Definition Time 43The reason is that you need to clear your bowel of the food before
feeling any real benefits and definitely before testing it as a food challenge.
That may take up to 5 days, or more if you are constipated. However there is
a further complication, which is that if you wait too long before reintroducing
a food, the reaction may settle down and not provoke any symptoms when
you eat it as a test.
But allowing for these stumbling blocks, the definition holds good
and is very workable: I have used it in my practice for many years now, often
with spectacular results.
Non-immune allergens
To mainstream doctors, this concept would seem laughable or contradictory.
But that doesn’t mean they are correct in dismissing the idea. Many doctors
said that anesthesia was impossible, heart transplants wouldn’t work or that
sunlight was not capable of curing rickets.
The fact is that we encounter the food allergy and intolerance problem
often without any apparent immunological explanation. No antibodies
show up. There has to be some other explanation than that the patient
imagined it. For one thing, I have had countless reports over the years of
patients reacting to a substance they were not even aware they were eating
(hidden ingredients), so the phenomenon is real enough.
Note that von Pirquet’s original definition did not require the
antigen-antibody model. It had not even been discovered at the time.
In my era we still had not learned about the importance of genetic
make up, though I was teaching the significance of individual biological
variation. Nowadays this is coming to the fore and explains a great deal of
the mechanism of food incompatibility.
US pioneers in allergy discoveries
After von Pirquet, a great deal of pioneer work in this field was begun right
here in America. All those who practice it today have cause to be grateful to
Dr. Albert Rowe Sr., who first experimented with elimination dieting in the
1920s. Following him came Dr. Herbert Rinkel, who verified the existence
of the masked or hidden allergy, which I rate as one of the biggest medical
discoveries since anesthetics and on a par with antibiotics; and who showed
us how to rotate and diversify diets (see Chapter 15). Probably the greatest
and most revered worker in the field, the doyen of environmental medicine,
was the late Dr. Théron Randolph of Chicago (1906- 1995).