I was addicted to antihistamines. Here’s how I quit.

This post is my personal experience and pro­vides gen­eral infor­ma­tion and dis­cus­sion about med­i­cine, health and related sub­jects. It is not intended as medical advice. If you have a med­ical con­cern, please con­sult with an appropriately-licensed physi­cian or healthcare worker.

—

My story of antihistamine addiction is just another example of how my perception of drugs, allergies, sickness and recovery changed.

I reached the age of 19 thinking I was allergic to shellfish — clams, mussels, and the sort — because of an incident when I was four years old. Then one day when I was in France visiting my host family, the mother made a cold salad that contained some sort of small mussels. I ate it and felt fine. Then later on I realised that the ‘incident’ was probably food poisoning.

As a teen going to a school with air-conditioning, I was sneezing almost all the time. This recollection was corroborated by my best friend, who told me recently, “Yeah, I remember you had a cold all the time.” (See? Really, “all the time.”)

I shared a room with my sister and we had always slept with the aircon on. But it was only as a teen that I started to have problems, waking up with a blocked and/or runny nose, which carried on throughout the day (because of the aircon in school).

Brief moments of respite? Only when walking in the fresh air between classes. It was a rich school, and aircon was a luxury, but unfortunately it made me so very sick. The constant sneezing irritated my airways and I often ended up with an URTI as written on the medical chits — upper respiratory tract infection — and also ended up with a bunch of drugs. I regularly got paracetamol for accompanying fever and cough suppressants containing codeine.

‘Little yellow pill’

But my favourite was the ‘little yellow pill’ or chlorpheniramine, a potent 1st generation antihistamine. Oooh yes, that tiny pill could knock you out for hours. I began to think that I needed it to ‘cure’ any bout of non-stop sneezing. In fact, I remember once when I was living in France (out of Singapore I never had these allergic sneezing episodes) I woke up feeling a bit ill and I took a yellow pill to ‘ward off the flu’. (No idea back then how diseases worked, obviously.)

Chlorpheniramine blocks H1 histamine receptors in cells by competing to bind with them. Circa 2012, enter new over-the-counter (OTC) antihistamines like Zyrtec (Cetirizine) and Clarityne (Loratidine), all promising to stop sneezing due to allergic-like reactions with no drowsiness. Zyrtec was great, but Clarityne didn’t work on me at all.

When I was taking it, the yellow pill had always been a prescription drug. What I found suspicious was that on trips home to Singapore while living in Europe, I discovered that it had become available OTC. And for like, 1/20 of the original price as a prescription drug. What just happened here? (Maybe 2nd generation antihistamines crowding out the market for 1st generation ones?)

It made me realise that there were definitely some economic — and not purely pharmacological — forces at work in deciding which medications were deemed ‘effective’.

Something in the aircon…

On these trips home I also started to notice that I would have an allergic reaction anytime I wore a piece of clothing in my summer wardrobe, which had been untouched for half a year or so. Now I know that this is a reliable sign of a dust mite allergy, the most common type in Singapore.

When I got my own room when we moved into a new house in 2007, I learned to sleep with a fan instead of the aircon. It worked — I never woke up with a blocked/runny nose again. I noticed also that when I was tempted to switch on the aircon (some nights are really hot, right) I started sneezing as soon as the cool air hit my face.

In 2013 I got pregnant and I had one of these sneezing episodes on my trip home. My mum had told me before of one of my aunts who was paranoid about taking any drugs while pregnant, avoiding even paracetamol. That stuck with me, and I doubted whether to take the yellow pill now (this blogger had the same doubts – she took it though). In the end I took half, fell asleep, and suffered through about a week of sneezing and runny nose and URTI before I recovered.

During another episode on that same trip home, I did the same. Suffered through another week of it. I didn’t know it yet, but I was retraining my immune system to recognise the allergen and give a full immune response, uninterrupted by antihistamines.

Rebuilding my immune system

When my son was a few weeks old, I got the flu. I happened to read about how the European elderberry (Sambucus nigra) flower can help with thinning and clearing mucus. It was easy to get — the tea/dried herbs section at the neighbourhood organic supermarket — so I drank cup after cup of hot elderberry flower infusions while breastfeeding. My flu was gone in 3 days and my son never even got sick.

This Sambucus tea became a staple every time I got sick. Now I know it was also helping to strengthen my immune system, as evident by the length of time I took to recover. At the time, just 3 days to get over the flu was something incredible to me. I never thought it was possible to recover with just herbs, and no drugs. Now I know that drugs just mask and suppress symptoms, they don’t heal. Even worse, many drugs also impede future healing by blocking detoxification systems in our body.

Case in point: antihistamines. The many warnings to not take antihistamines if you have liver or kidney problems is to me a warning that your liver may not be able to take this kind of regular antihistamine abuse. Chlorpheniramine also blocks the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, so overuse is logically linked to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.  In fact, Zyrtec (cetirizine) has also been linked to acute liver injury.

I think that our immune system is ridiculously smart. Give it a virus or bacteria through the usual channels of the nose, mouth and gut, and it will learn to make the correct antibodies, antivirals and anti-whatever to prevent you from getting sick again the next time. Blocking the full response with symptomatic drugs prevents the body from properly learning how to fight.

For me, I did notice that once I stopped taking antihistamines, my immune response dramatically improved. Instead of a week, I needed only about half the time to recover from a cold or flu.

Things got better: I discovered other ways of dealing with being sick. I discovered the herb Echinacea, mega-dosing (10g-15g) with vitamin C (a buffered form is calcium ascorbate), using nasal sprays like Sterimar to clear a virus from the nose before it goes down to the throat and lungs, and eating probiotic foods (recently I chugged down a shot of the brine from homemade fermented radish). In addition to other commonsense things like rest and drinking lots of water.

Immune system: rebooted

Just a few weeks ago I got an allergic reaction from too much time in bad aircon, and feeling an approaching URTI, I did all of these things. I had been sneezing for a whole day, and was feeling a sore throat coming on. I was desperate because I had a big event the next day.

And how did I feel when I woke up? As if I had never even been sick. My throat and nose were completely clear and I felt no irritation at all.

In short, I do know that my immune response to allergens I had been struggling with for decades (dust mites and aircon mold) has improved dramatically. Getting an allergic episode no longer means that I will automatically get an URTI or that I must take a yellow pill.

These days when my immune system is a bit down (because I haven’t been eating/sleeping well) and I trigger an allergy (wearing a piece of clothing that’s been in there just a bit too long, or sitting in a cafe with aircon mold), I sneeze for 10 minutes and the response dies down.

It’s as if my immune system has finally learned that these allergens are rightfully harmless, and can be left alone. Just like how it was supposed to. Like, wow, right?

—

TL;DR: My allergic response to dust mites and mold in certain aircon systems is to sneeze until I got an upper respiratory tract infection. I took antihistamines regularly for 10 years to stop the allergic response. I quit cold turkey while pregnant. Gradually learned to use herbs, vitamin C and probiotics when sick. Immune response to allergens reduced from hours to a few minutes. Over 3 years, recovery time from cold/flu viruses reduced from 7 days to 1 day.