As your sister's sole breastfeeding-supportive helper, you're probably 
trying to be upbeat.  But maybe she needs to hear that this is all very 
hard, with no clear endpoint, and that if she's losing weight that fast, 
she's probably feeling crummy herself.   Sometimes it helps to hear 
"Boy, this really sucks" -- opens the way for a few more positive 
observations. (Your counseling skills are probably great, but it's so 
hard to step back when you're dealing with people close to you, 
particularly if you feel her breastfeeding relationship is threatened -- 
helping relatives and friends is another topic we've grappled with on 
Lactnet.)

A baby's lower gut, injured to point of bright red bleeding and clots, 
needs a lot of  time to heal -- there's no quick fix.  Maybe it would 
help to point out that the baby * is* thriving and happy and has good 
lab results, so that does give her some time.  It's a plus that she's 
not also dealing with an unhappy baby. You've probably discussed the 
growth factors in milk that actively help knit together the cells lining 
the gut (which may explain the recently posted study on the reduced 
incidence of colitis in adults who were breastfed). And human milk's 
multi-level disease-fighting factors protecting that open gut.  Once the 
allergens are eliminated, her living milk will play an active role in 
recovery, in a way that hypo-allergenic formula cannot.  Maybe putting 
some focus on the baby's long-term intestinal health, particularly if 
the baby seems predisposed to problems, can help her through this rocky 
patch.  Her continuing to breastfeed now might help her son when he's an 
old man.

Helping her see the big picture, long-term, and how much fun it is to 
nurse an older baby, might help her hold onto her ultimate goal.  It 
sounds like she might be getting desperate enough to want to try 
something drastic, like a two-week trial with a hypo-allergenic 
formula.  And who knows, maybe that would start some healing, after 
which she could ease the baby back onto breastfeeding, after carefully 
protecting the supply during the experiment.  At least she knows how 
much work pumping is.

The idea of the mother taking digestive enzymes seems worth a good try 
-- perhaps her own digestive tract (genetically shared by her baby?)  is 
open enough to cause the easy passage of intact proteins.

There's a good round-up on allergy issues, with lots of links to various 
elimination and rare-foods diets, which might give her some variety, at
http://www.kellymom.com/babyconcerns/food-sensitivity.html.

Sometimes it helps to just pack the house with food that you *can* eat, 
to take the focus off what you're eliminating.  It's hard enough to get 
anything to eat when you have a little baby in the house, so the daily 
routine should be as easy as possible.

Good luck to the whole team.. 

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