I had never heard of this problem with tick bites until this summer.  There is a condition called Alphagal that occurs after a tick bite in humans, where they are extremely sensitive to meat and meat biproducts.   It turns out meat biproducts are in a LOT of things.  It is spread by the “lone star tick” which originated in the South.  But now, this tick has made it up the coast and is particularly prevalent in Martha’s Vinyard.

I had heard about it on NPR, but a patient alerted me that Acupuncture is being used to help with the problem.  This makes sense since acupuncture helps allergies and other autoimmune issues.  A quote from the New Yorker below, highlighted.

from the New Yorker

t was a perfect day for a blood meal. A salt breeze blew over the western shore of Martha’s Vineyard, riffling the meadow grass under a pale-blue sky. They’d been waiting by the footpath all afternoon, crouched in the shade of a windswept cedar. They didn’t do well in the sun. They’d spent the winter half asleep, in the moist, rotting leaves under a huckleberry bush, well away from other creatures. But they were hungry now, as they always were in the spring. They’d scuttled out into the open air that morning and were sitting side by side on a blade of switchgrass, their tiny teardrop bodies barely bending it down. Their back legs gripped its serrated edge while their front legs reached toward the path, waiting for a warm body to lumber by. They looked like children at a Macy’s Parade, leaning out to touch the Snoopy balloon.

“Look at them sitting there,” a voice said. The ground shook beneath them and a giant face suddenly loomed above, its bulbous eyes inches from their bodies. They could smell the carbon dioxide in the air. “Just a little hot breath and they stick out their legs to latch on,” Patrick Roden-Reynolds said. He blew on the ticks again, and watched their front limbs spread wide, trembling in the current. Then he reached down with a pair of tweezers and plucked them off the grass. He stuck them on a lint roller and pressed them deep into the spongy plastic, next to the others he’d collected that afternoon. They were arranged in neat rows by sex and species—dog tick, deer tick, lone-star tick—eighty-one in all. “Everyone comes here and is afraid of Jaws,” he said. “That is not what you should be scared about. It’s the little things.”

Roden-Reynolds is thirty-three and has been the island’s public-health biologist for four years. To a hungry tick, he must have been an appetizing sight: tall, stout, and soft-featured, with pale red hair and eyebrows. His cheeks and hands were flushed pink with blood beneath the skin. But he knew better than to expose his other body parts. He was covered from neck to boots in fabrics soaked with permethrin—a pesticide modelled on the toxic pyrethrin found in chrysanthemum flowers. Had one of these ticks crawled up the cuff of his pants, it would have been dead before it reached his belt.

When Commins has patients who are highly allergic, he often prescribes Xolair. Originally approved for asthma, Xolair can also prevent severe reactions to food allergies. Some patients even eat meat while they’re on it, though it’s not yet approved for that use. Others swear by acupuncture that focusses on the nerves of the outer ear. “I’m fascinated by it,” Commins told me. “The best I can think of is that the needles are manipulating the signal from the vagus nerve—this master controller that has a branch that goes to the back of the ear. Mast cells sit at the end of nerve endings. So it may be that acupuncture somehow manipulates what the mast cell is sensing.” Allergists have always downplayed the role of the nervous system, he said. “But I think about my own kid. He eats a walnut and has hives within seconds. That has got to be the nervous system. Nothing else moves that fast. In my mind, that is where we are going. That is the next great thing.”