It does not matter if it is the bloom of spring, the height of summer, the release of fall, or the dead of winter. Every season can induce an allergic reaction in you. There are a lot of ways these allergic reactions can express themselves: Itchy eyes, runny nose, sore throat, etc. Luckily, there are treatments for these things.
Allergies are painful because they are an immune system response that uses the body’s resources. This means that as long as you can replenish those resources, you can treat the side effects of your allergies. One of the most straightforward ways of doing this is with intravenous (or “IV”) therapy.
Symptoms of Seasonal Allergies
The symptoms of seasonal allergies are as follows:
- Runny Nose
- Watery Eyes
- Cough
- Throat Irritation
- Sinus Congestion
- Headache
- Fatigue
- Sneezing
As you can tell, these take place primarily in the nose, throat, and eyes. This is because allergies tend to be a response to what is or is not in the air. Your body filters what you breathe through your “sinuses”, a series of passageways around your nose, mouth, and eyes that fight toxins trying to enter your airways.
When these sinuses have to do a lot of fighting, they become inflamed. That inflammation is irritating on its own, as it makes the sinuses and the area around them sensitive and pronounced. It also dries them out, making them more irritated.
The sinuses are always fighting to find a difficult balance. In order to get allergens out of the respiratory system (that is the system that delivers air to your lungs) they have to force things out. In the process, they inflame and force out tons of mucus and tears that your body would rather use for more productive purposes.
This “flushing” of fluids is necessary to keep your respiratory system safe, but it needs to last for as little time as possible in order to keep you breathing and not dehydrate you. This is why IV treatment using vitamins is important: Your body knows to start the flushing process but does not or cannot always stop.
How does IV Therapy Help with Allergies?
The body’s response to an allergen in the air is always to try and fight it. It will do this using the immune system, or by simply using the pressure system of the sinuses to flush the allergen out of the body. The result of either of these is that the sinuses become irritated, causing the nose to run and the eyes to water.
The thing about inflammation is that it is easy to start and hard to reverse. This is because all it takes for your body to inflame is a chemical called a “histamine”, which triggers a soft tissue like the sinuses, lips, or gums to inflame. But once that tissue is inflamed+, it actually becomes even more sensitive to irritation.
This can lead to a spiral of a tissue being irritated, becoming more sensitive, and then becoming irritated due to being more sensitive. In the end, you can spend a whole month with itchy and aching sinuses just because of one allergic reaction. No allergic reaction should take a month of running nose and tearing eyes.
These things mean that your body is using resources to fight off allergens. In addition to this, it also loses fluid to mucus running out of the nose and tears running from the eyes. IV therapy helps by replacing those resources lost and those fluids that run out due to an allergic reaction.
More importantly, however, IV therapy helps by forcing inflammation to stop once it is no longer helpful. You might be concerned that your body needs to stay inflamed, but it is usually the opposite. Most times, the body only “needs” to be inflamed for a few seconds. Everything that comes after that is unnecessary.
What Vitamins Help Allergies?
Here is a list of some of the vitamins that can help you deal with your allergies. The general trend among these vitamins is that they help manage the process of inflaming and relaxing the soft tissue of the sinuses.
B12
Vitamin B is one of the stress fighting chemicals in the human body. As a result, the body needs a lot of it. Fighting off seasonal allergies just so happens to use a lot of it, so it is an important one to replace.
B complex
B complex is a regulator of inflammation in the sinuses. While the sinuses do need to inflame in order to flush out allergens, the inflammation can get out of control fast. B complex is a vitamin that helps control that. B complex helps boost the immune system as a whole for this reason, as it makes the system more efficient.
Magnesium
This vitamin is a natural antihistamine. That means that it fights irritation and inflammation, which makes it an important vitamin in managing your respiratory systems when they are being irritated by allergens.
Selenium
When your body flushes out allergens through the eyes and nose it also flushes out mucus and tears. Selenium helps reduce the amount of mucus and tears your body leaks by controlling the “flushing” reflex.
Vitamin C
Another naturally occurring antihistamine. Rather than dealing with the inflammation itself, vitamin C stops it from happening in the first place by breaking down the chemicals that cause inflammation. It also helps shorten the amount of time you spend inflamed by speeding up the process of breaking down inflammatory chemicals.
Glutathione
Glutathione aids your immune system by cleaning up excess inflammatory chemicals. This keeps the inflammation from lasting longer than it needs to.
Conclusion
If you are suffering from severe allergic reactions, or even if you are suffering from mild allergic reactions that persist for far too long, IV therapy can be an incredibly effective way to treat those reactions. Talk to your doctor about it before you try anything yourself, and consider what vitamins you might need.