Gluten Free Works Gluten Free Resources News and Tips
On December 13, I posted a question on the Glutenfreeworks Facebook page to ask people who had adopted a gluten-free diet if they no longer needed medications they had been taking. The response was incredible. Dozens of people described how they no longer needed drugs, some of which they had been taking for years or decades.
Here is my post and their responses…
“I gave a presentation to a group and mentioned a friend who had been on Zantac for 20 years. I went on to say that once she went gluten-free the acid reflux disappeared. A woman in the audience stood up and said the same thing happened to her – she had been on it since she was 10 (I’m guessing she was in her mid to late 30s.).
My question for you is what medication (of any kind) were you on, before you went gluten-free, that you no longer need to take and how long did it take before you did not need it anymore?”
As you can see, removing gluten from the diet can result in recoveries that expensive drugs could not effect.
This begs the question. Why don’t health maintenance organizations and the medical community sit up and take notice?
The simple answer is that doctors are not exposed to this information because there is no profit in dietary intervention.
With their medical training, doctors are experts in matching symptoms to causes and could quickly revolutionize how these maladies are diagnosed and treated, but they do not have access to all the information they need. The truth is that physicians do not understand malabsorption, nutrition, food sensitivities or celiac disease, although they think they do. And the result of their ignorance is that people remain sick while pharmaceutical companies and surgeons treat the symptoms instead of the underlying causes.
Doctors – all the way to the top – do not realize what they do not know and do not believe it when a “non-key opinion leader” presents them with information or processes with which they are unfamiliar. Doctors will hesitate to believe another doctor unless he or she is considered a key opinion leader. Sadly, patients who present them with new information that differs from their training are treated with contempt or ignored. Politicians who develop budgets for government research are misled by those same key opinion leaders who they believe to be the best in the field.
The results are poor policies, increasing and ineffective health expenditures and a sick populace.
Medical references like Recognizing Celiac Disease, that compile medical studies and case reports from around the world, and accurate nutritional assays like cellular micronutrient testing could revolutionize the way gluten sensitivity and celiac disease are diagnosed and treated. When properly equipped with the right information and tools, doctors quickly and effectively CURE people, rather than maintaining declining health by use of drugs and surgeries.
Physicians must be educated on a large scale to effect change. Grass roots efforts cannot accomplish this. Only national and international education programs led by foundations and government funding can make a difference.
How to reach and influence the right people at these institutions is the difficulty…any ideas??
I don’t take meds but since going GF I don’t have to take iron pills anymore. I don’t get bloated, headaches, gas, flatter belly. I feel so much better than I ever felt in my life.
I had been anemic for years, and required iron pills to even begin to attempt to have numbers anywhere near normal. But three and a half years now after my celiac diagnosis and going GF, my numbers are totally within the normal range (almost on the high end of normal) without an iron pill in years.