All right, welcome. This is episode 587 of the Divine Intervention Podcast. In today's podcast,

we're going to be continue our series on the step one free, 120. This is going to be series 5. This is

going to be part 5B. So we stopped at 45 because there were a lot of things I really wanted to go

through in terms of just content and pathophase and test sticking

principle. So we're going to finish that up. So question 46 says, a 40-year-old woman comes to the

physician because of a runny nose, sneezing and itching eyes on exposure to cats since childhood.

Anti-allergy drugs have not provided relief. Her symptoms improve with a program of

desensitization involving an administration of increasing doses of the allergen. Which of the

following is the most likely mechanism of the beneficial effect of this treatment? So, this person

basically is, we're told that, okay, we're going to start a desensitization program.

This is actually something that's not really common, but it's actually very effective for the people that are willing to kind of stick it through.

So, you know, many people call this immunotherapy.

In fact, this was probably like some of the earliest kinds of immunotherapy that existed.

So basically, what does allergen desensitization involve?

Basically, you keep getting bigger and bigger doses of things,

bigger and bigger doses of the allergen.

And then over time, that induces a lot of tolerance by your immune system, right?

Like a bunch of things actually happen, right?

So for example, like your immune

system starts making these regulatory T cells that make things like Interleukin 10 and TGF beta

that pretty much kind of dumb down your immune system. You switch away from like a T helper

two response to more of a T helper one response, right? And also in that process, you make a bunch of IgG antibodies

...