Eye stims, teeth grinding, cause?
We’ve been GFCF for a little over a year, and combined with ST, OT,Floortime and a dash of ABA, Eric (3.5, PDD-NOS) has been doinggreat. Stims had virtually stopped. Life was good.
Recently, Eric has started doing a “Stevie Wonder” thing with hishead and eyes. He seems to be doing it for a visual stim. Also, hebegan teeth grinding and hair twirling. Ped sees no infections (earor otherwise). Gastro-wise he’s fine. In fact, no colds for over 6mos.
Nothing had changed food-wise, as far as I could tell but I need todo more checking to see if some “old reliables” have changedingredients. But what did change was DS started a new SPED pre-school. He does great there and it seems the stims come out when hegets home. Our OT suggested a stress reaction and we increased theOT and relaxation techniques at home. (BTW, he does not eat thereand teacher is aware of GFCF, most kids there are on it.)
With the increased OT, the hair pulling is down now, but the teethgrinding is up. The visual stim seems an ingrained habit now. Ourdoc suggested using ABA, but we hesitate.
Is there a common food related source for these stims? DS does geta little soy in soy yogurt. Drinks Darifree and sometimes rice milkfor his milk. I just don’t know why he would do fine for a year andsuddenly have the stim if it is a food thing.
I wondered if his growing could have something to do with it. He’srecently gotten bigger. I thought maybe I should up his vits. Ihad been giving him omegas (children’s DHA, Nordic brand), mannatechmulti, a probiotic, and extra calcium. I had been dosing for under4. He’ll be 4 in April, but is as big as a 4 yr. old. I’ve alsoordered some samples of the Brainchild supps. DS did terrible onSupernuthera (B’s made him nuts) , but the Brainchild has differentformulations, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Anyway, wondered if a food source could be at issue here, or justeveryone’s thoughts.
This post tagged as: teeth grinding, ear infection, calcium
Erick Wescovich said,
Wrote on February 19, 2007 @ 10:32 pm
I just wanted to thank you. I think yeast and possibly soymay be the problem. It occurs to me that he gets so much potato andrice in his diet, now that we use Darifree and rice milk, I betyeast could be it. He gets so little Soy relative to the other two.It will be easy to eliminate the soy and see what happens, then turnto the yeast issue.
I will also look into increasing zinc.
I kind of think there may be some environmental factor involving theschool classroom too, but am not sure what.
Always a mystery, isn’t it! Anyway, thanks to all.