This seems to be the season for kids to tic. Call it the end of year excitement with school, seasonal allergies, and never to be underestimated, CHLORINE - yep, that's a huge trigger.

Rather than re-invent my story (cause I'm lazy and tired) I'm going to cut and paste a post I added for my Twitch and Bitch group last week.

The question was: If you're doing all this food elimination and supplements, and he still tics, then how do you know it's working at all?

Here's my answer and would love to hear your thoughts.

Hi all -


First off, we all seem to be in crisis now! For us, Stink has been clearing his throat four times/minute for about a week. The eye rolls were out of control a few days ago and now are down to a few hard stares. The hums are a bit less, but taken over by the barking coughs.



I decided to give him some sucking candy to see
if swallowing spit and having something quieter to do would "replace"
the clearing. Everything has sugar, of course, and tons of dye. The
best candy I could find, ironically were... get this... TIC TACS.
Stink: "You mean, to attack the tic, right?" Too funny. I only
offered him candy to help his throat because he was complaining how
sore it was. Either he has strep (a good reason for the tics or it's
just from the constant barking. I think the latter.)




Regarding some of your food questions - I stick by the diet 100%. I
would not have gone gluten/dairy/peanut/citrus/soy free if his allergy
test did not show he had this issue. We have had very very good
results up until now. He did cheat a lot last month, plus school
ended, plus he's swimming (chlorine is awful for him) AND he's not on
any enzymes/probiotics now. We will reintroduce those, along with a
very steady diet, by end of August.




As far as enzymes and probiotics go, I think for us what happened is that
once his gut cleared out, and we stopped (due to my husband's concern of over medicating him with stuff we really don't know a lot about) he rode on auto pilot for awhile. This month is a case of the bottom falling out.



Also, the reason I'm not freaking out altogether is that I've
slowly started to accept that he has Tourettes. All the diet changes
in the world are not going to keep him from ticking if it is his
nature.




But the thing is, my son is happy. I mean, beyond happy. And his tics
would undoubtedly be so much worse if he wasn't on a some steady diet.
I know I'm going to do more, including giving him an OATS test for
heavy metal testing in August. That, combined with some quiet time
this summer, more probiotics in August and perhaps the magic tic tacs, all will be well.



I don't mean to be glib. Head bobs, kicks, eye rolls, facial
grimaces... it can suck. But really, our kids are not these tics. And
I just refuse to live in fear over it. I don't believe God makes
mistakes.



If some kids are going to make fun of Stink in the future,
sure I"ll cry. But I've got a few years still to keep him on a
positive path so that by the time that happens, we'll deal with it.
He'll have friends that matter and those that are mean can kiss his
ass.




And that's all I have to say for now.