I’ve had recurring problems with hives for a couple of years now. I have, at times, jokingly attributed this to an allergic reaction to George W. Bush continuing to be President, but I really have no idea what, exactly, is causing the problem. My allergist says that it’s most likely an autoimmune thing, and thus there isn’t any cause to find, and I’ll just drive myself crazy chasing false correlations.
I can tell you, though, that the whole thing has given me some sympathy for people who seek solutions for their health problems in “alternative medicine.” Because, really, if somebody told me confidently that magnets would stop me from itching, I would load myself up with so many that I’d erase every hard drive in the department just by walking down the hall. Plausible mechanism be damned, I want relief…
Of course, I don’t really believe that “alternative” woo does anything, so I can’t rely on the placebo effect to save me. I guess I just have to put my hopes in Barack Obama…
Totally agree, I am also confident that Barak Obama will put an end to hideous cargo shorts, and computer non-operating systems, among many other things.
I just want to say that it’s been a long term goal of mine to get the word ‘idiopathic’ into a paper.
Cargo shorts are great for birding. You get your regular pockets for regular stuff, plus extras for glass and water.
I’m fairly certain that the decline in manned moon missions has caused your urticaria.
Chad
I had the same problem (chronic hives) and a great allergist who helped treat them. He was very understanding as he had had them himself. I can totally sympathize with your desire for relief.
Apparently hives are caused by your mast cells over reacting to stimulus. Nope I don’t know what mast cells do exactly. Interestingly, the initial cause might not be the current stimulus so Bush leaving office might not help, if he was the initiator 😉
On the woo front I tried hot baths with oat fiber added because some one had told me that would help. However, the Doc told me that the worse thing you can do with hives is have a drink (alcoholic), take aspirin or have a hot bath; and yeah, those are just the things you want to do when you are itching all over. Oh shucks.
Finally, Zyrtec helped me. But I had to take it for a month or more for it to have any effect.
Oh crap yeah. I’ve had this problem on and off for years.
The one thing that helped, actually — the dermatologist I was seeing here suggested I get my iron level tested. She said that, although they don’t know *why* yet, there seems to be a correlation between lack of iron stores and exaggerated allergic response, wherever allergic response involves skin. Even though I wasn’t anemic, turned out my body’s reserves of iron were low. I started taking iron supplements as per recommendations for anemia, and as my reserves reached normal levels the urticaria eased off, and as I have maintained my iron with occasional periods of supplementation over the last two years the symptoms have almost entirely disappeared. I haven’t had any outbreaks at all in the last 8 months, which is what I consider wonderful.
Not saying that this is necessarily anything to do with your situation. But it might be something to ask your doctor or dermatologist about investigating.
“…it’s most likely an autoimmune thing, and thus there isn’t any cause to find, and I’ll just drive myself crazy chasing false correlations.”
FWIW, my wife had minor stomach irritation/pains sporadically for a couple years. She went to a food allergist, dietician, gastroenterologist, got an endoscopy, etc. All to no avail.
For other reasons (keeping track of calories), she’d been keeping a spreadsheet of all the things she’d been eating for the past couple years. She brought this data to the food allergist, but the allergist couldn’t draw any conclusions from it.
So my wife wrote a program to parse the spreadsheet, classify each food into potential allergen groups (fish, nuts, wheat, etc.), and find the correlation between each allergen group and the onset of symptoms. With possible hypotheses of “food X makes me feel bad on the same day”, “food X makes me feel bad the next day”, up through “food X makes me feel bad 4 days later”. For almost every time window, peanuts and tree nuts had a positive correlation with pain. The correlation coefficient was small (0.1-0.2), but she tried cutting nuts out of her diet — and has been pretty much stomach-pain-free since.
So: collect data! Analyze it! Doctors wown’t take the time to look at it properly, but you may be able to find something out on your own.
And it’s better than rubbing aspirin on your forehead 🙂
Take a few days off. Get naked. Lay out in the sun for a bit but avoid getting burned. A single glass of wine every day wouldn’t hurt much. Eat lightly but push fruits and vegetables. Salads are your friends. Get laid. Sleep well. Get some exercise.
Stress may be part of your problem. Even if it isn’t your going to find it easier to cope if your well rested, tanned and relaxed.
I have been amazed at the numbers and sorts of chronic problems that disappear or are greatly diminished by rest and relaxation.
Take diphenhydramine, Benadryl, for the itch.
so I can’t rely on the placebo effect to save me
I hear the placebo effect works even if you don’t believe in it. Just as long as you’re not taking naloxone.
For about two weeks near the end of writing my Master’s thesis I was breaking out into hives every morning. Nothing else in my daily routine had changed, and I had never experienced hives before. It went away after I’d finished writing and had given the document to the profs on my committee. I’m hoping the same thing doesn’t happen for my PhD.
I know how bad hives can get, so you have my sympathy. When I was in my 20’s, I started getting giant hives. They would be 2-3 inches across and about 1/2 an inch high, all over my body. But the most painful hives were the ones on the soles of my feet.
I remember sitting in the bathtub running cold water over my feet and scratching them with a hairbrush. Then my eyes would start to swell, and finally I would have to go the emergency room when my blood pressure would start to fall and my throat and tongue would start to swell. It was horrible.
But as abruptly as I started getting hives, they went away after about 2 years. The doctor could never figure out what I was allergic to. I found out years later that it was a combination of sunlight and heat that would normally cause me to sweat. I don’t hardly sweat, even in extreme heat. Instead of sweating, I have an immune reaction against my sweat glands. Now I know to stay out of the heat. It’s funny, as I live in the desert.
A close relative has had chronic urticaria for almost five years now. She goes to a physician who is doing research on it.
The bad news is, chronic urticaria (unlike the transient variety) doesn’t usually have one trigger stimulus. Instead, it seems the mast cells become predisposed to trigger to something, and if the original trigger stimulus is no longer encountered they just start reacting to something else. Searching for the trigger may thus be very difficult and not really all that helpful.
The good news is, chronic idiopatic urticaria always does go away on its own eventually. There are apparently no cases that are really permanent. And indeed, over these five years it has improved a lot for my relative. The first two years had constant coverage over a substantial part of the upper body during winter (cold seems to be the first trigger for my relative, but no longer the only one); now she gets an outbreak perhaps once or twice a month, and it’s usually no more than one to three spots the size of a coin to the size of a palm.
The second good news is, histamine blockers really truly do work if you just find the combination that works for you. You have H1 and H2 blockers, and within each group the effect will differ from substance to substance. In my relative’s case it’s a twice-daily low dose of one H1 blocker and one H2 blocker that will quickly remove the itching and dampen an outbreak if it occurs (she no longer has to take it daily). But it did take over a year to find the combination of antihistamines that were both effective on the urticaria and didn’t knock her out.
mast cells release histamine when activated by antigen
You can treat your itch with cortizone topical cream for fast relief and take antihistaminics also, Claritin or Zyrtec. The antihistaminics are safe but cortizone cream should not be used continously (over 1 week) because it can damage skin and cause other problems.
Its hard to guess what cases it. To be on the safe side stop using fabric softeners. Vacuum your matress, and change the towels, sheets and pajamas more frequently.
While I’m sure it may not be true for all of you with recurring hives, you all ought to be tested for Celiac disease (especially Luna_the_cat!) which is a sometimes severe intolerance to gluten. It masquerades as all sorts of things. My daughter was diagnosed with it a couple of years ago. While the blood test is usually accurate, the only definitive test is the biopsy.
WOW!!!
Haha I thought I was the only weird one with random hives… Either that, or I’m allergic to life!!! (That’s what I tell my friends… it’s easier to explain!!!)
I have been getting hives whenever I’m exposed to cold water (like being out in the rain), whenever I’ve been sitting in the grass, whenever I walk into a room where a cat has been, wherever there is dust, when I get excited, when I get scratched by someone wearing makeup… ahh the list goes on and on…
But thanks for letting us know we’re not alone!!!