Updates

I want to make a few things clear... when I was asking Eric if he thought Justin was ever autistic, he got confused. He said that most people think autism is an incurable problem, a dead end diagnosis.

It's actually a constellation of things- social disconnect, sensory integration issues, delayed speech, stimming (doing the same behavior over and over again), delayed gross or fine motor skills, inflexibility, and labile mood. Physical manifestations are food allergies, gut dysfunction, immune system dysfunction, yeast overgrowth, and sleep disturbances.

Autism is treatable. There are biomedical treatments, homeopathy, physical treatments, OT and speech therapy, detox, chelation, methyl B12, on and on. It is like being hit by a bus. You don't get cured, but you can recover. Kids can recover from autism.


I'm not labeling my son as autistic. We have seen quite a few practitioners who haven't either. However, Justin does display autistic behavior, and has in the past. He did when he was 12 months old and his development was delayed due to his gluten allergy. He had the staring episodes and couldn't connect with us whenever he ate it. He also never slept more than 1 hour.

At age 2 when he had the ear problem he had delayed speech (obviously), delayed gross motor development without a known cause, extremely labile moods, temper tantrums, and was extremely inflexible. The ear tubes were sort of a band aid for the physical problem, but until we removed dairy from his diet and did the homeopathy, these things didn't improve.

Now at age 3 we are doing food challenges and we see the behaviors come out when he has gluten, dairy, and soy. We don't see these behaviors when he doesn't have these foods, and it is very easy to tell between a food tantrum and a bratty 3 year old tantrum by the level of frustration we see, and by how long it goes on.

So in effect the elimination diet has helped his gut rest for a while. The homeopathy took care of his labile moods and sensory issues. Speech therapy has helped him tremendously, but we still have a ways to go. He just tested at 2 years 10 months at his speech evaluation on Monday.

The problem with elimination diets is that you limit the diet to certain foods, and the body can start to react to those foods as well, unless the gut is healed in between. He has started reacting to the rice products that he eats all the time as an alternative to gluten. He's getting the yellow sticky snot again and having tantrums. The most extreme was dragging his head on the floor!

So anyway now that we have figured out what all is going on with him, we can go about healing him. He has really taken to the digestive and therapeutic enzymes we're giving him to heal his gut, the B12 has really helped his mood, and we just need to figure out a way to get him to take the powder supplement to help bring down the inflammation in his gut and repair it.

He's a good kid! I'm not saying he's not. He's happy, his new phrase when we do something fun is "yay yay yay yay yay!". I am saying however that he is difficult and many of his issues are food related. Many people don't see what I see b/c they are not with him 24/7. Many people also believe that he's just a bratty boy and I have trouble disciplining him.

There is a difference between behavior he can control and behavior that he can't control. We finally found a discipline method that works for him- we tell him what we want him to do, as opposed to the constant "don't" phrases. Apparently kids don't hear the word "don't" and do just what you tell them not to! So if we phrase it in a positive manner, and tell him what he should be doing, he actually does it! He is much happier too without all the constant browbeating...

The behavior he can't control is his food reactions.

I'm not about to allow what happened to my husband to happen to my son. Eric has been told his whole life that he was a horrible kid. Destructive, out of control, hyperactive, just plain awful. He was diagnosed with ADD but Ritalin didn't work for him. His mom says that he was never out to hurt anyone, was just hyper.

They kept him home for the first 6 years of his life because he would destroy other people's houses, pull drawers out just to hear them crash on the floor. His sister had to keep her door constantly locked so that he wouldn't destroy her room. They couldn't take him out to restaurants because he couldn't sit still, and would be at other people's tables eating their food! The horror stories go on and on...

His parents say he calmed down by age 11. But by then they were exhausted and he was the kid who rode his bike to birthday parties and went to the movies alone on the weekends b/c his parents were too tired to deal with him. His grandmother was the person who took care of him when they went out on weekends and went on vacation because she was the only one who could "handle" him.

He drove his teachers nuts b/c he could never sit down and he wandered all over the room talking to other kids. You can imagine the psychological ramifications of all this- the abandonment issues because his parents never took him on vacation, not even to Disney World- or really anywhere. They were doing the best they could, but were from the school of thought that if you ignore it long enough, it will go away...

Well I'm not from that school of thought.

Here's what I think happened with my husband as a kid- if Ritalin didn't work, he didn't have typical ADD. He most probably had food sensitivities- namely gluten, food dyes, artificial sweetners, preservatives, etc. His favorite snack was Coke and candy bars- which he bought himself at the convenience store when he was sent to buy his mother's cigarettes and his father's Crown (I guess that's normal in small towns?).

When my husband is on vacation he's on a clean diet, without all of the above. At the end of the vacation his attention span is much better than it is at the beginning. I don't think that's a coincidence. When he has any of the above he is all over the map. We'll be having a conversation and he'll go off on tangents like he is in his own conversation- he can't follow.


So anyway, I'm not going to ignore Justin's behavior issues that come out when he has foods he's allergic to, and just pretend that they will go away. Because they won't. I'm going to help him heal and get over his food issues while he's young, before he's labeled the "bad kid" at school. We certainly don't want a repeat of the episode where his preschool teacher taped his shoes to his feet...

So that's where I am coming from. One of the other treatments for Justin's issues is not vaccinating and exposing him to more toxins. I have had two practitioners including the MD tell me how pleased they were that I decided not to continue the vaccine schedule with him, because it would expose him to more aluminum, bacteria, and viruses.

I understand that not vaccinating is not for everyone. However I think at the very least there should be basic testing to see which children are not candidates for vaccination. And I think at the very least there should be studies done on the long term effect of vaccines on our bodies at a biochemical level, because assuming something is safe and doing studies are two completely different things.

Hope this clears things up.