Here's my take on why this remains an invisible, undiagnosed disease by the medical community. There is no money in it. There is no pharmaceutical prescription that addresses the disease.
This is because the only cure for celiac disease is to stop eating all products containing gluten-- forever.
There is nothing to gain for doctors to investigate a celiac disease diagnosis. Most people are misdiagnosed and prescribed inappropriate, even harmful medications that distract and cover-up the core sickness they are experiencing.
This means that we all are on our own and have to be our own doctors when we have what may be a celiac condition!
My own journey has been what feels like a hairpin race around blind curves inevitably leading to the arrival at a foreign and flourless diet, the unfamiliar trip down food aisles bearing amaranth, greens, and quinoa. Glancing over in those aisles to my fellow food travelers, we smile and I realize: I have become one of "those people" who speak in "gluten".
For sure, this doesn't mean I am 100% fundamentalist on the prescribed nondairy, meatless, 3-day-a-week fish regime. To wit, the 10-layer dark, ganache chocolate hazelnut cake someone recently surprised me with. Sigh.
But that's a gleeful/guilty anomaly.
Most of the time, the highlight of a food day involves some fascinating variety of seaweed.
On the one, most important hand, I am incredibly lucky. I have comprehensively cracked the case and the reward is health!
I could also teach a small seminar on what it means to have the celiac condition, having lived with it undiagnosed all my life, and now researching it, literally, to the bones.
