Head tics?

[ratboy]

I was just on a forum about Tourette's; which, like stuttering, is now widely thought to be caused by excess dopamine. These last few days I've started to wonder about very sporadic head tics I get... About once every three weeks (sometimes more time goes by) specially in periods when my stuttering is really bad, one side of mi neck jerks back for less than a second and I hear a weird fizzing sound as I regain control of it and move it back up. I'm a very mild stutterer: some days my stuttering is minimal, and with incredible effort can make short fluent phone calls and such... Different form what people with Tourette's go through everyday? I don't know, but I wonder.

Does anybody else get anything like this?

[mela]

I don't have tics, or tourette's and I don't know what my son feels other than that it feels good. I do know that when we eliminate artificial colors and flavors my son's tics are greatly reduced. Usually to the point where he does not have any. We recently started to add things in and he is fine now but two years ago elimination was a huge step ahead. My son's tic, at times, was so severe. The doctors said it was normal but I knew it was not. He would do this neck jerk thing probably about 100 times an hour. Eventually I found that all corn products were a problem. Corn, which you may or may not know is in almost everything with corn syrup or another ingredient made with corn. Eventually he was scratch tested for corn and found allergic. Recently he was blood tested and found to not be anymore that is why we started to add things in again. He did show mild allergies to about 10 other things though. Blood allergy testing, is not covered by most insurances and it was $180 for the test.

Now at the risk of sounding like a hippie or something, I have to say that I really do think that if we lived in a world without artificial ingredients in our food our healths would improve. Honestly I would have never never felt this way before I saw what I saw with my son. When I first started eliminating foods, I thought to myself what can it hurt? Its not like I am trying a new drug with side effects. We had nothing to lose and everything to gain. We saw improvements within a week or two.

Now I hope I am not implying that allergies cause stuttering because I really don't know much about it but maybe in some instances it does. Or maybe in some instances in increases it.