Some of you might remember me mentioning Hannah's chronic rash around her mouth in the past. She had it for around two years.

It was red, often bright red. It would itch and flake off. It would get worse in contact with certain substances that were acidic such as spaghetti sauce.

I asked the doctor at her 3 year check up and he said that he thought that she was licking around her mouth and her saliva was burning it.

A couple months later, though, I just couldn't shake the nagging thought that it was food allergy related so I took my kids to the doctor and asked for allergy tests. He declined to test them and just told me to go do food elimination trials. I wasn't satisfied with that answer so I kept looking. A short while later, I had a naturopath run some simple tests on my kids. My daughter was sensitive to gluten, dairy, and she also had systemic yeast problems!

I immediately took her off all gluten and dairy and started to supplement with probiotics and eliminate sugar as best as I could. Her skin started to heal up. Then I thought, well, yogurt should be okay, afterall a lot of lactose intolerant people can handle yogurt. I figured that the yogurt would help them with the probiotics that they needed. Bad move! The day after I gave them yogurt, Hannah and Micah both broke out in ugly rashes again. Hannah's rash was red and angry and horrible looking. I learned my lesson, anyway!

I immediately went back to total avoidance of gluten and dairy. I also found a soy based dairy free liquid acidophilous supplement for my kids. My daughter's skin around her face is healed up for the most part now. Other than some faint redness that I also hope goes away with time, you wouldn't know that she has had major issues in the area.

So, the moral of the story if your child is having symptoms, go with your mommy gut and push further if you're unsatisfied with the answers from your doctor. And always consider that food intolerances/allergies/sensitivities may be involved.

Good going, Ruth! I'm so happy YOU were able to figure this out. Nobody knows your babies like you do! :)

That's wonderful Ruth! :mrgreen: I'm glad you pushed further to find out the problems. It seems we're having to do the same thing with our oldest DS who has ADHD. The pediatrician only suggested medicine. We didn't want that so we saw a therapist over the summer who helped us but DS recently had some more issues. So we decided to try another therapist who specializes in pediatrics and had our first appt. yesterday. I'm not sure why doctors don't want to give their patients other options. We've had to find all this stuff on our own. I'm really thankful for the internet. It helped us find our new therapist.

we have had way more success with taking our son to the naturopath then with any other doc that he has seen. many of them are just medicate, medicate, and medicate, and we didn't want that.