This website aims to:

• Help people who have asthma or allergies
  Knowing more can often help you to choose the best way forward, may help you to get better treatment, and may help you to make the most of the treatment which has been prescribed.

• Help parents of children with asthma or allergies
  The sections on nut allergy and anaphylaxis are largely for parents. We intend to add other sections for parents.

• Be of interest to doctors, nurses and other health professionals.
  The pages aimed at sufferers may also be some help to professionals. Some information and links to other websites are specifically for health professionals.

• Answer questions people ask when they visit our clinic
  If your question is not answered, why not ask it via the Guest Book, so that we can consider including it? Unfortunately we can only answer a small proportion of questions by email.

• Tell you more than we can tell you in the clinic
  All health care systems limit the time you can spend with the doctor. Here are some of the things we'd like to tell all our patients but haven't time to.

• Be more up-to-date than the leaflets we hand out in our clinic
  Printed leaflets can only be updated occasionally. These pages are updated all the time.

• Answer questions people ask via our Guest Book
  Why not ask your own question? We don't guarantee to answer it, but you might be lucky. We won't answer your question in a personal sense, but for general interest. EMPHATICALLY, THIS WEBSITE IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR CONSULTING A DOCTOR. YOUR DOCTOR KNOWS FAR MORE ABOUT YOU. DO NOT FOLLOW ADVICE IN THESE WEB PAGES IF IT CONFLICTS WITH THE ADVICE OF YOUR DOCTOR.

• Be more detailed than other websites, at least in some areas
  See for yourself.

• Present some viewpoints you may not see elsewhere
  Doctors don't all agree about everything, even if they are all mainstream conventional doctors. You might like to see more than one point of view. Some of the sites we provide links to give views we disagree with, so you can see them too. The views in these pages are individual views, not usually the result of collaboration between a group of doctors. This has advantages and disadvantages.

• Represent a 'mainstream' medical approach.
  The problem with alternative medicine for us is that if mainstream doctors believed in it we would be doing it, and it would not be called alternative medicine!

• Provide links to other websites.
  Most of these sites in turn contain links to yet other sites. Therefore this website should provide you with a route to just about everything which is worthwhile on asthma and allergy on the Worldwide Web. However, the rapid growth of the web means that we will not be able to keep up. Soon we will only be able to point to major sites and small sites which have caught our attention.

  • Such a link does NOT imply our endorsement of everything in the other sites, though it does mean we believe it has good points worthy of your attention.

  • We cannot read every part of every site to which we provide links. Even less can we keep up to date with changes in those sites.

  • If you know of a good site which you think we should list, let us know.

  • If you find unacceptable claims in a site we do list, let us know.

  • We do NOT provide links to sites we know to offer approaches which we believe to be dishonest or a waste of time. Specifically, you will find links in other allergy websites which do not meet our criteria.

Dr Martin Stern is involved with the AllergoSpace project of the Audio Visual Subcommittee of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. By clicking on the highlighted underlined name Allergospace you can visit its website, which also contains information for allergy sufferers. The content is subject to international agreement between European specialists. This makes it more authoritative but it takes longer to agree changes or new text. It is also more highly developed technically and graphically. In comparison, the AAIR pages you are now looking at are not agreed by a committee, and can be changed quickly, but are technically and graphically less sophisticated. There is a place for both approaches; see for yourself by using our links.