The Sunday New York Times Magazine featured an article called The Boy with a Thorn in His Joints about a child with idiopathic juvenile arthritis. For those of you who do not know greek that idio means what you think it does. Idiopathic means “we don’t know why”. Except that as this boy’s mother learned…maybe we do.
She tried the conventional medical route. She put her son on the drugs. He continued to deteriorate. She put him in therapy. It didn’t work. He was three years old and crippled with arthritis.
Then she saw someone who told her to get rid of gluten, dairy, and nightshades, cut the sugar and put him on probiotics. They saw improvement within weeks.
The boy is now five and has been arthritis free for a year. There is a photo of him tearing around on a scooter.
Whether it is autoimmune arthritis, nwurological delays, multiple sclerosis, IBS, plaque psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, sensory processing disorder or even the autoimmune form of autism, I am convinced that this mom is correct. Somehow all these problems are offshoots of leaky gut and if we fix the diet these children can go on to live normal lives. I can’t prove it but since the testing process is something you can do at home for very little cost with almost no risk, it seems like something doctors should suggest.
I realize that there are people who talk about what we give up in terms of food for this, but the trade off is easy for me. Constant pain vs a different kind of pizza? A different brand of chocolate cookie? Early death vs planning dinners out in advance…are you serious?
There is an adjustment period, but once you get used to it, the meals are no more challenging, and I can assure you that cooking virtually every meal you eat for the rest of your life is far easier than having a child who is in nearly constant pain.
The point of this website is to show that there is very little that you cannot do within the confines of “the diet”. You can eat out. You can eat doughnuts. You can eat cake. You have to plan, but it can be done.
This blog is named after an incident in the children’s classic, The Phantom Tollbooth. There is another incident in that book that comes to mind right now. Near the end of the book the hero Milo finally asks the two kings what the secret was that they could not tell him until after he completed his mission. They told him that his mission, which was to rescue Rhyme and Reason from a Castle in the Air, was impossible. It could not be done. Which is why they needed to wait until after he was done because if he knew it was impossible he might never have done it.
Do I think everyone can be cured? Probably not. Some parents will try this and it won’t work. I have two autistic girls in my extended family and the diet did very little for them. It may be impossible to cure most children of arthritis and autism using only food. But we now know that sometimes food works. There are simply too many of us with the same story.
What if it is impossible only because we think that it is?
You can read the entire article from the New York Times here
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/the-boy-with-a-thorn-in-his-joints.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
