What is an allergy and how does medicine help against it?
In: Biology
Allergies are essentially your immune system reacting to non harmful things as if they were actual threats. Sometimes the reaction is minor other times it’s potentially out of control. When your immune system detects an allergen it sends out histamines. These chemicals bind to certain cells telling them to swell amongst other things
In the case of a normal infection the swelling is useful for getting more blood flow and immune cells to the infection site. In this case there is nothing there. And more importantly the immune system is panicking in the more severe allergies causing the release of too many histamines creating out of control and often dangerous swelling.
Allergy medication neutrally binds to either the receptors on the cell or the histamine itself in order to prevent them from interacting and creating that immune response. Though this is an extremely oversimplified view. The full biological mechanics are very much beyond me.
When you get a cold, usually that means a runny nose. There’s an infection in there! And the immune system response, among other things, causes the runny nose.
Sometimes there’s no infection, but because something got in there (like pollen or dog hair), the immune system THINKS it’s an infection, so you still get the runny nose.
The medicines that help, they are medicines that tell the immune system to relax and calm down, or they are medicines to tell the nose to stop being so runny.
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