How are food and skin allergies diagnosed?

There are many ways we can use to test and see where these skin allergies, what they’re from, the food allergies, what they may be from. Generally, adults know what they’re allergic to, as far as foods go. By that time, they’ve tried a lot of things, they can do that. So we usually see the food allergies in kids. But nonetheless, tracking down what causes the allergy can be difficult. It’s definitely a work in progress with a lot of patients. You basically backtrack and see what they were exposed to that was different or new. Maybe it was a soap they used, maybe it was some food that they had never had before, some spice that they had never used before, or it could be multiple things. With that being said, once you start eliminating those things, they’ve tried some food, stay away from that food and let’s see what happens and if they have another reaction and they were not taking that, then we start looking for other reasons for it. As far as the gold standard, I should say, for diagnosis, it is skin testing. They take a little bit of what they call antigen, and stick it under your skin with a little needle and if you react to it and you get a big welt, then we know you’re allergic to that. That’s the testing kind of gold standard for those things. We don’t do that in the office here. We use more of a detailed history to kind of test to determine what they’re allergic to or how to determine that.