How To Document Your Allergy Symptoms

Before you complete allergy testing, your allergy clinician may ask for you to document your symptoms — and there are many different ways to do it. Providing timelines, photos, and food journals can help your clinician determine what you should be tested for, and this blog gives pointers for documenting your allergies most effectively.

Timelines

A timeline can help diagnose environmental allergies.

Include where you went in your day and what new environmental triggers you were around (think about pets, new environments, scents, etc.). It may also be helpful to include what products you used that day — like perfumes, laundry detergent, bug spray, and so on.

Your clinician may look at your timeline and ask further questions. If they saw you experienced symptoms two days in a row after going to work, they may ask more about that environment and think of allergens to test for based on that information.

Food Journaling

Food journaling can help diagnose food allergies.

One way to create a food journal is to make three columns: one for the time of day, the second for the food you eat, and the third for symptoms you experience. Throughout the day, document every food you eat and any time you feel symptoms — and include a timestamp for each.

This can help your clinician look for patterns and connections between what you eat and what you feel. They can use this information to narrow down harmful ingredients or foods and then test for them.

Photos

Photos can help diagnose food or environmental allergies.

Those with food allergies and/or environmental allergies can experience allergic reactions on the skin — also known as atopic dermatitis or eczema. Take pictures of outbreaks and make a note of when the picture was taken on your timeline or journal.

Photos AND timelines and/or food journals can help your provider even further. Bringing as much “evidence” of your allergies to your appointment will help to make solving your allergy mystery that much easier.

Testing and Treatment

All of this documentation will ultimately lead to allergy testing — either an allergy skin test or blood test. Clinicians use the clues from your documentation to determine which allergens to test, and both blood or skin testing can determine the specific level of sensitivity to each offending allergen.

Our Allergy Screener can also help to see how much allergy impacts your life, and if treating the cause is something that would be beneficial to you.

Getting to the bottom of what you’re allergic to can help you with two things: avoidance and treatment. You can learn what you need to avoid to reduce symptoms. But, testing can also lead to a personalized treatment that treats the cause of the offending allergens.

Immunotherapy, including allergy drop immunotherapy following The La Crosse Method™ Protocol, slowly introduces the body to the allergens that make you sick. Over time, the body learns to not react and cause symptoms.

Allergy drop immunotherapy following the La Crosse Method can treat all your offending allergens at one time, safely and effectively. Learn more about how it may help you, and then find a provider near you that offers this treatment.