Folks in a bid to work out why I'm not healing faster from surgery I saw a naturopath. He conducted IgG food allergy testing and also showed that i'm deficient in the following minerals:
- Glutamine
- Serine
- Vitamin B12
- Fructose
- Folate
- Spectrox
Has anyone seen an improvement by increasing levels of these minerals or tried IgG food allergy testing with success?

Ok so a fair disclaimer first: I'm a sucker for conventional medicine and a skeptic of naturopathic medicine. This is my personal bias, so I felt it fair to point out up front.
With that being said ... none of these are actually minerals. Glutamine and serine are amino acids; vitamin B12 and folate are vitamins; and fructose is a sugar. Never heard of Spectrox before, so I googled it and it looks like some kind of proprietary test for "antioxidant function."
I don't think there's any widely accepted source that suggests these would impact fissures or surgery healing. I'm sure there may be anecdotal reports of such on the Internet, but that's probably about it.
Honestly I'm not convinced and don't really buy it. Personally I'm not even sure what deficiency in fructose means -- fructose never enters the bloodstream at all (only glucose can). Fructose goes through the GI tract directly to the liver and is metabolized to either glycogen or triglycerides.
I don't feel like it's a bad idea to understand the state of your body and take steps to keep yourself healthy. I was personally deficient in vitamin B12 and vitamin D and supplemented both for a while. But I don't think any of these will be the "magic cure" for faster healing, unfortunately.
P.S.
Just re-read my post and it came off a bit more "snobbish" than I'd intended. I definitely didn't mean for it to sound that way. But count me as a skeptic for sure ... would be nice if I were dead wrong though :)

Snobbish? You'd have to try harder than that Neuro :)
Thanks for the throrough reply. It's great to put these things out there because through discussions we learn more. A naturopath wouldn't be my first stop for healing a fissure, but when conventional medicine can't explain something I'll try other avenues. In my case I have a great CRS with 35 years experience telling me that the reasons aren't well understood why some people like me would heal slower. Personally I'm fascinated to find out why - there has to be some inefficiency in my healing process that could be optimized in some way.
IgE is the more traditional food allergy testing (which I did some years ago through York University), it flagged the main culprits that make IBS worse - wheat, dairy products etc. IgG food allergy testing looks at food that might have a delayed effect on the body. For me it threw up many similar foods, but also a couple of new ones that surprised me. The second test they do is a micronutrient analysis (I was referring to this above as a mineral deficiency test). Of particular interest to me is the role that Glutamine might play in healing after surgery check out the pragraph on this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamine. I know this is a non essential amino acid, but could this hamper tissue healing if it was deficient?
Good points on the fructose and Spectrox, I'll dig in deeper on why those show up.

seattlesounders wrote:A naturopath wouldn't be my first stop for healing a fissure, but when conventional medicine can't explain something I'll try other avenues. In my case I have a great CRS with 35 years experience telling me that the reasons aren't well understood why some people like me would heal slower. Personally I'm fascinated to find out why - there has to be some inefficiency in my healing process that could be optimized in some way.

Agreed 100% here!
My body actually sucks at healing too. Haha. In my case I'm pretty sure I'm deficient in lots of things because I have super crappy eating and exercise habits though, so it would be hard to pinpoint what the main issue is :) It's likely to be a combination of things, I suppose, but what the right balance is would be the million dollar question.