Conscious Choice: Crossing Over

July 2003

Crossing Over

by Keith Berndtson, MD

I had never seen a patient with worse looking bags under her eyes. She was pale and weak from lack of sleep. The reason: Emma, her 15 month-old, had severe eczema, so bad that she’d cry all night, sometimes scratching her cheeks until they were raw. The mom was seeing a dermatologist at a downtown hospital, whose latest recommendation was that she should apply a more potent steroid cream to Emma’s face.

This mom did her homework, and she was reluctant to just keep treating the symptoms and risk the side effects of potent steroid creams. She wanted to get at the root cause of her daughter’s problem. I saw them in my early months as an integrative medicine doctor, and I wasn’t very sure of myself. That was okay with this mom, though; she was comfortable with the idea of our acting like graduate students trying to figure this out together. Emma’s skin problem seemed to get worse when she started eating regular food, so mom wanted me to check her for food allergies, understanding that insurance wasn’t likely to cover the particular test she wanted, and that she’d have to pay up front. Emma turned out to be allergic to eggs, dairy, corn, and soy. Because she was nursing, this meant that both of them had to completely avoid these foods for a while.

I suggested that, based on what I was learning about nutritional medicine, it might help if Emma ingested some supplements, which provide targeted support for the skin. We stocked a concentrated, liquid form of vitamin A, so that was easy. Getting zinc into her was not. Ever resourceful, this mom invented a way to dissolve zinc tablets into water and sneak it in with Emma’s juice.

We also added supplements to help restore Emma’s digestive health. From an integrative medicine perspective, eczema (and a host of other problems) can be related to what holistic doctors call "leaky gut," a condition often unrecognized in conventional medicine. To treat it, we started digestive enzymes at the beginning of Emma’s meals, to help take the guesswork out of how well she digested her protein. We added probiotics (friendly gut bacteria) to help restore a healthier bowel ecology, and L-glutamine, to give the cells of her gut a preferred energy source and help the leaky gut repair itself. Most importantly, we stuck with the plan, even when the first month went by with little change.

Then it started working. Emma came in with cheeks that were almost normal. She was beautiful, and a lot less fussy. I took a close look at mom...the bags were going away. She was getting her life back. And it was on her terms, not the dermatologist’s. The way Emma’s recovery was playing out, I was convinced we dealt with the problem at a root cause level...the essence of integrative medicine.

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