Oral Immunotherapy for Food Allergic Patients

With the arrival of the warmer and sunnier days of spring, it is our pleasure to present you with an update from the Center for Allergy at the Assaf HaRofeh/Yitzhak Shamir Medical Center. As you might imagine, the process of food allergy diagnosis and treatment can be quite stressful especially for young children and their families. At the Center, we are constantly searching for ways to improve the experience. Our waiting room has a number of computers, as well as board games. We also have an outdoor play area, which will likely see more use now that the winter rains have passed. In addition, the Center has regular visits from medical clowns, who definitely are able to lighten up the mood for many of our patients. The benefits of clowns in a variety of clinical settings have been recognized for the past 45 years. Within the realm of food allergy, another Israeli group demonstrated that medical clowns could improve the pediatric patient experience during skin prick tests. We recently obtained a grant to study the efficacy of medical clowns during other food allergy interventions, specifically oral food challenges and oral immunotherapy. Given the high number of food allergy challenges and treatments we perform, this study should be quite informative. Of course we owe gratitude to you, our donors, whose funding at the $25 level assisted in generating some of the preliminary data for this project. As described on our donation page, we are looking to fund several other projects related to food allergy treatment and research. We encourage you to spread the word and partner with us in making advances in the field!