Re: insight from our visit to the chiropractor

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Thanks, . I've thought about the low oxalate diet too, but have been reluctant to try it because my DD is a vegetarian and going low oxalate means eliminating so many foods that are important sources of nutrients for vegetarians...but we may end up there eventually! We used to rely heavily on soy and have been slowly working to reduce that dependence...now it's down to once or twice a week tofu. But one way we reduced the soy was to use nut butter instead of soy milk on cereal...which gives my DD needed protein and fat but...I think nuts are high in oxalates...And then there are other issues, like: her current favorite cereal is GF, but it's a brown rice puff cereal...and rice is constipating, plus, I'm not sure processed cereals, even this one from the HFS, are really a healthy choice. On the other hand, right now the nut butter/cereal combination is something she'll willingly eat. So much of her diet seems to consist of foods like this that I classify in my mind as " not terrible. " I wish the bulk of her diet, instead of being " not terrible, " was exemplary. On the other hand, back in the day when her diet used to be exemplary, she was just starting her long journey of constipation, and all those fruits/vegs were not helping her. And, maybe the oxalate content of the fruits and vegs was contributing...

Update: she did actually have a soft bowel movement today after seeing the chiropractor yesterday, though I'm still not sure if today's was related to that or was leakage from some new impaction. We'll see. He didn't do any sacral adjustments, just adjusted her neck, but wanted to see if that alone would cause some improvement...

Bonnie

Hi Bonnie,

I can completely appreciate how you feel. Hang in there and stay the course! I too have often said it is like peeling away layers or putting pieces of the puzzle together. We were 1 1/2 years into biomedical treatments for my daughter's sensory integration problems and ADHD (including going GF/CF/soy free) and I was ready to stop due to lack of progress. Then my DAN suggested the low oxalate diet, and that was our first huge breakthrough. It led us into a whole year of peeling away more layers (more food intolerances, etc.) before we finally hit bottom, and now are resolving all the problems those layers revealed. We finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I highly recommend taking a look at the low oxalate diet and look to see if there are any salicylate/phenol sensitivities as well - addressing those two have pretty much

eliminated my daughter's sensory issues (as well as greatly improved her ADHD).

To give an example of how you have to keep peeling away the layers, my son went GF/CF/SF when he was 3 because he started having major attention problems (much more than age appropriate). We def. saw improvement, but then he regressed again. While I didn't know it at the time, what happened was we were inadverdently giving him high oxalate foods and Vit C to try to address his long term constipation issues. After starting my daughter on LOD, I decided to try him, and we began to get back that improvement after the first initial dumping phase. So long story short, one treatment can cancel another's good effects, and until you get to the root of the problem, you may not see any improvements. The most important thing is to be persistent, even if it seems extreme (I can't begin to tell you how much skepticism I dealt with from some family and

friends). If I had given up (and trust me, 2007 was soooo tough to hang in there!!), then we wouldn't be where we are now. In the end, it is all worth it.

God Bless and good luck,

insight from our visit to the chiropractor

We went to see a new chiropractor. ..haven't been to our old one for a while because of insurance changes...and he was very thrilled with everything we've been doing. He said, " You're doing all the right things. Who's helping you figure all this out? " I said, " Um...it's mostly the moms on the Yahoo Miralax list! " Anyway...he thinks that our daughter's sensory integration problems have to be solved before the constipation will clear. He thinks that the stress from living with sensory problems is overloading her sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. He also thinks that some stuff we've tried that didn't help, like the gf/cf diet, may not have helped because other factors weren't in place yet, and that a lot of the things we've tried that looked like they weren't helping actually are helping, but that when you're working on healing the nervous system, the body will prioritize brain healing before GI healing, so that if we give it some

time, and keep doing what we're doing, we should eventually see GI improvement too. We definitely are seeing sensory improvement, I just had not been viewing that as the primary issue. I always felt the constipation affected her quality of life more than the sensory problems, which we viewed as mild. So I'm really pleased to have all this explained to me...I sort of feel like what we're doing is like peeling away the layers of an onion. We have to peel away all these toxicities one by one (while also trying to add back in nutrients one by one), and we don't seem to see improvement, but eventually I feel that we'll finally get to the last layer. And, I think that even though she's still constipated, maybe the fact that she's been so darn healthy all fall is a sign that her GI tract is healing in ways that we just can't see, yet. It is such a slow journey, though. This chiropractor also cautioned me that it can take years to clear mercury from

kids' systems. Sigh. In the meantime, I'm thinking of going back to the GF/CF diet because I'm thinking it may, like some of these other things, have been helping her in unseen ways, even if we couldn't actually SEE how it was helping her before. On the other hand, I'm also thinking about trying to gradually shift her onto a more raw foods diet (which would be mostly GF/CF anyway, but might include some sprouted grains that still would have gluten in them--since she doesn't have celiac disease, I'm not sure that she'd need to be as strictly GF as celiacs are.) I'm shifting to more and more raw foods myself. Unfortunately it's easier to switch me than her...I'm a lot more open to trying new things than she is. It would have to be a VERY gradual shift! And the frustrating truth is, if a dietary change is helping her in unseen ways, and it's a rough diet to implement, like both GF and raw foods diets are, than we're likely to backslide, because it

will seem like we're doing all this for nothing (it will especially look that way to my skeptical husband). Sigh. Oh well. At least we're making progress, however incrementally. ..Bonnie

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