' And I don`t picture our school district allowing a doctor who trains every school nurse in the district on the epipen (hundreds of nurses; our district is huge) to be teaching wrong information. That seems pretty far fetched to me.'
Unfortunately it doesn't sound far fetched to me at all. My son's former pediatrician is our district's physician--the one who writes the standing orders for the epi pen. He doesn't know ANYTHING about food allergies and gave me so much bad advice he could have ended up causing my son's death. We are only LUCKY that DS was fine in spite of his terrible lack of knowledge about food allergies. DS didn't get diagnosed until age 2 because of him and the terrible first allergist we saw. Because of the two of them DS ended up having super severe anaphylaxis and they still were telling me to just give Benadryl even then! The fact that someone is a doctor doesn't mean they know anything about food allergies. Most general practitioners are lacking in their knowledge of food allergies because it is a specialized field where the current best practices and recommendations differ a lot even from 5 or 10 years ago. There are many here who went through several doctors before they got a proper diagnosis, many who got diagnosed and weren't told to carry epi pens, many who got epi pens but weren't told when to use them or were given dangerous emergency plans such as 'use if he stops breathing', etc. And if we want to talk about nurses, unfortunately many have even less information about food allergies. They apparently teach that Benadryl can stop reactions in many nursing schools because it is a very common myth among nurses.
How would your school district be expert enough to know whether this doctor is teaching the right thing with regard to how to treat anaphylaxis? School districts often know even less than doctors about food allergies and they will NOT question a doctor on what they say. They won't have the legal authority to contradict the district doctor.
the fact that a school nurse said this story means zero. I'm not sure what type of medical conferences you went to where people were saying this story but this story, if true, would be PUBLISHED. It doesn't appear to be published anywhere. Even some allergists do not know food allergies and can be ill informed. My son's first allergist told me I was just a nervous mother and that ds didn't have FAs in spite of my telling him about DS's lip and eye swelling, hives and vomiting after eating certain foods. He didn't give me an epi pen or anything. I'm not impressed by hearing 'an allergist said blah blah'. I pay attention to things that come out of top allergist's mouths (even they are not infallible but they go by science) and what FAAN published and other researchers publish, etc.
Again, the suicide was so long ago, there is no way that you could possibly know that it was not published. Have you read every single piece of medical literature ever published? Probably not. Many of us on this board have been misinformed by pediatricians, including me. I already posted on this very thread about being told to give milk allergic dd butter to increase her weight gain, being told wrongly that butter does not have milk protein. Many of us here have stories about wrong information about allergies from pediatricians. However, the physician who trains the nurses on the epipen is an allergist, not a pediatrican, and actually very well known and well respected in the medical community. And then most recently having been told the same thing at a FAAN event, I guess then one would have to believe that FAAN is not a reliable source either. And that might have been true at one point years ago when they published articles saying airborne reactions do not occur, but at that time some felt that the motivation for publishing such articles was that FAAN was receiving funding from the peanut industry. The motivation for an allergist at a FAAN event falsely stating that airbore pb reactions occur would be far more obscure to me. But again, if you are so sure that it is not true, you could email him. I mean after all, if you are so sure that he will reply stating he never said that, you would have spent far less time emailing him to get the facts that posting over and over and over on this thread about how you don`t believe it. The fact that those on this thread who insist that this pb suicide story is made up, and who insisted on a source, have not emailed the source to "prove" I made this up says it all.
And no,
of course, I am not going to post my credentials on an internet message board. That`s just common sense. I am under no more obligation to post my credentials than when some of our members who work in the legal field give input on legal situations or when an opthomologist on this board posted in response to an eye question. When Ark has posted about nursing situations, no one is asking her for her credentials. When teachers on this board post about learning disabilities, no one is asking for their credentials.
It is a shame that a couple of people on this thread have such a hard time with the fact that not every allergist agrees with you. Whatever....I am finished with this thread. I posted initially because I didn`t want new people to see information that may not be correct. I think anyone objective can read this thread and see what is really going on. And as for me, I am moving on.