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Food Allergies and Orthodox Medicine
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The vast majority of patients with "everyday" symptoms are given drugs which
merely serve to give them short-term relief.
Welcome though they may be at times of pain or distress, drugs can only ever give temporary relief. Indeed, the long term effects can never properly be known of any drug on a human and it often takes years of prescribing before any possible long term damage becomes evident.
Drugs do nothing to restore health.
The food allergy connection to many disorders is massively under-diagnosed. Many symptoms can be removed or greatly alleviated simply by identifying and avoiding the offending foods or drinks -without any drug involvement.
Doctors are given no training in the food allergy connection to common disorders and it is that which is responsible for it being classed as the world’s most widespread under-diagnosed condition.
As your doctor will only know about the food allergy condition from what he will pick up in magazine articles etc, do not expect him to know about a possible diet link to your symptoms. Well-meaning though he may be, he will treat disease the only way he knows how, by prescribing palliative drugs.
Over the last 20 or 30 years, since the food allergy link to common disorders has been given more and more prominence, patients have often been left to their own devices to try and identify these difficult-to-detect foods.
Identification of your dietary allergies can be an immensely confusing process. It is common for people to suffer for decades without EVER making the connection.
Hospitals are not equipped to perform food allergy testing. At least not the food allergies we are discussing here. They may have an "Allergy Clinic" which will give skin tests or even blood tests, but the food allergies about which we are talking - the ones that can provoke any number of seemingly "ordinary" symptoms, are not the classical or conventional allergies in which these clinicians are trained.
Your doctor may resist the idea that there can be a simple explanation for your chronic symptoms. He may even feel embarrassed (after all he is human) that he has missed something so obvious as diet as being the responsible factor in your arthritis, your depression, your migraine or other symptoms.
He may feel further embarrassed that he has been barking up the wrong tree for years, prescribing drugs to dampen down your symptoms when the real answer has been in front of him at every mealtime...
Dr. George Watson in his book Nutrition and Your Mind tells of one patient with depression who spent thousands and thousands of dollars on psycho-analysis and years and years on the couch being quizzed about her childhood, only to have her depression lift dramatically after allergenic foods were removed from her diet!
Whilst doctors might find it an irritant that they are often asked by their patients "Do you think it is a food allergy?", the widespread wish of many doctors is that the food allergy hooh-hah would just go away.
Well the news is that it won’t - it will only become more and more widespread, more and more better known, as our nations’ diets become more and more artificial (read Discover Your Hidden Food Allergies for more information on how allergies are a result of historical bad diet).
Beware also the doctor who states that there is "no evidence" to support the food allergy link to common symptoms, or the doctor who states that all the evidence is merely "anecdotal". Such statements are the stock answers to expect. These answers, in face of increasing worldwide evidence, are anything BUT scientific, despite the reverse claim that their resistance is based on scientific logic.
If these were truly men of science, they would grasp at even the remotest possibility of helping their patients by such simple means rather than dismiss the phenomenon out of hand simply because it was not part of their training.
There is a vast amount of evidence supporting the food allergy phenomenon, with many studies in respected medical journals (see back of this booklet) including double-blind placebo-controlled crossover trials, which are high standards of proof required by orthodox medicine before acceptance.
This demand for more and more proof in the face of overwhelming evidence seems ironic coming from a profession which wholeheartedly embraces the entire spectrum of psychiatry when there is not, never has been, and never will be, the slightest proof that it works!
It often takes orthodox medicine many decades to catch up on any "new" discovery. The classic case of Vitamin C curing scurvy is only one of a catalogue of similar heel-dragging by orthodox medicine. In the 18th century, in A Treatise of the Scurvy, James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon, demonstrated the importance of lemon juice in curing scurvy.
He restored to full health members of his crew who had become ill with the disease, simply by giving them a diet of oranges, lemons and limes (thus the British being referred to as "Limeys"). Probably initially dismissed as "anecdotal", it took orthodox medicine half a century to make a daily ration of lemon juice compulsory to all sailors!
The food allergy phenomenon is apparently also destined to sit patiently at the back of the slow-moving queue until orthodox medicine finally puts its hands up and admits to its existence.
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