Almost Autism:Recovery for Kids, Support & Community for Moms
Having a son with a developmental delay was very hard on me. He didn’t walk until he was 20 months old.
This was extremely hard for me because he didn’t walk until 3 weeks before his little brother was born, and I was having to carry him everywhere.
I suppose the bright side is that he didn’t weigh a whole lot, given that he was also a failure-to-thrive baby. [Read more…]
A few years ago, when I was going through an extremely stressful time with my older son’s worsening Sensory Processing Disorder, I became very irritable and cranky. I also developed middle-of-the night insomnia, where I would lie wake for 2-3 hours at a time in the middle of the night.
I went to my gynecologist, who was my primary care doctor at the time, and he put me on Zoloft, an antidepressant. It definitely helped with the irritability but it, and the Ambien he gave me, did nothing for my insomnia.
I wasn’t crazy about taking pharmaceuticals. Antidepressants come with many possible annoying and/or dangerous side effects, about which Harvard Medical School published an article: “What Are the Real Risks of Antidepressants?” Possible antidepressant side effects are:
My search continued because I was also experiencing a whole host of other health issues: shingles, uterine fibroids, ovarian cysts, irregular cycles, bronchitis and constant, lingering colds and sinus infections.
Given my own issues and those of my son, I researched the gut-brain connection, especially to find out what effects digestive issues, which my sons had had since birth, had on Sensory Processing Disorder. The gut is called “the second brain”; most neurotransmitters used in the brain are made in the gut.
This concept was popularized by Dr. Michael Gershon in “The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine“.
Digestive issues can also create nutritional deficiencies, many of which can contribute to the initial conditions that an antidepressant was prescribed for in the first place.
Given that neurotransmitters are made in the gut, it stood to reason that working on digestive issues would help all of us, and it did. I began to sleep through the night without taking medication, my sons’ sensory issues improved (as did their acid reflux), and I was no longer a cranky mommy.
Believe it or not, acid reflux medication dangers are real, and these medications do major harm to your body. Shocking, right?
It’s true. All of those medications (Prevacid, Nexium, Zantac, Prilosec, omeprazole, even Tums) reduce stomach acid, which is what they are designed to do.
The problem is that acid reflux is actually caused by TOO LITTLE stomach acid, not too much. Counter-intuitive, right? So what happens when you have too little stomach acid? For starters, you can’t properly digest food, leading to nutritional deficiencies, particularly magnesium, calcium and vitamin B12.
A magnesium deficiency is linked to:
A calcium deficiency is linked to:
A vitamin B12 deficiency is linked to multiple neurological disorders, including
Not only do acid reducers cause nutritional deficiencies, but they also take away an important component of our immune system. Stomach acid is used to kill nasty bugs, viruses, parasites and bacteria. Without enough stomach acid, guess what happens? That’s right – infection.
By prescribing proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs), doctors are putting their patients at a higher risk for infections like pneumonia and gastroenteritis, as well as getting more colds and stomach bugs.
In addition, by taking acid-reflux drugs, you’re more likely to get sick more often because your immune system can’t fight off these offenders. It also makes the rest of the gastrointestinal tract susceptible to bacterial overgrowth.
Is it worth taking acid-reflux medication? I don’t think so, and I can tell you that, as a mom, I was furious at the doctors who prescribed them to my boys for their acid reflux after I found out how truly dangerous these drugs are.
Statins are increasingly being prescribed to bring down high cholesterol levels, which are thought by many in the medical community to be dangerous. I disagree.
Your brain and neurological system need cholesterol to function. As Dr. Sherry Rogers says in her September 2007 edition of her “Total Wellness Newsletter” (I highly recommend you subscribe to it to keep yourself updated about how doctors aren’t paying attention to health problems created by toxicity, nutritional deficiencies and side effects of prescription medication): “Robbing the body of cholesterol synthesis deprives the brain of dolichols, messengers or neurotransmitters, damages our NF-kB production that then ushers in:
She then goes on to say that they can cause sudden amnesia. That’s a scary thing to think about: what if you’re on statins and you’re driving a car and all of a sudden you get amnesia?
Recent research has shown that statins also increase your risk of diabetes.
Remember, cholesterol is NOT the enemy – inflammation is! Cholesterol is simply the band-aid that is trying to protect your body from chronic inflammation.
In addition, remember that if you’re lowering cholesterol, you’re also lowering levels of hormones that are made from them, like progesterone and testosterone, which is why a low sex drive is also a side effect of taking statins.
Dr. Rogers points out in her February 2011 edition of “Total Wellness Newsletter” that “plasticizers and phthalates… are the number one culprit for a rising cholesterol or other lipid abnormalities. Plus they trigger the inflammation called arteriosclerosis.”
Most doctors simply don’t take into account the effect of toxicity on our health, but the research is there if they look for it.
Here are some great resources for educating you and your doctor further about statin dangers and the demonization of cholesterol. This is just a small sample of the over 900 studies that have shown the dangers of statins:
A recent study showed that 100% of dust samples from airplanes contained flame retardants, those noxious thyroid-disrupting chemicals that have been linked to autism and other neurological disorders.
Not only that, but the levels of flame retardant on airplanes “were elevated by orders of magnitude relative to residential and office environments.”
Your best bet? Bathe yourself and change your clothes as soon as possible after flying.
Methylation is a subject that keeps coming up again and again for my sons and myself. It’s one of those all-encompassing issues like toxicity or gut dysbiosis because so many diseases and conditions are linked, directly or indirectly, to it or rather, a lack of it.
What is methylation? It’s the chemical process of donating a methyl group (CH3) to a molecule or compound. This doesn’t sound like much, but this little group is very important to how our bodies function, as I’m finding out.
It not only helps with energy production and builds immune cells and neurotransmitters, but it also processes hormones, detoxifies our bodies, puts protective myelin sheath on our nerves, and can be responsible for epigenetic gene regulation.
Because of its association with all of these essential processes, an inability to methylate is linked to a whole host of diseases and conditions. Methylation defects are linked to: [Read more…]
Great. Not only is triclosan, the drug in many anti-bacterial hand sanitizers and soaps, an endocrine disruptor (it damages your thyroid and hormonal system) and a pesticide (it kills your good gut flora), but now researchers are finding out it leads to muscle weakness, including cardiac weakness.
So not only is triclosan linked to allergies and any other chronic conditions with a gut dysbiosis component (like autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases, but now it might be linked to Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and heart disease.
Please pass the word. This is a product no one should be using!
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You may or may not know my personal recovery story.
I have recovered my 2 sons, now ages 6 and 8, from sensory processing disorder (SPD), asthma and acid reflux with a biomedical approach, which means correcting nutritional and hormonal deficiencies, removing toxicities and correcting gut dysbiosis.
I’m still working on failure to thrive, mitochondrial dysfunction and hypothyroidism. In addition, they both had developmental delays, and my older son had severe hypotonia as a baby.
I have recovered from immune dysregulation, in which I had shingles twice, the worst case of poison-ivy ever, bronchitis (which I’d never had before), constant sinus infections and constant colds that would last 3-4 weeks at a time. [Read more…]
Learn how toxins and lifestyle factors contribute to autism, PDD-NOS, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, hypotonia, retained reflexes and developmental delays.
In this video presentation, Patty Lemer, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Developmental Delay Resources, explains the top toxins and their effect on the health and development of fetuses, babies and children.
Patty shows us how endocrine disruptors like soy, fluoride, chlorine and flame retardants as well as heavy metals like mercury contribute to these disorders.
Patty also tells us how to enhance our body’s ability to detoxify as well as how to avoid exposure to toxins.
Most obstetricians do not warn their pregnant patients about toxins like pesticides in food, like phthalates or endocrine disruptors in consumer products, or like heavy metals in the environment that could harm their unborn child.
A great resource on toxins that harm the neurodevelopment of fetuses, babies and children is the Mount Sinai Children’s Environmental Health Center. Read more…
SOURCE: Environmental Health News
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