einatmike

Hi again! Carolyn-thanks for the link! San70-when I think about it I think our daughter has had her tics from approx 5 years of age. Different kind of tics-"heavy breathing", coughing, sniffing, eye rolling and blinking, it´s not until the last maybe 6 months we realized it´s actually a tic. MSG has been a regular ingridients in our cooking. Like you say, you can´t shelter your child all her life. Although I have to admit, my wife is home with our girl this last vacation week before school starts, and she thought about taking them to the amusement park again since the kids love it, and I suggested she should concider avoiding it since our girl has been tic-free since we were there last time. I´m just afraid to trigger it again... I feel really torn....

Thanks a lot Bonnie. I really appreciate your help. I googled Epsom salt and found a few local links, I´ll also check your links. Mike

Hi Bonnie & Faith! Thank you for your quick replies! Bonnie: I´ve been recommended epsom salt baths by Cheri aswell. Excuse my lack of knowledge, but where can i get a hold of that?(We don´t live in the States). I´ve never heard of it before, is epsom the brand of the salt bath, or is it a substance in the salt? We gave our daughter a regular bath yesterday, and it calmed her down a bit, but the blinikin went on for the rest of the evening. Concerning the magnesium, do you have any idea about dosage and if we need to buy pills with magnesium, or just find food-stuff that is rich in magnesium? Faith: Interesting theory about the flashing lights. We were there during daytime, although I have no idea if the lights affected her anyway. My theory is that it was the more intense excitment like riding the roller-coaster(which is quite a trip for a 7 year old girl(soon to be 8 in a few weeks)). What we´ve been trying to be much stricter with during the last weeks is to let her have much less sweet stuff like cookies, candy, ice-cream etc. Also we removed(as far as we know) all MSG from the food we give her. We used to use chicken flavour powder in almost all our cooking, until we realized it contained a lot of MSG.... Another very interesting thing is the development from yesterday to today. Until a few weeks ago I was very annoyed and stressed about her tics until I found this forum. Finiding the forum made me calm down a lot, when i realized that there are a lot of people in the same situation, willing to help one another. Yesterday it was my usually calm wife that was more annoyed. I told her that we should wait until tomorrow and see if it will go away after a good night sleep(I thought about the dopamine effect mentioned earlier). And amazingly, today she is tic-free again!! I don´t know if it is a combination of relaxation(we´re on vacation now) and a better diet, or something else. What I´m more and more certain of is that excitement is a major tic trigger in her case. Oh, I also remembered, we tried to let her watch less TV for a while, but that didn´t seem to make any difference. We feel that we can´t deny her everything she enjoyes if there isn´t a clear connection to the tics. Hope my answer helped you, please let me know if you want to know anything else. I will also be grateful for more tips. Mike

Hi friends! Our daughter has been tic free for almost a week. We´ve been very restrictive with sugar(cookies, cakes, sweets etc), a positive side-effect is that we´re focusing on healthier food now! Today we took her to the amusment park. She went on the roller coaster, and after that she has been eye bliniking like never before the whole evening... Cheri explained that an excess release of dopamine (which is a well known tic trigger) activates during excitement. What shall we do? Not take her to the amusment park as long as we suspect the tics to reoccure? Is there any way to avoid exciting activities to activate the tics? Mike

Thanks a lot Cheri! :-) I printed your tips, and also checked the link to your site. I´ll se where I can get a hold of the vitamines and minerals you mention. Currently we´re letting our daughter eat a lot of roasted sunflower seeds, since I read that lack of magnesium is a tic-trigger, and the seed are supposed to contain magnesium, is that correct?(in any case it can´t harm her, and she likes to eat them) Mike

Thanks a lot for your tips! I alreday ordered and read Sheila Rogers book, that´s how I found this site! I had my suspicions that there wouldn´t be any magical cure against tics, but still, sometimes you get desperate.... Mike

Hi! I just discovered this amazing forum! How wonderful it is to find people in the same situation as myself! I have had tics of different sorts since as far as i can remember(i´m 36 years old now). Our 7 year old daughter started with different tics some time ago. Approximatley two years ago she started with "having a problem to breath in". We went to different doctors(pediatricians, ear-nose-throat specialists of diffferent kinds etc), no one could see any pathology in her breathing. In the end we saw she was fine and stopped focusing on it. After a year she started coughing instead of the breathing-thing, again we went to see doctors, without any result. About half a year ago she started sniffing, after that wrinkling(I don´t know if it´s the right word since English isn´t my first language) her nose, and now, the lastet-eye rolling(luckily she´s moving from one habit to another instead of combining them!). Thats about the time I actually realized she had tics.... It made me really upset, since I have had that problem since i was a kid! My parents confonted it with irritable comments like "stop twitching with your eyes!" etc. I have decided to confront the problem with patience, love and more patience, even though it scares the ###### out of me that she will be teased by her friends at school(thats almost the thing that worries me the most, although I wasn´t teased myself since I managed to "hide" my tics quite well). My wife and I are totally against medication, why I decided to search the net for more info(an option my parents never had). Imagine my suprise when I found that there are plenty of people out there with similar problems! Now we started the search for triggers..! I´ve started to try to reduce cane sugar as much as possible, and also remove MSG from the food, which we use quite a lot(crazy to use glutamate in food when the substance actually is a neuro-transmittor!). As far as we can see there is no connection between food and her tics. What we do notice is that when she gets excited(like meeting a lot of friends she hasn´t seen for a long time, or when she has a lot on her mind i.e stress), her tics get more intenese, we don´t really know how to handle that. There seems to be a lot of intelligent and insightful people on this forum why I would be really really grateful for tips and ideas on how to confront this. Mike

I´ve had the stomach tic for at lest 15 years(I´m 36). I´m less bothered with it now than I used to be when I was younger. Also they are much less frequent and intense now. They haven´t harmed me as far as i know. I also saw a doctor a few years ago who said it shouldn´t be harmful. Miek

Hi! Has anyone out there ordered and read Mary Andersons book on tics? Is the site reliable to order the book, and is it worth to order? Mike