Dr. Elizabeth Boham

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367 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 1 Dec

Dr. Elizabeth Boham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Dr. Hyman Show · Mold, Lyme, Gut Health, and the Mystery of Histamine Intolerance · 21 Apr 2025 podcast

Exactly, yes. Type of white blood cell. Type of white blood cells, yeah. And the also interesting thing is that histamine actually works as a neurotransmitter. And when you think about this, this is really an interesting thing.

And as I was preparing for this, I sort of stumbled upon some things, which I thought was really quite fascinating, is that when you take antihistamine, what happens to you? You get drowsy. Exactly. So histamine, when it's at high enough levels, it stimulates the brain. Histamine is actually involved in the sleep-wake cycle.

Right. So it's a balance. Like, you know, too much histamine is bad. Too little histamine is also bad. So when you actually totally block histamine, you actually get sleepy. It'll actually be involved with the sleep-wake cycle. And modafinil, which is the drug that people take, that actually works on histamine. It's Pro-vigil. Pro-vigil, exactly. Actually, part of that works on the histamine.

So it keeps the histamine levels higher, so it keeps your brain sort of awake, if you will.

Yes. Yes.

And that's actually a poor man's way. I oftentimes will use that with patients to determine how much histamine they're having in the connective tissue, because the mast cells are the type of white blood cells that are in the connective tissue of the body. And when they have excess amounts of histamine in them, or they release histamine too easily,

you will get this thing called dermatographism where you can take your finger and stroke on the skin and you will form a red line and it'll stay there. And sometimes it'll get really welty and raised. And that will tell you that there is a problem with excess amounts of histamine in the body.

Yeah. And there's a term out now, which when I was in medical school, we didn't even have it. It's now called MCAS, Mass Cell Activation Syndrome. Like it's a real medical diagnosis. It's a real medical diagnosis. I mean, we're seeing a lot of it now. And the question is, is why are we seeing so much mast cell activation? Hmm. It's a it's a really it's a and I've been puzzling on this myself.

Yeah, I never took that class in med school. I know. Right. Exactly.

We're seeing a lot of it. And it's not like there's one cause for mast cell activation. There are multiple causes. And I actually even, when I deep dived into the literature, one of the things that I stumbled upon was the effects of EMF on mast cells. EMF EMF is electromagnetic frequency. So like your cell phone background cell towers, Wi-Fi. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And there's some there's some work by a woman, Johansson, out of I think it's Sweden, who's done some work on the effects of EMFs on mast cell degranulation. And there's some good studies showing that EMFs are one of the things insusceptible individuals that cause their mast cells to release more histamine that drives this allergic inflammatory response.

Well, they oftentimes, uh, will react to every food. They're sort of the people who they can't, they, they, they have a more and more restricted diet because the more foods that they eat, it'll trigger because lots of foods contain histamine, uh, or we'll get broken down. Uh, histidine is an amino acid and that, uh, um,

When you consume foods that are high in histidine, things like meats have a lot of histidine, your body will actually break it down into histamine. And normally the body can process that, but when you have problems with either too much ingestion or too much production of histamine or not enough breakdown of the histamine, then you'll have problems with histamine intolerance.

And these are typically a lot of people who have food allergies. And Mark, I think you've done this yourself. This is really interesting, is the old way of treating food allergies was what? Chromalin sodium. Remember using that? It's actually a pretty good treatment for people who are really, really reactive to foods.

And the way that chromalin sodium, because chromalin is actually used for patients with asthma. Yeah, you inhale, it's an inhaler. It's an inhaler, exactly. It's a very effective drug for really bad cases. Chromalynsodium can be very, very helpful for patients who have severe histamine responses to foods.

body and their tissue because it's puffy swollen you can get edema in the legs you can see just people carrying a lot of extra weight and fluid yep there's often some type of histamine activation there well sure because well the mast cells which are the one the cells that contain histamine they're actually found in the spaces the interstitial spaces uh in the connective tissue of the body so that's why they get puffy because that those are where those cells that are high in histamine reside

Yeah. Well, again, we talked on the last podcast about the role of leaky gut in the microbiome. Interestingly, when you have dysbiosis, some of the bacteria will actually cause more of your body to produce excess amounts of histamine.

So that's another thing where when the histamine is in excess in the digestive tract, that can be related to food consumption, which are high foods in the histamine, or the bacteria are actually causing the breakdown of histidine as an amino acid to go into histamine. So dysbiosis is one of the things that can trigger excess amounts of histamine.

Crazy.

Well, you can measure histamine in the blood. You can also measure tryptase, which is another marker for mast cell activation. You can also measure, there's another test, which in my preparation for this, I've not measured, I haven't found the lab that does it, but it can be measured as N-methyl histamine, which is a breakdown product of histamine. That is another one that can be done.

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