Cow’s milk ??
27 Jul 2009 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: asthma, children, personal
K has had a dry, racking cough for months now. We have reason to believe that it is asthma related, as there is a stong history of asthma in my family. My mother had it, my maternal grandparents had it and I have very strong asthmatic tendencies.
The cough is more predominant in the mornings and evenings and flares up, with any infection that she catches. A cold or a fever aggravtes her hyper-sensitive respitatory system, causing her constricted airways to go into spasms, making her breathing difficult.
She has been on medication for months now. We started with the fast-acting inhaler, for instant relief. When her cough did not improve much with the broncho-dialator, we were advised to start using the long-term, preventive steroid inhaler. It did improve and has largely been under control, except for when she has an infection. Yet the cough has not gone entirely.
The last few weeks have been particularly bad, and the doctor had to prescribe her some oral steroids to bring it under control. It was a 4-day soluble steroid course, and I cannot see a marked difference at all yet. She continues to cough, waking up in the middle of the night too, at times. Sometimes her cough is persistent through the day, and the nursery staff have voiced their concerns about it too.
The other thing which annoys me no end, is the varying opinions of the doctors in the surgery and in my own life. Of course it is my own fault for consulting so many people – my sister, my uncle included, but I am just desperate to try anything to get rid of it now.
I, obviously do not want her to continue on steroids, if I can avoid it and have been exploring various alternative treatment methods. Homeopathy is top on the list for me, but i am very very wary of going to a homeopath, not recommended by people I know. I plan to take her to one, highly recommended by a friend, when I visit India in November, but dont want to wait around till then either.
I finally decided to go to a nutritional therapist over the weekend. She – let’s call her NT (has to be a ‘she’, K will scream her lungs out if we go to a male doctor/barber/male nutrition therapist – dont ask !!!) started off with K’s diet as it is now, and as I was telling the practitioner all about it, I realised how little K eats (even though I always knew that in my head !). She then gave me a list of things to try out – eliminate them from K’s diet and see if it has any effect.
One of the biggest culprits is milk and dairy, according to NT. NT thinks we should eliminate that completely from K’s diet, subsituting it will rice milk or nut milk. I have a big big problem with it. Other foods to eliminate is wheat and wheat based products. NT also said that combining wheat and milk is the worst offender. K does do that in nursery, as she has Veetabix for breakfast. I doubt that she eats it, she probably has a few bites. Others include brown rice, brown bread, using flours other than wheat, raisins which dont have sulpha added in them and if applicable, giving up meat.
I am struggling to come to terms with getting K to try giving up cow’s milk. We do buy organic, whole milk everytime, and because her eating is rather erratic, we take comfort from the fact that she gets her nutrition from milk. Also, Indians have been using milk and diary products for years together and I have never heard of milk or lactose intolerance in India. Is it because we did not have a term for the condition or did we not suffer from it or is it ignorance ? I tend to associate lactose intolerance as more of a Western ailment, rightly or not. What are your thoughts ?
For the time being though, I plan to observe her more carefully and record the correlation between her cough and drinking more milk, if any. I will re-evaluate the situation, based on my oberservations.
What are your thoughts ? Should i eliminate cow’s milk completely from her diet ??
