Children as Special Patients 183at all costs. It is sometimes possible to secure the help of a teacher in
supervising what the child eats, but make sure this is someone you can
depend on or you may face ridicule for your ideas and possibly open
contempt of your requests. Unfortunately, there is a general misconception
among teachers that, because they are held liable for the safe custody of a
child at school, the parents’ wishes don’t count for a thing when it comes to
the child’s management.
It is undoubtedly best if you can bring your child home for meals
at lunchtime. If this is impossible, the options are to provide a packed
lunch within the guidelines of the elimination diet or to wait until a school
vacation. Trust the school staff only if you are sure. The trouble with
packed lunches is twofold and probably obvious to you at once. The most
convenient foods, such as bread, are banned on the diet. Sandwiches are
out! Moreover, even if you do send your child off with a tasty and entirely
permitted lunch in a box, there is no guarantee that it will be eaten. As every
child knows, ‘swapping’ fare is a perfectly legitimate way of livening up an
otherwise boring meal. But that’s the last thing you want to happen. Use this
approach only if you can trust the child implicitly.
Academic performance
Talking about school meals and teachers makes this a good place to
stress again the relationship between food incompatibility and academic
performance. I would like to refer you once more to the case of Maxine,
quoted in Chapter 10. One of the commonest of all manifestations of
allergy reported is a disturbance in concentration and alertness.
Dyslexia may be associated with this phenomenon, and if this
were true it would be nice because it would make it very treatable. Certainly
when being tested at my clinic, children sometimes react to food and other
substances so strongly that they become unable to read and write or to
decipher characters correctly: Comprehension is lost, and images may be
inverted. One of my young Irish patients called Eamon had an extraordinary
reaction to wheat and apple; if he ate either food he would write only in
mirror image format – perfectly legible, but in reverse. I tried to explain to
his mother the dazzling brain power required for such an extraordinary feat.
He was a very bright lad, once this “handicap” was removed.
The trouble with labels like dyslexia, as I said earlier in connection
with a ‘fancy’ diagnosis, is that it detracts from the real cause and implies
knowledge of a condition which exists by the mere virtue of giving it a name.
There are, moreover, cases where handwriting and word comprehension