All About Allergies

Allergy season is coming up and Dr. Sanders is here to talk about how to stay on top of your symptoms this spring.

Transcription:
Dr. Sanders with Voyage Direct Primary Care. I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about allergies.

We’re heading into Valentine’s Day, March is coming up and April, and with the spring comes lots of flowers and lots of pollen and lots of allergies. So common symptoms, sneezing, watery eyes, coughing and lots and lots of mucus.

The ways that I like to treat it, over the counter medicines actually work really well for this, there are some prescription medicines as well that we can add to the picture if over the counters don’t work, but personally I get allergies seasonally and when I do get them I like to take an antihistamine, which would be like Zyrtec, Clartien, Allegra. Those are the non sedating antihistamine, the newer ones out there. There’s still generic and they’re still pretty affordable. I like to switch those every year, so if last year you did Cetirizine or Zyrtec, I like you to do Allegra this year or a Claritien, so those will be really good for you.

Another one is a nasal steroid, so Flonase, Nasacort, those kinds of things also over the counter, they went over the counter a few years back. A common thing that people mess up with on the nasal corticosteroid is they spray and sniff really hard and the steroid ends up in their belly and doesn’t really do its job, this is a common mistake. So when you spray, just hold your breath, spray twice (in one nostril), hold your breath, spray twice (in 2nd nostril) for adults and it should do its job just fine.

Just those two things, that’s all I do personally and it makes the allergy season tolerable for me. Obviously there’s allergy testing and things like that if you have profound allergies or if you have eczema related to that obviously we should probably talk, because there’s other options for you. As far as prescriptions, there’s prescriptions we can use. Some of them are like mast cell stabilizers you might have heard of Montelukast or Singulair, those are really great medicines as an adjunct to the over the counter stuff that we can use for the prescription as well. Voyage Direct Primary Care talking about allergies today. Thanks for listening.