AAT

Alright I am finally writing about AAT!

AAT stands for Advanced Allergy Therapeutics . It is a new treatment for allergies based on acupressure.

When you describe it to someone it probably sounds super new-agey and hoaky but it totally works.

I guess there was this scientist who worked at NASA who somehow had reason to figure out that when people ate certain foods, certain areas of the brain lit up. So he isolated all the different foods and components (somehow). Then he figured out which electrical impulse would stimulate the same brain activity (as if the allergen had been introduced). Now, it is well known that muscle weakness can be observed if someone is exposed to an allergen.

So you go in there, and you get this cuff hooked on your arm and they send the electrical signal through and try to push your arm down. This part is really remarkable and you have to feel it for yourself but your arm literally becomes like a noodle and loses all strength, compared to just a second before, if they send an allergen through to you. So in this way they find out all your allergens and sensitivities. The initial testing session is long, like an hour, I think.

Then after that you go in for 15 min treatment sessions. They send one allergen at a time and it's related components through the cuff, and then they use this tool to stimulate the acupressure points up and down the spine. This is supposed to "reset" the brain's reaction to the allergen, so that it no longer interprets the stimulus as bad, preventing the immune reaction that an allergy is.

And as much as it might sound crazy it works. James (the hubby) went, in a handful of treatments, from spending 10-15 mins every single morning sneezing and blowing his nose to never doing it. Just like that.

So Ya-ling (our chiropractor friend) has found that certain things are more important to treat than others. She always treats histamines first. See, people that have a lot of allergies and sensitivities are almost always ALSO allergic to histamines. Your body releases histamines in response to an allergen. But when people are also allergic to histamines, then this response triggers a cascade of continually releasing histamines which makes the response to ALL allergens worse. So she does this first.

Next she does digestive mucus and fermentation toxins. If these are not functioning correctly, they will cause your body to over-react to everything, similar to histamines, since these things are involved in the digestion of ALL food. Luckily james was not sensitive to either of these things so we didn't need to do that on him.

So next we tested him for food preservatives, colors, and dyes. I think he was just allergic to one (dyes? I forget), so we did that next.

At this point (maybe 2 weeks ago now) I decided to start coming in twice a week. My back has been really messed up (just from stress), and I figured I could use the extra adjustments and that way we would get more food groups treated sooner.

So then I decided to do soy, because it is a really huge part of my diet and not avoiding it would make everything a lot easier.

And then last week I did chocolate--perhaps it doesn't seem like an important food group, but for me it is. And some things make life worth living, LOL. And tomatoes--we picked tomatoes because out of a few different things he was most sensitive to that, and it's a pain in the neck avoiding ketchup and tomatoes because they are veggies and I am used to eating them on sandwiches and stuff.

And then on Monday we did yeast. He was very allergic to it and it's one of the things I haven't even been trying to avoid because it's just too much, so it was good to get treated. He was allergic to more than six components of it so we have to take two sessions to do it, so we finished yeast on Wednesday.

Anyway, it definitely seems to be helping a lot. He is breaking out some still but I haven't been avoiding things in general as strictly. He is DEFINITELY not reacting to soy, chocolate, or tomatoes as much as he WAS, but he might still be reacting a little bit (which I can totally live with). So we're going to keep going with it and hopefully soon I won't have to be very careful at all about what I am eating.

I am still going to careful about what actual foods I give him, and might try to avoid feeding him most of the foods he was originally allergic to until he's closer to a year or two. But yeah things are progressing!

And I would definitely encourage anyone dealing with food allergies (or any kind of illness, sickness or problem, really, food sensitivities are the basis of more issues than you might think!) to look up where there are AAT treatment centers near you, and give it a try--totally worth the money, in my opinion!