How About Those Antihistamines?

Hi everybody, this is Pete Piotrowski here, for another installment in the Sinus Pain Help blog and video series. Here to help you with your sinus infections, and remedies thereof. Today I’m going to give you some of my tips around antihistamines. Antihistamines are pharmaceutical products that you take to reduce reactions that your body has to things like pollen and other allergens. Now these can be your best friends, they can also be your worst enemies. In the last video, I talked about how it was June here in Colorado, but as the seasons change different things are blooming. I suffer a lot of hay fever, my eyes itch, my nose runs, et cetera, et cetera.

So what I’ll do is take an over-the-counter antihistamine. There’s lots of “flavors” of these that you can get over the counter. I’ve also taken prescription antihistamines over the years. Now here’s the tip, and it’s important, antihistamines will stop your nose from running, now is that a good thing or a bad thing?...well, you have to be real careful. If you have a sinus infection, you want your nose to run because you want your sinuses to clean themselves out naturally. If you take antihistamines when you have a sinus infection it’s only going to make the sinus infection worse because it’s going to dry up your sinuses, keep them from running, keep them from cleaning out naturally. The sinus tissue is excreting mucus to try and help heal itself and get rid of the infection, and now you’ve dried that up so that stuff is just excreting up there and building the pressure, building the pressure, building the pressure. That’s going to make you more miserable than you know.

So I recommend that you take antihistamines when you need them, for hay fever, but as soon as you feel a sinus infection coming on, stop taking them immediately. Don’t start them again until you know that the infection is gone. That’s the tip for today. I actually got it from a doctor as sort of an off-the-cuff comment, but I took it to the nth degree and it has worked wonderfully for me. See my website to read more about my search for an effective treatment for sinusitis.