Search Results for: Melanie Thernstrom

The Therapy That’s Helping People Suffering From Food Allergies

— Is it possible to get over a peanut allergy? In Stanford Medicine Magazine, Melanie Thernstrom reports on how oral immunotherapy (OIT) is helping to fix food allergies. Thernstrom’s son Kieran was allergic to eggs and nuts before going through OIT, and now can eat the foods without his parents worrying:

“For everyone who has stayed in the study, the treatment has been 100 percent successful,” says Nadeau. “It turns out that everyone’s immune system is capable of adapting — and surprisingly, it is as true of adults as children.” She and her team now have an eight-year study of OIT — the longest record in the United States — in which they found that everyone who was compliant with the treatment and continued to eat the foods has kept their allergies from returning.

What happens if the patients stop eating the foods altogether? Nadeau recently published the results of a withdrawal study, where 20 formerly peanut-allergic patients who had completed two years of OIT and were able to eat a full serving (1 tablespoon of peanut butter or 20 peanuts) without any reaction stopped eating peanuts altogether. After three months, more than half (13 out of 20) had regained the allergy to peanuts, although their reactions were no longer as severe. By six months, almost everyone (17 of 20) had regained the allergy.

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Photo: Daniella Segura

The ‘Anti-Helicopter Parent’ Is Just as Insufferable as the Helicopter Parent

Photo by jdlrobson

If you read enough #longreads about parenting in The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, and Slate, then eventually you will discover you are an awful parent. But there is nothing so satisfying for us awful parents as reading stories about parents who are more insufferable than we are. So it is with great pride I share this piece by Melanie Thernstrom, who profiles a “free-range” parent who lets his children play on the roof of their house and then rubs it in the face of his neighbors – thereby forcing the other parents to become imagination-quashing killjoys, AKA people who try to keep their kids from potentially breaking their necks. (But hey, my neighbor says the odds are low, and life-endangering activities are mother nature’s way of thinning the herd! I guess it’s fine!) Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Meet the Twiblings: How Four Women (and One Man) Conspired to Make Two Babies

Meet the Twiblings: How Four Women (and One Man) Conspired to Make Two Babies