© CNN
When her daughter Phoebe Carney was 2½, her doctor did a skin test and said that she would be fine drinking milk. Hopeful, the mother gave Phoebe rice cheese with casein, a dairy product.
Suddenly, the toddler began coughing, and the color drained from her face. The mother gave her an antihistamine, but the child's entire body turned red. That's how they ended up in the emergency room.
"I think the tests are inconclusive, and that obviously there's going to be instances where it looks like there has been an outgrowing of an allergy when there actually hasn't," said Bayer, of Brooklyn, New York. "It's an inexact science at this point."
It turns out that the term "food allergy" has no universally accepted definition, nor are there well-accepted criteria for diagnosis, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
That means that while children like Phoebe may have life-threatening reactions to foods that don't respond to tests, others who think they have allergies may be unnecessarily avoiding foods. There is no cure for food allergies, and doctors are unclear on why some people develop them.
"It's a limiting diagnosis; it's difficult socially, it's difficult nutritionally, and so really trying to nail down whether or not you truly have an allergy is a really important thing," said Dr. Jennifer Schneider Chafen at Stanford University School of Medicine, lead author of the study.
