ADD and milk (of cow, that is ~)

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I don't see what the point is in cutting out gluten and casein without first determining that you have an intolerance. Just because you have stomach trouble doesn't mean you should cut them out. Your problems could be related to an allergy to a different food.

Not everyone who has an allergy is allergic to gluten.

FYI -- I get severe stomach pain after drinking almond milk. I would not be surprised if I were allergic to almond milk and not allergic to dairy.

Well, allergy testing isn't exactly a 100% reliable procedure. There's no such thing in medicine, and allergy testing is less reliable than many. Not worthless, but not totally reliable either.

The most reliable test for an allergy or digestive intolerance is if you eat something and it consistently causes problems for you. The trouble with that is that extreme reactions can be dangerous and you don't want to mess around with testing whether you have the sort of allergy that'll cause anaphylaxis. If you're at risk for that, better get the allergy test first, and if the test site swells up like nobody's business, better not play around with that particular allergen.

Another thing: Celiac disease. Can be tested for, but if you haven't been eating wheat you might get a false negative. So testing for that would be your first step, if you suspect a wheat intolerance.

I mean that no test is 100% reliable. If a test says you have a disease or disorder, it's not guaranteed that you actually have it, whether the test is an allergy test performed at a doctor's office, a breast biopsy, or a test you perform at home by just eating the problematic substance and seeing if your stomach gets upset.

Usually, a test for a disease or condition works something like this: If you have the disease, then there's a 90% chance that the test will be positive ("positive" meaning "detecting the disease"). If you don't have the disease, there is a 10% chance that the test will be positive (a false positive--it will say you have the disease, but you actually don't).

Let's test a hundred people, of whom 50 actually have the disease and 50 don't.

Of those who have the disease:
45/50 will test positive
5/50 will test negative

Those who don't have the disease:
5/50 will test positive
45/50 will test negative

Of the people who test positive, 90% actually have the disease; 10% don't. Of the people who test negative, 10% will actually have the disease and 90% won't.

The really weird thing happens when the disease is rarer than that. Let's say that only 10% of the people being tested actually have the disease. Now, when you test 100 people, it looks like this:

Of those who have the disease:
9/10 will test positive.
1/10 will test negative, a 10% false negative rate.

Of those who don't have the disease:
81/90 will test negative.
9/90 will test positive, the 10% false positive rate.

Only one case of the disease was missed by this test. But, of those 18 people who tested positive, only half of them actually have the disease.

So--a test for a relatively rare condition, used to screen a large number of people, can mean that most of the people who test positive actually don't have that condition at all.

Allergy tests are one example. You are being given a battery of maybe twenty, thirty tests for allergens and each one of those tests has a chance of giving you a false positive. Each allergy is comparatively rare--maybe 10% of the people being given the test will actually have that allergy. So, for the most part, you can expect there to be one or more false positives in the average allergy test.

That doesn't make it useless, because even with the possibility of false positives, you still know that your chance of having that allergy is higher than for the general population. However, it is not an absolute yes-or-no answer.

Another diet-related thing:

I just figured out that certain my migraines are triggered by chocolate. Possibly ADD symptoms, too.

I had an intense migraine yesterday, and ended up at the hospital for a few hours. They gave me a shot in the upper thigh/lower buttock area. Sent me on my way with a bunch of sheets printed out about migraines. One of the triggers listed is chocolate. I ate some cookies today with "chocolate buttons" (very similar to M&Ms) and the migraine came back.

I have heard that migraines and ADD are linked. I think my ADD with hyperactivity, gets worse with it.