DALLAS - It's that time of year again. The grass is growing and trees and wild flowers are blooming, which means many North Texans are suffering.

While different people find relief from different treatments, some have turned to acupuncture for allergy relief.

Thanks to her severe seasonal allergies, Maureen Nault used to call spring time misery season.

"It turned into asthma, and bronchitis and sinus infections," she said of her allergies. "... I would be so ill that there were several times I had to go to the hospital for breathing treatments."

Nault said her allergies also meant missing work. While she said she tried a slew of allergy medicines and injections, she said nothing seemed to work.

"I pretty much exhausted the pharmaceutical end of the spectrum," she said.

Then she tried acupuncture.

"This was the only thing left that I hadn't tried," she said.

Now, she says her life has changed since she started the treatments.

"I just don't get sick," she said. "I do not react as violently to the allergens as I once did."

Saiyad Ahmad, an asthma acupuncturist, uses a technique developed by an medical doctor and acupuncturist in California, who also happened to be an allergy sufferer.

"It's a very powerful technique with very powerful results," Ahmad said.

While it may seem strange to some to see a patient hold bottles of allergen extracts while getting acupuncture treatment, Ahmad and patients like Nault say it works.

"If you stimulate these kind of acupuncture points while the body is sensing that allergen, basically the allergy goes way," Ahmad said.

However, Doctor Gary Gross, with the Dallas Allergy and Asthma Center, has a different opinion.

"It's not a cure," he said. "And really, you have to change the immunologic system to really affect a cure, and currently the only way we can do that is with allergy injections."

He said you can never just make an allergy simply go away.

"Allergies are kind of like high blood pressure or diabetes, you take the medicine to eliminate the symptoms and try to keep the disease under control," he said.

But more and more of the nearly 40 million Americans who suffer from seasonal allergies are giving eastern medicine, including allergy acupuncture, a try.

"You pretty much have nothing to lose," Ahmad said. "Whereas with surgical techniques, you always have risks. With drugs, you always have risk."

Nault took the leap. And while she said she still gets the occasional sniffle or scratchy throat in spring, she said she is breathing much easier.

"[I'm] just more able to function and work like I need to be," she said.

E-mail bgreene@wfaa.com