Help me heal my little guy's gut

[2boyzmama]

Connor is 3. He has a Primary Immune Deficiency along with multiple medical issues stemming from a chromosomal deletion (Velocardiofacial Syndrome/DiGeorge Syndrome). He is frequently sick, and nearly every illness means antibiotics. I literally can't count how many times he's had antibiotics (oral, IV, PICC line, he's had it all). We try to be very careful with culturing all infections that we can so we are sure to put him on the right antibiotic.

He's finally reaching a point where less and less of his viral illnesses lead to secondary bacterial infections In fact, right now he has some sort of crud with bad runny nose (the thick green kind that leaves his nose/upper lip raw), bad cough (required his inhaler because it triggers bronchospasms), and a day of a fever...but no signs yet of anything secondary (no ear drainage, no extended fever, clear lung sounds) With summer coming soon, we will hopefully have a few months of relative health.

So I want to focus hard on healing his gut. He gets probiotics, Omegas, and Vit D supplements most days. But with his history, I'm guessing he needs more. I spend all my time researching his various illnesses, defects, therapies, etc and I'm not well-read in this area. What can I do? Where should I start?

[tanyalynn]

In the Resources thread, there's a Healing the Gut sticky, I found that helpful.

One of the links is a poop link, I've found it helpful with my kids' stools, seeing what's likely going on. We've had fairly typical, straightforward imbalances--haven't had to send in stool samples to be analyzed or anything like that.

http://www.enzymestuff.com/rtstools.htm

The stuff that's helped my kids:

-remove food intolerances (gluten and dairy for DD, those plus soy for DS--DS has a couple other low-level intolerances that I can let him have sometimes that don't seem to cause digestive issues).... gluten does some weird things in people

-I've used homemade kimchee for probiotics because we buy a lot of supps already and I wanted to see if I could skip this one--for us, it works well, foods are often higher dose than normal probiotic supps... but if you need something specific--maybe specific strains--some of the high end supps do seem to work best

-look into zinc, my kids need a crazy amount and that's not typical, but if you read about diet and minerals that are more likely to be stripped out of food (for me, it was accumulating deficiencies over a couple decades, not just what I'm eating now), zinc and magnesium are often consumed below the RDA, and since zinc's involved in both digestive stuff as well as immune, it's something to consider

-daily vitC did not reduce the number of times DS got sick (more than typical kids, way less than Connor) but it did, and does, reduce the severity, especially when I'm careful about increasing the dose when DS is sick--the amount goes up a lot when he's sick, the standard guidelines I've read are 50 mg/kg body weight per day, divided, but when sick, that jumps to 250 mg/kg body weight per day--1.1 grams per 10 lbs body weight, 3 doses. My kids always needed a lot more than that, but in general it seems like a good starting place.

[CageFreeFamily]

Check out the Gut & Psychology Syndrome book for a great, comprehensive guide to healing the guts of children (and adults).