DK, FYI your article's link to the VHC website page still works, but the page you link to now says that it's "being updated" and it no longer has the info you are/were referencing. You might want to update your posts here and at Huffpo with the screen shot of the original version, if you have it, since it looks like their response is to disappear the information rather than address your questions and insights.

Dear Michelle:

This is about your tears and your heartbreak.

When your child receives the diagnosis of autism, it feels like a brick upside your head. It shakes you and your family to their very core. This is the “autism brick.” Ours hit six years ago. It was like a very bad dream. Since then we've come to think of autism as someone/something that has invaded our home and family. Our goal in life is to rid our lives of this intruder. We now share this goal with thousands of other families.

I encourage you to visit http://www.generationrescue.com as the first stop on this journey to understand and treat your child. You will discover as we did that ASD (autism spectrum disorders) is definitely treatable. Many now believe it's curable.

Our child is similar to hundreds you can read about—and even watch videos of at places like http://www.autism-recoveredchildren.com--who have recovered from autism and are now nearly indistinguishable from their neuro-typical peers.

Treatment usually begins with a patient history followed by lab tests by a qualified doctor. To implement this approach, it's recommended that parents consult a DAN! affiliated physician or another physician who treats autism bio-medically. There's a list of DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) doctors, listed state-by-state at http://www.healing-arts.org/children/amyholmes.htm. The doctor will coordinate and interpret a series of tests that will likely include:

CDSA: Complete Diagnostic Stool Analysis that measures digestion/absorption, gut immunology, gut metabolism and gut microbiology.

Urine Toxic Metals Test (following a chelation challenge) for potentially toxic metals such as aluminum, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, lead, mercury, nickel, platinum, thallium, thorium, tin, tungsten, uranium. Depending on the child’s ability/inability to detoxify naturally, the child could have toxic levels of one or more of these.

RBCE: Red Blood Cell Elements for calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, iron, manganese, chromium, selenium, boron, vanadium and molybdenum. These essential elements are often blocked from uptake by disturbances caused by heavy metal toxicity.

Microbial OATS Panel which checks for yeast and bacterial byproducts. For a small subset of children, even so-called “normal” exposures to toxins can cause serious disturbances in a child’s digestive, immunologic, and neurologic systems. If you have a child on the autism spectrum and have not had that child evaluated for toxicity and an impaired ability to detoxify via sulphur-bearing amino acids, we urge you to seek such testing from a qualified physician.

The physician will use the results of these tests to help determine your child’s functioning in regards to:

1. Gut Biosis/Diet. Most autistic children (70 to 80%) have gut and bowel problems, especially yeast overgrowth and the presence of more "bad guys" in their bellies than beneficial bacteria. There can also be strep infections and the presence of live measles virus, most likely from the MMR.

The GFCF diet is important here (http://www.gfcfdiet.com), and the underlying issue of gut bacteria also needs to be addressed and cured. Many doctors treating autism bio-medically require that the gut be successfully healed as a pre-condition for further treatments.

2. Heavy Metal Load. These are metals that, literally, poison the body: lead, mercury, cadmium and others. Most autistic children have a reduced ability to chelate metals. If a child's metal burden is in the toxic range, the child needs to be chelated. Because of the metal tests, most children end up with diagnostic codes like: “270.4 – Disturbances of Sulphur-Bearing Amino-Acid” and “985.0 – Toxic Effect of Mercury and Its Compounds.” With these diagnoses like these, many insurances will pay for the child’s treatment, including chelation.

3. Vitamins and Minerals. Again, autistic children will tend to be low in essential vitamins and minerals, especially calcium, zinc, magnesium, B12 and so on because of an impaired ability to take them in and metabolize them. These essential elements have to be replaced in the child's body on an ongoing basis with supplements.

Many children take a cabinet full of supplements every day. Our son takes methyl B-12 nasal spray, TMG with folinic acid, fatty acid supplement, probiotics (to promote good bacteria growth in the gut), twice-daily multi-vitamins, krill oil, taurine, Cal-Mag-K, Coenzyme Q10, selenium, transdermal zinc, transdermal n-acetylcysteine, transdermal glutathione.

4. Brain metabolism and hyperbaric oxygen treatment. One of the effects of the brain inflammation associated with ASD is that key areas of the brain go into a sort of hibernation—the cells are still alive but are no longer active, as documented in an MRI study done by Dr. Gunnar Heuser, a toxic exposure specialist (“Clinical Study: Mild Hyperbarics for Impaired Brain Function”). This condition is similar to what happens to a person in a coma or under general anesthesia, when massive areas of the brain have gone into a temporary hibernative state—alive but not active.

One way to reactivate affected areas in the brain of a child with ASD is with hyperbaric oxygen treatment: increasing normal atmospheric pressure to 1.3 ATA (atmospheres absolute) and providing supplemental oxygen (O2). The treatment causes profusion of oxygen into all of the body's fluids, including blood and central-nervous system (CNS) fluids and stimulates the metabolism of dormant cells. The “battery” of each dormant cell, the mitochondria, can in many cases be switched from hibernation mode to active mode.

Results from SPECT imaging (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) show post-treatment reactivation of parts of the brain that were dormant due to lack of oxygen and vasoconstriction. This brain reactivation of key areas such as language and mood has resulted in observable behavior changes in autistic children.

Recent research adds support to this treatment modality. According to a study published in the April 2006 edition of the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulation Physiology, a typical course of hyperbaric oxygen treatments increases by eight-fold the number of stem cells circulating in a patient's body. Stem cells, also called progenitor cells are crucial to injury repair.

Without bio-medical testing, you may be flying blind a little when it comes to these treatments, diet, supplements and so forth.

What about chelation that I’ve heard so much about?
Many parents report dramatic and almost immediate improvements with chelating agents like DMPS. Here are a few things our family and friends have learned along the way:

1. Conduct chelation under the watchful eye of a qualified physician. We know parents whose children have to be off and on chelation due to other issues.

2. Make sure that your child's gut system has been repaired (if needed) and that he/she is receiving all the supplements necessary for good health. Since chelation depletes some minerals such as zinc and magnesium, their re-supplementation is important on the “non-chelation” days.

3. The immediate results you may see will likely be the result of relieving oxidative stress rather than the actual removal of mercury, which takes months or, in the case of lead, years. But the wait is worth it--children are being taken off the spectrum and many today have this hope for their child, too.

4. DMSA vs. DMPS. DMSA is FDA approved (although chelation of children is an off- label use of it). The FDA approval does give DMSA an NDC number. Again, if your child's labs came back showing toxic levels of mercury and lead, your insurance may pay for DMSA. If you are having to pay out of pocket, DMSA is about 3-4 times cheaper than DMPS.

You'll likely hear some concern about chelation being dangerous. When done properly with approved medications and protocols, chelation is safe and effective. In the FDA's Federal Register addressing the approval of DMPS as a bulk compounding agent, they note, "DMPS has been used to treat heavy metal poisoning. At doses reported in the literature for this indication, DMPS appears to be relatively nontoxic, and serious adverse reactions associated with its use have not been commonly reported."

Chelation therapy has been proven in hundreds of thousands of clinical examples to effectively remove toxic metals from people's bodies. According to the CDC, over 60,000 Americans used some form of chelation therapy each year. Many major health insurers have policies endorsing chelation therapy as the appropriate therapy to address heavy metal toxicity. (See the policies of: Aetna, Blue Cross, and CIGNA as three examples.)

More Info
Finally, here are some more parent-friendly web sites besides those already mentioned:

NATIONAL AUTISM ASSOCIATION
http://www.nationalautismassociation.org
A clearinghouse organization for the latest. It is also a great resource for all the different non-medical therapies (speech, occupational, behavioral) that can benefit your child.

FAIR-FOUNDATION FOR AUTISM INFORMATION AND RESEARCH
http://www.autismmedia.org/
You will learn so much from this collection of TV and radio clips.

DAN! WEBCAST
http://www.danwebcast.com/
25 hours of video from the February 2005 DAN! Conference where the latest research and treatments were reported on in detail.

AUTISM ONE
http://www.autismone.org/homepage.cfm
Chock-a-block with downloadable PowerPoint presentations from the top minds in the field. Not to mention Autism Radio.

The Department of Defense may have "legitimate concerns about vaccine injuries and their possible connection to autism", but they also have a whopping conflict of interest such that it is commonly believed vaccines may be a key defense against biological warfare and terrorism.

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David Kirby thinks "the Department of Defense has legitimate concerns about vaccine injuries..."

NFL. Not ___ likely.
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If the Dept of Defense had any such concerns, they would have behaved very, very differently with regard to - oh - maybe, ANTHRAX vaccinations?
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Let's hear from Dan Olmsted about how 'concerned' he thinks they may be.
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The comment I left at Huffington Post

David, Thank you for your fine work and your dedication.

In yesterday's article at AoA (http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/12/dod-and-cdc-stu.html#more) you quote Dir. Engler, MD. A friend pointed out the very meaningful last sentence of that quote.

"The consultation does not prove or disprove causality association but it is from these consultations that we have refined our understanding of the questions, a critical first step to future refinement of research agendas. It is our firm belief that increased research into side effects that are more severe but may be short duration, may help us understand more severe adverse events (more rare at 1 in 10-100,000). However, our work over the past years has been humbling in relation to the knowledge gaps."

Again, "our work over the past years has been humbling in relation to the knowledge gaps."

This is what the autism community has been screaming for years. There are many, many questions that have not been asked by our scientific community through valid studies...never mind answered. There is so very much we don't know scientifically. But there are thousands of us who Know that vaccines injured the children we love, care for and live with.

I am in tears reading this. I had sluffed off the idea of vaccines causing Isaiah's autism because we know Isaiah has had autism since he was an infant...we don't know why we don't know how but we know he has it...some parents their children were fine then they got the MMR shot and bam they were gone, that wasn't the case w/ Isaiah, we've never had him...since he was a baby he's shown signs of autism. But now to know that a shot he recieved as a very young baby, is known to cause autism is breaking my heart. To think he could have been, should have been, normal, how different our lives could be...should be, I don't know if I should be pissed, sad, or happy, I'm a mixture of emotions right now.