September is National Food Allergy Month:
Meek
Chiropractic offers services that they believe are beneficial to the
community and their patients. Dr. Meek and his family added the food
allergy testing as a service to patients almost a year ago. It was
tried and tested by the doctors, staff and family before it was offered
as a service to patients. This is how most things in our office are
added to make sure we are offering the best quality care. In
recognition of September being National Food Allergy Month, Dr. Meek's
wife, Tara, wanted to share their family's story about their own food
allergies.
Hello-I am for the first time
going to share our story with patients. It is hard to admit when things
are going wrong with your kids because as a parent, you think it is
usually something you are doing wrong. In our case, it was not
something we were doing. It was something we were eating. I also want
to disclose that English grammar and spelling are not my strong points. So please, all you teachers out there, DO NOT GRADE MY PAPER :))
Our first son, Dawson, was born in October 2001. As a
healthy baby who was breastfed, everything seemed perfect until he
reached 8 months old. At 8 months, I stopped breastfeeding because our
pediatrician strongly suggested I get our son on milk. The doctor
advised our son was gaining too much weight with breastfeeding. I,
admittedly, was ready to stop because it was very demanding and limited
the freedom of running to the store etc. Very selfish looking back, I
know.
Dawson immediately started projectile vomiting
with every feeding of milk. The pediatrician suggested this was normal
because Dawson's system was trying to get use to the change. Seemed
reasonable as new parents. So we continued. The vomiting did seem to
get better after a few months, but something else was happening. Dawson
began getting upper respiratory infections, bad diaper rashes, and
diarrhea. Our pediatrician began ordering at home breathing treatments,
which did help, but when stopped, the symptoms would return. All of
Dawson's symptoms seemed to be getting worse with every passing week.
He was also not sleeping well, very cranky and getting reoccurring ear
infections. (Dawson now has some hearing loss due to so much fluid
drainage to his ears over the years). Fevers started to occur every two
weeks causing us to miss a lot of work and running to the doctor for
chest x-rays to rule out pneumonia. It wasn't until a family member
suggested it may be milk that we even considered the idea. Dr. Meek had
a brother who could not tolerate dairy. So we decided to experiment on
our own. Not knowing what else to give our child because we had both
grown up knowing every child must have milk for strong bones and protein
(my grandparents were dairy farmers), we researched some options and
chose to try soy. (Soy now is not recommended as a supplement to milk
for children which later we changed to rice or almond milk). Within a
day, we had a different child. Even family could see Dawson was
happier, more active and seemed to feel better. After two weeks of
improvement, we took Dawson to see his pediatrician excited to share our
discovery. However, our excitement was not shared with the doctor. He
strongly told us we were wrong in doing this and told us to get our son
back on regular milk immediately. We shook our heads yes, but deep
down there was no way we were going to do this. It was sad that we had
to resort to lying to our sons doctor in order to keep him healthy.
Years
passed and we as a family started getting used to the idea that we
needed to stay away from cheese, dairy, ice-cream and any other product
with milk as an ingredient. We were not perfect and resorted to not
monitoring it very closely due to laziness. Dawson during preschool to
4th grade would experience emotional outbreaks, disturbed sleep, rage,
paranoia, nightmares, sleep walking, and crying from leg pain which
would be so terrible he would scoot on his rear to get around. Dawson
would also check the doors several times during the night and made sure
the alarm was set. They only way to get him to sleep was to let him
sleep in our bed. Dawson was starting to struggle at school, falling
asleep, being very disrespectful to teachers and us. I hate to admit
this, but we hated picking up our son from school because the car ride
was always a fight, homework was a fight, and the teachers were stopping
us weekly to talk to us about Dawson's behavior at school. The stress
of not knowing what was happening to our once sweet loving son was
almost unbearable. That was until September 2011.
What
changed September 2011? Well, in order to explain, I have to share
that in 2008, Dr. Meek and I had our second son, Ben. Because of
Dawson, I breastfed Ben longer, and kept him away from dairy just in
case. However, once starting Ben on solid foods, he started
experiencing his own problems. Fevers every few weeks, which ended in
runny noses, mucus, and blisters on his hands and feet. Ben also had
problems burping up food in the evening which looked to be what he had
eaten at lunch. Ben would vomit and get diarrhea. It was not until the
summer of 2011 when Ben was visiting his pediatrician for the reflux
that we decided to tackle the underlying problem which may be going on
because the pediatrician wanted to put Ben on reflux medication at 2
years old and possibly do a scope. As a mom, I just had this feeling
there was more than we could see going on. Because of our experience
with Dawson, I immediately thought about food being the source of our
problem.
Dr. Baca had joined our office that year and he was
discussing the food allergy testing with us, so we decided all of us
should have it done. Once we received our family's results, we knew
there were many things we needed to change in our diets, but knew the
task would not be easy.
Dr. Meek's results: Very high
allergy to dairy, eggs, gluten, garlic, yeast and wheat. (This finaly
explained why he suffered over a decade of reflux and digestion issues.
His symptoms of these are gone since changing our diet)
Dawson's reults: Very high allergy to dairy, eggs, gluten and wheat.
Ben's results: Very high allergy to dairy, eggs, gluten, wheat and cane sugar.
Tara's results: No allergies
As
you can see, our family would now have to learn to eat very differently
than we had in the past. I will admit, it was and is not easy. After a
year, it is still a daily struggle because of school parties, birthday
parties, holidays, sleep overs, grandparents and other events. It is a
struggle to teach our kids the choices they make with the food they
chose effect their health. Dawson is starting to notice how he feels
when sticking to his diet closely and when he chooses to eat pizza or
cake. (Gary and I are too :)) Ben understands what he cannot have, but
is still only 3 years old, almost 4, and does not understand certain
foods contain things he cannot eat. Since changing our diet, Dawson is
very different, happier, easy to talk to and both kids have not been
sick since changing what they eat.
By going through
this experience, Dr. Meek and I started wondering how many of our
patients are personally going through unexplained health issues and/or
our patient's children. That is why our office made the choice to add
the food allergy testing as an option for our patients. We understand
it is an expensive test at $300 (Most of the charge is for lab testing
which are not done in our office), but if done at other medical offices,
it can cost $2,000-$3,000 if not more to the patient. That is if you
can get your doctor to do the test. We found that our doctors tried to
send patients to their family doctors to have the test done so insurance
would cover the procedure, but the doctors would not order the test
because there were no signs they needed it in their eyes. (Many of those
patients took our test which resulted to them having some high food
allergies.)
If you are interest in finding out more about the
allergy testing, please do not hesitate to speak to our doctors. Many
of our patients are finding out it was worth the cost because they have
more energy, are less sick and many have even lost weight.
Thank
you for taking the time to read our story. Please share with others.
Your health is important to our doctors and staff. If there are ever
any questions you have, you may also contact me.
Tara Meek
My favorite Cookbook:
The Healthy Gluten-Free Life: 200 Delicious Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Soy-Free and Egg-Free Recipes! Tammy Credicott
(Author)
