A recent article in Natural News highlighted a number of possibly unanticipated side effects of allergy medication that you should probably know about if you intend to use OTC medications such as anti-histamines.
Read the full article here but a few that I was not aware of were pregnancy complications and infertility – although neither of these is common. More common, it would seem, is anxiety, depression and weight gain… So treat with care!
On a separate subject – an article by LR Moore of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, suggests that we need to rethink our attitudes to food intolerances and to those who choose to adopt a gluten-free diet.
The article was ‘based on 31 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between May and October 2012 with gluten-free and -restricted persons.’ The author saw three factors as relevant in the growth in the number of those going gluten-free:
‘Participants broaden the lay understanding of gluten-related disorders’ (those who have adopted a gluten-free diet do lots of research and pass on what they learn). They thereby ‘undermine biomedical authority’ (tell friends to ignore what their doctor says) and ‘diagnose others’ (persuade others that they would feel better if they too adopted a gluten-free diet).
‘Such participant-driven change,’ says Mr Moore, ‘termed self-ascriptive looping, is one factor in the diet’s rapid popularization’.
He goes on to show ‘how participants question the doctor-patient relationship and increase social contestability for other dieters. My findings,’ he says, ‘challenge previous work on contested illness and suggest food intolerances may require a reconceptualization of contested illness experience.’
Medics – time for a rethink?
You can read the abstract here but will need to pay Elsevier if you want to read the full article.