I have spent years trying to figure out whether gluten free was for me or not - first on wheat/gluten, then off. I remember finding an article like this a while back but I had trouble finding it a second time. So, I am posted it now so it can be of benefit to all of us. Few have the stamina to heal this thoroughly but some may not have a choice. Here's some good information from the Weston A. Price foundation on the current research on Celiac Disease:
A Healing Protocol for Celiac Disease
By Katherine Czapp
When a patient receives a diagnosis of celiac disease or gluten intolerance, either via laboratory testing or by process of elimination by the sufferer himself, complete avoidance of all gluten-containing foods will often bring improvement of many symptoms in a short time, sometimes as quickly as three days; others may require a month for positive signs to emerge. Finally understanding what was wrong can be a tremendous relief for someone who had likely been struggling with unhappy digestion for quite some time.
It is important to remember, though, that the impaired digestive capabilities of someone suffering from this autoimmune disorder will not automatically return to full healthy functioning by merely excluding gluten from the diet, nor will longstanding nutrient deficiencies be corrected unless they are actively addressed in a recuperation protocol designed with care and insight into the needs of the individual. Celiacs who have been severely afflicted should expect significant renewal of health only after one or more years of concerted effort.
Depending on how much damage this condition has caused by the time it is diagnosed--cases have often gone improperly diagnosed for as many as 12 years, and some as long as 30--deficiency problems may have pushed one to a life-threatening condition. This was what had happened to my own father who had suffered from misunderstood digestive problems for decades.
Several years ago he had become dehydrated from a particularly long bout of severe diarrhea and briefly lost consciousness and fell from his tractor while far from the house in one of his fields. He made it back home and my mother immediately took him to the hospital where they routinely stuck him with an IV to rehydrate him.
He started to bleed without clotting. Vitamin K, responsible for blood clotting, is manufactured in the small intestine, and of course he had none, although no one at the hospital knew this yet. If he had nicked himself while unconscious in the field, he would have bled to death in about 10 minutes.
THE DIAGNOSIS
In the hospital he received transfusion after transfusion and was being talked into exploratory surgery by the head surgeon when my sister, a family practice physician living in Maryland, became alarmed and flew in to have a look herself. Pat had just been introduced to her first case of celiac disease in one of her own young patients, and had been enlightened to many of the intricacies of the disease by one of the leading experts in the condition at the University of Maryland. This stroke of serendipity literally saved my father's life, since now my father's years of symptoms finally made sense to all of us, and Pat got him an injection of vitamin K which stopped his bleeding in about half an hour.
Surgery was called off--in fact, my father left the hospital against the wishes of his doctors--but my father was very weak and unable at that time to digest anything at all without severe diarrhea.
THE PRESCRIPTION
Here another act of serendipity provided exactly what was needed at this crisis. During the winter, several months before my father's fall, I had been pottering away in my kitchen experimenting with bone broths. I had become entranced by the extraordinary nutritive and recuperative properties of highly gelatinized broth made from the long simmering of bones, and I wanted to have a good storage of it. I improvised my brews by adding astragalus root--a nutritive immune system enhancer--to some pots, and kombu (a brown kelp) to others for its contribution of minerals and soothing mucilage. I added vinegar I'd made from shiitake mushroom stems--another immune system booster--in others, and nettles I'd grown on the burial ground of spent fish bones in another.
Nettles have so many nourishing and energizing attributes that one can barely enumerate them all, but I had been counting on their ability to pull minerals from the soil to augment my bone stocks. I only recently have come across a reference to their ability to actually promote the growth of intestinal villi! When the crisis came, I had over two dozen quarts of concentrated bone broths in my freezer. I took every one of them to my parents' farm in rural Michigan to feed my father.
Warmed bone broths (undiluted) with a bit of Celtic sea salt were the first things we gave to my father. He was hungry, so we made small meals of ground lamb and mashed potatoes with raw butter. In between meals he drank bone broth.
It wasn't too long before his diarrhea became less frequent and less severe, but his digestion was still quite precarious. He was gaining energy and insisted on taking care of his cows himself, so something was being absorbed, but his diet consisted of very few items at first, and contained no grains of any kind yet. On a necessarily restricted but nutrient-dense menu he continued to improve noticeably day by day, and he was so much better after a week that my sister and I felt we could return to our homes and that he and our mother would be all right continuing and expanding the healing regime together.
My father's case was a severe one, but some important lessons can be gleaned from the experience. First and foremost one must insist on utilizing high-gelatin bone broths for healing in all sorts of digestive and deficiency disorders. The colloidal mix of minerals and amino acids, while not complete nutrition, is easy to digest and also helps the body to digest whatever else is in the stomach with it. There are many references to the ability of gelatin (from bone broth) to heal and soothe intestinal mucosa.
I cannot recommend any commercially made soup stock on the market, however, for purposes of recuperation and healing. One simply must make this properly at home, using the very best ingredients, time and good thoughts. Concentrated broth can be used not only in soups, but in sauces, stews and ragoûts, and up to half the liquid in cooking grains. A mug of salted broth is a satisfying drink, and many other uses can easily be devised by the enterprising cook. The key is to liberally supply this alchemical elixir daily.
See the rest of the article here:
http://trit.us/moderndiseases/healing-celiac-disease.html
