Hi,
My 18 year old teen was diagnosed with CFS several months ago. She has also suffered from stomach problems since about 6th grade, after a lengthy mono-type illness. Recently she was diagnosed with gastroparesis (slow stomach emptying), which may be causing the stomach upset. She was also diagnosed with orthostatic intolerance and FM!
She is allergic to most trees and pollen and has been on prescription allergy meds since 6th grade, which keep her allergy symptoms at bay, or so we thought. She also skin-tested positive to many foods, but the allergist said wheat for example "looks like" certain grasses/weeds that she is allergic to. Thus, the skin tests can give a lot of false positives. She has tested negative for celiac disease, and a whole host of other things.
I thought that the best thing to do would be to try an elimination diet to see if she has a food intolerance, since as far as I know, those can't be identified via a skin test. However, her allergist has hypothesized that because she is allergic to so many trees, that she would benefit greatly from allergy immunotherapy (allergy shots). He is theorizing that her allergy meds are just masking her symptoms whereas the shots would actually improve her immunity to such things. He also thinks that just by breathing in the environmental allergans, this is inflamming her digestive tract. He claims he has helped several patients with thier fatigue via allergy shot therapy. My daughter is also scheduled for an endoscopy with a GI doc to confirm teh inflammation of her upper GI tract.
Her allergist seems confident that allergy shots can help her. He cited research from James Jones of National Jewish Medical & Research Center that suggests that underlying allergies can contribute to CFS in some patients. My daughter would rather not take the shots if she didn't have to, but if others had experience that allergy shots actually do help with CFS, then she would be very enthusiastic about doing so.
So, my question is, has anyone who has underlying allergies tried allergy shots? Certainly, this may not help everyone, but if it would help a subset of people with CFS, then it would be important to know and try this therapy.
Thanks in advance for anyone with experience and advice.
Scotty
P.S. I've seen a couple of other posts on allergy shots in the Allergies Forum. But, I'm not sure how to specifically search within the CFS forum on this topic.