I have used desensitisation therapy for nearly 40 years, starting with EPD – the Enzyme Potentiated Desensitisation technique developed at St Mary’s Hospital in the 1960s by Dr Len McEwen. More recently I switched to the almost-identical LDA form. In October 2014 at a conference in Albuquerque there were major developments in our understanding of and use of desensitisation; we now realise that it can do much more than we knew.
Disease conditions that now may be treatable in this way include:
- Allergies of all types including inhalant allergies (eczema/asthma/hay fever) food intolerances and chemical sensitivities
- Autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, autoimmune arthritis, autoimmune hepatitis, autoimmune thyroiditis, and some forms of psoriasis
- Post-infective problems such as Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome, chronic Lyme disease, Crohn’s disease
- Complex and previously unexplained problems such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, ulcerative colitis, endometriosis, sarcoidosis.
The best way to see it is as one more tool for damping down the inflammation and hypersensitivity that can keep you ill – a tool that may work when others don’t, but probably works best alongside other measures. These days we don’t generally advise starting treatment with desensitisation alone, but for most of the last 40 years we kept finding things that helped the EPD or LDA to work – avoidance, nutrition, stress handling and so on – so that now we know there are many different ways to approach allergies, and it’s generally best to use most of them. That’s Integrative Medicine.