Neuropathy and allergens

  This blog is about how I found a way to control my Crohns disease through diet alone, and get completely off of medications. I did this by eliminating wheat, gluten and corn from my diet. These are my trigger foods. I avoid these allergens and all their derivatives, and I'm fine. In earlier entries I outline my diet and include recipes that I enjoy.

  It also  came to my attention that allergens could cause other "auto-immune" diseases such as eczema and relapsing polychondritis.  My daughter had severe eczema when she was around a year old. The doctor suggested changing our laundry detergent... to no avail. After much experimenting with her diet, I discovered that she had a citric acid allergy. I took her completely off of citric acid. The eczema had completely cleared up. I was diagnosed with Relapsing Polychondritis, which causes inflammation of the cartilage. This was in addition to Crohn's disease. I am also free of this, through my elimination diet. Read further in this blog to see how I was able to clear my daughter's eczema with the elimination of citric acid in her diet.

   This brings me to my new entry; Neuropathy. Neuropathy is the inflammation of the nerves. It can cause many symptoms, including tingling, numbness and pain. My daughter had gotten eczema from citric acid, a common addition to many baby foods. I eliminated this from her diet and her skin cleared in 3 days. Completely. As she got older, (she's now 16) she was once again able to eat foods with citric acid with no problem. She outgrew the allergy. Or so we thought.

   This takes us to Christmas of last year, 2011. My mother-in-law had made some delicious wassail juice, and we were drinking it like crazy. It's a combination of apple juice, lemon juice, pineapple juice and a few other things. Really good. And my daughter Loved it!

    A few days later she started complaining about tingling and numbness on the left side of her head. I didn't think much about it at the time. I was asking her what she was using lately on her skin. She had started wearing a new necklace and I wondered if that might be related. It was an antique and I wasn't sure of the metals in it. The symptoms weren't too bad so I put it to the back of my mind.

   A week or so later, she woke me up in the middle of the night. Now her tongue and throat were tingling and parts of her tongue were numb! She was also experiencing tingling in other parts of her body including her hands. She also experienced some pain in different areas of her head that felt "hot". That was enough to scare me, so I took her to the ER. The doctor on call did some neurological testing and said that everything appeared to be normal. They told me to make an appointment with her pediatrician. The following week, we went to the pediatrician. She again did the normal neurological tests and could find nothing. Now came the appointment with the pediatric neurology doctor at Children's Hospital.

   This doctor wanted to be thorough. He  started with literally about 25 different blood tests. He tested for everything under  the sun, vitamin deficiencies, auto-immune diseases, lyme disease... One blood test came back slightly elevated; pyruvic acid. (As a side note. Pyruvic acid has something to do with the citric acid cycle in the body. )They weren't concerned about it. Then they ordered an MRI.  Everything there (TG) was normal too. They were at a loss.

   Then we had the idea to completely eliminate citric acid from her diet and see if there was an effect. She was allergic as a baby and maybe she still was.  There was an effect from eliminating the citric acid. The neuropathy started to fade and was completely gone in a few weeks. As a side note, she also had inflammatory acne that cleared up from the elimination. And she also had had joint pain that went away. Two times she also broke out in hives after drinking the wassail juice, and once again after having orange juice and spaghetti in the same day.

    Once again, food allergies causing inflammatory reactions within the body. Could this work for other people with neuropathy? Could different allergens affect different people in different ways? It is worth looking into. I can't say that it is always citric acid that causes neuropathy. I can say that it caused it for my daughter. It would be well worth looking  into eliminating common allergens from the diet. One week at a time eliminating one allergen at a time and see if it helps. Common allergens are fish, eggs, wheat, gluten, corn, peanuts, and tree nuts.

   Please let me know if you or someone you know has suffered from neuropathy and if you have tried to eliminate common allergens from your diet, and what the results were.