insight from our visit to the chiropractor

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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