Almost Autism:Recovery for Kids, Support & Community for Moms
I’ve been chelating to remove heavy metals for a while now. I had myself retested back in January 2011, and my levels of heavy metals had declined significantly.
“H” means higher than the reference range, and “VH” means it’s a way-high number. My initial mercury levels were literally off the charts! Mercury is toxic at one part per billion, which is about the same concentration as one grain of salt in one swimming pool. [Read more…]
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:
My sons have had eczema their whole lives. It has ranged from cradle cap (did you know that was a form of eczema?) to itchy bumps in the creases of the knees and elbows to full-blown bloody red rashes on the arms and legs.
Pediatricians, as usual (sorry!), were useless in treating eczema. Their standard advice was to “put a little cortisone cream on it”. I did try that a few times at first with my older son, but I quickly grew worried about the effects of it on his already-poor immune system. [Read more…]
A recent study found that inflammation (there’s that word again) is responsible for bad bacteria gaining a strong foothold in the gut.
Intestinal inflammation produces nitrate, which then feeds these bad bacteria and thus worsens intestinal damage while crowding out probiotic bacteria.
When bad bacteria multiply and take over, a condition known as gut dysbiosis, they can cause a multitude of symptoms such as cramping, bloating, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
These symptoms are common in disorders like colic, ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn’s disease.
Thus, learning to control inflammation is a key component of getting these conditions under control.
“Failure to thrive” is when your child’s weight percentile falls to the 3rd percentile or below or when it crosses 2 or more major percentile curves. When either of these (or both, as in the case of my older son) happens, it’s an indication that the child is not growing as he or she should be.
I could scream every time someone tells me that I’m not that big or my husband’s not that big, so my sons’ failure to thrive is something I shouldn’t worry about. Or how about when I’m told to stop comparing my kids to fat American kids? [Read more…]
Because of my son’s failure to thrive, our pediatrician sent us to see Vicki Kobliner, a holistic nutritionist, who’s also on the board of Epidemic Answers with me.
Given that Crane Man has constant fatigue and stomach pain, poor growth, mild sensory issues and developmental delays, Vicki suggested having preliminary tests for mitochondrial dysfunction done. [Read more…]
A few months ago, my then-6-year-old son had a definite change in his typically sweet personality for the worst.
Given that he already been recovered from sensory processing disorder, I was confused.
This time, instead of crying at loud sounds, bright lights, fast motions, etc., he was ANGRY. In fact, every time I would ask him to do something, he would yell back at me and say that I hated him and that I was yelling, when in fact I wasn’t yelling at all.
Almost every day he would look at me with total hatred and anger, stomp out the front door and tell me he was running away from home.
I was really confused because these are supposed to be the “golden” years of childhood when there’s not so much hands-on work to do with children this age and they are happy to be with their family.
I kept thinking “If he’s like this as a child, what the heck is he going to be like as a teenager?”
This went on for a few months until I remembered about Lyme disease; this blog is about Lyme disease symptoms in children.. Lyme disease can cause sudden changes in behavior, and we live in tick-ridden Connecticut, so this wasn’t a far-out hypothesis.
Lymedisease.org lists the following common symptoms of children with Lyme:
Here a few other symptoms in children:
It was the uncharacteristic behavior, outbursts and mood swings that really made me suspect that it might be Lyme.
I did more research on it, especially about Dr. Charles Ray Jones, a Lyme pediatric specialist who practices near my town. I had heard him speak before at Dietrich Klinghardt’s Klinghardt Academy in New York City a few months prior; Dr. Klinghardt also specializes in difficult-to-treat disorders, like Lyme, autism and autoimmune diseases.
I had brought a friend who suffers from possible Lyme disease with me to the Academy’s workshops, and she knew of Dr. Jones and his amazing work.
Dr. Jones is fairly famous in the Lyme disease community for recovering children from what is thought to be autism, ADHD, SPD, OCD, ODD and other neurodevelopmental disorders. It turns out that in MANY of these cases, these children actually had Lyme disease.
Dr. Jones has recovered over 10,000 children from these disorders. He prescribes various antibiotics for a course of many years, whereas if you were to go to a typical doctor for treatment of Lyme, he or she would prescribe antibiotics for a few weeks or months.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to subject myself or my children to antibiotics for any amount of time these days, knowing what I know about how they destroy the immune system. But, hey, the man gets results, and the results show that many of these disorders are, in fact, from Lyme infections.
In his presentation, he gave a few examples of children. One of them was a young boy who at a very young age (5 or 6) had already been in and out of juvenile detention for things like harming animals, which is a known sign of a child or person on the road to becoming a hardened criminal. After a few months of treatment from Dr. Jones, this same boy had become the sweetest, most likeable child.
Dr. Jones typically suspects Lyme if the child has any of the following conditions:
What’s interesting is that 50% of Dr. Jones’ patients have no known history of being bitten by a deer tick and fewer than 10% have a history the classic Lyme bull’s-eye rash (erythema migrans). In fact, many times the mother unknowingly passes the infection on to the child during pregnancy or childbirth.
Lyme disease isn’t just infection from the Lyme spirochete bacterium. There are also co-infections (bartanella, babesia and erlichia) that typically occur at the same time. Or someone could just get one of the co-infections without having any of the other co-infections of Lyme.
Lyme disease and its co-infections are difficult to test for. One reason is due to the corkscrew shape of the bacteria, which allows them to burrow in without being easily detected.
Spirochetes (see the word “spiral” in there?) are one of the most ancient forms of life on this Earth, and they know to survive and adapt to rapidly changing environments.
Lyme can masquerade not only as autism and development delays but also as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis and neurological damage. In my mind, it should be one of the first things tested for when an autoimmune disease or neurological dysfunction has a sudden onset. It’s becoming a hidden epidemic, as not a lot of doctors know to test for it.
There’s an excellent documentary about Lyme called, “Under Our Skin”. I specifically remember a beautiful woman documented in the film who became increasingly contorted. She gradually lost control of many of her muscles, and doctors, of course, thought she had multiple sclerosis (MS).
The reason that we know it wasn’t MS is that she regained her strength and control after a very long course of antibiotics, so it was obviously an infection. How many people that have MS, RA, fibromyalgia, autism or developmental delays simply have Lyme? It’s a real shame they’re not getting proper treatment.
Lyme is not just limited to the Northeastern U.S. anymore; it’s now spreading west to places where you wouldn’t think deer ticks are. Deer ticks are not the only means of transmission: mosquitoes, fleas and ticks can also carry the infection.
Given that there is an increasing number of people with gut dysbiosis and toxicity, and thus, a compromised immune system, it’s not surprising that their weakened state allows for such an infection.
Most doctors will run a Western blot test, but it’s not always accurate. An IgG test would show elevated levels when fighting an infection for a long time, and an IgM test shows if an illness has been reactivated.
Given the confusion surrounding the issue of detecting Lyme, I asked our naturopath to test my son for Lyme with his ASYRA (yes, it’s a little “woo woo”). Sure enough, my son was infected with bartonella, also known as cat-scratch fever.
Rather than going the antibiotic route, our naturopath prescribed a super-strong herbal remedy. Ever since treatment began a couple of months, my son hasn’t been hateful or hurtful and is now the super-sweet boy I remember. His favorite words now are, “I’m so happy I could cry.” Me, too!
I remember when I was growing up in the 1970’s (ahem) that no one had allergies, let alone an allergy to peanuts. Now, if you go to a school, you’ll see “nut-free classrooms” and “nut tables” in the cafeteria.
Visit the school nurse’s office these days, and you’ll see epi pens everywhere along with a binder full of names of children that may require them.
Peanut allergies are no laughing matter. They can be deadly very quickly, causing sudden anaphylaxis upon exposure to even dust or oil from peanuts.
Peanutallergy.com reports that 1% of the American population has an allergy to peanuts, while 4% of children are allergic to peanuts. This means that the incidence is rising in the pediatric population.
So what is a parent to do? One thing is to learn the soft signs of a compromised immune system that Epidemic Answers lists. Be on the lookout for projectile vomiting, cradle cap, colic, diaper rash, red ears after eating, chronic runny nose, chronic constipation, a distended “pot” belly and more in your baby or toddler.
Yet more research is coming to light about the damaging effects of heavy metals. A recent study showed that autistic children have much higher levels of them than the general population (that said, however, doesn’t mean that the general population is free of heavy metals).
These children had significantly higher levels of lead, thallium, tin, and tungsten, “toxic metals that can impair brain development and function, and also interfere with the normal functioning of other body organs and systems.”
The study also noted that “38-47% of the variation of autism severity was associated with the level of several toxic metals, with cadmium and mercury being the most strongly associated. Mercury toxicity, the effects of which mimic autism, is, according to my perusal of the research, the most damaging.
It bears repeating, for those of you who don’t know or who haven’t read any of my previous blog posts, that heavy-metal toxicity played a huge role in my sons’ Sensory Processing Disorder (which I call “autism light” and Beth Lambert calls “almost autism“) and in a lot of health problems that I had as well.
Almost autism
Sensory Processing Disorder
Autism
ADHD
PANS
PANDAS
OCD
Lyme disease
I have recovered my sons’ health with... [Read More …]
