• Question: what is the quickest way to get rid of hayfever

    Asked by to Claire, Ian, Sergey, Vicky, Zena on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sergey Lamzin

      Sergey Lamzin answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hayfever in itself is not a disease, it’s a condition. Depending on your own susceptibility to those things you get different symptoms.

      There are two common ways to battle it:
      – reduce the susceptibility (anti-histaminica do that).
      – reduce the symptoms (nose spray)

      Both are temporary
      You can not get rid of hayfever forever though, it’s like trying to get rid of your eye colour, you can tint it with coloured contact lenses, but you can not change it forever.

    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      It’s not the quickest, but the best hope for curing hayfever is called “immunotherapy”.

      The process involves deliberately exposing your body to small, frequent doses of the allergen (for example pollen) over a long period of time and slowly increasing the dose and decreasing the frequency of exposure. This trains your immune system to ignore the allergen, but the process takes 3-5 years to complete and works best in people whose hayfever is only caused by a single allergen rather than a group of them.

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