It used to be that if you wanted to know what you were allergic to you had to go through many tests that would take weeks, or even months to get the results. If your allergy was an uncommon one or out of the ordinary, it would perhaps take years, or you will just not ever find out.

If you suffered from seasonal allergies, they may have gone away before the testing clinic was able to see what was bothering you, and you would stop clinic testing and go back to regular life as before. It just took too long to obtain any definite results from tests. This method has all been revamped and is more up-to-date and speedier nowadays, however if you are being tested for allergies, it is likely that you will go through a number of tests still to determine what you are actually allergic to.

Of course this also depends on what medical history you bring to bear in the equation. There are three basic ways that a clinic or hospital can use to test you for allergies. These include a skin test, elimination test and a blood test. of course each of these has it’s pros and cons and a competent doctor will be able to surmise which one you need to start with for maximum effectiveness.

Skin Test

The most commonly used is a skin test. This involves putting a small amount of the allergen on your skin. Allergen, by the way, is the medical term for the substance suspected of causing your allergy. Most often, the allergen is applied to your forearm but it could also be done on your back or upper arm. Then the skin in that area is irritated by pricking it with a needle or scratching the skin. This allows the substance to get under your skin. If you are allergic to it there will usually be an allergic reaction in less than 10 to 15 minutes. Usually the reaction just involves redness, itching and swelling of the skin but testers have to be careful with skin tests because in some cases the reaction may be severe and involve respiratory complications.

A variation of the skin test is the intradermal allergy test. This test uses a small needle to inject the allergen just beneath the skin. Skin tests are usually used to identify things in the air that you inhale that might be causing your allergy or allergies to insect or animal bites.

Elimination Test

A second type of allergy testing is called elimination testing. This is most often used to identify food and diet allergies. In a very controlled environment, various foods are either added or removed from your diet and your reaction is monitored. Often the food is disguised in some fashion to prevent psychological factors from interfering with the test. Sometimes if you think you are allergic to something you abnormally influence the result. Obviously, this method is very time consuming and can only be used if the reactions are relatively mild.

Blood Test

The third and best technique to test for allergies is the blood test. As the name suggests, a small amount of your blood is taken for laboratory testing. The lab activity is complicated, but simply explained they will expose your blood to different allergens. If you are allergic to any of them, your blood will make IgE antibodies in order to fight the allergen. Depending on what kinds of IgE antibodies are created and how many are created, the lab can tell you what you are allergic to as well as how severe your allergy is.

RAST and UniCAP are the two standard kinds of modern blood testing for allergies. UniCAP is nearly an entirely automated process that can search for several 100 allergens and will even assign a number from 1 to 6 to distinguish the severity of the allergic reaction. The main downfall of blood testing is it requires specialized equipment. Normally your clinic or hospital will have to send your blood sample away and will not get results back for many weeks.

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