The most effective long-term treatment is immunotherapy, desensitization by injections of an extract of the causative pollen administered once or twice a week for one or more years.
One of the most prominent behaviour techniques, variously known as systematic desensitization, reciprocal inhibition, extinction, or counter-conditioning, has its experimental basis in work done with animals in the 1950s by psychologists Joseph Wolpe and Arnold Lazarus.
The adaptation is probably akin to desensitization, a process used sometimes to cure patients suffering from asthma by giving them repeated injections of small doses of the pollen to which they are sensitive.
Treatment consists of avoidance of the substances causing the reaction, desensitization, and use of decongestant drugs and antihistamines (drugs that, by inactivating the histamine given off by injured cells, suppress many of the symptoms of an allergic attack).
Many receptor-mediated events show the phenomenon of desensitization, which means that continued or repeated administration of a drug produces a progressively smaller effect.
When the technique, known as desensitization, is applied to human problems, patients may be asked either to imagine anxiety-producing situations or to deal with actual feared objects or situations.
Those who hold that neuroses are the result of learned responses may recondition a patient through a process known as desensitization: someone afraid of heights, for example, would be gradually exposed to progressively greater heights over several weeks.
In desensitization therapy, for example, antibodies that normally would attack the nonmatched organ are filtered out from the patient's blood.
When I described the experiment to Lincoln Taiz, he suggested the words "habituation" or "desensitization" would be more appropriate than "learning".
Those caught in such a vicious abuse-reactive cycle will not only continue to expose the animals they love to suffering merely to prove that they themselves can no longer be hurt, but they are also given to testing the boundaries of their own desensitization through various acts of self-mutilation.
Re "The Penicillin Superstition" (Hard Cases, Sept. 10): An allergist can be called in to determine if the patient is allergic to penicillin and to direct a desensitization process if the patient is allergic when there is no satisfactory alternative drug.
