I've been wanting to post about this for a while.
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My daughter started the shots last November. I did it as a "long shot," becaus there were so few foods she seemed to be able to eat without a rash around her mouth, or atacking her stomach with itchiness, or sometimes attacking her whole body with itchiness. Her skin was dry, and we couldn't seem to figure out what she was reacting to. I did an elimination diet and we went down to 4-6 foods, and couldn't seem to add much more back in without flareups. I took pictures, and I'm glad I did, as now, looking back I start to doubt myself, wondering if it was really as bad as I thought...
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Well, she had her first shot in November and within 3 weeks I started to notice a difference in her skin reactivity. She started clearing up! The literature says that 3 weeks after the shot is around the time when you start to see a change. Honestly, at the 3 week mark, the shot had slipped my mind. As she was clearing, I was trying to figure out what I had done differently - which foods had she eaten/not eaten (but she was still on the strict diet so that was easy!), what special bath had she had, what supplements had a taken, etc, etc. I had been pretty sure she had a salicylate sensitivity in our pre-shot life. So, she cleared, and we gradually started adding foods back in, more and more. Within a month she was eating everything except gluten (I keep that one off limits due to her brother's celiac), and she was FINE. She has had 3 more shots since the first one, in Feb, April, and now last week. Everytime we go in to see our LDA doctor, I fill out a symptom questionnaire and I rate the severity of her symptoms. Her list has included eczema, itchiness, sleep issues, cradle cap, and a few others I don't remember. I realized going in last week, that all those symptoms had completely disappeared. When I looked at my ratings since November, they had been going down and down (a significant drop after the first shot, and then progressively down further with each subsequent shot).
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We had intradermal allergy testing down in April 2010, and we are going to have it re-done in 2 months time to compare the results. I will post back. But in the mean time, I wanted to post about our LDA experience. Preparing for the shots is an ordeal (we go down to an extremely limited diet of foods that don't cross react with anything in the shot). We eat fish, lamb, sweet potatoes, cooked carrots, tapioca, and a few other things for 3 days around shot time. However, the results have made it absolutely worth it! I am considering starting the shots for my sons, whose issues aren't nearly as acute as hers were, but I think they could benefit.
