Founder and CEO of Allergy Release Technique Amy Thieringer has helped over 500 children.
Allergy Release Technique
Amy Thieringer was a naturopath when her 13-year-old son suffered a severe allergic reaction after eating cashews. An emergency trip to the hospital led to a three-day stay and he almost died. The doctor ordered Thieringer’s son to carry epinephrine at all times and to avoid tree nuts and peanuts, but Thieringer had a hard time coming to terms with the sudden and drastic change in lifestyle that her son—who had never had allergies before—was facing. Thieringer’s son is one of the 32 million Americans with food allergies. Among children with food allergies, more than 40% are treated in an emergency department at some point. This is a statistic that Thieringer, an integrative and nutrition health coach, wanted to challenge. She decided to apply what she knew about functional health to allergies, and became an entrepreneur with a mission to cure allergies and change the lives of as many children as she could.
Thieringer founded Allergy Release Technique, and currently runs centers in Massachusetts and New York. She has cured deadly food allergies of over 500 children. In contrast to standard allergy treatments, she designed a process that targets the overreactive immune system. This involves at least two months of resetting patients’ immune systems through identifying and neutralizing toxins and other stressors through radiofrequency, while simultaneously shifting microbiome in the gut using a probiotic. She also implements mind-body control to calm the anxiety response and later reintroduces foods once the bodies have healed and adjusted. Thieringer started small, running a solo clinic through her home and later decided to scale the business and expand her impact. In 2020 A.R.T. brought in $775,000 in revenue.
When she opened her clinic out of her home in 2006, Thieringer was a single mother of three children going through a divorce. She had only two clients and earned $100 per week. Hardships and her son’s near-death experience however, pushed Thieringer to manifest her vision of successfully wiping away allergies for good. A study approved by Boston Children’s Hospital involving children with milk and/or peanut allergies found that children with those allergies who utilized Thieringer’s treatment methods were able to consume foods they were previously allergic to on a weekly basis, had less severe allergic reactions after skin prick testing and reported lower impact of food allergies on their qualities of life compared to those in standard allergy management.
She has treated adults as well, but the impact on children with anaphylactic reactions was deep “and their worlds were very small,” Thieringer said. “It leads to a lot of anxiety and I really wanted to change the trajectory of their lives.” She soon moved her business to an outside office, and two years ago spent $200,000 to open a larger center with multiple practitioners.
From the beginning Thieringer knew she wanted to design a system that would work well for practitioners as well as for patients. One of the biggest challenges at the time was “thinking about how to scale, and scale in a way that keeps the integrity of the process intact,” Thieringer said. At first the goal was to train individual practitioners who would work in their own settings. But she soon learned, “to keep the integrity of the process intact and really support the practitioners, that creating centers is really the way to do it,” she said.
The Massachusetts location of A.R.T. now has six practitioners and the New York office is gradually growing as well. Through her six-month program, Thieringer has trained over 40 practitioners—most of whom are based in the northeast with a few in other parts of the United States. Behind the success and growth of A.R.T., Thieringer sometimes faced doubt and struggled in grappling with people’s perceptions of her holistic approach. Some medical professionals had pushed back on her methods, but now that many physician allergists refer patients to her, it reinforces the strong support for her approach and business.
Thieringer’s foremost wish is to eradicate food allergies around the world, but in the meantime the process has enabled Thieringer to pave her own journey as an entrepreneur. “I’ve learned how to be a leader,” she said. “I’ve learned how to listen to the needs of not only our clients but also practitioners—what works, what doesn’t work, where the gaps are, how to make this better, how to really expand myself and push myself outside of my comfort zone.”
