Joan Stevens,

Great quote at the end of the video:

"Blindness separates people from things.
Deafness separates people from people" ~ Hellen Keller

It seems that researchers are finally looking into how children with autism hear:

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/4608/hearing-test-may-identify-autism-risk.aspx
Hearing Test May Identify Autism Risk -Monday, July 25, 2016

"Researchers have identified an inner ear deficiency in children with Autism that may impact their ability to recognize speech....... "

Angus and Hildegard, I'm so sorry that you've been spoken to in this way. As someone who occasionally describes myself as Aspie (for want of a better word, but more often vaccine injured) I would in no way condone such uncaring treatment. Perhaps having some ability to empathize is the reason why it's often denied that I have ASD. You can't win! I think it may sometimes be the case that people misunderstand the others meaning, which is another aspic difficulty. I hope to keep advocating for both ends of the spectrum, because I know we all suffer in our different degrees, and also because we need as many hands on deck as we can muster to fight the war on vaccines.

Where does a parent of a young adult who is severely affected by autism; dare I say disabled, go for support these days. The social media is full of parents who claim to be autistic themselves, married to fellow autistics, and raising usually more than one autistic child. Mention the word "severe" and you are shot down. Mention "nonverbal" and receive an immediate reference to all those who use FC.

According to these parents, if a child is gifted, it is part of their autism and shouldn't be changed. If a child has an intellectual disability it is not part of the autism but instead a result of a comorbid condition.

Feel good stories about autism take away from the reality so many of us face of aggression or self-injury. Reducing autism to a meme "Autism is just another way of thinking" takes away one of the greatest struggles we face. I wish I knew what my child was thinking. I wish those thoughts could identify what hurts, or what they did in school, or where they put their favorite toy, or what the most recent medication feels like.

But, when I express this part of autism I find myself attacked, viciously, by persons who advocate for acceptance.

What?

Grace,

Medical conditions in autism research have been grossly overlooked because, as everyone here knows, autism has been considered a purely psychiatric condition, hence the Refrigerator Mother and Smother Mother theories - and recently the Depressed Mother theory. Behavioural therapy and teaching Mums to play with their babies is not going to help the infants and children who can't distinguish voices from background noise or process language.

Struggling with the meaning in language is an auditory processing problem, even when you are reading because we 'hear' what we read. In addition to autism, some of our children have hyperlexia and although they may read well, their comprehension is very poor.

The problem is that a Central Auditory Processing Disorder can't be detected by a standard hearing test which is why our children always 'pass', even though they still appear to be deaf. This result leads health professionals to believe that there is nothing wrong with our children's hearing and, in turn, they mislead parents (and teachers) into believing that their children are just not listening or paying attention. (I was told many years ago by a SLP that children like mine had a _language_ problem and that CAPD was BS.)

There are many clues that auditory processing is the central deficit in autism:

hypersensitivity to normal sounds - hyperacusis (as British Autism Mother said)
appears deaf
ignores voices
doesn't respond to name
doesn't orient to sound
lacks attention
talks or babbles with an unusual tone
speaks in jargon (which might be how they hear us speak)
plays alone (avoids noisy and unpredictable children)

reverses pronouns
is echolalic
uses metaphorical speech
re-winds videos or an audio tape to a favourite spot over and over, and over again
craves visual input (alphabet, numbers, shapes, patterns, jigsaws etc)

How many parents of children with regression noticed that their children developed hypersensitive hearing at the same time as their children lost language? My son appeared deaf and started covering his ears at ordinary sounds that hadn't bothered him before. Why was this?

If this change in behaviour is commonplace in a subgroup of children with autism - the regressive type - it should be researched because it must be a symptom of brain/auditory damage.

I don't understand why there has been so much research on eye-contact and eye-gazing when the first symptoms parents of children with regression report are that our children appear deaf, and they've lost their words or phrases they knew well. I've never heard a parent say that the first thing their child lost was eye-contact.

In my opinion, autism experts have been steering research in the wrong direction for years.

Patience and ATSC. This topic is very interesting and I whole heartedly agree that understanding the brain is the best way forward in solving the autism problem. I do experience some of the auditory symptoms you describe, however I don't think this can explain all of the symptoms of autism, such as gut problems, skin sensitivity etc. Also, I find I struggle with meaning in language even when it's written down. I think hearing deficit was probably investigated and discounted in the early days of autism, but of course all systems of the body are connected with the brain, and it may be in the connections that damage has occurred.
On the long term solution to the happiness and well-being of adults with autism, I would recommend looking into the Camphill Community movement. I am fortunate to live in the city where this was founded, and our local community runs a very successful organic wholefoods shop, cafe, craft workshops etc. All of the residents are found employment, at whatever level they can manage, and there is a wonderful happy and respectful atmosphere. Not all have autism, but I'm sure some do. Best wishes for your son, Patience.
Grace.

British Autism Mother, yes!!!
Subacute Sclerosing Pan-encephalitis (SSPE) is something I first read about back in the 1970s, and it was found to be a long-term complication of measles. If the measles vaccine contains live virus, SSPE should be investigated as a possible unwanted outcome in some children.

Also, I remember reading that SSPE can begin with initial injuries in the brainstem. I just put "subacute sclerosing panencephalitis colliculus" into PubMed, and found the following article:
Thomas M et al. Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis with bilateral inferior collicular hyperintensity on magnetic resonance imaging brain. Ann Indian Acad Neurol. 2012 Oct;15(4):329-31.

Has anyone included the above article in their "The Science is Clear" exoneration of the MMR vaccine???

So glad that your son is safe Eileen. I hope that his living situation improves too.

Patience

Very glad to hear this - worst nightmare.

John

Is TMS different than the MRT therapy Dr Bradstreet was working with, or are they the same thing?

Eileen Nicole - I am so very glad that your son was found! My adult son has wandered in the past, so I understand the gripping fear and worry you must have experienced. Once again, really happy for you...I was thinking about you and him all day.

I empathize with you too, on the challenges of finding good (or even adequate) day programming for your son. Mine is also capable of doing productive work, but it seems only high functioning individuals are seen as having any potential. The job programs and training opportunities just don't seem to be there for the lower 2/3 of the spectrum.

My son spent his day today hanging around a community center with his DSP (Direct Support Provider). He said they went to the playground. He's 26. Of course the playground equipment is too small for him.

the study John Robison participated in was never meant to be a treatment study, contrary to what Kim Stagliano, others, and perhaps Robison himself imply. It was a measure of brain plasticity in persons with asperger's. Alvaro Pasqual and Lindsay oberman et. al. have not done research into TMS as a treatment for autism. Manuel Casanova and Peter Endicott have though.

My son has been found!!! He is being kept overnight in the hospital, then possibly transferred to inpatient psych unit. It's too late for me to go visit now. I will go first thing in the morning.

Thanks to everyone for your concerns. This is the kind of problem the neurodiversity self-advocates are totally unable to understand.

Eileen Nicole Please let us know how it is going? It never ends, I am so sorry.

Linda1,

There's one point I would add to my previous post. The MRI references were for general populations, which may or may not include any people with autism. To identify potential adverse effects of MRI, or TMS, on people with autism, one should have trial data from ASD populations. In particular, to identify potential adverse effects FOR A PARTICULAR PERSON WITH AUTISM who is considering TMS therapy, the test population should have characteristics as closely aligned as possible to those of the prospective TMS patient. That lack of alignment tends to be the Achilles Heel of many extrapolations from clinical trials to practice. I addressed that issue in my eBook, and have appended it below.

9D. CLINICAL TRIALS IMPLICATIONS OF UNDER-REPORTING OF ADVERSE EVENTS
9D1. Inadequacy of Foundational Cause Accounting

Clinical trials are very important for determining the efficacy of treatments for disease. While much effort and attention are expended on insuring a credible statistical structure for the trials, and some co-morbidity of the test subjects is taken into account, much less attention is typically placed on the potential foundational causes of disease being experienced/ pursued by the test subjects. Why is this important? I will demonstrate its perceived importance through examination of one interesting data point.

Dr. Terri Wahls is on the medical faculty of the University of Iowa. She developed Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and eventually became non-ambulatory. Her book [148] describing her experiences shows pictures of her giving classroom lectures from a wheelchair.

At that point, she decided to research the biomedical literature to ascertain whether MS could be reversed. Based on her research, she concluded that a major contributing factor to her MS was poor diet. She speculated that the MS could be halted/ eliminated using mainly a dietary improvement approach, and the motor control damage from the MS could be reversed using a technique called Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES). Heretofore, NMES had only been used for athletes' rehabilitation from injury.

Dr. Wahls eventually integrated nutritional enhancement with NMES. Her experience was that she used NMES and made very slow progress, then improved her diet and made rapid progress. This comports with the LRDI holistic medical hypothesis: removal of cause is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective. This appears to be exactly what happened in Dr. Wahls' case; the cause (poor diet) was removed and the restorative treatment (NMES) became effective.

If one separates the sequence of events necessary for healing into
1) disease cause removal,
2) disease symptom removal, and
3) disease damage removal,

explanation becomes somewhat easier. Dr. Wahls eliminated the major cause of her MS (poor diet), and the symptoms associated with MS disappeared (pain, fatigue, etc). However, the damage from MS (gait and motor control problems) remained, to some extent. To reverse that damage, she had two major options. She could let nature take its course and reverse the symptoms of the damage. This alone might work, but natural biological processes can take a long time for healing. For faster results, she could use some external form of treatment to accelerate healing. She chose NMES, and, in combination with improved nutrition, was able to accelerate healing.

Now comes one of the more critical insights from this book. Assume we rate the quality of diets from one to a hundred, where one is the lowest. Assume further that Dr. Wahls had an average American diet before she contracted MS; her diet pre-2000 (before being diagnosed with MS) was perhaps a 40. Then, she was diagnosed with MS, started to deteriorate, and changed to a Paleolithic diet in 2003 (there are various incarnations of the so-called Paleo diet, but they consist mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts, and exclude grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils). Assuming she followed it strictly, I would rate it about 95, based on our past LRDI (mainly dietary) findings for different diseases.

Then, in 2007, she started NMES. Her progress, if any, was minimal. When she switched to her present strict diet, which a pro-Paleo advocate might rate at 99, the NMES results increased dramatically.

If she had received the NMES when her diet was 40, there probably would have been zero gain, since the poor diet was continually destroying the myelin sheath (the electrically insulating layer around the axon of a neuron whose degradation is a characteristic of MS). Even receiving the NMES when her diet was ~95 didn't do very much. It was only when her diet approached near-pristine status (from a pro-Paleo perspective) that real change occurred. So, if someone were to run clinical trials of the efficacy of NMES on many MS patients, the spectrum of responses they would see would be a mirror of the quality of the diet (or, more generally, the degree of cause removal from whatever source), and tell relatively little about the efficacy of NMES.

This means that if we see clinical trial results of a new 'treatment' performed on a number of patients who have the average American diet, and the test results don't show much improvement, it may tell nothing about the quality of the treatment, irrespective of the randomized double-blindedness of the trials! If all the test subjects were like Dr. Wahls pre-Paleo, with a ~40 level diet, and they had received NMES, we probably would conclude that NMES does not work for MS. The more accurate conclusion might be that it doesn't work for people with MS when the dominant cause(s) is still being experienced; in fact, why would one expect it to work under those conditions?

But, that's the reality of many medical 'treatments' today. The foundational cause is not addressed, 'treatments' are administered, and there is a wide range of responses. The so-called 'incurable' diseases, like MS, are never 'cured' because the true foundational causes are never removed!

Linda1,

You raised some interesting questions about potential adverse effects from TMS therapy. In our EMF health effects paper, and in the version I am presently updating, I don't remember too much negative about the effects of TMS therapy. However, we need to remember that conclusion is based on what is published in the open literature, and you know my views about the open biomedical literature.

I did a quickie search for TMS side-effects in Google, and came up with the references appended. They all say pretty much the same, and it checks with a quickie search of Medline. Side effects are relatively minimal, although there could be rare instances of seizures. All the references state or imply that long-term effects are unknown, and have to be researched.

Neurostar TMS therapy states: "Is similar to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)". The implication is that the therapy is as safe as MRI imaging. In my eBook, I identified some potential side-effects of MRIs; they are also appended, showing the titles of relevant papers. I have no idea how this would translate to TMS therapy. Certainly, MRI diagnostics are very valuable, and my guess is that the benefits far outweigh the risks, especially with moderate use. Like everything else, too much can be problematical. CT scans, which are also useful for diagnosis (and involve ionizing radiation), can be problematical in large amounts. I identified potential adverse effects of CT scans in my eBook, and they are appended as well, in the same format as for the MRI adverse effects.

TMS POTENTIAL SIDE-EFFECTS
http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/details/risks/cmc-20163840
https://www.evms.edu/research/centers_institutes_departments/psychiatry_behavioral_sciences/divisions/therapeutic_brain_stimulation/tms_risks_benefits/
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/specialty_areas/brain_stimulation/tms/faq_tms.html

MRI ADVERSE IMPACTS REPORTED IN EBOOK
2D2b. Non-Ionizing
(e.g., Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI))
*An unusual burn during routine magnetic resonance imaging.
*Arteriovenous fistula complication following MRI.
*Deleterious effects of MRI on chondrocytes.
*Efficacy of diphenhydramine in the prevention of vertigo and nausea at 7 T MRI.
*Genotoxic effects of 3 T magnetic resonance imaging in cultured human lymphocytes.
*Hearing loss after noise exposure.
*Iatrogenic hyperthermia during cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.
*MRI magnetic field stimulates rotational sensors of the brain.
*Spontaneous dissociation during functional MRI experiments.
There were many papers addressing the impact of MRI on implantable devices, many of these impacts being adverse, but only biological issues were used for these examples.

CT SCAN ADVERSE IMPACTS REPORTED IN EBOOK
2D2a. Ionizing
(e.g., X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT))
*An association between cerebral aneurysm re-bleed and CT angiography--more than a coincidence?
*Cancer risk in 680,000 people exposed to computed tomography scans in childhood or adolescence: data linkage study of 11 million Australians.
*Cancer risks from diagnostic radiology.
*CT scans in childhood: leukaemia, brain tumours.
*Risk estimates for meningiomas and other late effects after diagnostic X-ray exposure of the skull.
*Leukemia among medical diagnostic X-ray workers in China.
*Theoretical increase of thyroid cancer induction from cervical spine multidetector computed tomography in pediatric trauma patients.
There is a very extensive literature on radiation doses from CT scans, the dose-disease translation, and ways to reduce the dosage and eliminate unnecessary scans. There are also many papers on the adverse effects of the contrast media used as part of the CT scan, but since the taxonomy contains a category for contrast media, they are not included here.

Hello, Patience. I'm so sorry about your son. I didn't notice that he was missing in the news, but then our children are conveniently overlooked whenever possible, especially when they're adults. I always wonder how much misery could be avoided if we only could see a 25% improvement in our kids. Certainly this treatment is interesting. But there's no interest at the top, where money is being made.

I hope John is going to take note, however, of comments in Jonathan Rose's blog "Yes, There is an Autism Epidemic": perhaps when he states "The "autism epidemic" idea is not part of the conversation at NIH and CDC because the evidence does not support it" he has not read the minds of those that he is dealing with closely enough - the CDC had it in their own data for Atlanta that the rate of ASD had risen among 8 year-olds by nearly 4 times between 1996 and 2010 and was then about 1 in 64.5. The rates are probably even higher now (they are miles higher in the UK where the media connive to suppress the official data). But John, in his first book (published in 2007) mentions a rate of only 1 in 150.

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161992

One is, of course grateful that he responded in a concerned and courteous way (unlike the trolls) but I believe he needs to re-examine the facts.

I like John Elder. Met him at an AutismOne conference. His first book, Look Me in the Eye, helped me enjoy my brother. Thanks for the tip, Kim. I've ordered Switched On.