Asthma Allergies Children: a parent's guide

Asthma and allergies are at epidemic proportions. It doesn't have to be that way. Two experienced pediatric allergists tell everything a conscientious parent needs to know about these conditions, the best in approved treatments, behavioral changes that can help control them, what families can do to reduce the toll that even severe asthma and allergies take on their lives, the myths and realities of alternative treatments and food allergies, skin allergies, advice for support groups, lists, checklists, and much, much more.

Fun and entertaining, almost every page is enlivened by anecdotes from the authors' decades of practice showing the special rapport that have made them so successful in getting results and keeping patients out of emergency rooms.

They make common cause with overworked pediatricians, general practitioners, and other primary care physicians who, because of the way our health care system is organized, are doing more asthma and allergy treatment than ever before.

But wait! There's still more! Asthma Allergies Children, the book, is half of a new approach to providing specialty asthma and allergy care. It is being published simultaneously with the launch of AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com, the new town square where parents and primary care physicians can pick the brains of specialists about their own children or patients. The website has mailbags for parents and doctors, pollen counts, news coverage, review of the latest developments in allergy science, “Tip of the Week” for controlling disease and discomfort, and guest editorials by the most important thinkers in the field.

The authors say that they and their colleagues recognize must do more to leverage their knowledge. The ranks of Allergy specialists are dwindling even as the numbers of asthmatic and allergic patients are rising. The cost is immense. Asthma is the single largest cause of school and work absence. Allergic and asthmatic children lose out on all the things that childhood is supposed to be about.

The book is the mother ship of the Asthma Allergies Children enterprise. Read about the connection between your child's nose and lungs, and how stopping allergy symptoms in the nose can reduce the danger of life-threatening asthma attacks; The hazards from chronic inflammation even when there are no visible symptoms; The damage to a child's body from over-reliance on “rescue” medication, and inadequate “control”; How modern technology can tell you if your child has been “naughty or nice”; The use and misuse of allergy testing, and how false positives can result in malnutrition in small children; The strengths and weaknesses of immunotherapy; The stages of an allergic life; and the most sympathetic and wisest advice ever to worried parents about managing a home where a child has severe allergies.

And because every child is special, go to the website to ask that special question.

Asthma Allergies Children: A Parent's Guide and AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com-a winning combination for helping your child lead a happier, healthier life.

A veritable bible for parents of allergic kids. I enjoyed Asthma Allergies Children tremendously. It is full of the kind of great stories that teach both patients and doctors more than mere facts. The science is explained in language you don't need an MD to follow. This book should be kept right next to the antihistamines and epinephrine, and used even more frequently.

--Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of Every Patient Tells a Story. Her NY Times column “Diagnosis” inspired the TV drama, “House MD.”