Question:
A friend of mine has a five-year-old boy with an extreme allergy to peanut
butter. (Yesterday, a school friend who'd had a peanut butter sandwich six hour
earlier kissed him on the cheek, and he had to go to the emergency room!)
Anyway, she's trying to get general information about what to do about this, and
is also wondering about alternative treatments. Any information would be greatly
appreciated.
Answer:
Have your friend get here son to a pediattric allergist as soon as possible for
proper diagnosis. There are several good sites on the web that she should visit
for information and ideas such as:
The Food Allergy Network at http://www.foodallergy.org
Peanut Allergy at
http://www.peanutallergy.com
Both of these sites have good links to other informative sites.
I encourage you to have your friend spend lots of time learning about this life
threatening allergy. I also recommend the Food Allergy Network. As for treatments, there are
no currently available approved treatments for food allergy, though there
are 2 experimental treatments, and they are very difficult to find and
get into. (I've tried twice and was refused twice.) Again, the Food Allergy Network is best for advice and support.
She needs to talk to her son about techniques to avoid peanut butter. She
also needs to talk to the school about the problem. There are no alternative
treatments, although desensitization might be a good idea to consider. M.., as others will tell you, there are no "alternative" treatments for
peanut allergy. Severe, life threatening nut allergies tend to be for life,
and the only effective management is total avoidance. Since that is not
always 100% possible, the child has to carry with them a kit containing
adrenalin and antihistamines for the times that accidents happen (like being
kissed by someone with peanut butter on their face, or accidentally eating
something with nuts in it). The purpose of the kit is not total treatment,
but to buy the person with the reaction TIME to get to proper medical care
(i.e. so you don't die before you can get to the emergency room...which is a
genuine possibility for many of us). There is no herb or homeopathic remedy
that will cure a peanut allergy. There is no medical treatment that will make
a peanut allergy go away. Sometimes extremely mild nut allergies are grown
out of, but not severe ones. The child's mother needs to see an allergist and have the child properly
assessed...and then she needs to TALK to the allergist about how best to
handle the problem - what she and the school need to have on hand to deal
with problems. As a minimum, home and school both need access to an Epipen or
similar epinephrin/adrenalin kit all the time. The school also needs
information on what to watch for, and the child should wear a medicalert
bracelet (i.e. in case he ever has a serious reaction where no one realizes
what the problem is, or is found unconscious from one). At our local school,
the teacher keeps the kits for very young kids, and the older kids carry
their own...and incidentally, must know how to use them.
This is not something to mess around with. This can kill a child in the space
of a few minutes.
