have had allergies for years now and recently got tested and turns out the most problematic one for me is dust mites

these are often controlled through environmental means, like washing bedsheets, filters, or through typical antihystamines, or allergy therapy (shots)

shots are expensive and time consuming, and they dont always work if you move to a new area

I would rather not permanently be on antihystamines, it isn’t so bad that I can’t breath, but it is annoying and my nose… just does not work as well.

read through a bunch of the meta-analyses (I think this one was good?) on primary exposure (how you develop the allergy?) vs tertiary (symptom control), and it seems most of them come to the conclusion that it helps with primary exposure, but there aren’t enough studies that I could find that effectively control other factors vs. bedwraps/all these typical environmental remedies.

There is also conflict between the US and Europe on the effectiveness of these treatments, is unclear if that is due to environmental differences or something else.

in any case, I am still going to control my environment to maybe reduce some symptom severity, but I do wonder if a lot of the personal anecdotes of these remedies fixing things is because they happened to be comorbid with other environmental/lifestyle changes people make when they realize they are allergic.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24484971/

There are some that refute this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6474366/#R31

but those are referencing asthma symptoms/primary development/exposure in infants/children, not a blocked nose or anything like I have