Taoism and Shakespeare address Allergies And Snotty-Nosed Kids
Posted On July 24, 2011
I love Taoism.
There’s a ton of info about this philosophy, approach … thing, but one of its tenets is to “try softer“.
I know, I know, like what is THAT supposed to mean? Doesn’t “to try” imply trying hard, and if you do more trying then you are trying harder … so trying softer means to not try at all.
Ugh, it can make your brain hurt noodling over that. But think about it like this. You know how, as in a standard Shakespearean tragedy, the very act of trying to avoid some horrid problem brings about the problem itself?!? The harder you fight, the more likely you are that that horrid thing will happen.
Got it. But What Does This Have To Do With Allergies?
A new study has found that children who were exposed to animals at a young age had lower rates of nasal allergies as adolescents. In other words, parents who were freaked about germs and their potential allergens, and banned pets, etc., may have been actually making nasal allergies (and later asthma) MORE likely to happen!
“Family pets, in particular dogs…need not be removed to prevent allergies, and in fact may protect against them,” Melanie Matheson of the University of Melbourne, lead author of the study.
Looking at survey responses from nearly 8,500 adults from Europe and Australia, Matheson and colleagues focused on those who grew up around house pets or farm animals, and those who had the troublesome runny noses, itchy eyes, and sore throats that plague nasal allergy sufferers.
And it’s not just nasal allergies
A 2010 study from the University of Cincinnati showed than owning a dog may decrease the risk of childhood eczema. Similarly, a 2011 study from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that growing up with pets cut kids’ risk of developing pet allergies by half.
In the new study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, more than one in four respondents said they had nasal allergies. The factors linked to their nasal allergies include a family history of allergies, the mother smoking while pregnant, and less exposure to snotty-nosed kids.
More Exposure To More Kids
Small children who had lots of exposure to other little kids – because they had young siblings, for instance, or attended day care – had lower risks of nasal allergy. And the more siblings a child had, the lower the odds that the child would have nasal allergies later in life.
The scientists saw a similar pattern among people who grew up on a farm or had pets before age five. Compared to rates in people who didn’t have those experiences in early childhood, the odds of having nasal allergies in adolescence were 30 percent lower in people who grew up on a farm, while having a dog and cat were each associated with a 15 percent reduction.
Bottom Line?
Taoism advises to try softer. Don’t “white knuckle” your way through life and try to overcontrol every variable in life. Because — in this case — if you remove all allergens, you make allergies MORE likely to happen. If you relax your grip just a bit, you allow your body to build its defenses … and you get to have a kitty to boot!!
Does that mean you need to roll your child around in the dirt? Does it mean that you actually go around the house sneezing ON your child? (Can you see that in a Monty Python skit? “Little Johnny, come here please, daddy’s got a whopper phlegm ball for you. Ahh Chooo.”). Of course not, don’t be silly.
But it does mean that
Childhood pets linked to lower allergy risk | Reuters
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