Problem Situations You May Encounter in Elimination Dieting 203It is vital to let your doctor know what you are doing in advance.
He or she should be able to reduce your insulin dose. If you are the type
of patient who is already managing his or her own insulin levels, that makes
things much easier. Even so, the condition can become very unstable for a
while, and frequent visits to the family practitioner are suggested. As always,
you may meet with scorn and attempts to talk you out of any self-diagnosis
plan such as this diet. Don’t be put off: you may even teach your doctor
something!
Steroid medicines
One of the most dangerous groups of drugs in the modern doctor’s arsenal
are arguably those classified as corticosteroids, not just because of what
they may do to the patient but more because of what they take away. They
suppress the body’s immune reactions and may eventually undermine this
important defensive mechanism so completely that the individual is left
with little or no resistance to fight even the most trivial of diseases.
Unfortunately, these are commonly prescribed in combating
allergic responses.
Nature has endowed us with a superb combative screening system
which constantly does battle on our behalf with toxins and microbes that
enter via skin wounds, the mouth, lungs and other parts of the body. The
white blood cells are part of this system, and their wonderful power to
render harmless and ingest all manner of potential pathogens is well known
to anyone who has studied elementary physiology at school. Antibodies,
too, play a part by inactivating foreign matter called antigens. These are of
great concern to us in the study of allergies since some allergy reactions
at least are precipitated when antigens and antibodies meet. It is as if the
furious tussle with the intruder upsets the furniture and makes a mess,
which we call a symptom.
That is where steroid drugs come in. With certain illnesses, such as
allergy reactions, arthritis, colitis and asthma, the battle is almost too much
for the body and needs quieting down. Indeed, with rheumatoid arthritis
and other ‘collagen’ diseases, the whole war seems rather pointless since, so
far as we can tell, the body is attacking its own protein! Until the l950’s we
were helpless to intervene in these situations. Then therapeutic successes
began to be observed with a (then) ‘miracle drug’ called ACTH. This is
actually a hormone that stimulates the adrenal glands to produce their
own hormones, which are basically corticosteroids. Our adrenal glands
are remarkable organs lying just above the kidneys. They are endocrine,