The Phenomenon of Allergy

Thanks to the World Wide Web spun by the spider of technology, the non medical person has medical information at his fingertips, loads more than his doc. The poor doc with years of mugging pillow sized books has to read a whole Pandora’s box of diseases while the person affected with a particular condition has to only look up what pertains to himself.

Armed with this knowledge, his confidence levels are soaring and he decides to “check” this out with his physician by bombarding him with so many queries up to the latest news on WebMD, reducing the already beleaguered man into a ridiculous blob of muck, shit and misery.

So how do we guys tackle this unpleasant situation? Of course we could speak medical jargon, but the patient prods on relentlessly, and the last resort is to take refuge in the wonderful term called “Allergy”. A hundred salutes to whoever invented the word.

A person who is suffering from a skin rash has allergy. A person with a dry hacking cough is in a state of allergy. The raving maniac is also suffering from allergy and so does the nocturnal wheezer. You name it and I can fit it into the spectrum of allergy.

When I had taken up a night duty job at a well known private hospital in Adyar, Chennai, whilst I was pursuing my MD, I was disturbed at odd hours by patients who had either a skin rash or a wheeze. Sleepily I came down from the DMO’s room and attend to the patient who is red in the face, lying on the bed and scratching all over.

“What is the problem?” I would ask.

“Doc, I don't know what happened, but since 2pm in the afternoon I have this itching all over my body,” would be the reply. After a brief history taking and examining the patient I would say that he is having an “allergy.”

Fantastic, I would think to myself. This bloke has been scratching his balls since afternoon and he conveniently drops in at 2 am in the night to pester me. I dare not show an inkling of this but would ask the staff nurse on duty to fix him up with a shot and scribble out a prescription for 3 days, all the while sporting a plastic smile.

“Why couldn’t you come earlier?” I would sometimes venture to ask.

“No doc, I popped a pill called Allegra and thought it might subside, but it took a turn for the worse,” says the patient.

“Hmmm. Never self medicate,” I would say with an air of vindication. “Take the tablets I have prescribed and you should be as fit as a fiddle.”

I would have written another brand name for Allegra from a rival pharma company. It satisfies me that I have looked over the patient as best as I can, and the patient that he has had the benefit of an “expert's” advice.

The patient thanks me profusely but the anxious parent/brother/sister/friend who has accompanied him volunteers, “What do you think is the reason for the allergy, doc?”

“Oh, it can be anything,” I say nonchalantly, “From the food that you ate, to household dust, hairs from pets, pollen from the garden etc etc.” This is in effect: “Don't bug me with this anymore. I don't know how you landed up with this and I cant tell you how you can get yourself rid of this. Grin and bear with the damn thing until it leaves you. God knows when it is going to leave you”

I ask the patient to figure out what he has done in the past few days that might have triggered this problem and send him home on an introspective mood. Poor chap he goes home and yells at his wife for dusting the house today, or cursing her that she made some food item with litres of oil in it, and chiding her for having so many kittens in the house, which triggered his allergic condition.

The term allergy has come to span a whole gamut of diseases, like allergic asthma, allergic rhinitis, allergic sinusitis, allergic bronchitis, allergic this and allergic that. Medical science is becoming more and more metaphysical, ranging from the seen to the unseen!

At this rate of dumping anything and everything under allergy carries on, as RK Narayan humorously put it, the time wouldn’t be very far when we would point at a passing funeral and say, “That man isn’t dead, but is allergic to life”