Dr. Gary Erkfritz - the Natural Allergist

11/04/2022

Last weekend I had the privilege of being in Santa Fe. I was there because a dear friend of mine had written the vocals for an opera called "This little light of mine", about F***y Lou Hamer, a leader in the civil rights movement.
The opera was wonderfully done. Here's a write up on it:.

Excellent production shines a light on the fight for equal rights for Black citizens in 1960s United States. More productions like this are needed to educate and tell this story.

08/02/2019

How your gut bacteria can help create allergic diseases.

Allergic diseases, such as respiratory, cutaneous and food allergy, have dramatically increased in prevalence over the last few decades. Recent research points to a central role of the microbiome, which is highly influenced by multiple environmental and dietary factors. It is well established that t...

07/31/2019

Gastric acid suppressors result in allergies.

Gastric acid inhibitors promote experimental allergy in animals, and have been linked to allergy risk in observational human studies. Here the authors show in a country-wide medical record analysis that allergy development risk is doubled in gastric acid inhibitor users, and is higher in women and i...

07/11/2019

FYI

A study in patients identifies a nontraditional immune pathway that can cause a severe reaction to anesthetic drugs.

07/10/2019

This is an important article, but it starts in the mother's womb.
Here's an important paragraph in this article: "It made Nagler wonder if TLR4—and specifically, the propensity of certain gut bacteria to activate it—was the key to tolerance to dietary antigens. Sure enough, when she treated mice with broad-spectrum antibiotics to deplete their intestinal bacteria, even animals with wildtype TLR4 had severe reactions to food allergens. “That established a role of signaling by bacteria in the gut in regulating responses to food,” she says. “And then all of the studies we’ve done since then, over 15 years, have built on that.”

As evidence grows that gut bacteria play roles in the development and persistence of food allergies, researchers begin to explore microbe-based interventions.

06/15/2019

This makes a very important statement: the importance of vitamin D and allergies being one of the possible problems as a result of deficiency -- especially in utero.

More than 50 million Americans have an allergy of some kind. If you or a family member has allergies, you know how irritating they can be (literally). Allergies occur when the immune system overreacts to one or more allergens by producing antibodies called immunoglobulin E (IgE).[1],[2] Symptoms may...

05/10/2019

Excellent article about the origins of autoimmunity and why the uptick in AI and allergies in the past 20 years.

Changing environments and extraordinary stress are making autoimmunity one of the most puzzling medical challenges of the century

10/18/2017

https://waojournal.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1939-4551-6-21?site=waojournal.biomedcentral.com