<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

At 11:11 PM 9/12/99 -0400, Saskia Smith wrote:

>Have you had just ONE allergy test or many?  There's more than one way to
>diagnose it (blood test, skin tests, stool tests, pulse "challenge",
>rotation/elimination and then challenge, and keeping a food diary whenever
>you have symptoms to trace a pattern of illness to what you're ingesting),
>and with your info that you were neg.

This seems to come up on the list so often that I thought I'd offer my
opinion. According to the head of the largest allergy clinic in the UK who
also seems to specialize in food intolerances and allergies, the skin
scratch tests for allergies do not in any way measure your response to
foods that you ingest into your GI tract.

Scratch tests, according to him, measure only what affects you when it gets
directly to your bloodstream when you are scratched or breathe it in. Not
what will bother you when you eat it. -vance