• TheLameSauce@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’ve heard there have been studies that indicate that in some part modern allergies are our bodies directing an evolved immune response that we once needed for all the parasites we constantly carried. They gave parasites to people that had certain food allergies and suddenly their food allergies were just straight up gone.

    https://www.science.org/content/article/got-allergies-blame-parasites

    https://healthland.time.com/2012/04/18/doctor-infects-himself-with-parasites-for-health-experiment/

    • robotica@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Very interesting! Something that was missing from me in the 2nd article is whether the food allergy persisted after he rid himself of worms, which I assume that it did, given how he had traded the food allergy for a constant stomachache.

      Still very interesting and all this stuff reminds me of the fact that don’t yet know almost anything in medicine and are often just treating illnesses once they come, sometimes in gruesome or expensive ways, and I’m not sure we should immediately discard all alternative medicine as useless or ineffective, maybe it’s only effective in rare cases and we don’t know what those cases look like.