Dr. Zachary Rubin

It's not something that I can figure out clinically without testing.

So basically what happens is either they will order a blood test or a skin test that's trying to measure for that IgE antibody either on your skin or blood to the specific substances in the environment.

If it's a positive test, you have allergies.

If it's negative, we call that the non-allergic rhinitis.

It's not entirely clear because we aren't able to skin test everybody in the United States.

We kind of have to extrapolate it.

More people have allergies in general, but as you get older, it tends to turn into this non-allergic subtype.

There are a lot of elderly who have just a constant runny nose as an example, and that has nothing to do with pollen.

It's something that constantly happens, and we treat that with different nasal sprays to try to dry up the nose as an example.

But allergies in general, whether we talk about allergic rhinitis, hay fever is another term for that, eczema, food allergies, asthma, chronic hives, medication reactions, it's one of the most common chronic diseases that we face in the United States that affect millions of people, and it's just not talked about enough.

So roughly 10% of Americans believe they're allergic to penicillin.

But if you test them out, we estimate that about 90% of those individuals don't have a true penicillin allergy.

So it could be that they have a parent who has a penicillin allergy and were afraid to give it to them when they were a kid.

So they just had the label.

That's one example.

Another is as a baby, you had an infection.

The doctor gives an antibiotic and you get a nonspecific rash.

That's not necessarily a severe allergic reaction.

It could actually be a response from the virus or bacteria infecting you and creating a rash in it.

It gets confusing to figure out is this truly from the medication or from the infection itself.