Jennifer -
We had food allergy and EFA testing done via Great Smokies Diagnostic Lab. My difficult child - who is not ADD/ADHD - had just a mild deficiency of a couple of different EFAs. He takes one Efalex a day and one "The Total EFA" (by Health from the Sun). Many people on this board have not had testing done and just tried EFA supplements on their own with great success.
I totally understand the diet issue. The first round of testing my difficult child was allergic to most fruits, all veggies except asparagus, most nuts, wheat, soy, milk, eggs, yeast, sugar, corn and other grains! Even though the test results came back with a list of foods he "could" have, I had no idea what to make him except for plain hamburgers with no condiments and no bun.
I found a book called "Allergy Cooking with Ease" by Nicolette Dunke which featured tons of easy, great tasting recipes that excluded ingredients my child was allergic to. (If you're only allergic to a few foods, you can find other, more basic allergy cookbooks that offer easier to find ingredients.) It helps that I have a huge health food grocery store in my town that carries all those weird ingredients, but more and more mainstream stores offer the ingredients.
The diet route is a ton of work... for you and the one who has to stick to it. For us, the improvement in behavior (very ODD to easy child!) was worth it. Not everyone has those dramatic results or has a child willing to stick with it. My son started on the diet when he was only 4-1/2. It's now 2 years later and we're tired of the diet... so we're trying alternative therapies like acupressure and homeopathy to boost the immune system so that someday soon (hopefully), the diet will no longer be necessary.
Jukebox -- If the allergy test in October is a blood test by either Great Smokies or Immuno Labs, you may want to ask your doctor to consider checking for environmental allergens. My difficult child had violent rages for several years that went away the day we eliminated all his food allergies. But some ODD still remained and we later discovered he had terrible environmental allergies -- pollens, molds, dust mites,etc -- even though he was never congested -- so we had no clue! (which is also why our doctor didn't think we needed to have him tested for those allergens). The allergies had also seriously affected his fine motor skills and the issue completely went away with the holistic allergy treatments.
Anyway, I hope you find a treatment that works well for your difficult child and brings some peace to your family.
[ 08-14-2002: Message edited by: Waldorf Mom ]