I used to be completely derisive of food allergies and sensitivities. It always seemed to me that anyone who claimed to have food allergies was rather fey and wan, looking for attention. It takes experiencing it yourself to be changed.

For years, I had been mysteriously ill, always exhausted, filled with pain. And I’ve had breathing problems and hormonal imbalances all my life. Pneumonia six times. It took a terrible time of it last winter–seven weeks of not being able to eat; emergency rooms; CAT scans, etc.–before I was finally diagnosed with celiac disease. And yes, it was a naturopath who suggested the blood test, finally. Thank goodness. But I had it confirmed by the gastro guy. As soon as I stopped eating gluten, I started feeling better than I ever have in my life.

Now, I keep a website about this (glutenfreegirl.com), and I can’t believe how many people read it, then tell me their stories, of how the traditional medical field ignored them. 1 out of 133 Americans have celiac. So why had I never heard of it? Well, because it’s the most under-diagnosed disease in America. A friend of mine who’s a doctor told me they spent five minutes on celiac at his medical school.

Proof’s in the pudding, really. If you felt better off the gluten, stay off it. Why do you need a test to confirm it?

But even so… from my understanding of the school of thought that Palmer founded, the idea of a “holistic chiropractor” should be pretty much redundant, shouldn’t it?

I have a pretty poor understanding of how chiropractors practice, in the here and now (not that there’s too very much standardization in the first place), but I would — respectfully — want to ask about these “tests” that revealed your supposed sensitivity to gluten. The whole chiropractic philosophy (in its original, Palmer form, as I understand it) was all about the body’s natural tendency toward health, if only it can be freed of obstructions. Treatement is different in this discipline because it involves no drugs, and no surgeries. That’s the fundamental thing.

So how we get from that to your “diagnosis” of a gluten problem, I don’t understand — unless it’s intellectually permissible to treat gluten (one of the basic arrangements of chemical building blocks Nature uses in food) as a drug, and thus label it “bad.” I’d be interested in comments from those familiar with (or even better, practicing) Chiropractic.

The cynic in me (which I can promise was there far earlier than the nascent medico in me) wonders if it didn’t become trendy for alternative practitioners to identify food sensitivities a few years ago, at about the same time scientific allergists (using mainstream research methods) made some leaps in understanding them.

A lot of petty squabbling goes on in the health-care world about alternative therapies, and most of it is stupid and unnecessary. Most of it is mainstream medicine’s fault, too. The most compelling argument chiropractors make is that people will go where they feel their needs are being met, and that is undeniable. They also say that if the patient chooses to make them the primary point of entry to the health-care system, all the better, because chiropractic modalities are as well-suited as any for the minor aches and pains of life, and for those problems where chiropractic is not the best option, practitioners can refer patients to other parts of the health care system, including the stuffy old scientific part, if needed.

Research seems to show the first part of this argument to be true, by the way: for low back pain, chiropractic manipulation works better than placebo and about as well as physical therapy, regular exercise, or the equivalent of a fistful of Advil per week. But my experience, like the research, has been very uneven on the second part. In one study, a frighteningly high percentage of chiropractors would choose to treat a 2-week-old with a fever themselves, and not refer to another provider.

For the record, a two-week old with a high fever can die from it, so lab work is indicated in all cases. I don’t say that because I’ve picked teams and want to make chiropractic look stupid; I say that because it is stupid whenever someone dies for no reason. If they’re less than a month old, the stupidity is compounded, and anyone who advises against the right thing to do should never, ever be allowed to give that kind of advice.

Long (very long) story short, I respect the idea of diversity in health care. I respect most of how that diversity works out in practice. But there are pockets of blindingly frustrating and stubborn practice on both sides. From your story, it seems as though your “holistic chiropractor” should have given you a tentative, working diagnosis, and then sent you to someone (a dietitian perhaps, or better yet an allergist) who could confirm it.

In your shoes, I would of course be happy that the past few years were better, in terms of your health. That’s never a bad thing. But I’d be frustrated and frankly quite angry, about being let down in this way. You’ve been laboring under an assumption that turns out to be incorrect. You’ve made decisions — rational, sensible, intelligent decisions — based on bad data.

On the other hand, we should always save a lot of room for mystery. We understand orders of magnitude more than we ever have about how human bodies work, but there’s still way more we don’t know. And might never know. I think in the end it all comes down to how much ambiguity we’re comfortable with, in matters of our own health. My big flashpoint is that people demand precision and guarantees from people with MD, DO, or PhD after their name, and accept truckloads of inscrutability from alternative practitioners. It’s unfair, most of all to patients.