Can I live with a dog if I have allergies?

If you're allergic to your pet and your reactions aren’t life-threatening, there are many ways to reduce indoor allergens and allergy symptoms so you and your pet can live together more comfortably. Thankfully, there are many solutions that can allow an allergy sufferer to keep their beloved pets while successfully managing their allergies. You'd be surprised to know how many people with allergies that aren't life-threatening are able to live happily with their pets. In many cases, the benefits of having a pet outweigh the drawbacks of pet allergies. A person with animal allergies may react less to dogs with soft, constantly growing hair, or a specific cat or dog may cause more or less of an allergic reaction than another animal of that same breed. Reduce the allergens and your symptoms if you're allergic to your pet and your reactions aren’t life-threatening, there are many ways to reduce indoor allergens and allergy symptoms so you and your pet can live together more comfortably. A combination of approaches—medical control of symptoms, good housecleaning methods and immunotherapy—is most likely to succeed in allowing an allergic person to live with pets. It's worth it to preserve the bond between you and your pet by checking if you're truly allergic to your pet and, if you are, to try these solutions. You may hear claims about breeds of dogs and cats that are non-allergenic or cats and dogs who are hypoallergenic. Whether someone has an allergic reaction depends on both the individual person and the individual animal.

Many people are often told by their caregivers that if you’re allergic to cats or dogs which are the most common that it’s best just to find new homes for your pets. In reality in this country most people really don’t want to get rid of their pets and quite frankly even when they do many of their friends and family have have cats and dogs too. So it’s really hard just get rid of your pets. So the question becomes if you can’t avoid your pet or your animal then what are your alternatives? Things like room purifiers, particularly in your bedroom, I would definitely keep the pets out of your bedroom if possible. They’ve been shown to be very effective particularly with cat allergy; a little bit less so with dog allergy, but also work well if avoidance strategies don’t work. Then we move on to medications. Medications like, oh, any number of antihistamines or medications like the leukotriene inhibitor, such as Singulair, can be very effective at helping to kind of soften many of those allergic symptoms, especially if you can be taking them on a regular basis. And basically the end goal is really to see if you can still maintain and manage your allergies and your allergy types of symptoms while at the same time having your loving pets around for as long as you’d like them to be.