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What people are generally supposed to do about gluten intolerance is to
totally avoid gluten, 0 gluten.

So then after a while one gets hypersensitive to gluten.  This seems
dangerous.  If tiny amounts make you sick, what would, say eating a
slice of wheat bread thinking it was gluten-free rice bread do to a
person?

So one wonders if total avoidance is really the best answer.  Maybe it
would b a better treatment to be densensitized a little bit by eating tiny
amounts continuously.  That's what they do with allergy drops.  A nurse
who works with allergy drops told me "maybe they help a food intolerance".
Allergy drops are used for inhalant allergies, they say they work for
IgE food allergies.  Maybe for non-IgE food intolerances, too.
So maybe that way one could avoid the possibly dangerous situation of
getting hypersensitive to gluten.

I'm not for myself thinking about trying to get densensitized to gluten.
I am gluten/dairy intolerant.  But it is *corn* which is bothering me
right now ...  Corn is much, much harder to avoid than gluten or dairy.

I was on antibiotics for weeks for bladder infections.  then on one course
of antibiotics, I felt sick *on the antibiotic*.  My symptoms were
entirely consistent with a food reaction, and the antibiotic's main
ingredient was ... corn starch.  So I quit the antibiotic, and over the
next 4 days i gradually got well, which is how long it usually takes for
a food reaction to fade away.

I tested corn the other day.  I ate 1/16 of a grain of corn, and i got sick
- woozy, out of it.  I don't feel any psychological reactions, not the
anxiety, hyperreactivity and tension that i had from food challenges when
i was first finding out about my food intolerances.  I remember anxiety,
tension, paranoia from food reactions in general, not just gluten.  there
was also a slightly hallucinatory aspect to my awareness that went away,
and that may have been from gluten and dairy specifically.

getting sick from 1/16 a grain of corn, there's about half a milligram of
corn protein in that, is entirely consistent with getting sick from corn starch
in the antibiotics - I checked on how much corn protein pharmaceutical
grade corn starch would have in it.  Last january i got sick twice after
eating about 2 tbsp fructose, that would have had about the corn
protein of 1/32 of a grain of corn.

It's not a good situation - I could get dosed with corn so easily.  What
if i were in an accident and they gave me an IV with dextrose in it, which
comes from corn?  You HOPE they use really pure dextrose, but.  I can get
prescriptions made up by a compounding pharmacy, which can make them
without corn starch for me.

So, any advice on what to do about this, how to recover from these
intolerances, i would appreciate.  I know the usual suggestion is -
avoid the food totally for a while, then start reintroducing it in small
amounts, only taking it once every 4 days.  I'm not sure this has worked
for me.  I've avoided corn as completely as i could, other than small amounts
of corn starch in prescription drugs.  Even with a compounding pharmacy i
can't *totally* avoid corn, it takes them about a day to make the
medication and i would have to take a standard drug, almost always with
corn starch, in the meantime.

I have been gluten free for a year & a half.  i have really generalized
immune system problems, I had 24 allergies on skin tests, i reacted to
half of what they tested for.  I had food intolerance reactions - groggy
stupor lasting about a day, wooziness for several days - to *everything*
in the grass family i tried.  My corn reaction, at least, has not just
gone away like the "other" non-gluten food intolerances are supposed to.
actually, maybe it *had* gone away and it got reactivated by being on
antibiotics with corn starch in them for weeks.

Are all these severe immune problems a consequence of gluten?  Is there
anything that can be *done* about them, other than avoiding the foods?
could doctors do anything about it?  I question the idea that
gluten is the central issue that causes all the others.
Quitting gluten certainly hasn't been a magic ticket to health.  Maybe it
just takes longer to recover than one & 1/2 year.

a candida tidbit - people's ideas about their "candida" problems are often
ridiculed - but it's not necessarily silliness.  Some researchers at the
university of Michigan caused intestinal candida overgrowth in mice by
giving them
broad-spectrum antibiotics, and it made inhalant allergies worse in the
mice!  Candida can mess up people's immune systems by generating
inflammatory prostaglandins.  I'm going to be trying a very lowfat diet,
ornish diet more or less (not to lose weight), to see if I can help *my*
immune system by drastically reducing the fats that are precursors for
inflammatory prostaglandins.  And caprylic acid to keep candida down.

best health,
Laura

* Visit the Celiac Web Page at www.enabling.org/ia/celiac/index.html *