My daughter, who is 16 months old, has had severe allergic eczema for over a year.

She is severely allergic to nuts, egg, milk and many grains (on blood tests - no anaphyllactic reactions yet though).

But she has been doing ok on a diet of vegetables, meat etc. and her eczema has been slightly less severe for several weeks, and we have been able to stop steroid creams almost totally.

She has NEVER (until last week) had a severe anaphyllactic reaction - only some minor face swelling around eyes (as well as widespread eczema breakout) when we tried her with milk etc. many months ago. She had never had a reaction severe enough to attend hospital.

Until last week.

I had taken her to see a highly experienced constitutional homeopath, and he prescribed aluminium (not sure what dose) - partly because he decided she was suffering some aluminium toxicity.

He also said it would be good to try to clear up the underlying constitutional causes of the eczema/allergies, even though they were slightly improved, in case it later turned into asthma etc.


About 36 hours after she took the aluminium dose, our baby had a massive and sudden anaphyllactic reaction immediately upon swallowing some lamb and vegetables - 2 of her safest foods.

She started choking and turned red. Then, over the next half hour she started swelling up far worse than ever before, until her face looked mongoloid and you could hardly see her eyes.

Her ENTIRE body went bright red.

We called an ambulance and rang her homeopath who advised apis mel 200. But this didn't seem to help and in the ambulance she was so lifeless that they injected her with adrenaline.

I would have given carbo veg for the collapse but I wasn't in the ambulance - only my wife was.

Our baby recovered in hospital, and was discharged 6 hours later, although her ears and eye area didn't return to normal size for 24 hours or more.


Our homeopath says he has never seen such a reaction, but admits that there seems to be no other explanation other than the aluminium (which he says IS a skin remedy also).


Our baby's airways were NOT affected noticably during the attack - so it could be seen as just a monster attack of eczema/swelling to skin and surface tissues - the kind of exagerration of symptoms one might attribute to a skin remedy.


In the week since her attack our baby has been pretty normal - the same reduced level of eczema as the weeks before the remedy/attack - and certainly no noticeable swellings.


But we did try her with a very tiny piece of the lamb yesterday and her cheeks developed red wet aczema - so it appears that the attack has now sensitised her to one of her favourite and most harmless foods.

We will have to keep her off lamb totally for the forseeable future.

She is still fine with chicken and rabbit.

Incidentally - one homeo book says that aluminium is associated with aversion to meat!!




We will have a rast test done soon to see if she is type 1 allergic to lamb.

In the meantime, I do not know whether she has had some kind of healing reaction (our homeopath has often said that major healings rarely occur without reaction); or whether the whole incident has just been a disaster that has opened up a whole new level of reactivity and stopped her ever again eating lamb.


Is there anyone who has any experience or thoughts?

Cheers

E