No doubt about it — food allergies can cause a wide variety of symptoms ranging from a mild tummy ache to a major system shutdown, but food allergy can’t be blamed for every medical condition known to humankind. Unfortunately,
people commonly suspect food allergy as the root cause of a host of maladies. In the following sections, I encourage you and your doctor to consider more obvious causes and cures before pointing the finger at a food allergy.

The risk involved in mistakenly suspecting food allergy as the cause of other medical and behavioral issues is that the time, energy, and resources you spend in pursuing an unlikely cause is wasted. You’re better off seeking help from specialists who treat these conditions.

Meeting the rare breed of symptoms
Medical wisdom advises doctors that “When you hear hoof beats think of a horse rather than a zebra.” In other words, suspect the most common causes first before testing for causes that are less likely.

Food allergies, for example, can cause other conditions — arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, migraine headaches, or recurrent ear infections, but when these conditions arise, you need to investigate their more common causes first
before suspecting food allergies. Only after ruling out more likely causes (or if these conditions are accompanied by other symptoms that can be more readily attributed to food allergy) should you suspect food allergy as the cause.

Keeping food allergies out of the psychiatrist’s office
Some people want to blame everything on a food allergy, including psychiatric and behavioral disorders, such as attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and depression. As I write these words, a quick search on the Internet revealed over four million Web pages dealing with the relationship of attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity with food allergy. These conditions, however, are rarely, if ever, due to a true food allergy.

In caring for patients with food allergy, I’ve learned to never say “never,” so I’m not claiming that behavioral disorders and other conditions can’t possibly be related to food allergy, but the likelihood is extremely low.

I see many families who are hoping to find an easy and quick fix to significant behavioral issues by first exploring the possibility of a food allergy. In doing so, their children might be missing out on some wonderful therapies that are
available elsewhere.

Related posts:

1. Food Allergies Symptoms : Respiratory reactions
2. Food Allergies Symptoms : Having a gut reaction