Our Experience

This is something I post often on various listservs. I thought I'd post it up here, incase some may find it interesting.

We first heard about TNI when my brother was 8 months old. That's when we started him on it. It has helped him TREMENDOUSLY!!! I'll give you a bit of history, so you can understand - for the first several months of my brother's life he had a HORRIBLE time gaining weight. We spent lots of hours and paid lots of visits to the doctor's office, because they were concerned about his lack of weight gain. He spit up ALOT. We went back and forth with the docs trying to figure out how to do different things to help him gain weight. None of it really worked. We asked them about his thyroid (thyroid problems are common to DS and low weight gain is a sign of hypothyroidism). They told us it was fine (he had it checked at birth - they told us it was fine, but we never saw the results). Anyways, when he was 8 months old, we switched doctors and his new doctor ended up calling us saying he was borderline hypothyroid. Through research we realized this explained my brother - the reflux, poor weight gain, etc. We ended up finding out that his thyroid was messed up back at birth, but we didn't know better at the time. So, after we found out about my brother's thyroid problem at 8 mths old, we started researching things out - natural ways to help his thyroid and in that research process we came across TNI. After we started TNI, within days and weeks, my brother started gaining weight (he has a twin sister and he caught up to her - today he weighs more than her), his spitting up slowed down and eventually stopped - he doesn't spit-up now unless somefood bothers him. He looked SO much better and healthier, because he was actually able to keep things in him and gain some weight (GROW!). His tone improved greatly, he was able to sit within a month (he was nowhere near that before TNI). He started progressing majorly in motor skills and awareness. He became so much more alert and in-tune to the things going on around him. A couple months after we started TNI, we ended up finding out that he was zinc and selenium deficient (which is common to DS). Zinc deficiency is related to poor growth (another thing which explained my brother). So, we started giving him extra zinc and that helped him greatly. He was pulling to stand and standing at 13/14 months. He was crawling at that time too. He learned to walk at 17 1/2 months. I know that God used the TNI to help my brother's life out tremendously. If we had not found TNI, I really wonder how my brother would be today :(. My brother says several words now and he is so active and full of energy. He is such a smart little boy and understands SO much! He takes the Nutrivene-D Daily Supplement and Nighttime Formula. We started the Nighttime formula a few months after starting the daily supp (thanks to Dr. L encouraging us to do so :)) and that has helped him alot. He has grown so much more since we started him on that.

Let me also mention something else - Not everyone will see major changes when they start giving Nutrivene-D, particularly as drastic as my brother's, but even if you don't see changes, it is still doing benefits. As Dr. Leichtman says, we need to look at this as a marathon, not a sprint. It's what it does over the long run that is the biggest advantage. It's best if you start giving it to your child as early as possible, than wait until you have a problem and you notice a huge difference in him. It's such a huge pet-peeve of mine when people say "well, I used to have my kid on TNI, but didn't see any changes, so I took him off." We cannot see all that is going on inside of the child - and, no, blood tests do not show everything either.