You don’t need a diagnosis to work with us
Support for children whose difficulties do not yet have a name
Most of this website is arranged by diagnosis, because that is how the health system is arranged and it is how a lot of parents find us. It is a poor description of who actually comes through the door.
Plenty of the children we work with have no label at all.
Some have been on a waiting list for years. Some were assessed and told there was nothing to find. Some have been given a diagnosis of FND, a label that names the symptoms without saying why they are there. Some have collected three diagnoses that overlap so heavily that not one of them explains what is actually happening.
Some are already under a consultant who is doing everything right, and they are still not getting better. And some have a parent who simply knows, in the way that parents do, that something has changed and nobody is listening.
We have never needed a label to start.
The children we work with
Some of what brings families to us:
A child who was developing normally and then changed, after an illness, or a course of antibiotics, or a period of stress, or for no reason anyone can put a finger on
Regression in speech, skills, continence or behaviour, whether it happened suddenly or crept up over months
Anxiety, OCD, intrusive thoughts, rituals
Tics
Rage and meltdowns that do not match the child you know
Sleep that goes wrong at every stage: hard to get to sleep, waking through the night, waking up tired
Eating that has narrowed to a handful of foods, or ARFID
Sensory reactivity
Chronic gut problems: constipation, diarrhoea, pain, bloating, reflux
Recurrent infections, or a child who never quite recovers from one
Fatigue, or a young person who has withdrawn from school and from life
Low mood in a child far too young for it to make any sense
Some of these children go on to be diagnosed with something. Some never are. It changes remarkably little about how we work with them.
Why the label matters less than you would think
A diagnosis is a description, not an explanation. It tells you what to call a cluster of symptoms. It does not tell you why your child has them.
When we look properly, we usually find a reason. Often several. The gut is inflamed. Nutrients are low. The immune system is reacting to things it should not. These show up on tests, and they are almost never looked at, because once a child has a label everyone stops asking why.
Finding out why is where we start.
How we work: foundations first
We work in a particular order.
Before we go anywhere near the deeper work, we get a child steady. That means calming the things that keep a child in a state of high alert and stop anything else working: the stress response and the adrenals behind it, inflammation, any infection, the mast cells that drive so many of the reactions we see, and the mineral balance the whole system runs on. Until those are settled, anything else we try tends not to last, and a child who is already flaring will often react badly to it.
There is no single starting point, because it depends entirely on the child.
If a child is badly constipated, we deal with that. If a child is inflamed and flaring, we settle that first. What we do not do is work in a fixed order regardless of the child, or pile everything on at once. This is why so many families arrive having tried a rigid protocol that made their child worse. Get the order wrong, or ask a child to tolerate too much before they are steady, and you can set them back months.
Once a child is stable, we go deeper: the gut, detoxification, methylation, whatever that particular child’s picture calls for.
Thirteen years and around 3,500 families have taught us where to start and, more to the point, what order to do things in. By the time they reach us, most of these children have already seen several different practitioners and specialists, each looking at one piece of the child rather than the whole of them.
We do not work in isolation
We work closely with a prescribing GP and other specialists who know these children well. If a child needs a medical assessment, a prescription or a specialist opinion, we say so, and we can usually help you get to the right person rather than back to the end of a waiting list.
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“We have seen breakthroughs we never thought possible”
Tom no longer freaks out at certain smells and has been willing to try new foods for the first time in six years. He is eating larger quantities and enjoying his food much more. He told us his tummy always used to hurt after a few bites and now it doesn't. He seems more even-tempered, his confidence has been boosted, and he recently announced he felt "100% smarter." It's nothing short of a miracle, and for the first time it feels like anything is possible.
— P.H, Luxembourg
What working with us looks like
Everything is done online, so where you live makes no difference. Families work with us from all over the world.
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Fifteen minutes with one of our practitioners. Nothing to prepare, nothing to pay, and no obligation at the end of it. You tell us what has been happening, we tell you whether this is likely to help your child, and you decide from there whether you want to go further.
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Seventy five minutes on Zoom, after you have filled in a detailed questionnaire covering your child’s history, symptoms, diet, sleep, gut and everything that has been tried before. We go through all of it with you, and we leave you with the first few things to start on, chosen because they are what will settle your child soonest, rather than everything at once.
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Stool, urine, saliva or blood. Only where the result will actually change what we do, and only where it is realistic for your family.
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This is the opposite of a fixed protocol. At first we review every six to eight weeks, adapting the plan each time to how your child has responded. As they need less support, the reviews space out, because the aim is always to be doing less over time, not more. We build things up carefully rather than overwhelming a child, or a family, with too much at once. Depending on what the picture calls for, the work can include targeted nutritional support, amino acid therapy, phospholipid therapy, our Gut Restoration protocol, micro-immunotherapy, and the diet, lifestyle and environmental changes that do so much of the heavy lifting. We refer on where you need it.
Most families are with us for at least six months. It is patient work, and we would rather say so at the start.
Where to start
You do not have to decide anything today. Book a free fifteen minute call, tell one of our practitioners about your child, and they will tell you what they think, what it would involve and what it would cost. You can take it from there.