Dr. Kari Nadeau tells Terry Gross about the desensitization treatment she is pioneering on children with extreme food allergies:
What it usually involves is a small amount — let’s say specks of the food, very small amounts of the food that you can barely see — in a dish and then, over time, you increase that dose ever so slightly and you want to make sure that the patient can tolerate the dose well and this is safe and then every two weeks you come back into a clinic and you increase that dose. And this should all be done in a research setting with a very well-trained team of individuals that are ready to help the patient for any type of reaction … and by the end of a number of months to years, one can get up to … about a serving’s worth of food which, for a lot of people, is very promising.
Image Herr Hans Gruber
