Fix Eczema With Natural Treatment - Determine the Cause With Allergy Testing

When you first start working with an allergist, it is likely that they will ask you many questions about your lifestyle in efforts to establish the most likely causes of your adverse reactions to allergens, foodstuffs that you are allergic to and so on. For example, they will ask about your family background - because as we have already established, problems like eczema are generally believed to have an inherent hereditary element.

In general, there are only two types of allergy testing that are commonly accepted as being scientifically valid for anything other than experimental research purposes.

The first of these is the skin test, which has been in use for 100 years and is still the preferred method of allergy testing even today. In this situation, the qualified practitioner places a small drop of a commercially prepared solution containing the allergen to which the patient is thought to be allergic on the skin before scratching the skin so that the allergen enters the body.

When they do this, the allergist will be looking for a certain degree or level of reaction from the patient to prove that they are sensitive to a particular allergen. However, because the initial allergen solution is very weak, it is quite common for the allergist to runs several skin tests using slightly stronger allergen solutions to establish the degree of adverse reaction the patient will suffer.

The allergist is artificially inducing an allergic disease in miniature. If the initial test on the outside of the skin is not effective for establishing exactly what it is that is causing some kind of negative reaction, a similar test will be run by injecting the allergen solution under the skin.

The alternative form of allergy testing is known as Radioallergosorbent testing (RAST), which is a test for specific allergic antibodies in the blood, a test which is gradually improving in scope and accuracy. However, because RAST is considerably more expensive than skin testing and because the results often take days or even weeks to arrive, it is still skin testing that is by far the most popular form of allergy test.