Testing for Allergic Disease

Excerpt

To the Editors: The American College of Physicians' position paper (1) and the article by VanArsdel and Larson (2) on allergy testing make several disparaging comments about the radioallergosorbent test (RAST), clearly implying that this procedure does not compare favorably with diagnostic skin testing. These conclusions differ from those of a multispecialty allergy panel of the Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association (AMA) (3-5).

The deficiencies of the test, as stated in both the position paper (1) and the article (2), and in our comments based on the Council on Scientific Affairs In Vitro Allergy Report (5),