Solving Allergies - with Dr. Doni!

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donni Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hey guys.

This episode is from one of Dr. Donnie's live Facebook streams where she answered listeners questions live on Facebook.

I'm Dr. Donni Wilson and I'm a naturopathic doctor. I graduated from Bastyr University in the year 2000, so that's 20 years ago. And I completed a residency in naturopathic medicine as well and at Bastyr. And I've been helping patients ever since then. I am located in the Tri State area, New York, Connecticut. But really I help patients from around the world because my practice is virtual for me. Really the way I look at it is our health issues are ultimately related to our stress exposure, right? Because what we know is that we all have, we're all human, we all have our genetic tendencies, but the genetic tendencies are only part of the equation determining our health. Really what happens is our stress exposure. Various types of stress exposure turns on our genetic tendencies and that's what makes it so we each have different things that come up, whether it's digestive issues or immune system issues like allergies that we're going to talk about today or hormone related issues, sleep issues.

You know, all different scenarios. But ultimately it comes back to how stress has turned on our genetic tendencies and stress has affected us in ways that make us susceptible to these health issues. And so that's what I study and that's what I help people with, is really about stress recovery. So any, you know, feel free to comment if you can relate to that. If especially right now when we all have not only our usual stresses but we have our extra stresses going on related to so much change in our lives. First of all, having stress related to fear about catching a virus or, or even having loved ones who might be sick from a virus. So that's a huge stress. We also have stress of just our work environment changing. Either maybe you're not able to work right now or you're having to work from home and learn how to do your job from home.

Maybe you have your kids at home and there's extra stress with just how to help, you know, take care of your kids while juggling everything else. Those are some of the things I've been hearing from everybody. Let's see. Allergies. Yes. Thank you for your question. What to do about runny nose and itchy eyes. So let's dive into more about allergies. By the way, I grew up in the northwest, so Washington and Oregon, and I had terrible allergies. Like, I get it. I think when I was in college, I had such bad allergies. I think I would just walk around literally with a roll of toilet paper or if I didn't do that, that's what I wished. I. Because my nose was running so much and I was sneezing so much constantly. And at that point in time, I tried everything. I tried over the counter things for allergies, every type of allergy medication. I went to doctors and tried medications. And the thing maybe you can relate to this is that everything I tried over the counter medications and prescription medications for allergies just made me feel worse. I would feel groggy and dry and heavy, headachy. And I was like, wait a minute, if I feel worse with the medication, I'd rather just deal with the allergies. But the allergies would really ruin my spring time because I didn't want to be outside with the pollen. And I, I just was like, when can this be over? When can this pollen situation be over? So I also have a history of dust allergies. So even when it wasn't spring allergies, if I cleaned the house or, you know, dusted, I would be sneezing my head off. And I think probably some of you who have allergies can relate to just that constant drippy nose sneezing a million times. And.

There can also be other symptoms related to allergies. Like you might get sore throat, you might be coughing.

It might be disrupting your sleep. It can definitely cause headaches, sinus pressure. And when you have allergies, it can also make you susceptible to sinus infections. And if you're blowing your nose a lot, it can make your nose all raw and sometimes irritated or even get a little infection around your nose from blowing your nose. Believe me, I've been there, done that. And what I can say now is my allergies are like so minimal. I would like to say it was zero. It's basically zero. Now I have the tiniest, you know, maybe I'll. If I'm right under some pollen, I might sneeze once and that's it. So it's. Now I Feel so glad to be able to, you know, say that I'm not having allergies. And they're one of the first times in my life and I want to share with you how I got to there because it's one of those things where a lot of times we feel like allergies is impossible to change. Like we kind of have this understanding that once you have allergies that it might just stay that way. And you know, certainly you can go to the allergist, right, and they can test you for pollen allergy, grass, mold, dust, animals, and then you know for sure which, what you're allergic to. And they can, you can do allergy shots. Maybe some of you have tried allergy shots where, which is essentially like a low dose exposure until your immune system kind of stops reacting to the allergen. But those can be, you know, it takes a lot of time cost and injections so you have to go in and out of the doctor's office for these injections over sometimes years. And I do have patients who've told me that they get some benefit from going through that. But to me that's a, that's, you know, that's a lot to go through for. Not sure how much percentage benefit, if any of you have gone through that and seen results or not seen results. I'd be happy to hear from you. By the way, of course, with recording this, you know, this is me just sharing educational information. I really want to be able to share with you my experience and what I've seen help. But I want to make sure you know that you need to check with your doctor. I'm not. This doesn't create a doctor patient relationship and I don't at all intend for any of this information to be medical, you know, diagnosis or treatment or anything like that. So feel please know that this is, this is. I want you to have information because I believe that when you have information about your body and what has helped other people, then you can make informed decisions and you can know your body better. So that's really the intention of this information, is for you to have knowledge to help yourself more. So, so anyway, so all right, so we've covered common symptoms of allergies. We've covered, you know, working with the allergist to identify your allerg. There's also food allergies of course, like some people have like, you know, a classic food allergy would be to like shrimp or peanuts where the person is exposed and they have to go to the emergency room because it's affecting their breathing. There's also food sensitivities, which I help a lot of patients with. And I have to say, if you asked me, hey, Dr. Donnie, what helped helped me to get rid of my allergies? That's what I want to share with you today. And I would say that one of the most surprising things that helped me with my spring pollen allergies was figuring out my food sensitivities, because I don't have food allergies. Like, there's no foods that will send me to the emergency room. Growing up, I did figure out that I have a mild allergy to apples, for example, but it just causes itchy throat and then it goes away. But food sensitivities are different antibodies. So classic allergies are caused by an antibody called IgE. We just name these antibodies with a letter. So the letter E is when you have an immediate response, and it triggers histamine and it triggers all of this, you know, respiratory fluid and swelling and even swelling in your throat. That's an ige, immediate response allergy. And then there's the other antibodies called IgA and IgG. Again, they just give them different letters. There's also an IgM, for example, but the IgA and IgG cause more delayed responses. So IgA can cause reactions even over a few days or a week, and IGG can cause reactions even over three weeks. And these delayed responses, especially to foods, you know, common ones would be like dairy products, casein, Whey are the proteins in dairy? Gluten, for example, is IgA or IgG antibodies. A lot of times you don't realize you're reacting because it might not immediately make you sneeze or immediately make you cough. And so you're not putting it together. But these delayed reactions will.

Can.

Make you more susceptible to the pollen allergies. So this is the thing. I mean, I didn't even learn this in naturopathic medical school 20 years ago. I figured this out by for myself. I had gluten and dairy food sensitivities. And once I took those foods out of my diet, now we're talking at least 17 years ago. I measure that based on my daughter, by the way, my daughter, who's now 17, because being pregnant with her and when she was a baby really even gave me that extra push to figure this out. And so I became gluten and dairy free thinking, okay, I've got to solve her digestive issues and my digestive issues, which it did. It made a huge difference. But to my surprise, the longer that I was gluten and dairy free, the less and less allergies I had to pollen in springtime. And so I think it's because the food sensitivities increase inflammation, increase your immune reactivity. And so essentially the immune system is on guard and ready to react. And it's ready to react to any foods we eat, but it's also ready to react to other things we are exposed to in our environment, like pollen and dust and mold and so on. You don't often connect what you're eating with other areas of your body. Like, we usually think if I'm eating something, it's going to cause digestive issues. And sometimes it does. But for a lot of people, they might, their digestion might feel fine, but it's showing up on their skin as allergies or like eczema or other people. It's showing up in terms of allergies and their sinuses. And so that's really, I would say if you've been dealing with long term allergies, whether it's, you know, wherever in your body that you notice allergies, I would definitely recommend doing a food sensitivity panel so that you know for sure. Now you can do what's called an elimination diet, where you, you sort of guess, you decide, okay, well, dairy and gluten are common food allergens. Let me just try avoiding dairy and gluten for three weeks and see if I feel better. And you can do that way. And then you, after three weeks, you add them back in and notice if you feel worse when you add them. Now my, what I call my stress remedy program is an elimination diet. It guides you to eliminate dairy, gluten and eggs. And then you. So you could follow the stress remedy program and then add those foods back in. Now the thing I would say is that.

Sometimes three weeks is not enough. Sometimes it's, you know, after you avoid a food for three weeks, might not be enough to really be able to tell. And you guys see my cat Des here, maybe he wants to join us.

Sometimes.

It'S, you know, it's just that it's not long enough to be able to help you recover. And here's, here's my thinking on that. And this brings us to the next point of how to solve your allergies and decrease your allergies overall is to me, it's about leaky gut. This thing called leaky gut, which some of you maybe have heard about. Leaky gut. Leaky gut is when the small intestinal cells, right. So in our intestines it's cells all lining the intestinal wall. The job of those cells is to make sure our food is all the way digested and that only the nutrients from our food can get absorbed into our body, which is the healthy version. But what happens is when we are exposed to stress, which of course, we all have stress, and sometimes if we're exposed to different medications or other, you know, pesticides, for example, a lot of things can cause leaky gut. It damages the intestinal cells. And what happens then is the food is not as well digested. It's able to leak through the intestinal lining, and the immune system sitting there right on the other side, waiting to protect us from viruses and foreign substances. So as soon as this undigested food gets through, the immune system's like, well, that's not an amino acid and that's not glucose, so I better attack it. And so the immune system starts attacking our food. And once that happens, now we have this full immune response going on in the digestion among the intestines. But that immune response can spread anywhere in the body. Sometimes I use this analogy of like a drop of ink in a gallon of water, right? So as soon as that drop of ink, blue ink goes in, it's going to spread throughout the whole gallon of water. And.

Then you're going to feel that inflammation anywhere. So it might appear on your skin, it might make you then more susceptible to pollen allergies. It might make you. For other people, it's more like headaches or joint pain or, you know, it can cause symptoms anywhere in the body, even autoimmunity, menstrual related issues, fertility issues, increased likelihood for hpv, abnormal Pap smear. I've seen a lot of things related anxiety, depression, dementia. So this inflammation from our gut caused by leaky gut is huge. And I feel like, yes, we will talk about things, natural ways that you can block histamine and prevent your allergies. But I feel like it's so important for you to know that if you get to this deeper level of managing the leaky gut, you could actually decrease the allergies so you don't have to take so much stuff. And I really think that that's why in my body, I'm finally to the place where I don't have to do. Hi there, Dr. Zen. I don't have to do so much to manage.

My allergies because the leaky gut has been addressed. And not only has leaky gut been addressed, but my adrenals have been addressed. The adrenal glands make cortisol and adrenaline our stress hormones. And when we're stressed, that cortisol and adrenaline gets affected. It's not. It's going to be either too high or too low. And as soon as your cortisol and adrenaline is either too high or too low, if you have a genetic tendency to allergies, they're going to come up, you're going to start to have allergies because stress is throwing off your stress system at making your immune system more likely to have, you know, allergies. So here's the thing is, I always feel like, yes, we can do things that are going to be more natural ways to be antihistamine, but then you're having to take, you know, and it's fine. You can. I'm going to show you, I'm going to tell you all exactly what I do for natural antihistamines. But I don't want you to miss this deeper level that if you can address your stress, if you can help your body stay healthy while stressed by looking at your cortisol and adrenaline and get them balanced and address the leaky gut and get off of your food allergens already, you're going to have less histamine already, you're going to have less allergies. Okay, so I think you guys got that we can do. We got to look at food sensitivities. We've got to look at leaky gut. We've got to heal the leaky gut. Because a lot of times I hear people say, well, I'm just going to avoid these foods forever. But the thing is, is that that's not going to solve the leaky gut. We need to help. We can heal those intestinal cells. We can. I've got Des's hair in my nose. We can use digestive enzymes. We can use glutamine and dgl. And what I talk about in my discussion about gut health, we can use these things to heal the leaky gut so that you can get ahead of this.

Oh, yes. Here's a good question. A lot of the foods that came up on your food panel are foods you ate often. So when that happens, if, say, you do a food panel and you get it back and it's like, maybe you don't even eat dairy. Maybe you're like, I'm eating almond milk or almonds instead of cow milk, and I'm already gluten free. But I eat eggs all the time, and eggs came up on my food panel. So what's happening there is that's an exact definition of leaky gut. Because with leaky gut, what happens is we start reacting to the foods we eat all the time.

So if you're eating those foods all the time and you start reacting to them, then you know you have leaky gut. So it's because some people then will feel like, oh, I should just give up on the test because what's the point if it's just going to show me what I'm. That's the wrong way to look at it. The way to look at it is if you're reacting to the food you're eating, it means your gut is leaky and it needs to get healed. But the good news is there's ways to heal leaky gut. Definitely. I'll post here and definitely want to follow up. Check my blog, because I have a lot of information on how to heal leaky gut. And I'm just putting together a new course that's going to be like a group online course like this where we can do this together. And we, we're going to do a food sensitivity panel together and then we're going to work on healing leaky gut together. So I can show you exactly how to do it because I know sometimes it's hard, it can seem impossible, and you're inundated with lots of different information and you're just like, not sure what to do. But we can heal leaky gut and I can show you how.

Colostrum, she's asking about. Yes. So this is a good question in terms of healing leaky gut questions.

Colostrum is a great example of using substance from an animal source. Now, colostrum, one tricky thing is it can be from a dairy source. So if you're super sensitive to dairy, what they do is you can get colostrum where they've removed all the dairy. So that's better. We have that in my store@drdonnystore.com you can get colostrum where they've taken away the dairy. The idea with Colostrum is it's helping your immune system and your digestion to heal. But there's other ways to do that too. They've now we found products. There's one called SBI Protect. And SBI Protect is one of my favorite products to do something similar, maybe even better than what, than what the colostrum can do. Just from what I've seen from patients, the SBI has the immune system support that you get from colostrum, but it doesn't have any of the Dairy component. And so it's much easier to take and it seems to be more concentrated. Definitely is a great way to basically boost. Now this is the thing with immune system. It's complicated, right? Like I think sometimes with our immune system we think of it, we want to think of it as black and white. Like either we have a high immunity or low immunity. You know, is it on or off? And the thing I've learned about immune system over the years is that our immune system is complex. We can't really fit it into a box or a black and white. You know, we have to just know that the immune system is complex and it's also determined by our stress and our genetics. So one person's immune system may be more likely to tend toward histamine reactions and allergies like we've been talking about. Another person's immune system then might be more likely to create autoimmunity or both. You could have allergies and autoimmunity or and in some cases we're talking about immune system as being too low and not being able to protect you from infections. And sometimes all of that goes on at the same time. So that's just to say, you know, when we talk about something that might be supportive to the immune system in the digestive tract, like we're talking about leaky gut healing. My favorites for leaky gut healing really are digestive enzymes because they want to get your food digested better so it doesn't trigger an immune response. We want to get glutamine because that's the essential nutrient for your intestinal cells. Got to have glutamine for those intestinal cells or they're not going to be able to keep up with managing your food and preventing reactions. The next thing on the list would be dgl if you dgl, which is an herbal licorice that's very anti inflammatory and healing to the digestion. If you can't do dgl, I would do slippery elm or both. And sometimes we also use aloe, but we're using herbs that are anti inflammatory and help the system heal. Now those are the essential beginning steps. And for someone with severe leaky gut and severe allergies and severe histamine reactions, we have to start very slowly because here's the thing is it's like a paradox. The more severe your histamine and leaky gut, then that means we have to start more slowly. We have to start with fewer things. Sometimes all we can do is do minor diet changes. And as the leaky gut Starts to heal, then we can add digestive enzymes. Would only add pancreatic enzymes, not HCl, not nothing complex, just very simple pancreatic enzymes to help digest the food. Then as the leaky gut's healing, we can add glutamine little by little. Then we can add DGL little by little. So basically, to me, the severity of leaky gut, because leaky gut is not just. It can go from severe to moderate to mild. And we wanted to get it to over to mild. So as it heals, then you can add more help. It's kind of this paradox. But it's important to know, because if you're one of those people like I used to be, where everything I tried, I felt worse. Like, I would try an herb and I would be sneezing more, you know, so you just have to know for yourself, if you try things and you feel worse because you aren't sensitive and you do tend to allergies, then you probably have to start with less. Less is more in that case. So definitely, I always recommend, you know, really noticing how your body responds. And if you feel worse with anything, gotta stop and back up and go, okay, my body's not ready for that yet. And that can kind of tell you. Then you can gauge, because a lot of times when you're working on healing, a lot of times I'll say it's like we're in a dark tunnel and we are out at sea with no lighthouse, you know, and you feel like you don't know which way you're going or where if you're on the right track. So if you can just know, okay, any symptoms your body gives you are like little lights on the, on the journey. And if your body, if you try something new and you feel worse, okay, that means we got to back up and start more gently, start more slowly. And as you progress, then maybe you consider, hey, maybe now I want to add in some other healing for my gut, Especially if in the large intestine, if you have imbalanced gut bacteria, that can also increase your allergies. So if you're getting bloating or if you can do a stool panel, you know, we do these DNA analysis stool panels, and we can see, see the bacteria and we can see what's too high or too low or yeast, for example. And when that. Those bacteria get out of balance, that also makes you more susceptible to allergic symptoms. So we need to figure that out and get the bacteria back on track. On the stool panel, we can also see how your immune system is called secretory iga. How it's doing, do you have enough protective immunity in your digestion? Because if you don't, you're more susceptible to imbalanced gut bacteria. So especially if the secretory IGA is low, that tells us there's leaky gut. And the way we address it is this, you know, kind of bringing it back to this concept of colostrum or sbi, protect to help get your secretory IGA working again. Because the secretory IGA will actually protect you. It's not going to increase allergies. It's going to calm down your immune system and protect you. So that's a, you know, this is where it's important to understand the immune system and how you can support on this side and, and help calm down the histamine on this other side.

So.

Let'S see, let's come back to talk about histamine.

So histamine is separate from the antibodies because we've been talking about antibodies like IgE, IgA, IgG, separately. There's this thing called histamine, and histamine comes from mast cells. Some of you maybe have heard of mast cell syndrome, which is another way to basically say allergies or histamine intolerance. Sometimes you hear it referred to as histamine intolerance. Basically, it's when your body is just very likely to release histamine and histamine. Basically, you're gonna know it because it's these symptoms we've been talking about. Histamine will cause redness, swelling, sneezing fluid.

So that can happen anywhere in the body. It's going to just be redness and swelling. And itchiness can be a histamine reaction, too. Itchy nose, itchy eyes, itchy throat. Some of you could probably relate to that. So.

Yeah. And she's mentioning Ehlers Danlo, which I also have Ehlers Danlos syndrome. And I'm sure that's why I. Oh, by the way, this is Zorro here. I'm sure that's why I had so much struggle with allergies and histamine throughout my life as well. Ehlers Danlo, by the way, is we can talk more about one day. Is a condition, a collagen issue where your, your joints are hypermobile. And Ehlers Danlo, you can see my little hypermobile fingers here is associated with more histamine reactions. So histamine.

For some people, it just shows up as the springtime allergies. But other people, histamine can really be a digestive issue. And I think that looking at it from that perspective can really help us understand my original point, which is that to manage your.

Allergies, we really have to look at the gut. We can't not handle the gut. If you really want your allergies to go away.

We really need to handle the gut because. And those of you who have a lot of histamine intolerance and histamine reactions in your digestion, or say a bacterial overgrowth like SIBO is bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine we talked about, when that's happening, you've got leaky gut, imbalanced gut bacteria, your immune system is going to try to protect you. And so when it's trying to protect you, it creates all this histamine. So a big part of that is avoiding foods that trigger histamine is one place to look too. Besides the food allergens, that helps. We talked about that. But you also want to look at foods that trigger histamine. And there's lots of lists out there. I have a blog post about histamine triggering foods as well. Some of the ones that I've seen the most would be citrus fruits, strawberries. Oh my gosh. Strawberries used to make me. So I would get canker sores from strawberries. And that's also a histamine reaction, by the way, is canker sores. If some of you get canker sores, you. You get how painful they are. Oh my gosh. Then you don't want to eat or talk or anything. So glad to not have canker sores. Oh, boy. Those things are very painful, by the way. Sometimes for people, you'll get nausea in your like or stomach feels nausea. That tells you there's probably a lot of redness and histamine going on in there. And we need to calm it down. We need to eliminate those histamine triggering foods. Chocolate can be a histamine trigger. Let's see what's some of the other ones. Even nuts, A lot of nuts can be a histamine trigger, which is tricky because here you are trying to avoid dairy and gluten because those are inflammatory foods, but ends up you're eating more nuts, and the nuts trigger histamine. So it can definitely be tricky to try. You can end up feeling like, what am I going to eat? You know, what can I eat here? If you start to realize that a lot of the food you're eating are triggering histamine, believe me, we're talking my life here. Because this is what I've had to do. So if any of you. I know sometimes it can feel like you're all alone in this and you're like, why me? But it's just, I mean, I try to just think back. We're human and our immune system is trying to protect us. So what we can do is try to help manage the environment that we're exposing our body to and the allergens we're exposed to. But again, the thing that's made the biggest difference for me is not just avoidance. Believe me, I lived in a world where I was just having to avoid constantly. What I found made the biggest difference is the adrenal healing, which is cortisol and adrenaline balancing, and the leaky gut healing and getting my bacteria and my gut back on track. That made the biggest difference.

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So look at those food, those foods that trigger histamine, especially this time of year, especially if for you it's mainly spring allergies. Even then you might find, hey, I've got to stay away from some of these histamine triggering foods right now because I don't want to add to my allergic response. And then from there.

Another one that's important is to drink water. I prefer filtered water. But another thing you might consider that I've seen helpful for histamine is to put a little pinch of sea salt like we're talking like Celtic sea salt, where it has all the minerals in there, not like just sodium, but actually real sea salt. You can either put a pinch in your water or put it like a teaspoon in a gallon of water. But the sea salt really can help mitigate the histamine reactivity, maybe some of you have noticed that too. So that's a trick. And then I would also, when I was really having a lot of sinus issues, I would even potentially put sea salt in a bowl of water. And then you can, especially if you tend to. Oh, my gosh, I used to get such sinus infections and I would just make a bowl of filtered water, put a pinch of sea salt, stick my nose in it and sniff it up. You know, you're not going to leave your face in the water. You're going to just do a sniff, sniff the sea salt into your sinuses, blow it all back out again. But sea salt is anti inflammatory, antihistamine, antibacterial. So it can really just help clear things out of there. Yes, you can get various saline nasal sprays, but honestly, with the saline nasal sprays, I didn't find near the benefit of just sea salt and water. And I think of it like just swimming in the ocean. It's almost like you just went swimming in the ocean and got a little sea salt water up in your nose and blow it out. But here's the thing. Let me tell you about some of my favorites for supplements that you can use for allergies. And one, this is also, this is a nasal spray. You can find this. This is called nasochrome. This is a.

Natural antihistamine. It's a substance called cromolyn sodium and chromolyn sodium. They also make in capsules, by the way, and can use it for digestive histamine issues. But chromolin sodium in a nasal spray, you can get over the counter or we have it at Dr. Donny's store. Squirt it in your nose morning and night. Now, best, they say, is to use it regularly even before the allergy season starts. I end up just using it as needed. Like, something catches me and I sneeze, I go use a nasochrome nasal spray here and there, and that's all I need. So the nasochrome can be a lifesaver. And it doesn't, it's not steroidal. It doesn't have any side effects. You don't become dependent on it. So it's just a really great antihistamine. I just wish more people knew about it because it's available out there and it doesn't have any negative associated with it. I also my other favorite, and I'm going to see if Lou can bring this so I can show you. Lou, if you can hear me, bring me One of those hesperidin or hmc. One of my favorites, all time favorites, I've used this for so long, is something called hesperidin methyl chowcone, or we call it HMC for short. And.

HMC is, I think comes from the peel of an onion. It's like. Or the peel of an orange. Hang on a second, let me grab a. You have one of those HMCs there. I'm gonna show it to them. By the way, when I was in Russia recently, they actually eat the peel of the orange and the grapefruit. It's amazing to me.

They dry it. I wish I could show you one. But they slice the orange and the grapefruit, which of course these are citrus fruits, so that could trigger histamine, but they dry it and then they actually eat the, the peel, which is to me is super interesting because it's in the peel of the orange where the antihistamines are. And maybe the problem is that we've been eating citrus without the peel and that's why we're reacting to it. If we would eat the peel, we would get the antihistamine part. But instead of having to eat the peel of an orange, you can just use hesperidin, which is a natural antihistamine. The great thing about hesperidin is that it can prevent the mast cells from releasing histamine. These are capsules and you can take. I usually gauge the dosing. You could take one or two even every four hours if you need to. What I find for myself is it decreases any of the fluid production. So you're not having all that runny nose and fluid going on all the time.

And that really makes a difference. It decreases the inflammation. I also use hesperidin, by the way, for any viral infections that cause fluid. Also because the thing bacteria love is bacteria love when fluid is sitting around. So we need to get rid of that fluid in order to prevent a bacterial infection. And plus we want to get rid of it because it's going to feel a lot better. That fluid sitting there and dripping all the time makes you crazy. It's like you have to carry around tissue or towel all the time. You just want to turn off the faucet. So between, you know, the nasochrome twice a day and the hesperidin capsules, sometimes even four times a day. Now, at a certain point you might notice you're feeling like a little bit dry, but it's not going to be anywhere near as drying as the over the counter Antihistamine, histamines. And it doesn't tend to cause grogginess, fogginess, fatigue, any of that. Now some of you may have heard of quercetin, you know, like Q U E R C E T I N. Quercetin is very similar to hesperidin. It's also a natural antihistamine, plant based, you know, from a plant source. And quercetin can be wonderful also. Maybe some of you have used quercetin and quercetin can work similarly. And I find that some people respond better to quercetin than hesperidin. So if you, or vice versa. So if you've tried quercetin and you felt like it wasn't very effective, try hesperidin. Or if you tried hesperidin and you wanna try something else, try quercetin. You can also use them together. But I just find for myself that hesperidin seems to work a little better. And there's products that have these, these things in combination. Like this is a product, maybe some of you know, dehist.

So the idea here is that it's going to block histamine and it has quercetin in it, but it also has stinging nettles, which is an herb that is an antihistamine. You can also get stinging nettles by itself. And then this product has some vitamin C. Did you know vitamin C is actually antihistamine? So you can, you know, one of the simplest things you can do for allergies is take like 500 or a thousand milligrams of vitamin C twice a day. Because vitamin C is going to help block the histamine and it's going to be boosting your immune system against viruses at the same time. But vitamin C is a nice, simple, especially safe for kids. Maybe they'll, maybe you can just get them to take some vitamin C. Kids a lot of times do well with hesperidin because you can open the capsules if you needed to and then dehist. A lot of people love because it has the combination. It also has bromelain. Bromelain is a enzyme and when you take it away from food, it's anti inflammatory. So that's when we use bromelain and take it away from food. It's anti inflammatory for wherever your body has inflammation. So we can use it for sinus inflammation, lung inflammation.

Joint inflammation, you name it. Bromelain away from food will be anti inflammatory. So that's what they have in the dehist. And this is another product that a lot of people love to help with their allergies. Another one I want to make sure and show you because this one actually made a huge difference for me. This is a homeopathic remedy. Now, some of you may know about homeopathy. Homeopathy is, is a medicine, ancient medicine of dilutions. So it's diluted substances and what homeopaths found back in history. And homeopathy is used a lot still in India today. It's one of the main medicines used in India.

That when we use these dilutions of substances. Hey there, Caroline. We can, when we dilute the substance and we match it to the symptoms. So a homeopathic remedy for allergies is going to have the homeopathic remedies in there that help with itchy eyes, runny nose, sneezing, inflammation. And so we put those in a combination and that's what you find in the triple allergy defense is a combination of homeopathic remedies for allergies. And I have to say, when they were formulating, this was back when I was still having some allergies. And one of the remedies in here made a huge difference for me. I was having still a year where I was sneezing. I just didn't even want to leave the house. I'm like, shut the windows, shut the doors. I'm not leaving. I'm quarantining myself basically until allergies are done. Maybe some of you felt that way. And.

One of the ingredients in this triple allergy, which happens to be the homeopathic remedy of flaxseeds, some of you may, you know, know flaxseeds, just like, you know, the little brown flaxseeds we eat for our digestion. But when you use the homeopathic remedy for flax seeds, it helps with allergies. And that's in this formula along with other things. The nice thing with this is it's a liquid, it's gluten free, dairy free, all that. These all are gluten free, dairy free. And you just do a few drops in your mouth, you can use it preventively. So you could use, you could do it like once a day. You could use it as needed. So if you started sneezing or you notice some allergic symptoms, you could then use a triple allergy defense, you know, multiple times a day. And so that's nice because it's homeopathic. And homeopathic remedies are safe for children, safe during pregnancy. And so that's a really great solution. And A lot of times, honestly, what we do is I encourage you to find the right combination for you because it's probably not just one thing. You know, you're going to want to make the diet changes, you're going to want to make sure you're doing your self care right. What I call self care is like getting enough sleep, getting some stress reduction, like meditation, journaling, taking a walk, calling a friend, and then some exercise or movement. So you want to do your self care that's going to help reduce your allergies. And.

Then you can layer in any of these potentials that can help decrease your histamine and allergic responses. And you want to see what works best for you. You know, for you. If you get a lot of sinus symptoms, I would use the nasal chrome nasal spray. If you prefer homeopathic remedies, add that in. If you like to have, you know, capsules around that work pretty fast, I would use, I would get hesperidin and have that around. So you want to try to find a combination that works well for you. Now.

There'S a couple other things I want to mention because I feel like it's important for you to know about them. For some of you, this one may sound completely out there, but the way I think about it is we talked about our gut bacteria and how important it is to have a good balance of gut bacteria. Besides just the bacteria, there's other microorganisms that can live in the human digestion. And what we are learning is it's important to also have a healthy balance of these other microorganisms in our digestion. And so there's actually quite a lot of research over the past decade about helminth, something called helminth therapy, which is just another microorganism. We usually think of probiotics, right? And probiotics are Lactobacillus, bifidobacteria, the bacteria we put in our gut. But there's also helminths that we can use and have been shown to help manage the immune system for us from our gut. Isn't that amazing? Like when you think about how who's living in our digestion determines so much of what we experience in our bodies, they really in some ways are running the show quite a bit. So we. If you're having severe allergies, I definitely recommend talking to me more about. And you've tried all of this.

We should talk about, okay, let's make sure that your gut bacteria are helping you and not hindering you. And do you even Maybe need to consider some helmint therapy. Because I have to say, even though my spring allergies and I was feeling so much better with my allergies, I still had dust allergies, which, I mean, the funny thing is it meant that I really couldn't clean my own house because I would be sick for days. But once I did Hellman therapy, this is almost two years ago, the dust allergies went away. So now I really have no excuse why I can't clean my house.

Because I'm no longer. Does dust make me sick? But.

But still. So you, you have to keep that in mind. You know, you might, you might. Then if you have dust allergies like me and we get rid of your dust allergies, you might have to come up with another game plan for cleaning the house. But helminth therapy made a huge difference for me. And so I feel compelled to make sure you guys know about that as an option. It's just a matter of making sure we have the right, you know, microbes or organisms or however you want to refer to them, the guys living in our digestion that humans had over time. And to understand that there is such a connection between who's living in our intestines and how that's communicating with our immune system. That's true also for autoimmunity, because I saw Shelly. Thank you for your question about. She's really asking about th1 versus th2 immunity. And to me, this is a question of, you know, whether person has a tendency toward maybe allergic versus autoimmunity. And the thing we find is that.

For a long time like this, this research on TH1, TH2 came out around the time that I was in naturopathic medical. It was something we were like all this research was coming out and it was kind of the thing to talk about. But now, 20 some years later, while still you can look at TH1, TH2 dominant immune system, now it's much more clear from the research that it's not as simple as that. It's way more complex. Because I think in that 20 year span, we also have learned so much more about who's living in our gut and how that influences our immunity. And we've learned so much more about leaky gut. And so the more information we learn, the more we understand that our immune system is really complex. It's not so much of like a teeter totter like we used to think. It was just this teeter totter. It's either this way or this way. And it's not that simple. It's really not. So a person who maybe has imbalanced gut bacteria may have more tendency to allergic symptoms, but they might also have more tendency toward autoimmune symptoms. Like, even in my case, my mom and my grandmother both had. My mom still alive, but she and her mom had severe autoimmunity. Like live their whole life managing autoimmunity. And I don't have any autoimmunity, but I think it's because I've taken action to handle the allergic tendencies and my adrenal and stress patterns that I've been able to prevent autoimmunity from turning on. Luckily. But.

That'S where that th1, th2 is this concept that, you know, our immune system can kind of go toward more autoimmunity, which autoimmunity is when our immune system starts trying to protect us from ourselves. You know, instead of just trying to protect us from pollen or gluten, it starts attacking our own cells. In some ways, you start to go, what the heck? Our immune system could attack ourselves. That's kind of scary. And that's what happens with autoimmunity, is it's just confused. The immune system gets confused. It thinks it's protecting us, and it ends up protecting us from ourselves. And so the thing about autoimmunity, and we can talk about this more too, one day, because I really think it's important to know that autoimmunity can be turned off. You're not stuck, just like you're not stuck with allergies. I'm proof of that. I've turned off my allergies. I still may have a little tendency, but I can. They are no way running my day or my life. And I know for a lot of you allergies are a major part of your day, but same thing for autoimmunity, we can turn it off. And part of that is understanding also the genetics of the whole thing, that when we have certain genes that trigger autoimmunity and those genes get turned on, then we're going to be susceptible to autoimmunity. And these same things we've been talking about everything from diet, leaky gut healing, balancing gut bacteria, balancing cortisol and adrenaline. Those same things that turn off allergies can also help turn off autoimmunity. And so it just shows me that really we can solve so many things with these same strategies.

That's an important angle. Very important angle. Let's see. Can you address autoimmunity once it's been activated? Absolutely. You can all the time I see it in my patients, we turn off their autoimmunity, they feel better, they're off of medications. If you have or you know someone with autoimmunity, please help them know that there's more they can do about it and not to give up. And mast cell syndrome, we definitely talked about that. Mast cell syndrome, to me is really just that the mast cells, which are part of the immune system, are just really likely to let go of their histamine. You know, the histamine. Think of it like it's a mast cell, is this little cell filled with histamine. And with mast cell syndrome, it's just easily bursts out its histamine and then you get all of these allergic symptoms. So really, then you'll hear about substances that are mast cell stabilizers. Basically, they're trying to stabilize the mast cell so it doesn't release a histamine. And that's the same thing as a lot of times we call those antihistamines vitamin C, hesperidin. We talked about quercetin, we talked about anything that try to calm down those mast cells and not them let them explode with histamine is what we're trying to do. And so that's a strategy for sure, and it can help decrease your symptoms. But the thing is, is that to me, that's only part of the strategy. You know, part of the strategy is calm down the mast cells, calm down the histamine response, calm down the inflammation, which we do. We have lots of natural antihistamine ways we can do that, but you could be doing that forever unless you really start to think outside the box and go, wait a minute. Why is it that my mast cells and my histamine is so activated all the time? What's it trying to protect me from? Is it trying to protect me from foods like these food allergens we talked about, like gluten and dairy, for example? Is it trying to protect you from imbalanced gut bacteria? Is it trying to protect you because you have leaky gut? Is it trying to protect you because you've been under a lot of stress and it just started trying to protect you from everything in your environment. And once you start to ask that question, what is my immune system trying to protect me from? We can solve this and we can rebalance these systems. And the last thing I really want to make sure and tell you about is something that I recently learned about and recently started using is the Cavenson peptides. We hear the word peptide a lot of times because Peptide is just basically a protein. It's a tiny, tiny protein. Proteins are made up of amino acids. Amino acids even. Just like glutamine, for example. Right. We talked about. Glutamine is important for healing our intestinal cells. But when you put a chain of amino acids together, a short chain is called a peptide. The thing is, is that there's certain peptides our body makes, animal bodies make that are signaling to our various tissue in our body.

And signaling at a genetic level to determine the function of that area. So if we're talking about the immune system, for example.

There'S peptides that signal to the immune system and determine what it's going to do. Is it going to help fight off a virus? Is it going to create allergies? Is it going to create autoimmunity? These peptides can signal to the, to the, at a genetic level, to the tissue. And we can also use peptides, for example, to the adrenal glands or the intestines or the joints or you name it. There's different peptides for all different parts of the body. But the key thing to know about peptides, these particular Russian Dr. Cavenson peptides, is that they can reset the function of the tissue, which is actually, to me, it's like game changing, because here we are talking about everything we can do to help our body to sort of calm down the histamine response and help our bodies recover from stress so we can prevent the histamine response. But a peptide sitting over here saying, hey, I can just go in and communicate to your immune system and hit the reset button so that it goes back to healthy function before you got exposed to stress. It's like, let's go back in time before your allergies turned on. And that's what peptides can do. So I think that's really awesome. They've been Studying peptides for 50 years in Russia, and we didn't really hear about it much in the United States until recently. And I went to Russia to learn about them.

Well, I was in Russia already, and then I decided I got to go learn about them. So I went to the Cavenson Clinic, met Dr. Cavinson, got treatment with the peptides, and really learned the power of how they work. And I'm just super excited because I'm already seeing great results with patients who are using peptides to help their immune system to fight off viruses, but also for all different health issues. So if this is something, again, if you are resonating with wanting to just reset your body function, reset your system, then, you know, reach out to me about peptide therapy because it's a. It's a. And it's natural. No side effects. They researched it for decades. No side effects. Safe.

No, you know, it's like. It's a natural substance. It's like. It's amino acid, peptide. So it's amazing when we can come across something that's not a medication, doesn't have side effects, doesn't have withdrawal symptoms, you know, like, wow, we can actually use something from nature to help our body again. I'm Dr. Donnie, and you can find me. Well, you can find me here, Dr. Donnie Wilson.

And reach out to me. If I can help you more with your allergies, I'd love. I mean, for me, being able to live life without allergies is so huge that I want that for all of you too. All right, take care. I'll talk to you soon.

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