I can't help you by: Kerri Knox, RN- The Immune Queen!
Hi Heather,
I'm simply not interested in helping people get tested for gluten sensitivity. Once you start getting into the rabbit hole of testing, then you spend thousands or tens of thousands of health care dollars just so you 'know' and the vast vast majority of the time it comes back negative and then you are confused, worried, don't want to try a gluten free diet, your doctor told you that it would be useless and thinks your crazy to go off gluten, your family thinks that you are crazy etc.
Personally, my belief is that it's simply wrong to spend so much money just to 'know for sure' when:
a) You probably won't end up knowing for sure b) You will get MORE information by just going off of gluten at zero cost to the health care system. c) By going off of gluten and sensing how you feel, then you will begin to learn to listen to your body and what foods agree and disagree with you and that will do you FAR more good in the long run than any testing
So, I won't judge you if you feel the need to get testing, but you're on your own and I can almost guarantee that you'll be FAR more confused and even potentially have some difficult decisions to make such as whether or not to get an upper GI endoscopy with a biopsy- since that is the 'gold standard' that gastroenterologists use before they will give a diagnosis- even though a recent study showed that people with mild gastrointestinal damage (who will NOT get diagnosed with Celiac Disease and will be told to eat as much gluten as they want to by their doctor) who still continues to eat gluten has a shorter lifespan than those without any gastrointestinal damage.
So, if you felt terrible, got off of gluten and felt better, do you REALLY need a doctor or anyone else in the world to confirm this for you??
Stop spending health care dollars unnecessarily for problems that you can fix on your own. This idea of using insurance to pay for this because you don't have to pay is one of the reasons for our huge health care problem in the US. I'll bet that if you had to pay for 10% of the costs of all of these tests, that you wouldn't feel the need to be tested anymore....
I understand why you want to get diagnosed. However, before you do it, make sure you know about the risks. If you feel better not eating gluten, stay off of it. It shouldn't matter what a doctor says. You may or may not have a sensitivity, but the other person who commented it right. It can get VERY expensive. If you have your heart set on your doctor telling you that you are intolerant, have a beer. Just a single one should do it. I wouldn't think any more than that would be needed. The gluten in barley is thicker, and your system will probably react harder to it. Gluten is a set of molecules, not just one type. Our bodies are not meant to process as much as we force it to process.
Good luck with you testing if you follow through with it.
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