Episode Details

My friends are starting to sniffle and sneeze every time we speak, signalling it's finally the worst part of the year: The latter half of Spring, where most of the allergens that you'll be dealing with for the year are finally starting to make themselves apparent.

Did you know that you can opt out of allergies? Well, seasonal ones, anyway. In four months, for about a thousand dollars,[1] it just... won't be an issue anymore. Mostly.

The most common method in the US (because it's covered consistently by insurance) is subcutaneous allergy shots (subcutaneous immunotherapy, SCIT), but if you're afraid of needles, there's also tablets and drops you can take (sublingual immunotherapy, SLIT). Some of the tablets can be covered by insurance in the US, but at the present time drops don't seem to be. You can get drops via Amazon's primary care service, apparently, but I haven't tried it, and don't know what the costs associated would be.

SLIT, despite its relative lack of acceptance by the US FDA, is effective: SLIT has been fairly standard in Europe for a long time, to good success.[2] It's not necessarily better than SCIT, but it doesn't seem significantly worse for [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
May 21st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqTwaZDZDgNGRaXus/you-can-opt-out-of-allergies

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.