Sick all Over: common and chronic illnesses often confuse patients and phsyicans and too many people suffer for years without a solution.

Despite medical advances, more than 150 million people in the USA and Canada are not well and receive little or no help from modern medicine. The least understood illness patterns are ill-defined and chronic. Our theory is that immune responses to food proteins cause some of this suffering and can be corrected with diet revision. We believe that these delayed patterns of food allergy may afflict more than 100 million people in the USA alone. This may seem to be an outrageous assertion, but if you examine the lengthening list of ill-defined and immune-mediated diseases, you have to be interested in this theory. Play flash games, cooking games.

For many years I saw patients who complained of being sick-all-over. They often apologized for having so many symptoms and were grateful when I did not label them "hypochondriacs". The majority of these patients who complied with my instructions improved with diet revision and remained in better health as long as they stayed with a "safe core diet. I developed a standard method of diet revision, now called the Alpha Nutrition Program. Anyone who is sick-all-over can follow this program and, with a little luck and lot of determination, can restore more normal feeling and function.

Most patients I saw had chronic illness with features of a recurrent flu-like syndrome. They often had digestive complaints and most over the years accumulated health problems with diagnoses such as migraine, fibromyalgia, depression, chronic rhinitis or sinusitis, asthma, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and arthralgias or joint pains. Their illnesses evolved over time. Often there was a "background noise" of milder but chronic symptoms, punctuated episodically by more acute and dramatic events. Most complained of fatigue, irritability, digestive disturbances, reduced exertional tolerance, sleep disturbances, flushing, sweating, swelling and cognitive dysfunction. Some recalled a lifetime of symptoms that began with colic, rhinitis, recurrent otitis media and/or eczema in infancy and progressed through different symptom patterns as the years went by.

Delayed patterns of food allergy are not obvious and generally go unrecognized. Symptom onset is delayed many hours after eating foods and chronic disease is often the result.

Many unsolved diseases are either degenerative and/or inflammatory and are recognized to be immune-mediated or hypersensitivity diseases. The delayed patterns of food allergy can be the cause of chronic and disabling hypersensitivity disease. The stakes are high both for individual patients and for society as a whole. None of the common hypersensitivity diseases have been solved and most appear to rage on, afflicting increasing numbers of patients with chronic and disabling diseases. Asthma, allergy, rheumatic diseases, autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, thyroiditis, and psoriasis are examples of hypersensitivity diseases which involve humoral and cell-mediated immunity. We use celiac disease - wheat allergy- as a prototype which demonstrates the prolific ability of food allergy to produce a wide range of diseases.