I just realized that it's been a while since I've updated. We've been seeing our new NAET provider for about 3 months now (wow- I hadn't realized it was that long until I looked at the calendar!) DD has been treated and cleared for:
- BBF (brain-body balance formula)
- egg mix (she had to do this treatment 3 times before she cleared it)
- calcium mix
- vitamin C mix
- B-complex mix
- sugar mix
- iron mix
- and she did the grain mix last week (we'll find out if she's cleared at the next appointment)
Now don't get excited... just because she "cleared" the treatment doesn't mean that all these foods are suddenly safe for her (I wish!) As it was explained, all foods have a ton of different vitamin/mineral components, and sometimes you have to be cleared for each individual component before you can tolerate the food.
The only thing that we've "tested" at home was egg. DD is contact reactive (hives) to raw egg, so I figured it would be pretty easy to see if she's still allergic. I put a little raw egg on her arm the other day, let it sit for about 2 minutes, then washed it off thoroughly. Within about 5 minutes, she had one itsy-bitsy hive. It faded within the next half hour. So obviously, she is still reactive, though maybe not as much as she was before? It's not definitive, because I didn't leave it on very long. But it is a little encouraging.
It's so hard to continue shelling out money for a treatment (especially one not covered by insurance) without seeing immediate results. But I'll tell you a few things that we have seen so far with this treatment:
- One of DD's reaction/inflammation symptoms is dark, sticky ear wax. She hadn't had any for a while, but earlier this year it came back. A lot of it. Gobs and gobs. We modified the diet, but didn't see any changes (I'm suspecting it was the quinoa that we added to her diet after losing buckwheat.) But there weren't any other major symptoms, so we let it slide. The first few treatments, it seemed like the wax was less for a couple days, but then it would come back full force. I stopped paying attention for a while, but looked last month and she had hardly any visible wax. I checked again today, and there is none.
- After each visit, DD gets really emotional. Almost every time, we have a major meltdown when we leave (and since removing all her food triggers from her diet, meltdowns are few and far between, so this is definitely not "normal" for her.) I can tell that something is shifting in her body. What, I don't know. But something is happening for sure.
- This week, she did the grain mix. We've been grain free for about a month, but probably should have been long before that. She is IgE positive to every gluten-containing grain that we've tested, and the gluten-free grains (which the allergist office doesn't have tests for, so we don't know if they're IgE or not) always cause some sort of digestive upset. The week before this treatment, she was having some sort of food reaction and was sleeping terribly. The night of the treatment, she woke up only 30 minutes after falling asleep, and I thought for sure we were in for a rough night. I woke up in the morning, and realized that she hadn't budged all night!! She has been sleeping great all week since then. Twice, she stayed in her bed the entire night, not waking once. And the times she has woken, she's quietly climbed into bed with us and fallen right back asleep, with no assistance needed. No tossing and turning, no crying, nothing. So I know for sure the grain mix made a positive change for her. I'll be really curious to see if it tests ok for her this week.
We're trying to decide right now if we want to take the GI doc's recommendation and get DD scoped (endoscopy/colonoscopy) to check for: eos disorders, inflammatory bowel diseases, pancreatic enzyme deficiencies, etc. I'll report back if I ever come to a decision. ;)
