The Twinkies

When your son runs over to you in order to wipe his snotty nose on your pants.

Brian had his post-operative check up today and is doing well. They plan to send him home on Friday. He is walking well, can climb stairs and has had his pain medication reduced. He will go be going back to the doctor’s office next Tuesday for another post-operative check-up.

Thank you everyone who send him an e-card (Brian Berry in room 3316) or a snail-mail card. Those have really brightened up his days.

I had a massage this morning and my jaw tension is… remarkable. I’ve contacted my chiropractor-who-makes-house-calls to see if she can make it over anytime soon. Maybe she’ll bring her newborn for me to ogle.

The kids have started to show some signs of stress in all this. Both have had some separation anxiety when I drop them off in the morning at school which is understandable. From their perspective I drop them off and than disappear until the middle of the night. I picked them up both yesterday and today and that seems to have alleviated some of their concerns.

We are seeing signs of success with F’s new diet. Her poop output is slowly returning to normal, using J as a yardstick for what normal is. Her rash is almost totally gone.

And that’s the news from Lake PoopBeGone, where all the men are invalids and all the children have above average poop and rash output.

It’s funny how resistant people are to the idea I’m using naturopathy to diagnose and treat F’s issues. More than one person has shared that muscle resistance testing is obviously just the placebo effect, which is, I think, their nice way of saying “laden with quackery.”

I would note that F obviously has food sensitivities. Feed her tomatoes, watch her digestive system churn out poop that rashes on contact. Something is not right there. Stripping common allergens from a diet, waiting until her digestive system is back to normal based on poop output and then reintroducing them one at a time seems to me an awfully conservative way of treating the issue. It nicely falls into the “first, do no harm” mandate of medicine. Skin prick tests are not good at picking up milder sensitivities that can make you feel lousy without actually causing a full blown allergic reaction and elimination and challenge diets are a standard method of diagnosis.

And, yes, milk, eggs, yeast, strawberries and corn are all very common allergens.

I first met naturopathy when I couldn’t take steroid nasal sprays for my spring allergies because they are not wholly safe when breast-feeding. A friend suggested I try a teaspoon of local honey a day. Local honey contains the local pollens mildly processed via bee gut. It sounded a trifle nuts but I figured, “Can’t hurt, might help” and that taking a teaspoon of honey each day was hardly a burden. It helped. Steroids or honey. Which would you pick?

Muscle resistance testing has good results for some people. And, being forced to eat fresh, non-processed foods, homemade sourdough bread¹ and gourmet chocolate² is, like eating honey, hardly the worst prescription ever. If her digestive issues don’t clear up then we move to blood testing. What we are doing now? Can’t hurt. Might help. I’ve noticed that people who turn first to naturopathy seem to have clear skin, healthy hair and a noticeable dearth of illness. Perhaps its the reliance on healthy eating. And, of course, if the placebo effect works who cares that it’s “not real”? I had horrible headaches almost every day during the spring until I took allergy medication. Honey also keeps me headache free. I don’t care whether it is because I only think it will; all I care about it the lack of the horrible crushing pain in my head.

So I’m doing the naturopathy dance and I don’t particularly care if anyone thinks it quackery. I have no interest in convincing anyone that muscle resistance testing is a useful test and no desire to convert anyone to alternative methods of health care. All I want to do is get my daughter well.

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¹ Because sourdough is made from a starter that utilizes wild yeast instead of baker’s yeast many people with baker’s yeast allergies can eat it without any problems. The only catch is you have to make it yourself because commercial sourdough tends to “cheat” and use some baker’s yeast to speed up the rising process.

² High quality dark chocolate has neither milk nor eggs in it.