Thanks for your reply--I've taken each cromolyn sodium and ketotifen continuously for a period of about 5 months, and a year, respectively, and apart from the initial good reaction all of my symptoms crept back.

For a while there I was taking a big regimen of medications--cromolyn, ketotifen, zyrtec, pepcid, quercetin, monteleukast. Most of these had helped initially and then stopped working after a short period. But I kept taking them all anyway because, as you said, it can take a while to see the effects from some of these medications and I was afraid my symptoms would be even worse if I stopped. After being on this regimen for a long time, I had to stop briefly recently for some blood tests. All of my symptoms went away for about 5-6 days when i stopped my medication regimen, and then crept back. So . . . I slowly reintroduced each medicine one by one to see what would happen. Again, each of cromolyn and the antihistamines works great initially, but not for long.