Slide
67:
Now, in approaching a child therapeutically, as many of you know, the
first key to me is to remove negatives. It doesn’t pay to ask what you can throw into
the body to make it healthy if you’re giving a child something that fires off their
immune system. Since this is your body’s immune system, that overrides anything I
would do medically, unless I used heavy dose steroids or heavy dose immune-toxic agents
and suppress your system.
So, if you want to have a healthy body, you’ve got to have a
healthy immune system. So, the first key is to get rid of the triggers where you can. That
usually means an elimination diet and removing any agent I can that fires it off. This is
perhaps the biggest reason most nutritional approaches have failed to help adults or
children. Unfortunately, most of the products are not very pure. So, if you’re
putting in something that’s supposed to help your body and it’s firing off the
wrong part of your immune system instead, you’re going to wind up worse.
One of the basic concepts that have held up for me in physiology was
that I was always very interested in the idea of milk and dairy sensitivities. In fact a
Dr. Frank Oskie came around when I was in residency and really ingrained in me that if you
think of iron deficiency, it was often connected to milk and dairy products. This was at a
time when if you told someone to stop milk and dairy, they figured that you must be from
Mars. Thankfully, Dr. Oskie was a very reputable pediatric hematologist. He went on to
become Chief of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, so he’s pretty good. I’ve always
followed his suggestions.
One of the things that caught my eye was the idea that there were
studies showing that if a child was allergic to milk or dairy, they were put into a
hospital. This was actually done more often in foreign countries than in this country. A
biopsy was taken of their intestines. What you saw was this irritated, red inflamed
intestine that you could easily call leaky gut if you wanted to. But how do you think you
fixed that? By giving the child a bunch of supplements? No. What they did was take away
milk and dairy. Three or four weeks later they could do a biopsy of that gut and it was
totally normal.
The key is to help the body get better. The best thing that any of us
can do is help your child’s body help itself. Therefore, the goal is to eliminate the
stress on the body. The problem, as I said, is that you have to worry about concerns on
nutritional items. You have to worry about potential toxicities. Everyone says that
because something is a medicine that you have to worry about it, but no one says because
it’s nutritional you have to worry about it. There are now multiple reports out there
about melatonin causing seizure disorders. Many of you heard me speak against melatonin a
number of years ago. There is now a report in Good Housekeeping showing that most of St.
Johns Wort is so impure they really wonder themselves about the safety of giving it to
someone. Unfortunately, while it’s a nice idea to say let’s help the body –
I’m a strong believer in the idea that we could do a lot more for children and adults
with good nutritional approaches – but the products, unless purified, remain risky.
