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Primary Care Physicians can Treat Allergic Patients

Roughly 20 percent of the population has allergies. That means that if you are a primary care physician and see 20 patients per day, four of those patients will probably be suffering from allergies of some sort.

Primary Care Physicians Treat Allergic Patients

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As a first line of treatment, you may prescribe antihistamines or steroids to help your patients manage their symptoms. These medications can take the edge off of symptoms, but they don’t solve the underlying problem. In fact, the only treatment that can address the source of the allergy is known as immunotherapy.

Allergy Immunotherapy: A Lasting Solution

Immunotherapy involves exposing the body to the very elements that make it miserable in order to induce desensitization. Allergy immunotherapy comes in two forms: allergy shots and allergy drops. With allergy shots, extracts of common allergens are mixed into a saline solution and injected into the skin where they can absorb into the bloodstream. With allergy drops (known as sublingual immunotherapy), the allergens are introduced into the body as under-the-tongue droplets that absorb into the bloodstream through specialized cells in the mouth.

It used to be that primary care physicians had to refer patients to an allergist for allergy immunotherapy, but family care physicians and pediatricians can now prescribe sublingual immunotherapy to allergy patients through turnkey allergy treatment programs. It’s a great way to preserve continuity of care, expand your services and increase the profits of your medical practice.

Start Prescribing Sublingual Immunotherapy

You can start by ordering an allergy test kit for physicians that will allow you to administer the simple yet accurate skin-scratch test. (The test can be performed by a medical assistant in about 30 minutes.) After that, you can buy wholesale allergen extracts and mix the allergy drops in-office or order them through a compounding pharmacy. Because allergy drops are safer than shots, they can be taken at home rather than at the physician’s office. In this busy day and age, patients love the convenience of at-home administration.

As you vet your patients to see if they are candidates for allergy immunotherapy consider:

  1. The duration of their symptoms. If patients experience symptoms for more than a few months of the year, they would likely benefit from allergy immunotherapy.
  2. The severity of their symptoms. If patients’ symptoms are so severe that they are significantly affecting their quality of life, consider allergy immunotherapy.

Symptoms include a runny or stuffed-up nose, itchy eyes, eczema, hives, cough, wheezing, asthma, headaches, and sinus infections. Food allergy is linked to additional symptoms including gastrointestinal distress (cramps, bloating, gas, and diarrhea), eosinophilic esophagitis (inflamed esophagus), and interstitial cystitis (painful bladder syndrome). Contact AllergyEasy about our turnkey allergy treatment program to increase medical practice revenues.

About The Author

Stuart H. Agren, M.D.

Stuart H. Agren, M.D. completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Utah and went on to earn his Doctor of Medicine from Tulane University School of Medicine in 1974. He completed additional training at L.D.S. Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah and then established his private medical practice starting in 1975. Dr. Agren completed a mini-residency in Industrial Medicine at the Robert Johnson School of Medicine at Rutgers University and also completed training to become a certified Medical Review Officer.

Dr. Agren was the Medical Director at TRW and McDonnell Douglas in Mesa, Arizona and at Stauffer Chemical and Kennecott Copper in Salt Lake City, Utah. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at Arizona State University.

In his private medical practice, Dr. Agren specialized in family practice and allergy. In his work as a private practice allergist, he was one of the first doctors in the country to prescribe sublingual immunotherapy to his patients as an alternative to subcutaneous immunotherapy (allergy shots). He has also been a trailblazer in the field of food allergy treatment and research, developing a program to treat multiple food allergies simultaneously using sublingual immunotherapy. Dr. Agren has been featured on local CBS, NBC, and ABC news affiliates and won the peer-nominated “Top Doc” award from Phoenix Magazine.

After 20 years in private practice, Dr. Agren became the Founder and President of AllergyEasy, which helps primary care physicians around the country offer allergy testing and sublingual immunotherapy treatment to their patients. Over 200 physicians in over 32 states use the AllergyEasy program to help their patients overcome environmental and food allergies and asthma.