AGE OF AUTISM

Christmas, Pre and Post Recovery, and the Struggles of Managing Recovery

By Heidi Noyer

I have identical twin boys.  Their world today is very different than their world was a few years ago.  Pre-recovery, all they got for Christmas was books.  It was all they wanted.  I'll never forget their 3^rd Christmas.  As they came down the stairs Christmas morning, they focused on the large stacks of books.  They didn't just like any books, they liked the books that were about learning to read, write, and do math.  They yelled, "Books!" with excitement, and then tore through the stacks as if they were the happiest children in the world -- getting just what they wanted for Christmas. 

I suppose one would be wondering, "What's so bad about that."  Well, the bad news is that their world consisted of only letters and numbers.  Caregivers and relatives would complain how they would not respond to their name, nor recognize them.  At the store, they would point to numbers, while ignoring the toys.  At home, they would sit for hours at a time, exploring books.  The only attention they gave to toys, were to line them up.  The only exception was electronic learning toys.  They obsessed over them to such an extent that they were able to use these devices to teach themselves to read, write, and do math.  They would write a sentence in perfect manuscript or incursive, such as, "I want a cookie."  At first, I thought my children were just geniuses, but. . . . . even though they could write complete sentences, their speech consisted of a very small amount of words.  They would approach me and say, "A cookie," or "A drink."  When I asked them to say the sentence, "I want a cookie," they would cry instead.  I had to admit to myself, that they, too, were part of the current autism epidemic. A local psychologist diagnosed them both with PDD, NOS.

They were 3 years and 3 months at the time recovery efforts were started.  They started responding right away, but slowly.  They barely made it into regular education classes.  They were potty trained just a few months before it was time to start Kindergarten.   After a few weeks of school, I was contacted by an Assistant Principal and informed that my children had difficulty with transitioning, and that their obsessions and meltdowns were creating doubts amongst their teachers that they would be able to continue in school.  Recovery treatments were stepped up, and they were able to continue in regular education classes.  Today, they are in the 2^nd grade, and treated by school personnel as if they are neurotypical.  Most days they do well, but there are still some meltdowns.  Recovery is not absolute in my family.  Those last few symptoms seem to be stubborn, fading back in from time to time.  Just when you think they may be able to tolerate a reduction in recovery treatments, a symptom will flare back up.  Thus, they are in managed recovery which has it's own set of stresses and uncertainties. 

(Here are the boys last week in their holiday show.)

Autism One/Generation Rescue Conference Announces FREE Admission

Managing Editor's Note: Big news from our friends at Autism One and Generation Rescue. Hope to see you in Chicago this May!

Hello!
 
We have a gift from our family to your family. The headline says it all. This year's annual International Autismone/Generation Rescue conference features FREE admission. It is with open arms that we invite you come and share with the AutismOne family that which we have collectively learned over the past decade. Here's a brief glimpse of what you can look forward to.
 
150 Autism Experts
 5 Jam-Packed Days of Presentations
Keynote Address by Jenny McCarthy & Byron Katie
  6+ Specialized Content Tracks
 
 
We've a new location for you!
The Westin Lombard in the Yorktown Center, Lombard, Illinois.
Easy access.
Numerous economical resturaunts.
Beautiful setting.
 
 
Registration will begin soon. For more information check the AutismOne website http://www.autismone.org/content/autismone-conference-2011
 
 
We look forward to seeing you.
With my best wishes.
 
Edmund Arranga, Executive Director
AutismOne

The treatment category is sponsored by Lee Silsby, the leader in quality compounded medications for autism.

Age of Autism Awards 2010: Dr. Paul Offit, Denialist of the Decade

By Dan Olmsted 

Why bother to call attention to Dr. Paul Offit, the vaccine patent-holder who has led the attack on the idea that vaccines have anything to do with autism or any of the myriad of other ailments afflicting this generation of American children? Well, because other people are paying attention -- including the nation's pediatricians and the mainstream journalists who need to start calling him to account. Offit has a new book out -- "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All." Here's the question doctors who recommend him to nervous parents, and parents unsure what to think, and journalists who interview him, need to ask: Why is Offit transparently opposed to ever studying the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated Americans, even as he acknowledges that vaccines have a long history of causing serious side effects?

While his last book, "Autism's False Prophets," focused squarely on the disability now afflicting 1 in 100 children, Offit branches out here to deride those who have any concerns whatsoever about the safety of the current vaccine schedule. There is plenty of sympathy for parents of children who have died of infectious diseases, but perfunctory dismissal in cases where parents blame vaccines. 

Thus Michael Belkin, whose daughter Lyla died after her hepatitis B shot, is treated as a gullible gadfly, goaded by Barbara Loe Fisher into heading "the Hepatitis B Vaccine Project at her National Vaccine information Center. Soon Belkin, a Wall Street financial adviser, was everywhere" -- everywhere being the CDC and Congress, which is exactly where he should have been as a citizen and parent who believes that Hep B is a dangerous and unnecessary childhood vaccine that killed his daughter. Sniffs Offit: "Despite Belkin's certainty that hepatitis B vaccine had caused his daughter's SIDS, study after study failed to support him."

Parents of girls who died after Gardasil vaccination get similar treatment. The idea that Gardasil is dangerous is "a contention refuted by careful study" and "established science." 

And chickenpox vaccines are critically important because chickenpox can lead to shingles, "one of medicine's most debilitating diseases. Shingles is so painful that it has at times led to suicide. And shingles doesn't only affect the skin; sometimes when the virus reawakens it causes strokes, resulting in permanent paralysis. Chickenpox is a disease worth preventing." Absent is any acknowledgement of the evidence that the vaccine itself, by reducing cases of simple childhood chickenpox, has led to a big increase in shingles by removing the protective immunological "bump" those who already harbor the virus receive when they are re-exposed.

Hannah Poling and the government's $20 million concession that vaccines resulted in her autistic regression? Not mentioned. Billions paid out by vaccine court for all sorts of injuries over the past 20 years? Well, vaccine court is a strange place ...

 

Anyone concerned about any of these things fits Offit's definition of anti-vaccine, because vaccines don't cause any of them, because Paul Offit says so, a solipsism that is really quite breathtaking: "[B]ecause anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots -- conditions that aren't caused by vaccines -- safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made."

Yet Offit himself yields an amazing amount of ground by describing unsafe vaccines -- including early polio shots and a rotavirus vaccine that was the immediate predecessor of his own. His technique is to situate all this as historical, part of the triumphant march of progress into the bright sunshine of vaccine safety. Here's a description I find especially astonishing: "When Barbara Loe Fisher burst onto the scene, several vaccines had serious side effects, every year causing allergic reactions, paralysis, or death. Public health officials and doctors didn't hide these problems. But they didn't do anything to correct them, either. And most parents had no idea they existed."

Public health officials did nothing to fix vaccine problems that led to paralysis and death? And parents didn't know about it? Is this not an indictment of the medical industry, and an unintentional endorsement advocates who have worked to remedy it?  Does it not argue that at least some of the time parental observations may well be correct, an early warning system of the first order? Well, no, because apparently those things no longer happen -- to say otherwise, in Offit's parallel universe, would be anti-vaccine conspiratorial quackery. 

Much of the book is a score-settling screed against anyone who's ever criticized him or vaccine safety surveillance, including Fisher, Jenny McCarthy and J.B. Handley. So it's no surprise that his "can't be done" argument against studying unvaccinated populations for any untoward outcomes arrives in the middle of an attack on Handley. Offit quotes J.B.'s comments on a Larry King segment in April 2009: "Larry, we have no idea what the combination risk of our vaccine schedule looks like. At the two-month visit, a child gets six vaccines in under fifteen minutes. The only way to test that properly would be to have a group of kids who get all six and a group of kids who got none and see what happens. They don't do that testing. They have no idea."

Offit's comment: "Handley was asking for a study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. One result is certain: given recent outbreaks of Hib, measles, mumps, and pertussis, no vaccinated children would suffer and possibly die from preventable infections. It would be, of course, an entirely unethical experiment. No investigator could prospectively study children who are denied a potentially lifesaving medical product. And no university's or hospital's institutional review board worth its salt would ever approve such a study." 

Offit goes on, outrageously, to compare Handley's proposal to the infamous Tuskegee experiment in which doctors withheld treatment from black males suffering from syphilis in order to study the natural course of the disease. 

P-LEEZE. No one I know of is suggesting that a study of unvaccinated children deliberately withhold vaccination. Rather, there are growing numbers of never-vaccinated children in America -- a fact Offit acknowledges with dismay -- and plenty of families willing to participate in such a study. State governments have vaccine waivers on file for public school attendance that are another obvious source of non-life-threatening data.

The real problem for Offit is not an ethical one; the real problem is that any such study would trump all the self-interested industry and CDC studies that never manage to include never-vaccinated chldren as a control group. Informal efforts to do that -- by myself, J.B.'s Generation Rescue and others -- have pointed toward less autism and asthma, and been met by the medical establishment and its sycophantic sock puppets with an absolute frenzy of denial and misdirection.

In our book, "The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic," Mark  Blaxill and I discuss this aversion to doing the obvious. "A very simple test goes right to the heart of the vaccine controversy: What is the difference in total health outcomes, including autism, between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations? We would argue that we've uncovered a number of natural experiments in human populations that suggest we should be seriously concerned over the ever-increasing load of childhood vaccinations, especially in the United States. ... Oddly, when it comes to doing such studies in human populations, and studying the autism levels in the Amish, the homeschooled, or philosophical objectors, vaccine industry proponents resist mightily. Conducting human vax/unvax studies in existing unvaccinated groups would be so fraught with methodological problems that they are 'retrospectively impossible.' As for controlled studies, they would be so burdened with permission problems that they would be 'prospectively unethical.' In short, the resistance to the proposal to do vax/unvax work has not only taken the attitude that 'we already know the answers,' but 'we should not seek to know.' It's pretty hard to make scientific progress in the face of this kind of epistemological nihilism."  

I am begging, on bended knee, that pediatricians quit putting Offit on a pedestal, and that mainstream journalists do their job and ask him why he is so averse to any study that involves the health of never-vaccinated children. Don't let him call you "anti-vaccine," and don't let him change the subject to the quite thoroughly separate issue of preventing deadly disease. That's an important topic, but there is room at the table for both effective public health policies against disease AND a fearless examination of whether today's vaccine schedule contributes to chronic health problems -- whether Paul Offit denies it or not.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism

 

 

 

Son to Surgeon Father: "I Don't Have Autism Anymore."

Below is the start of an article from The Delaware County times in Pennsylvania. Take note how an allopathic doctor, a surgeon, has helped recover his children with autism.  Remember, surgeons FIX THE BODY - that's their mindset, unlike the traditional docs who "treat" autism, who at best, tinker with the unknown in a crap shoot of meds and behavioral services.  It's natural that a surgeon would decide to "fix" his children's autism. It's a terrific article, and we should thank Patti Mengers for running it.  When do you think it will be in the NYT or Philadelphia Inquirer? Click into the full article to see video HERE.

By PATTI MENGERS
pmengers@delcotimes.com

Dr. Patrick Elliott will never forget the day one of his 6-year-old twin sons delivered a self-diagnosis to him.

“I don’t have autism anymore,” the boy announced to his father.

It was a far cry from three years earlier when both twins were diagnosed with the neurobiological affliction of unknown origin. Between the ages of 18 months and 24 months, they went from being playful and happy to ceasing eye contact with others. They had lost any language they had acquired.

“They were basically disengaged,” said Elliott, a 47-year-old general and trauma surgeon at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland.

Through a combination of conventional and alternative therapies, one of his twins improved so much he was able to join his peers in the mainstream by the time he entered first grade at his local public school where he is now a fourth grader. He no longer requires therapy. At his parents’ request, his name is being withheld from this story.

His twin brother, Bradley, is in fourth grade at a private special education school in Chester County, where he reads and writes at his grade level. He still receives biomedical intervention.

“He still has issues with anxiety and (obsessive-compulsive disorder),” Elliott said, “but he has dramatically improved and we hope he’ll be mainstreamed some day,”

Born in April 2001, the twins initially developed normally as their two older brothers had at their home in Middletown. Their mother, Marie, was the first to notice changes in the twins, Elliott said.

The twin who no longer requires therapy “had horrible, aggressive behaviors, self-injurious behavior, head-banging and echolalia where he would repeat what everybody said,” Elliott said. “That’s better than no language, but it was clearly a problem.” Continued...

 

 

The treatment category is sponsored by Lee Silsby, the leader in quality compounded medications for autism.

Becky Estepp Talks About Autism Recovery: There is Always Hope

When It Comes To Autism, Jenny McCarthy Never Fakes It.

Thank you to Leigh Attaway Wilcox, from the MomBlogs of the Dallas Morning News for letting us share this terrific post with our readers. Please visit the DMN blogs regularly. Dan Burns has a regular blog there and Nancy Churnin, who runs the blogs, has graciously allowed me to contribute as well. KIM

Jenny McCarthy connects with warrior moms in Dallas 

3:00 PM Thu, Oct 07, 2010 | Permalink | Yahoo! Buzz

Leigh Attaway Wilcox  

Connections make life rich. Each of us seeks to surround ourselves with people who have similar priorities and goals. Sometimes it is thanks to rather dire situations that we truly connect with others who change our lives forever.

Jenny McCarthy, while on tour for her new book, Love, Lust and Faking It, took time out of her schedule Wednesday night to have a drink with a local group of moms (and a few dads, grandmothers and sisters) following a book signing at the Lincoln Park Barnes & Noble in Dallas. Why? She graciously honored a connection that many local "Warrior Moms," like me, have with her.

Let me be honest: Autism can be a very lonely place for families to journey. Especially in the beginning, after first receiving a diagnosis, many of us are so overwhelmed by responsibility ("I caused this" thoughts), shame ("I can't control my own child" thoughts) and grief ("my child may never...make friends...have a meaningful, fulfilling job...get married..." and on and on kinds of thoughts) we don't realize, (some of us for weeks, months or years) that we're far, far from alone...

Read the full post and share your comments HERE.

A Father On Autism Regression and the Road To Recovery (Paved with Love)

By Cody Jordan

October 20, 2004 was the day my son came into my life.  Holding him in the parkade of the hospital, I vowed to give him the life he deserves and to teach him what he needs to know to make this happen.  Little did I know at the time, he would teach me more about life, love, and compassion than I could ever have hoped to teach him.  All this in the five short years he’s been in my life.

His development was normal at first; he met all his markers.  The only thing was that he often got low-grade fevers that intensified and grew longer in duration as he got older.  He was at the end of another cold and feverish spell when I took him in for his 12-month well visit.  His pediatrician assured us that despite his illness, it was still okay to give him his MMR, Hib, Varicella, and his first flu shot.  A few weeks later, he got his flu shot booster.  A few weeks after this (Christmas Eve) his fever spiked to over 103, but the on-call pediatrician told us to monitor his temperature for at least another 24 hours.  On Christmas Day, he was so sick, flushed, and hot that we rushed him to the emergency room, where his temperature was between 105 and 106.  A chest x-ray revealed a very severe case of pneumonia.  The ER doctor said that if we would have waited much longer, his chances to make it would not have been so good.

After his pneumonia is what I call “the big switch.”  His development came to a screeching halt, and he lost most of the vocabulary he once had.  At one year of age, he had about 10 words, and when he was evaluated at age two, he had regressed to two words, used infrequently at best.  He quit showing interest in his peers and, more importantly, me and my wife.  Looking back on video footage, this was when he started toe walking, hand flapping, and he became increasingly repetitive in everything he did.

This is when I came across Defeat Autism Now! and their list of physicians who use a biomedical protocol.  It would forever change my son’s life.  The long drives didn’t matter; the money didn’t matter.  It was something I had to do for my son’s sake.  I loved him far too much to give him any less.  What happened over the next 2 ½ years is nothing short of a miracle.

As any parent treating an autistic child with a biomedical protocol knows, it’s a never-ending line of supplements, medicines, and homeopathics given in every imaginable way, and my son was no different.  The amazing thing about him is that he hasn’t complained about any of it; he takes it as though he somehow knows it is helping him recover.  There was one homeopathic in particular he was taking for a gut issue.  Right after he took it for the first time, he immediately went to the bathroom and threw it up.  The next night, he was at the kitchen counter, asking for it again.  He took it again and almost threw it up, but he fought to keep it down.  This is just one example about how he’s never complained about the supplements, medicines, or countless hours in various therapies.  This is almost as exciting and amazing of the recovery that started to take place.

Autism Recovery is Not for the Faint of Heart

By J.B. Handley
 
Soon after my son’s autism diagnosis, my wife and I were receiving advice from a DAN! Doctor helping our son. Transdermal glutathione and something very smelly called TTFD were prescribed, and we were told to rub each of these creams on his skin every night.
 
“How long do we need to do this for?” I asked.
 
“Six months, maybe a year,” came the doctor’s reply.
 
“A year? Are you kidding?”
 
I couldn’t believe it, what an inconvenience!
 
Those of you who are biomed veterans are already smiling. Five years later, I see the world a little differently, and I have this to say to all parents battling autism:
 
This job of recovery ain’t for the faint of heart.
 
Yup, I know it’s coming, parents who will complain and say that somehow I am blaming parents who don’t try hard enough for their child’s ongoing autism. I’m not. Really. Autism is a huge challenge. We all do the best we can…
 
Some people’s “best” just happens to be better than other people’s “best” -- and that’s the damn truth.

No Longer Autistic! Recovery is Possible.

We're happy to share a recovery story from The Autism File written by Lisa Mize of Arizona. Click HERE to read the full story.

...Ricky received strong antioxidants and an oral chelator for four months during kindergarten. With each round he made huge leaps in cognitive functions, social
awareness, and language. He began to interact with his peers. He wanted to play! He participated in class. At one point his teacher, a 30-year elementary school
veteran, pulled me aside and said, “I don’t know what you are doing, but whatever it is,
don’t stop!” Round after round, he dumped huge amounts of metals. And round by round, we began to see our son again.

(The holidays are here. The Autism File makes a great teacher, therapist, doctor or family member gift.)

The treatment category is sponsored by Lee Silsby, the leader in quality compounded medications for autism.

Last Place NFL Team to Host "Autism Isn't Treatable" Night To Boost Ticket Sales

Dear Cleveland Frowns football fan, in light of the incredible success of the recent articles debunking all treatments for autism and declaring the autism vaccine connection dead, buried and verboten for future discussion in Lired Magazine and The Chicago Fibune Newspaper, we've decided to host, "Autism Isn't Treatable!" night at Frowns Stadium.

Our crack marketing department was contacted by PR maven Callous N. Humdinger who informed us that flogging families of severely ill children and promoting the AAP vaccination schedule and pharmaceutical profitability has brought pennies, nickels and even (dare we hope!) dimes to both the shrinking magazine and newspaper industries.

Come! Get your syringe shaped pen! Children under 98 will also receive an H1H1 shot along with a RotaTeddy Bear, that squirts real diarrhea when you squish its tummy!

Buy your tickets now and remember, Autism Isn't Treatable!

(PS) No offense to Cleveland intended. Their football team just had a name that gave me a good rhyme. Although, Cleveland is the home of Max Wiznitzer from University Hospitals, the doctor who tells us of "spontaneous recovery" and then acts as an expert wtiness for vaccine companies in our kids vaccine court.  KS