My Green Family. ramblings of one family's journey to green living

In part one I discussed the history of autism; how until recently it was such a rare disease and I touched on the approach to treatment. In this post I’m going to go more in depth into the treatment controversy and how it relates to us going green.

Right now the medical community defines autism in the context of a developmental disability and as a spectrum disorder. There are so many different presentations of this disease; all the doctors and therapists and social workers will tell you that no two kids are the same. How is this possible if it’s just a genetic problem? And how do you account for the kids that have no family history of developmental disorders, like ours? Where are the genetics to account for Tristan having this disease?

The other thing that many people don’t hear about is the many physical problems that accompany children with autism. Many kids have a lot of immune problems like chronic ear infections; many have food allergies, and gastrointestinal problems like chronic diarrhea. Could it be possible that the physical problems are linked with the autistic behaviours? There is a whole community that thinks this is exactly the case, countless parent testimonials and many studies to prove it.

There are doctors that take a look at the whole body of a child with autism. They look at the behaviours but they consider the traditional autistic behaviours to be symptoms of a much larger and complex problem. They consider autism to be a multi-organ metabolic disease that manifests itself as a psychological disorder. Doctors that have been studying autism from this angle consider autism to be a disease that affects the immunological system, the gastrointestinal system, toxicological system and neurological system. Unfortunately many pediatricians and other people involved with children with autism don’t agree with this view and herein lies the controversy. For example our pediatrician, a leading autism expert in our city, told us Tristan’s autism was a genetic problem. He scoffed at us when we told him we had Tristan on the gluten free/casein free diet and were seeing good results. During the appointment Tristan was having a major meltdown in the doctor’s office (due to the new surroundings and lack of toys in the office) and the doctor proceeded to ask us if we wanted to talk about giving Tristan drugs to control bad behaviour. And to top it all off he indicated that Tristan would most likely always need to live with us. (This guy was a regular ray of sunshine!) This type of attitude towards autism treatment isn’t just isolated to doctors, many people we’ve been involved with in various community support organizations have strongly cautioned us about taking the biomedical route with Tristan. They have suggested that the biomedical treatments probably wouldn’t work and could be a waste of money.

We decided after many late nights of research to a least try seeing a naturopath who was experienced in treating kids with autism. This was not a quick and easy decision, as scientists we researched the crap out of all the biomedical treatments. We didn’t and don’t want Tristan to become some guinea pig. But by the same token the whole basis of biomed treatment is restoring balance to these kids’ bodies. It’s about changing the diet because many kids with autism have allergies. And adding in some vitamin supplements, because its been shown that many kids with autism have huge vitamin deficiency’s. So why not at the very least try this course of treatment? I mean we have three years to wait for the proven IBI treatment. And anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not very good at waiting.

What we’ve discovered is that Tristan is one of those kids that has allergies and gastrointestinal issues. We have him on the gluten (wheat) free/casein (dairy) free diet. He takes digestive enzymes to help digest any leftover gluten and casein, probiotics to help his gut issues, cod liver oil, a multivitamin and fibre to help the obvious. The improvements we’ve seen in him are incredible. Eye contact was the first thing to come back, he started playing with his toys functionally, he’s starting to share enjoyment with us, he’s copying us, and his joint attention is huge! And he’s babbling and humming, he does not stop babbling. All of this before we had one speech therapy session. And it’s not just us; people that don’t see him every day have seen these improvements as well. Don’t get me wrong I also think the behavioural therapies are essential. These kids have had damage done to all these vital systems causing them to have developmental delays, so they need the therapies to help them heal developmentally as well. Treatment for kids with autism has to be a multipronged approach.

After all the months of research I’ve done and all the improvements we’ve seen in Tristan I agree with what’s called the multiple hit hypothesis. This theory suggests that kids with autism have a genetic susceptibility, there may be a mutation in a gene for an important function in their gastrointestinal system and/or their immune system and then they get inundated with toxins. Toxins from all the pesticides that are used on lawns, all the crap we’re pumping into our air and water, they get a little bit of chemical residue from food they eat, hormones in meat, genetically modified organisms in their corn, and yep I’m gonna say it, a heap of vaccines. Not only has the autism rate exploded in the last twenty years so has our pollution level.

Does this mean that all kids with autism are going to be healed through biomedical interventions? Not at all. What I’m suggesting here is that there is much more to autism than simply genetics. Autism is a spectrum disorder, it varies from child to child so what works for one may not work for another, and the disease could be caused by completely different reasons. So it would be logical to recover these children with different treatments.

Our children are the most vulnerable part of the population and they are the first ones that are going to show the effects of our polluting. There is so much crap pumped into our air, water and food, and the day of reckoning has come and it’s our kids that are paying for our mistakes. I used to think, “oh the environment is important but I recycle the bigger problems don’t really concern me, that’s for our government to take care of”. I couldn’t have been more wrong. And its not just autism that’s on the rise, asthma, ADHD and other allergies are increasing too. This is why it’s so important to me to get the word out about the connection between autism and the environment and motivate people to give a shit about doing something about it. Not only for people to change their perspective and biases about this disease but to change how funding for autism is organized. There needs to be better funding into research on how to heal these kids, on why the autism rate is rising at this alarming speed and financial assistance to parents to treat their kids, both for behavioural therapies and biomedical treatments. Unfortunately the medical community is always extremely slow in accepting new theories and treatments and these children don’t have the luxury of time. Early intervention is paramount to healing and recovering our children with autism. Our children are our most valuable resource and we need to start treating them like it, and one of those ways starts with treating the environment they live in with much more care and respect.