What Is an Allergy and How Does Your Body React to It?
What are symptoms of an allergic reaction to pollen?
Pollen allergies have several common symptoms including coughing, sneezing, runny nose, stuffy nose, itchy eyes, watery eyes, scratchy throat, aggravated asthma symptoms, and more. You may experience one or more of these symptoms during allergy season. Days with a high pollen count may increase symptom intensity.
This article is a transcript.
What's an allergy? I'm Dr. Manan Shah, I'm an ENT and allergist with Wyndly Health. Our bodies have an immune system that is there to fend off things that are dangerous, like bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Sometimes your body overreacts to things that are not scary, like pollen or animal dander, and treats it as if it's a foreign invader like bacteria or viruses. When this happens, we call it an allergy.
A great example is if you're exposed to pollen from a plant. That isn't a foreign invader, but your body treats it like that. So what it does is it tries to get it to wash out by making your nose runny. It tries to get you to blow it out by making you sneeze. And sometimes it'll try to get you to cry it out by making your eyes watery.
You and I know that the pollen isn't dangerous, but your body has mistaken it for something that's scary. The best way to fix this is immunotherapy or using allergy medications. If you'd like to learn more, please subscribe.
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