Our story

Within weeks of our second child’s birth it became clear that he was suffering from some problems. While our first child had reflux as a baby, it never seemed to impact her behaviour or sleeping, and cleared up as she grew. With Austin, he would wake up crying every night and be unable to sleep for any significant lengths of time. Even our highly experienced mothercraft nurse could not figure out how to settle him. Most nights we would take him for walks in the pram or drive him around, as he would sleep when upright. Sometimes he would vomit up bits of blood in addition to the curdled milk. His hands were often clenched, back arched and tummy tight. The pediatricians all said he would grow out it - after 6 months, repeated visits and being told that mum was just being neurotic, we found a doctor who actually listened after bringing our mothercraft nurse along who insisted that he was not just another unsettled baby. This doctor recommended that we start him on Zantac, an antacid ulcer medication. Finally we were able to get some sleep! But after each month or so, it was back to the same old pain & sleepless nights as he grew out of the dosage of Zantac. So we would increase the dosage to match his weight. At about 1 year, it was clear that he was not ‘outgrowing’ the issue, and mum started taking him to homeopath, naturopaths and anyone else she could find that might help identify the real problem instead of just treating his symptoms.

Finally she found a naturopath who believed it was simply a food intolerance issue – she believed the list included wheat, cow’s dairy, cane sugar, soy and the nightshade family – tomatoes, potatoes and pumpkin, and a few others. We started on an elimination diet, switching to oatmeal, goat’s milk, rice syrup instead of brown sugar, rice pasta and removing other foods as she recommended. We also added flaxseed oil with everything. His behavior, sleeping and weight gain started improving quickly. Within a few weeks we started reducing the Zantac dosages and within 3 months had eliminated it completely! His occasionally itchy skin and minor eczema reduced as well.

Austin’s now 7 and is still a picky eater, but can tolerate most foods a lot better, but he still has goats milk on his cereal and hates cheese, and we stick to oat or corn based cereal, spelt bread, and wheat free pasta. You can tell when he’s passed his limit with some foods because his legs get itchy (his skin is still very sensitive to ingested food as well as dust and heat and some times breaks out in hives), or because his behaviour gets a bit out of control. We’ve found that regular visits to our chiropractor seem to help quite a lot. When his skin gets out of control, we give him baths with a stocking full of oatmeal in the water – it seems to soothe the ‘itchies’ away quickly, and we’ve found that chickweed creams as well as Derm-eze also help improve things.

During this journey, we realized that our first daughter’s diarrhea as a baby was linked to dairy intolerance and switched her to goat’s milk as well. She sometimes still has problems if she has too much cheese or ice cream.

At some point along the road, mum started having regular recurrent thrush infections. Anti-fungal treatments lasted for a week or two but it always returned. Moving to a yeast free, sugar free diet helped, but still did not eliminate the candida. Acupuncture and homeopathy all seemed to help, but not eliminate it either. Fast forward 3 years. After several doctors, specialists, and blood tests, she was identified as coeliac, having a leaky gut, as well as pyroluria, an enzymatic condition which causes your body’s zinc and vitamin B6 to be depleted.

Finally, after moving to a gluten-free and low yeast/low sugar diet, doses of vitamins, lots of pro-biotics, naturopathic intestinal healers, she has now been free of candida infections except on rare occasions for over a year.

We have found that for all of us, regular chiropractic treatment seems to help with energy levels, ability to fight colds and other infections and reduce the reactions to ‘system overloads’ of foods that the family members are intolerant of. Our chiropractor has recently written a book, 7 Things Your Doctor Forgot to Tell You, which I can highly recommend.