Is a clinic diagnosis of celiac disease essential (or even important) to persons living the gluten free life-style? This is my third article in the subject this week. Judging from the comments  and e-mails that I have received, it is a vital topic and a major controversy.

I attached one comment to the article published on October 12 and two comments to the follow-up article I published the following day. You may wish to review those articles and comments before you read these new e-mails.

Please keep the comments and e-mails to gfceliac@gmail.com coming. I sense that we have much more to say on this subject. I will never publish names or e-mail addresses. Eventually, I will attempt a summary of what has been said.

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“Well I have two points of view on this one. The first is that I had first tried the gluten free diet and had success based on the advice of a friend whose mother has Celiac, after about 6 months on the diet, my Dr. told me that it was all in my head and I needed to start eating gluten again. Fast forward to an extremely complicated pregnancy/delivery and being violently ill for the first 3 years of my daughter’s life before I was finally sent to a Gastroenterologist that confirmed a highly positive diagnosis of Celiac. I don’t think I would have tried the diet again or stuck with it if I hadn’t had the positive diagnosis. Then there is my daughter’s situation. Premature birth, failure to thrive, projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea for the first 3 years of her life, had her tested for Celiac after my positive diagnosis and her results were a resounding NEGATIVE. However, her pediatrician advised that we should try the diet anyway. She improved dramatically on the gluten free diet and to this day (she’s 8 now) if she is accidentally exposed to even a tiny amount of gluten she has an immediate and obvious reaction. I do not believe that the test results are sensitive enough for most cases and are missing an awful lot of pre-celiac patients, those who would benefit from being on the diet long before their body is damaged enough to produce a positive test result.

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“i have always had digestive issues and have been tested for cd.
i haven’t been eating gluten for 6 months and recently had a cd test.  i told the dr i had
no antibodies to test but she did it anyway.  i normally love my doctor but i think she
did it to shut me up.  of course it came back negative.  i’ve  been wondering if i should
start telling people i have cd just to make life easier for me but i feel weird about that.
hearing other people’s stories have been helpful, so thank you!”

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