When I first gave Shepherd his methotrexate pills, he was enthusiastic about taking them. The pills were orange, his favorite color. The real coup: Beau didn’t get to take them. But watching my son gulp them down defeated me. It reinforced an image of Shepherd as sick, forever dependent on a drug I felt afraid of, however unreasonable a doctor might tell me that fear was.

One morning, while the boys were at preschool and Darin was out of the house, I decided to call Char Walker. She answered the phone, and within minutes I was crying to this woman I had never met. Walker told me that when her son Shane was a month old, he started waking up seven or eight times a night screaming and crying, which he continued to do for a year and a half. He didn’t have any symptoms that she could see. What was wrong? Soon she was crying every night, too. And then at around 18 months, he learned to talk and told her what hurt: his leg, his hip and his wrist. Once they had the diagnosis, Walker realized he’d probably been in pain every night of his life.

Walker is a social worker and massage therapist who works with cancer patients at NorthShore University HealthSystem outside Chicago. When Shane’s rheumatologist presented methotrexate or steroid injections as the only choices, she was horrified. Because she worked in the integrative medicine department — a combination of alternative and conventional treatments — she knew there were other things to try. She dug into medical-literature databases. She learned about a centuries-old, anti-inflammatory Chinese concoction called four-marvels powder from a visiting naturopath. And she sought guidance from her colleague, Dr. Leslie Mendoza Temple, the head of the hospital’s integrative medicine program, who, while wary of the risks, had been comfortable giving Walker’s program a three-month trial. “I tried everything that I knew was safe to see what would work,” Walker told me.

I grabbed my pen and paper and started taking notes. No gluten. No dairy. No refined sugar. No nightshades, a group of plants that includes potatoes and tomatoes, which are thought by some to be potentially inflammatory, as is sugar. Every day, Shane took a probiotic. Plus two tablespoons of sour Montmorency cherry juice and at least 2,000 milligrams of omega-3’s from fish oil, known for their anti-inflammatory properties. Instead of naproxen, Shane took a combination of ibuprofen and Tylenol to lower his overall intake of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, which can be hard on the gut. And a quarter teaspoon, daily, of the four-marvels powder.

Walker said she believed that her son’s arthritis was caused by something I had never heard of before — leaky-gut syndrome, a concept that has been accepted in alternative circles for years despite a name that asks you not to take it seriously. The idea is that inflammation in the gut causes the tight junctions between the cells that make up the intestinal lining to loosen. Then, like a lax bouncer, the barrier starts letting through undesirables, various proteins or bacteria that would normally be rebuffed; they then leak into surrounding tissues. The uninvited guests, the hypothesis goes, then trigger an offensive by the body, which uses inflammation to try to get rid of them. That sustained inflammatory response characterizes autoimmune disease.

What could have caused the inflammation in Shane’s gut in the first place? Walker suspected an allergy or sensitivity to gluten and dairy (common perpetrators). She also implicated antibiotics, since they can decimate protective, good bacteria along with the bad. A week before he started waking up so frequently, Shane was given antibiotics for a 104-degree fever. By the time he was 1, he would have at least five more courses for urinary tract infections. After Walker told me this, I noted that Shepherd had started limping not long after taking amoxicillin for pneumonia. There’s no proof of causation, of course, and lots of children take antibiotics and don’t get arthritis, but it was an intriguing detail.

Six weeks into the alternative therapy, Shane started feeling better. After three months, his arthritis pain was gone. He’d been in remission for almost two years, Walker told me, much better than anything we were told to expect.