The Role of Gluten Elimination in Preventive Medicine

Reactive medicine means treating problems once they’ve happened. For instance, reactive medicine describes giving a pain medicine to a patient to treat a headache, or an antidepressant to treat depression, or even giving a child a powerful amphetamine drug because he or she had been given a diagnosis of ADHD.

Proactive medicine, also called preventive medicine, seeks to keep these types of issues from happening in the first place. And isn’t is interesting to see how medical literature is now showing that gluten sensitivity may be related to these and so many more brain disorders.

To be clear, we’ve known for a long time that those with a diagnosis of celiac disease (an autoimmune disorder brought on by exposure to gluten in certain individuals)  can develop various neurological issues. But now we are seeing research showing that a much larger group of individuals suffer from what is now called non-celiac gluten sensitivity.  Some estimates put the number of these folks as high as 30-40% of the population.

These people can also develop problems like ADHD, depression, movement disorders, dementia, neuropathy, and headaches that may well respond to a gluten-free diet. Again, this data doesn’t refer to the 1.8% of the population with proven celiac disease, but a much larger segment of the population.

So keeping people from requiring drugs to treat their ills might well employ a gluten-free diet. There’s absolutely nothing to lose by trying!

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