Intractable Asthma and Hostile Identification, Imprinting in Humans, and Autonomic Mechanisms

Abstract

Dr. Milton B. Eisenhower, President of Johns Hopkins University, stated in 1964 that the number of technical journals has doubled in the past 13 years; that in the biological sciences research findings have increased by 60% in the past five years; that the average biologist can now review only about five percent of the material published each year; and that the proliferation of articles, journals, and abstracts is so tremendous that we are now publishing abstracts of abstracts. A fortiori, it is virtually impossible for all but a dogged handful of hardy souls to keep abreast of progress in other disciplines bearing upon their own. The interdisciplinary conference (such as this) bridges the gap, of course, but there still remains work to be done. What I refer to is that we now have an avalanche of facts in many disciplines, which are potentially available for use in formulating answers to questions that plague us or in indicating fruitful lines of inquiry, but it is no one's business to try to fit them together. Various factors conspire to make this so. There is the pressure of one's daily work of being a physician, physiologist, psychologist, teacher, etc. that makes that the major activity and the other the tail to the dog. There is the notion that science beams on experiment, preferably expressed in imposing mathematical symbols, and frowns upon speculation; actually every high school student who has taken a course in general science knows that speculation, the formulation of hypotheses, lies at the base of all heuristic endeavor. There is the fact, as Will Durant ruefully observed of one of his own projects, that: “the probability of error increases with the scope of the undertaking, and any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for the myriad merry darts of specialist critique.” Few people relish exposing themselves to this sort of thing. There is the fact that some people engaged in clinical or experimental work feel that theory is not worth the time spent on it—it is only theoretical, not practical; they are engaged in healing people or observing experiments. With all of this, I say, “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.”

Food allergy, alone or with inhalant allergy, is, in our experience of 35 years, a common cause of perennial nasal allergy. With its recognition, possible chronic or recurrent infection in the nose and sinuses becomes a minimal cause. As discussed below, ^9,12 recurrent fever with attacks of nasal allergy is often due to food allergy rather than to infection. Failure to recognize food allergy is due to the fallibility of the skin test,^1,2 failure of most “test negative diets” to reveal such allergy, and failure to use trial diet, especially our cereal-free elimination diet, for its study.