| I was curious and did some research about the "Everlywell" food allergy test this article recommends, and the evidence behind it seems INCREDIBLY weak. From what I'm reading the product seems to be some Shark Tunk funded non-FDA reviewed no-oversight pseudoscience. Apparently many "at home testing kits" are not FDA regulated at all. Worse, it seems that many doctors and organizations think they can actually do harm given the misinformation they provide: ...... "Patients who ask Dr. Robert Wood, an allergist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, whether they have a food sensitivity would never undergo an immunoglobulin G test. Immunoglobulin G tests “are completely useless and do dramatic harm” because they may compel patients to unnecessarily avoid broad swaths of a healthy diet, Wood said. “In all my years of practice, I have never sent an immunoglobulin G test because they have no ability to predict food sensitivity,” he said. That’s because immunoglobulin G stems from the body’s normal immune response to exposure to many substances, including food. High levels don’t indicate a problem; they simply point to foods a person recently has eaten. For these reasons, a 2008 European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology task force recommended against testing for a type of immunoglobulin G to evaluate for food intolerance. In the report, the group wrote that the test was “irrelevant for the laboratory work-up of food allergy or intolerance and should not be performed in case of food-related complaints.”" [0] ...... "Dr. Neha Shah, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Stanford University, is one doctor who is skeptical. "What we don't have is proof that having a high IgG level against a particular food item means that that food is causing your symptoms," says Shah. "A lot of this kind of huxterist testing is keying off of the placebo effect," says Dr. Norman Paradis, a clinical lab expert who teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, referring to the industry in general and not to a particular product. "[1] ...... "The presence of IgG is likely a normal response of the immune system to exposure to food. In fact, higher levels of IgG4 to foods may simply be associated with tolerance to those foods. Due to the lack of evidence to support its use, many organizations, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have recommended against using IgG testing to diagnose food allergies or food intolerances / sensitivities" [2] ...... The author should seriously consider removing this from their article. [0]: https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/everlywell-food-sensitiv... [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/28/6141252... [2]: https://www.aaaai.org/conditions-and-treatments/library/alle... |