For those finishing up their workday in NYC, sit down and enjoy the ride home while we all CELEBRATE AND read about Henry Ehrlich, author of Food Allergies, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Science, and the Search for a Cure. Henry is not a food allergy, dad, grandpa, uncle, etc. He has a personal drive and commitment to our food allergy community to help bridge the gap of understanding between science and practical life. He helps so many find a better understanding of how to live a safer life with food allergies AND asthma. CONGRATULATIONS HENRY AND BRAVO ON BEING A POSITIVE MALE FOOD ALLERGY ROLE MODEL! #internationalMensDay Note: image taken by Colette Martin of Learning to Eat Allergen Free What do you do and how does it pertain to food allergies? Thanks for giving me the chance to take part. I am editor of asthmaallergieschildren and co-author of Asthma Allergies Children: a parent’s guide. Both these projects were undertaken with two distinguished pediatric allergists, Dr. Larry Chiaramonte and Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who happens to be a cousin of mine. I am also author of Food Allergies: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Science, and the Search for a Cure—the first book about Dr. Xiu-Min Li who works at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. In all my work with Larry and Paul, I try to cover the broad range of allergic diseases. Food allergies get a great deal of attention, but as a public health problem, it is much smaller than asthma, and in terms of quality of life measures, atopic dermatitis is a bigger problem day to day. However, most people have several of these conditions simultaneously and we try to keep them in focus at the same time. Those who concentrate on food allergies and neglect their asthma are putting themselves at great risk. Our book is probably the best all around guide to allergies and asthma you can get, and the website is updated all the time because, as we say in our motto, medicine moves faster than print. My work with Dr. Li is a departure for me. I met her when I asked her to write a guest editorial for the website. I was always skeptical about herbal medicine, but she persuaded me that ancient herbal formulas have something to offer those with horrible eczema, asthma, and food allergies that Western doctors have failed to deliver. We are now working on a book together. Can you elaborate on why you decided to choose food allergies to work with, given your speech writing background? Like most good things in life, my allergy-related work happened by accident. My cousin and his colleague had been asked to write a book about kids’ allergies and asthma. I knew my cousin really well, and as I read their manuscript, I realized very quickly that everything that made him and Dr. Chiaramonte good doctors disappeared when they started to write. So I persuaded them to let me start from scratch and fill the book with their jokes, bedside manner, and stories. Having been a speechwriter was ideal training for this. I used to say “I can get interested in anything long enough to write a speech about it.” Moreover, all the elements of good speeches—storytelling, humor, anecdotes, quotations, and a convincing story line are there in all the stuff we have done together. What does your work do in community (how it affects people)? That’s a hard question to answer, Cyrus, because writing is essentially a solitary profession. I don’t lobby. I don’t give motivational speeches. And I don’t raise money. For two years I felt like I was putting messages in bottles several times a week and throwing them in the ocean. That started to change, oddly enough, when I met your mom at a meeting about Auvi-Q in New Jersey. She came up to me and started going on about how our website was the most authoritative thing on the web, how the standard for science coverage was in a class by itself. Things like that. I had never had a “fan” before. I’ve tried to live up to that. Food allergies are a tricky subject. I can’t do the mommy thing for obvious reasons. I can’t give medical advice. All I can do is try to inform, disabuse people of myths, and keep the discussion rolling along. Two years ago when we had 275 original posts, I compiled an ebook out of 89 of them, which is called Children’s Allergies and Asthma: One of Nature’s Dirty Tricks. This morning I posted #429. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of other items. The subject isn’t going away.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:14:09 +0000
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