Dr. Xiumin Lee has a devoted following for her herbal treatments for food allergies and eczema. Her problem is whether she can overcome her skepticism about her own treatment. From Allergy Life Archive.
Annalee Matchett developed severe allergies at the age of 14. “I had been eating nuts all my life, but one night after cheerleading, my dad took me to a Thai restaurant. When I got home, my face started to swell. I went to the hospital. I was in an anaphylactic state.”
Annalee, of Collingwood, Ontario, continued to have reactions even though she avoided nuts and peanuts as much as possible. She went to the hospital every few weeks and missed many days of school. Her worst reaction to Annalee was when she was on a canoe trip in the bay of Lake Huron and she had just eaten a piece of pita bread and she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her throat. She soon went into full-blown anaphylaxis.
The girl was carrying four epinephrine auto-injectors, which camp counselors administered one after another until firefighters arrived in a canoe, transported her by ambulance, and rescued her. “I was hooked up to all these IVs in the middle of nowhere. The doctors said I was on the brink of death.”
Desperate to improve her daughter’s quality of life, Annalee’s mother, Teresa Gregory, took her to one doctor after another. “I remember she took me to a big hospital in Toronto and the allergist told her there was nothing that could help me for the next 30 years,” Annalee recalled. Masu. Gregory continued her search and found Xiumin Lee online, a New York City-based doctor who uses Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM, to address food allergies. Her family drove in, and Annalie soon became a patient.
At her Manhattan clinic, Li treats allergy patients with herbal medicines adapted from traditional Chinese medicine practices and tailored for eczema, food allergies, and asthma. She gives patients tablets to take by mouth and body creams and teas to drink. She also employs other of her TCM practices such as acupuncture to treat these illnesses.
“I didn’t invent this,” Lee says. “With new knowledge from research, we’re just adapting what TCM already has and using it for our purposes.”The families come from all over the United States and Canada; Some people travel across the ocean to visit in hopes that Lee can eliminate food allergies in their children, or at least significantly reduce their allergic sensitivities. Her patients are enthusiastic and open to unconventional treatment plans. But can we treat 21st century diseases with methods born in ancient China?
Personalized herbal medicine therapy
Florida mother Danielle Bollottieri is a strong believer in Lee’s work. Her daughters, Willa Bay and Addie, both grew up with food allergies. As they approached their teenage years, Bolettieri wanted to provide protection against accidental exposure to allergens. He said, “Before I knew it, they were going to university, so I wanted to watch over them and send them off.” In January 2013, Bollettieri began taking them for oral immunotherapy with allergist Dr. Scott Nash in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A few months into OIT, which involves gradually increasing the intake of trace allergens, Bollettieri heard about Lee and her herbal medicine approach. Intrigued, she flew her daughters to New York to meet with Ms. Lee in October 2013, nine months after she started her OIT.
Bollettieri was shocked. “She was very calm and accepting. She understands the anxiety of being a parent of a child with food allergies. She gave me a big hug. 1 day after I met her. Within minutes I broke down and started crying.”
When Lee begins seeing new patients, she asks them to submit blood test results, including a complete blood count, liver and kidney function, total IgE antibody levels, and IgE to certain foods. Examine the patient’s medical history and make the following decisions: How she treats them. Lee develops individual “protocols” for each patient. This usually includes certain herbs that the patient takes orally, as well as creams and herbal baths. If a patient has eczema, doctors treat it first and then move on to other conditions. If you have indigestion, we also have herbs for that.
Bollettieri’s daughters’ initial examination included a physical exam (for eczema), an oral history, and 15 minutes of acupressure. From there, Lee delivered oral herbs, bath herbs, and body creams to her family. For 14 months, they consulted with Lee monthly by phone, during which time the doctor tweaked the protocol as needed. Since then, they’ve been on base every couple of months.
Results won’t come overnight
Did Dr. Lee’s herbal medicine treatment help? Both Willa Bay and Addie’s allergies have become much milder, but is it because of the oral immunotherapy, the TCM, or both? It is difficult to know whether this is due to (OIT “alumni” Willa Bey currently eats about 10 peanut snacks every day.)
Bollettieri explains that Lee’s technique aims to rebalance the immune system, and this doesn’t happen overnight. Her research with Lee showed that her herbs first act on effector cells such as basophils and mast cells. During the first few months of treatment, IgE antibody levels do not change much, but patients often report less response.
“Effector cells are quiet,” Lee says. Over time, she says, these herbs reverse the production of allergic antibodies by memory cells, and then actually reverse IgE sensitization in most patients. Although Bollettieri cannot pinpoint the exact changes in her daughters due to TCM, she believes the time and money spent on treatment is well worth it. Additionally, as Lee points out, it could take up to two years for her treatment plan to start reducing her IgE levels.
“I think their digestion is better,” Bollettieri said. “Other than that, I can’t say for sure. But I understood this from the beginning – I was never looking for magic or a quick fix.”
A strong fan of Chinese herbal therapy
Bollettieri’s faith in Lee and her treatments is also reflected in the Facebook group “Herbal Medicine for Allergies” that first brought it to the doctor’s attention. The number of members exceeds 4,000, and the activities are going well. The group is open to both Lee’s patients and anyone who wants to learn more about her work, and parents post questions daily. There are general concerns about herbal bath tub stains as well as very specific questions about the products being used.
Many in the group refer to their work with Lee as a “journey,” and a significant number are just beginning that journey. Recent posts embody optimism. We had our first appointment with Dr. Lee tonight. I am very excited and excited to begin this therapeutic journey. Our protocol will exceed our initial expectations, but we can’t wait to get started. ”
Parents of children who have been using this protocol for a while have reported other health improvements such as less eczema, fewer IgE antibodies, and fewer illnesses.One mother’s example: “I started eating peanuts in my first year of life.” [test score] It went from 83.9 to 43.8! Most of the nuts are gone! And she has now overcome her asthma. She has had no side effects from the herbs and loves the cream, making this mother full of gratitude and hope. ”
If these parents want a case they can argue with compelling anecdotal evidence, they need only look to Annalee. Here was a girl whose allergy to nuts got so bad that when she did the almond skin prick test, she broke out in hives all over her body and couldn’t vomit. For a year and a half, she took more than 10 herbal medicines a day, took herbal baths once every week or two, and lathered her body with her blue cream. Annalee, now 19, admits she was a skeptic when she was a teenager. However, over time, her reactions to trace exposure became less.
For example, one summer while she was studying abroad in France, she accidentally ate a pastry with nuts in it. Annalie was shocked by her lack of response and she excitedly called her mother. “It felt amazing,” she says. “I am so grateful to Dr. Lee.”
Skepticism in the scientific community
But despite these success stories, there is skepticism about Lee’s work in the scientific community, largely because she has not held her methods to the Food and Drug Administration’s rigorous standards of evidence. This is because they are trying to do so. Beyond the world of her private TCM practice, Lee is a physician trained in mainstream medicine and immunology, and is a professor of pediatrics, allergy, and immunology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The school also runs clinical trials and a well-equipped laboratory.
So researchers are studying the details of a particular herbal concoction called Food Allergy Herbal Formula (FAHF-2). The concoction is similar to the one Lee uses in his private clinic, but has been refined over eight years. Their goal is to have this formula approved by the FDA and used as a treatment for food allergies. So far, Lee and her team have been able to reverse peanut allergies in mice, but gathering evidence that it works in humans is proving more difficult.
In fact, in a study published online, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which was far from positive. Not only did FAHF-2 not reduce the patients’ food allergies, the placebo was actually more effective than the herb.
“In the first placebo-controlled trial of FAHF-2 to treat food allergies, herbal medicines were not effective in treating food allergies,” said Dr. Robert Wood, chief of pediatric allergy at Johns Hopkins University. There is. Not involved in the research. But he said he was hopeful that FAHF-2 might be effective at different doses than those used in the trial, or even in combination with oral immunotherapy.
Looking back on the study, Lee believes the results were inconclusive because the patients weren’t taking enough herbs. To reproduce in mice the treatment used in the study, which proved to be highly effective, patients had to take 36 tablets a day for two to three years. In this study, participants took 30 pills daily for six months, but many participants took less, and almost half of the participants only took about two months. Thirty tablets a day can be difficult to swallow, so Lee and her team developed a new formulation called B-FAHF-2 that is more concentrated and easier to swallow.
Standardization of herbal medicine protocols
But Lee isn’t sure FDA drug approval is the only path forward. “There are a lot of gaps to learn about, including dosage, the product itself, and how to use a single product to address multiple symptoms.” (In her private practice, Lee tailors treatment plans to the individual. (although the same is not possible in clinical trials) the cost of research is also a barrier. she is realistic “It’s going to take her at least five years or eight years to finally get this product approved by the FDA as a prescription drug, even with very strong funding.”
Rather, Lee used some of the anecdotal evidence he collected in his private practice, combined with objective measurements from blood tests such as basophils and B cells, to submit clinical observational studies to the FDA. I am thinking of using . She aims to develop several different protocols that can be used depending on whether the patient has eczema, multiple food allergies, etc.
“Protocols are individualized, but they can also be standardized,” she says. Once such a standardized protocol was developed, other allergists and medical practitioners could use her methods, eliminating the need for people to travel to see her.
This will be welcome news to many parents and patients in the Facebook group Herbal Medicine for Food Allergies.
Annalee’s life has changed dramatically since the days when she frequently had to be picked up by an ambulance from school while enduring another anaphylactic reaction. As an example, she is eating nuts right now. And she embarked on her new international adventure: her three years of university life in Amsterdam. “It’s a whole new chapter after allergies. If I still had them, I would have stayed home,” she says.