Our youngest has celiac. It had wreaked havoc on her until we finally got the EGD to confirm what it was. Her hair was falling out, she completely stopped growing, lost a bunch of weight, and had explosive diarrhea all within 6 months of her stopping breast milk. Since then, she is finally growin again and is healthy, but she is extremely small for her age and ANY contamination of her food and we start seeing issue again.
It drives us crazy to see so many people talk about their phony "gluten allergy". As my wife puts it, "give celiacs their disease back!" Because no one takes us seriously because of all the fake ass people self diagnosing with heir fake ass disease
And your wife is ON SPOT mate!
Celiac disease is a SERIOUS disorder with extra-intestinal manifestations that can literally control someones life in many respects. One can be assured that 5"2" 300 pounder walking down the grocery bread isle casually discussing her "Gluten allergy" like hay fever, does NOT have Sprue!
More importantly as Shorty KNOWS, they minimizes the disease's significance, causation and treatment.
It's unfortunate some in contemporary society, because of their need to feel special, haphazardly select certain diseases as a means to that end.
Along those lines I usually KNOW when someone has legitimate CD by simply asking who made the diagnosis and if it wasn't a GI doc but "a blood test", the diagnosis is almost always BULLSHIT
Unfortunately Shorty even some Celiac web sites use "blood testing", which are notoriously inaccurate, to estimate the prevalence of CD AT 1:130 PEOPLE, which is absolutely absurd from a statistical basis alone.. (In my practice of well over 3K patients I've TWO patients with CD. However I have referred at least TWENTY for GI evaluation, primarily because of these false positive screening tests)
So it's not to surprising some people with a few episodes of diarrhea and a "cousin with Gluten allergy" read that crap and have a SCREENING TEST performed!
Importantly however most don't pursue confirmation testing,
because their symptoms resolve spontaneously, (which does NOT occur in CD patients) yet walk away with that "positive blood test" believing they have a "Gluten allergy"!
Best regards mate
jim