Sharing My Experience...hope It Will Help With Inflammation And Heartburn

[MedicalMojave]

Hi. I have recently realized I am gluten intolerant. I do not believe I have Celica's b/c I had no symptoms previously and I absorb food just fine.

However, gluten now gives me a painful arthritic flu as well as triggers asthma. By the way, something like 1/2 of asthmatics have food allergies with wheat being one of the big ones. Although I'm not allergic, but intolerant. It's all related though imo.

I wanted to share a few things I've done that help in the hopes they will aid others here. I haven't seen them mentioned and I came to them more through my history of asthma and adrenal insufficiency than from the Celiac/GI side of things.

I have been on a low carb low sugar low gluten diet for years because I'm prediabetic from all the steroids used to treat the asthma. When I eat what I call 'stupid carbs' I have learned to mitigated the 'carb hangover' by taking Alpha Lipoic Acid in high doses. This is a neat anti-oxidant because it is both fat and water soluble and thus can enter our cells at twice the rate. This cuts the carb hangover by about 60-70% (for me at least, your mileage may vary).

Over the last year though, I've developed a rash (eczema) and have had some flashes of joint pain after consuming carbs. Nothing serious and I wasn't too worried about it since I was rather busy having an adrenal crisis and recovering from that. Now, looking back, I believe this was the gluten intolerance showing its face.

Then last week, I ate a bunch of stupid carbs (a situation brought about by an empty fridge on grocery shopping day) and ran out of Alpha Lipic Acid.

For the first time in years, I got the full bore gluten flu. OMG. It was horrific and sidelined me for more than a week.

I spent a lot of time goolging how to recover and reading Celiac websites. No one mentioned using 'nutraceuticals' to assist in recovery from gluten exposure. I don't know if there's a reason for that or not, but I do want to encourage folks to look into this avenue of possible help.

Alpha Lipoic Acid has great anti-inflammatory effects. I've used it orally for years and this past year started getting it via IV from an Integrative MD who specializes in alternative therapies. I buy it at Vitamin World which often has buy 1 get 1/2 off the second bottle or get the second for a penny. There are different forms of ALA and you need to the R form if you want to try it. A great place to research vitamins is ConsumerLabs.com (although you do have to pay, it's not free.).

My other suggestion for those of you battling with doctors is to look for Integrative or Functional Medicine MDs. I think they are much more attuned to situation like yours--they are not as quick to ignore patient experience ime. Nutritional IVs may also speed up healing once you've gone gluten free. Sometimes these docs are independent and don't take insurance, but it's not completely unaffordable. You'll pay $199 for the first office visit and between $100-250 for each IV. This area of medicine also has a better understanding of nutrition and uses it as a treatment a lot.

Last, for the heart burn...I am a GERD girl. It runs in my family big time. I have had great luck with digestive enzymes from the Integrative MD.However, I don't think my digestive enzymes are gluten free, so you'd really want to talk to a doc who uses them and who can figure out which ones are safe for you. It's cheaper than Prilosec and there are all sorts of ancillary health benefits from using them.

Thanks for all the info you have posted here. I am reading it avidly and I hope my post offers some help to you.

M

[GFinDC]

Welcome to the forum MM,

And thanks for sharing your story! Alternative medicine is interesting to me. Alt medical practitioners do seem to have a more open mind when it comes to food related issues.

[MedicalMojave]

Yes, Alternative Medicine is really interesting and it can be very helpful. I wish it was more covered by insurance as it can get expensive. I spent probably $8k trying to sort out my inability to recover from an adrenal crisis and we eventually found I wasn't making enough progesterone which is used to produce cortisol. Now I'm doing Bio-identical hormone replacement a la Suzanne Somers with good results.

I have a blog of the same title as my user name if anyone wants to read more about my experience.