Children with autism and gastrointestinal symptoms have altered digestive genes

Children with autism and gastrointestinal symptoms have altered digestive genes:

'via Blog this'

Vaccination's vexed link to autism

Nice, calm article from someone that doesn't have a vested interest.

Vaccination's vexed link to autism:

'via Blog this'

Yay, UC DAVIS MIND Institute! I <3 you.

Of course, this is not news to us biomed families but if just one thing could bring us some vindication for being called whack jobs, HERE IT IS. This is where we need to be looking to see why biomed helps some and not others. This is where we need to be looking to figure out where to start with our kids, who should start where in biomed and how it should be done. This is where we start looking to come up with an actual diagnostic effort and acceptable protocols for mainstream acceptance. This is where we stop guessing and start proving.

Does anyone else find it telling that it's an article from Australia and not the US?

US researchers' discovery promises answers on autism

RESEARCHERS have for the first time identified two biologically different strains of autism in a major breakthrough being compared with the discovery of different forms of cancer in the 1960s.

Read the full article here.

After you read the article, come back and tell me in the comments what kind of autism you suspect/know your child has.

My son has immune and hormone dysfunction. It's likely the hormone dysfunction is a result of the immune dysfunction but hey, that might be digging a bit too deep for the uninitiated. Let's keep it simple for now.

What about you?

Should we even try to recover our kids?

I know, I promised a post on recovery and what it means but I got sidetracked and offer you this instead, which is sorta-kinda the same thing. But not. I still plan to post one on recovery, though. Pinky promise.
In response to Jim C. Hines' review of The Speed of Dark, I'm posting this here because what I have to say really isn't appropriate for his blog comments. I also thought that maybe some of my readers have read the book and might have something to add and would want to go to his blog to comment. I haven't actually read the book so this is really in response to the question he poses:should we "cure" those with autism? There was a little more to it, and I'm not even going to touch the high vs. low functioning topic today, but that's the basic question.


As someone that has a son that is mostly recovered from autism, it's not something that I can understand as being something that changes one's life to the degree that this kind of moral question asks. The book may be showing a "cure" in a different angle than real life, but in reality, there is already help. Not enough help, but some.


In real life, recovery is not a cure because autism is not a mental disorder that needs curing (something the NDers and biomed parents can all agree upon, but that's as far as the agreement goes). It's a bunch of biological inconsistencies and malfunctions that end up creating neurological symptoms. In some people, these symptoms can't be corrected because the underlying condition can't be corrected or found. I would venture to add that it's not for lack of trying. Each child is unique in their issues. There are no two children with autism that present exactly the same way. But with thousands of kids recovering from autism every year, it's hard to imagine that western medicine is right. A lot of people can be helped, and without the use of antipsychotics or antidepressants.


The real question is: what's really going on with our kids? Why does the diet work for some and not for others? Why is it that treatments for other chronic illnesses, like CFS or Lyme or any of the other many things biomed parents and practitioners generally discuss, work on our kids, too? Has anyone ever noticed that even some people with depression seem to recover through biomed? Why has no one in traditional western medicine noticed the pattern? Or maybe they have and just refuse to acknowledge or explore it? Okay, so that's way more than one question. You get my drift.


Not all kids can be treated the same. What works for one doesn't necessarily work for another. It boils down to this: different biological issues for different children (and adults). But they all produce neurological symptoms.


Is it fair to expect that a child that has nothing but diarrhea doesn't have something wrong with his/her bowels? They call it "normal" in autism instead of asking why. Prevacid is what you get. This is only one of may examples of what plagues these children. Sensitivity to sound. Why is it that when you treat a child for PANDAS, this sensitivity goes away? The OCD goes away? Why is it that when another child is treated for lyme, that child becomes completely and totally recovered?


Because there are really still very few cases of autism. It's still as rare as it's ever been, if it's ever been at all.
Recovery doesn't change who a person is. It gives them the chance to live life the way they want. Being able to not live life with an aching stomach doesn't change the core of a person. It just means their stomach doesn't hurt. Which in the case of developing children, many times means they can sleep better, eat better and focus better. Which amazingly enough, means they function better. Whoda thunk?


So is the question really about changing the core of a person with autism or is it about healing the medical problems they have? A person who thinks in pictures is still going to think in pictures. Having a healthy body isn't going to change that. A savant isn't going to suddenly stop being a savant because their vitamin deficiency was treated and they stopped scripting Thomas the Tank Engine.


My son went from moderate/severe autism to pretty much typical (I always say "pretty much" or "mostly" because he still has raging ADD - we're working on it) and not once did it change him as a person - except when I gave him antidepressants but that's another post. He is still the same lovable, caring and funny little boy he always has been. He's thrived and become so much more. And he's able to tell me exactly how what few issues he has left bothers him and makes him hate himself and frustrates him. I'm not going to lay down and allow him to grow up hating himself and then deciding he has to accept that this is him and he doesn't need to change, all the while silently hating every minute of his life - nor will I let someone else convince him of that.


No matter what, he'll be happy with who he is and I'll encourage him and love him and teach him to love himself, but that doesn't mean I won't strive to help him become who he wants to become.


There's a reason why autistic adults have a high suicide rate. If it's hard for neurotypical people to watch and be around, if it's hard for a mother to watch her son struggle, it's 100 times harder to be the autistic person. Everyone wants to be happy and comfortable with who they are, including those with ASD.


Now, this whole argument is probably geared more toward the management of symptoms with antipsychotics, antidepressants and the like and I've kind of hijacked it for biomed. But that's what happens when the argument is so vague. Could mean traditional medicine, could mean biomed. I dunno. And maybe those drugs do change a person. Like I said earlier, when I gave my son antidepressants, they definitely changed him. He was, quite literally, psychotic. At best, they are only meant to manage symptoms, and they do a very poor job of it. Still, some people do very well on them. I can't argue with that.


But the recovery I'm talking about, the recovery us "crazy moms" are talking about, doesn't change a person. It doesn't change the way a person thinks or views life.


Wait. I'm wrong. It does change people. It makes them feel normal. Or maybe a better way to say it is not that they feel normal, for what is normal anyway, but that they no longer feel abnormal. It takes away the pain they aren't supposed to have. Being in pain (physically or emotionally) doesn't make a person special or unique. It just makes them in pain. To go through life needing to bang your head against a wall long after the bleeding started, is that really something you want to keep?

Packing up and moving

[category This and That}

[tag This and That]

[publicize off]

I've decided to take the plunge and move my blog to Wordpress. Eventually I will be setting up an actual website with my very own domain name that will house my blog and Wordpress is just better for that. And I still get complaints of how blogger is working out. Or rather, not working out, for readers.

What does this mean for you, dear reader? Not much. You can continue to stay right where you are if you are happy with your subscription just the way it is. I will continue to mirror the feed on Blogger because I'm just sweet like that. I don't want to disrupt anyone's happy feeling and it isn't any skin off my back to continue mirroring here. But you may have to deal with seeing shortcodes at the beginning of every post. In order to mirror, I have to email all my posts. I haven't managed to figure out any other way to do it after extensive googling. (I wonder if I can put them at the end? I'll have to try a test of that.)

But for those that are unhappy with Blogger or are irritated by the way the page doesn't seem to load correctly for so many of you, there is an alternative. You can now also find Gryffin's Tail here. I can't make it as feature rich because I'm not self-hosting it yet but maybe someday.

This is actually my first test run on seeing how well emailing all my posts work out. Wish me luck! If all goes well, I shall continue on to focusing on plain old blogging and will get the recovery post up as soon as I can.

Summer reflections

As the summer break comes to an end, I find myself reflecting on how it went.

It's definitely been enlightening. My mostly recovered son didn't behave so mostly recovered while I was on vacation. As a matter of fact, he definitely had me worried for a second that I had accepted recovery as a fact a bit too soon.

Then I remembered.

Oh yeah.

I tried to stop the Valtrex again. Epic fail.

If anyone has ever had any doubt that autism is a poorly functioning biological system, all they'd have to do is take my son for a week or two and stop giving him antivirals. The difference is that big. Even in recovery he still has major ADHD issues. Having to deal with both the ADHD and autism can just be exhausting.

Got back on it and he's mostly back to normal. It will probably take until school starts to get him back to where he was.

Which brings me to another thought. My sil said something to me while I was visiting that made me realize I probably need to do a post on recovery and what it means. We were discussing water and how good Gryffin was around it and in it. And that moved on to how many children with autism drown because they have no concept of danger or drowning, or some don't feel pain or whatever it is that leads a child with autism to jump into water and drown. I told her water was still a concern for me even though I knew he was safe around water. Old habits.

She couldn't understand why I'd still be worried. She said, "But I thought you said he was recovered?"

And that's when I realized that recovery is very misunderstood. My sil is no fool. She's one smart cookie. She owns and runs a learning lab where she teaches struggling kids how to process information better and she's had ASD students. So this wasn't something I would've thought she would misunderstand. What I failed to realize is: why wouldn't she? She doesn't live with it everyday. She doesn't treat it. She doesn't research it and it doesn't engulf her life. She may not have even heard of recovery until the moment I first told her Gryffin was mostly recovered (yes, I always say "mostly recovered"). My expectation that people (anyone, not just my sil) know what I mean when I say recovered is completely unrealistic and unfair on my part.

A child recovered from autism is not necessarily issue free. Like a child with asthma, they live a mostly normal life if they have an inhaler.

So I really need to write a post on what recovery means. All the different forms and variations and how it's perceived. I'm going to post that sometime in the next week.

School is closing in on us and I feel like I haven't really had a summer. My NT son had his tonsils/adenoids removed right when we got back from vacation and that kept us homebound for a while. I wanted to do some more chelating this summer and never got around to it. Especially since I had to get Gryffin back on track with his antiviral. This summer seems to have just completely gotten away from me.

Pfffft.

At least we had some fun, though. We spent time visiting with our families and friends, something we just don't get to do enough.

2 studies connects vaccines to SIDS - 1 old and 1 new

Here's a great article to help put these into perspective: New study proving vaccines can kill children.

Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?

1. Neil Z Miller neilzmiller@gmail.com
   1. Independent researcher, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

1. Gary S Goldman
   1. Independent computer scientist, Pearblossom, California, USA

Abstract

The infant mortality rate (IMR) is one of the most important indicators of the socio-economic well-being and public health conditions of a country. The US childhood immunization schedule specifies 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year—the most in the world—yet 33 nations have lower IMRs. Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation coefficient of r = 0.70 (p < 0.0001) was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants. Nations were also grouped into five different vaccine dose ranges: 12–14, 15–17, 18–20, 21–23, and 24–26. The mean IMRs of all nations within each group were then calculated. Linear regression analysis of unweighted mean IMRs showed a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality rates, with r = 0.992 (p = 0.0009). Using the Tukey-Kramer test, statistically significant differences in mean IMRs were found between nations giving 12–14 vaccine doses and those giving 21–23, and 24–26 doses. A closer inspection of correlations between vaccine doses, biochemical or synergistic toxicity, and IMRs is essential.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Pediatr Infect Dis. 1983 Jan-Feb;2(1):7-11.

Possible temporal association between diphtheria-tetanus toxoid-pertussis vaccination and sudden infant death syndrome.

Baraff LJ, Ablon WJ, Weiss RC.

Abstract

Because diphtheria and tetanus toxoids pertussis (DTP) vaccine is routinely given during the period of highest incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), this study was undertaken to determine if there is a temporal association between DTP immunization and SIDS. Parents of 145 SIDS victims who died in Los Angeles County between January 1, 1979, and August 23, 1980, were contacted and interviewed regarding their child's recent immunization history. Fifty-three had received a DTP immunization. Of these 53, 27 had received a DTP immunization within 28 days of death. Six SIDS deaths occurred within 24 hours and 17 occurred within 1 week of DTP immunization. These SIDS deaths were significantly more than expected were there no association between DTP immunization and SIDS. An additional 46 infants had a physician/clinic visit without DTP immunization prior to death. Forty of these infants died within 28 days of this visit, seven on the third day and 22 within the first week following the visit. These deaths were also significantly more than expected. These data suggest a temporal association between DTP immunization, physician visits without DTP immunization and SIDS.

PMID:

 

6835859

 

[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]