By Emily Yuen
Patient Background
Two years ago, Sonya came in with painful red and itchy eczema covering her neck and face and on her inner arm. She had tried removing many suspicions foods for several months including eating a low histamine diet. She was using steroid creams to try to help it and it wasn’t working. The eczema was really impacting her life. She got a IgG Food Sensitivity blood test at Boise Natural Health Clinic which highlighted many foods and she was instructed on an elimination reintroduction food challenge diet. The elimination of foods from the IgG panel helped several of her symptoms improve but offered little benefit to her skin as strict avoidance was extremely cumbersome. She felt overwhelmed with avoidance and the idea of continuing avoidance indefinitely due to the high number of items that were revealed on the IgG test. Dr. Haynes recommended NAET allergy desensitization, so she could work on getting foods back into her diet.
Starting NAET
Sonya started NAET. As she began NAET and combined it with a move specific food avoidance some of her symptoms started to improve, such as a decrease in coughing, no more irregular heartbeat, increase in digestive health, relief of fluid in her ears and sinuses, and no more nose bleeds. She took a break from NAET and went on to see an allergist hoping there was a quicker answer then continuing with the NAET treatments.
Conventional Diagnosis
Sonya got a patch skin allergy test done at her allergist, which revealed she was allergic to gold and nickel. The allergist told her to stay away from gold and nickel and eat a diet low in it (which turns out to be the same foods that showed up on her IgG Food).
Conventional Prognosis Not Optimistic
The prognosis of a nickel allergy from a conventional medicine perspective according to The National Center for Biotechnology Information in the abstract on Low Nickel Diet in Dermatology is not optimistic. “The result of presently available treatment of such nickel eczema is mostly unsatisfactory as the relapse rate is high. This is due to the fact that nickel is present in most of the dietary items of humans. “Once developed, it tends to persist life-long. Careful selection of food with relatively low nickel concentration can bring a reduction in the total dietary intake of nickel per day to help reduce the severity of symptoms and the number of flare ups.”
She was strictly avoiding these 30 plus foods* high in gold and nickel and not eating food that came from cans. At first her rash improved but the avoidance was tiring, and she couldn’t enjoy sharing family meals or eating out. Her rash was still mildly there and threatened to come back with even the smallest exposure. Then when her stress levels got high even on the strict diet the rash came fully back! She was tired of it after a year plus of micromanaging her diet.
* Low Nickel Diet Avoids the Following:
Whole wheat, whole grain, rye, oat, millet, buckwheat, cocoa, chocolate, tea, gelatin, baking powder, soy products, red kidney beans, legumes: Peas, lentils, peanut, soya beans and chickpeas, dried fruits, canned foods, beverages, strong licorice, and certain vitamin supplements. Beer, red wine, mackerel, tuna, herring and shellfish, sunflower seeds, linseeds, hazelnuts, marzipan, walnuts, tomatoes, and onion. Green leafy vegetables and garlic, were to be used in moderation.
Sonya Found She had to Avoid the Following to Help with Symptoms:
Peanuts, walnuts, cashews, pecans, no seeds of any kind, no dried fruit of any kind, coconut, spinach, bell peppers, egg plant, any kind of beans (pinto, white navy, black bean and red kidney were the worst), no canned tomato products( salsa, spaghetti sauce, ketchup) avocados, potatoes, sweet potatoes.
Back to NAET – Remarkable Results
So, after this flare up she came back to complete her NAET treatments and focus on what her allergy tests revealed. She was treated for a foundational item, vitamin C mix, which helps support the body’s ability to detoxify as well as treated for mineral mix which contained what she was allergic to in additional to other minerals. After the first treatment for mineral mix her rash started receding and healing. The next week mineral mix was treated again. The following week the rash was 100% gone and she had been eating some of the foods she had previously been avoiding! Sonya plans to continue NAET treatment, she is expected to be able to return to a normal healthy diet thanks to NAET! What a great way to use the test results from conventional medicine to advise NAET treatment and turn a poor prognosis on it head!