, stress, bad diet, and so on. On the tiny level special immune cells called dendritic cells line the sinus and the gut as well initiate the allergic response. All day and night long these cells have arms that reach out into the sinus and gut space and grab whatever is around from the outside world. The dendritic cells essentially “feel” the things by matching up sequences of amino acids in the proteins to remembered patterns that it has decided to tell us that we are under attack from some killer bug. Its job is to be the early warning system for the immune system to tell it to be ready for a fight. The problem is lots of things feel the same as bad bacteria – like all the stuff we react allergically to. The body’s immune system thinks it is under bacterial attack when it is exposed to innocent pollens.
Things like a vitamin D deficiency greatly increase the number of reactive dendritic cells. A vitamin A deficiency makes the dendritic cells overly sensitive and reactive. Inflammation from any cause feeds into the reaction loop causing more of a reaction. Many different stressors trigger increases in the chain of events that ultimately result in the last immune cell in the reaction, the mast cell, to release histamine.
Histamine is a major cause of the inflammation response in the body. This is a good and important thing in the right place at the right time. With allergies histamine is being released all over the place and causing us our misery. Anything we can do to decrease histamine release is a wonderful decrease in our miserable symptoms. This is why we take antihistamine drugs, but like most drugs they have lots of negative side effects. The one most concerning to me is their effect on brain function and the development of dementia. However there are many histamine fighting herbs without those side effects, like stinging nettle, butterbur, and black seed oil as well as nutraceuticals like quercetin, and bromelain. Other nutrients help stabilize the mast cells to decrease histamine release like vitamin C, turmeric, ginger, holy basil, and selenium. These can all be useful in fighting off the seasonal allergy attack by starting on them before the season gets into full swing.
The stress hormone corticotropin also destabilizes mast cells, so getting enough sleep and reducing both physical and emotional stress decreases the allergy response. But for the super chronic sinus sufferer, we have to dig really deep into what is the root cause of over-activation of our mast cells – things like heavy metal toxicity, chronic hidden infections, and the ever popular leaky gut.
So like most everything in the body, our simple sniffles in response to oak pollen is really a deep, complex subject. Healing our sniffles is really about getting healthy on all levels – not a bad idea anyway.