User Guide - Definitions
Allergy
We use the term in a casual sense and it will not necessarily imply specific immune system involvement. As in the popular lexicon the use here can be interchanged with sensitivity, intolerance and aversion.
Incitant
We use the word incitant to refer to items on our master list of substances.
Wheat, for example. Perhaps you don’t have a wheat allergy and if so you can just ignore the incitant. If you need to track wheat in the application you build a personal allergen based on the wheat incitant.
The incitant includes a category name (food, pollen, etc) and optionally a food group number. A few common food incitants include information about products that might contain the food as a hidden ingredient.
When you create a wheat allergen you build on top of the basic incitant information. Your symptoms, reaction severity, photos and testing results combine with the incitant name and are all stored in a record called an allergen.
If you don’t find the incitant you need, or if you simply would rather create your own version, then you need to click on the ‘Custom’ row that is beneath the Incitant button on the Add Allergen screen.
There are three advantages to using our incitants when possible.
- Category names are provided for you to reduce typing. This will also help keep your main category list concise.
- We can provide updates to incitant data such as hidden food ingredient lists. We can’t update your custom incitants for you.
- We will be able to create more concise master shopping lists for all your PALs (planned future app feature).