Our services
Learning about you
At the end of the day, this is how we make a difference in your life. It’s important for us to know a lot about medicine, and we’ve spent thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars learning it. But we haven’t yet learned anything about you, and we know you’re the expert!
We’ll have a lot of questions for you when you book in. We want to know when you’re sick and when you’re well, what makes you feel better and what else you’ve tried! We want to know how your family’s going, how work or school are treating you, and what you’re dreaming about for your next holiday. We want to know your pets, your plans, and your hobbies! Because just knowing the science isn’t enough to make it useful to you.
Allergy testing
Here comes the science! Allergy testing can take many forms, from skin prick testing using purified protein derivatives to fresh, or ‘prick to prick’, testing to intradermal or serum testing – and we find people often benefit from related tests, like scans of their sinuses (for the sneezy, coughy, headachy problems) to looking at how well their gut is working (for the foodie types). There’s rarely one perfect test for each person – it’s combining the information we get from selecting the right tests for you with the things we learned about you in the previous step that lets us figure out how best to help.
There’s an important caveat here, and we’d like to clarify it early. There are a variety of tests for allergies or intolerances being promoted by people who don’t have a firm grounding in the science of allergy medicine, and those are simply not evidence based*. There is no reputable professional organization that would ever recommend Vega testing, for example, let alone ‘live blood analysis’ or the various mail order companies that offer over-the-internet IgG or immunoglobulin assays. That doesn’t mean we won’t see people who’ve had those kinds of tests done – we’re eager to help anyone, and we’d see people who’d unfortunately wasted their hard-earned money on fraudulent rubbish as more in need of help than ever. We’d love to know more about everything you’ve tried and everything you want to try, because we know how frustrating these problems can be and how desperately people look for answers. We’ll support you in anything you need.
Diagnosis and treatment
Knowing is half the battle – or so GI Joe always said! The other half is application. We’ll work with you to figure out what support you need, whether that’s as ‘simple’ as avoiding your triggers or as complex as a plan for immunotherapy to change your immune system’s mind about how to interact with the world around you. Most people with allergies or allergy-related problems have lots of options for how best to manage their impact on day to day living, and we’re excited to explore those options with you!