For anyone with multiple food sensitivities, avoiding all their culprit foods can be very difficult. And it may mean that they eat too much of other foods, with die attendant risk of developing new sensitivities. Even those who are intolerant of just one or two foods may find it difficult to avoid them, especially if they eat away from home a lot. So there have been many attempts to develop alternative methods of treatment.
Given the lack of knowledge about how food intolerance arises, these attempts are largely a ’suck-it-and-see’ exercise: trying out treatments and seeing if they work. No treatment has yet been devised which is 100 per cent effective for all patients, and there are some on offer from ‘alternative’ practitioners that are quite ineffective and even potentially dangerous (eg urine therapy). However, there are two methods currently being tried out by some doctors, known as neutralization or desensitization treatments, that are worthy of further investigation.
In some studies, these treatments have performed quite well, but in others they have been less successful. Consequently such techniques are controversial and many doctors feel that they should not be used until there is more evidence that they work. But given the complex nature of food intolerance, and the evidence suggesting that it is caused in several different ways (see Chapter Twelve), perhaps it is not surprising if a treatment gives varying results – it might be expected to work for some patients and not for others. Our own experience suggests that such methods are effective for a proportion of people with food intolerance. But they are probably not worth trying unless there is no reasonable dietary alternative.
These methods have also had some success in treating classical allergies, and in this context they may be very useful. The traditional method of desensitization, once widely used for hay fever and other allergies, cannot now be given by family doctors in Britain. This method involved injecting minute, but gradually increasing, doses of the allergen over a period of many months. There is a risk of collapse, due to anaphylactic shock, with this method, and a few patients have died as a result. Such desensitization treatment can now only be given in hospital, where resuscitation equipment is available.
Other uses claimed for these techniques include desensitization to environmental chemicals, such as exhaust fumes, and desensitization to Candida, where there is a sensitivity to the yeast’s products as a consequence of candidiasis.
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