Admin edit: we’ll ask about but after the audio file is gone it seems like there is a delay of up to 4 weeks and then they post the transcript – not the same but better than nothing.

IANAD but these symptoms sound like anaphylaxis so, like Musclguy, I did wonder about why IgG food tests were used. If Sanity was hospitalized after these symptoms (it’s not entirely clear to me) I should hope that some kind of referral was made rather than leaving him/her to self-diagnose.

I am not up on the IgG story, I self diagnosed as gluten intolerant (mild) 15 years ago using good old fashioned exclusion diets. My money was on dairy and I was surprised at the gluten results but a repeat made the issue incontrovertible.

Fortunately I can eat pasta or something like pizza once a week and I have some good bread machine recipes for extremely palatable GF bread. There are some who are keen to tell me I am allergic and the supermarket shelves heave with expensive products to allow me to wallow and pander if I was so inclined. Some people want such things as they then give them an identity and it is this which makes me sceptical of much of the modern fad to be intolerant to something. We used to call such people fussy eaters, now we have to be sensitive to their suffering. Bah Humbug!

So, I might be, but all things considering, I don’t plan on finding out any time soon.

The rest of the Polygonaceae family isn’t (as far as I know) edible, so that’s not much of a worry.

I consider myself rather lucky to be allergic to rather obscure foodtypes, you’d be hard pressed to find any store that sells either buckwheat or rhubarb anywhere near where I live. If my parents didn’t grow it in their garden, I would probably never have found out.

I took two IgG tests, because I would sometimes respond rather extremely to certain foods, and rather then risk hospitalization (again) by randomly trying what it was, my parents took me for a foodtests. It found nothing.

Some time later, I got sick again (swollen throat, difficulty breathing, horrible nausia etc), so another test. Again, no result. I was officially not allergic to any food. Until I got sick again.

Now, I was getting a little paranoid, but I was starting to see a pattern, after all, there are only so many ingredients in the food that aren’t in normal, everyday consumption. After some carefull DIY testing, it turned out I was allergic to Rhubarb. Yes, really.

Apearently, both tests didn’t check for rhubarb, because “Most european people aren’t allergic to rhubarb”…. Isn’t that what the test is for? to determine unlikely allergies?

So, if you’re unfortunate enough to have an allergy that affect less then 1 in 200.000 people, odds are that a normal foodtest won’t even look for it.