What is an allergy?

It's clear that allergies are much more prevalent today than they were in the past. One study estimated that rates of pediatric allergy have increased by 600% since 1970, so that a child today is about 7 times more likely to have an allergy than 40 years ago. What is contributing to this? There are probably many factors, but when we begin to think about allergy as a disruption of our healthy borders–first a loss of border too far in, and then a pushing of our border too far out–we can better understand how it can be addressed. Because we need to start at the root cause. Antihistamines and steroids reduce the inflammatory symptoms, but they do not heal our boundary. So it is useful to look at two extremes of border imbalance.