article points to doctors not aalways prescribing epi for pateints with LTFAs

My DH ripped this out of what he calls a "throw away" publication. This questionnaire seems to confirm what many posters here have experienced.

I couldn't access it on-line, so I'll transcribe it. Sorry for any typos.

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Internal Medicine News
July 1, 2006
[url="http://www.internalmedicalnews.com"]www.internalmedicalnews.com[/url]
Clinical Rounds
p. 37

Few Doctors Comfortable Treating Food Allergies

by Patrice Wendling
Chicago Bureau

[i]MIAMI BEACH --- Primary care and emergency department physicians provide care to a growing number of patients with food allergies, but they are necessarily comfortable doing so.

That's the conclusion of a survey of 82 primary care and ED physicians in the Mount Sinai and University of California, Davis, health care systems. The 23-item anonymous questionnaire was distributed in mid-2005 to board-certified physicians who had been in practice for an average of 12 years.

Almost all of the 82 respondents (98%) cared for patients with food allergies. Yet on a Likert scale, "very comfortable" was selected by just 11% regarding diagnosis and 7% regarding ongoing management of food allergies, Dr. Arvind Kumar and associates reported in a poster at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy. Asthma, and Immunology.

When asked how they would manage a life-threatening food allergy to peanut or shrimp, 77% said they would prescribe self-injectable epinephrine, 39% would provide dietary advice, and 28% would refer to an allergist. "Even though 77% would prescribe an epi pen, we'd want that number to be much closer to 100% in patients with a life-threatening food allergy," Dr. Kumar of the department of internal medicine, division of rheumatology, allergy and clinical immunology at UC-Davis, said in an interview.

Although nearly two-thirds of physicians reported being comfortable teaching a patient how to use autoinjectable epinephrine, 63% of offices lacked training devices, and 74% did not use educational handouts.

More than half (59%) of respondents received most of the prior training in food allergy through clinical experience rather than in structured educational programs. [/i]