My Experience With Different Autism Treatments
There are many, many different autism treatments that are available to help you help your child overcome. We have followed the DAN (Defeat Autism Now!) bio-medical protocol for the past 10 years. We have done many different treatments to help our son. I have had many requests to know about how the different autism treatments have helped our son. So, it is here that I will share my experiences and give you the website links to help you on your journey.
I encourage you to seek out treatments for your child. I am not a doctor and not giving advice. I am telling you only of my choices for my son and our experiences with each one.
Diet
The first intervention that we did was the gluten free and casein free diet. The first three months were the hardest because I had to replace the foods in my pantry and learn to cook in new ways. When we started, GFCF (gluten free and casein free) foods were not readily available in the stores. Now, they are! The best book that I read was Special Diets For Special Kids by Lisa Lewis. It does a great job in describing why our children need to be on the diet. The receipes in the back of the book are way to cumbersome to do though. This diet helped our son to stop being spaced out. Removing dairy from our sons diet stopped him from fluttering his eyes and closing his eyes and laughing hillariously for no reason.
Diet is probably the first of many autism treatments that parents try.
We moved past the gfcf diet and onto the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. The food on this diet tastes great! We had to quit this diet because the honey in the receipes made for major yeast infections in my son. We moved onto the Body Ecology Diet. This is the diet that I currently use for my son. It works and correcting the gut and it works well.
Supplements
After doing the diet, we implemented supplements. There are numerous supplements that our children can and should take. The best way to go about this is through a DAN doctor. Each child is different and they need to be on supplements that their bodies are lacking. Our son is on an excellent multi-vitamin and mineral supplement from Brain Child Nutritionals. He is on a good chewable calcium since he is off of dairy products. He is on zinc, omega 3, a time released melatonin (this got him sleeping through the night!), an antacid for reflux (a lot of our kids have acid reflux), B12, enzymes with every meal to digest foods (I like Houston Natraceuticals brand the best), and cod liver oil for brain function. Our son is well balanced on this autism treatment. A gfcf diet is worth looking at.
OSR is the latest of the autism treatments that we are doing for our son. It is showing some nice results. OSR stands for Optimize, Strengthen, Rejuvenate. In a nutshell it raises the glutathione in our kids. When our kids raise their glutathione levels, they detox on their own. You may get it through your DAN doctor. Developed by Boyd Haley at CTI Science. I found a great short 4 part video that Boyd Haley talks about OSR. Click here to watch a video of an interview with Boyd Haley.
OSR is bringing language on for our son. He has gained 22 new words in three months! His confidence is going up when he says words and therefore he says the words louder. It's safe, its easy to use and it runs us just under $100 a month. It is a supplement, not a drug.
Schooling Choices
We did the Lovaas applied behavior analysis, called ABA for short. It is an intense 40 hour a week home school program. We did this for just over 2 1/2 years. I liked the program but it was tough on the family lifestyle.
Here is an ABA therapists site who shares her autism treatments and behavior
strategies with parents.
Then we did the SonRise homeschool progam for 2 1/2 years. I did not like this program. It is my personal opinion, but I felt like this program went against my personal beliefs in God and it felt like an occult. (If you like this program...great. Don't write to me about it please. I did it long enough to know it is not one I would recommend to others.)
We moved on to the home school program of RDI. This stands for Relationship Development Intervention. We are still doing this program today. I like this program the best. Teaching children with autism with their techniques can be done full time or in as little as 15 minutes a day. It's focus is getting our kids to think for themselves and build relationships with people.
Prior to any home schooling our son, we were in our local school district for 2 1/2 years. The IEP (individual education program) wiped me out! I put out more energy in those meetings and making sure that they were following through than I do to home school our son.
Correct Sensory Issues
The best autism treatment that gave us the biggest bang for our buck was the Sensory Learning Center. This is a tripple treatment for our children. It is vestibular, vision and hearing therapy all at once. This treatment corrected the sensory problems that plagued my son. Once his vision was corrected, he had no problem going on playgrounds because his perception was corrected. The sensitivity went away and haircuts and cutting his finger and toes nails was not longer a big deal. It corrected his hearing and we no longer had the hands over the ears. The hearing was corrected and he then began to like the ocean (the waves of the ocean were to loud for him before this treatment.)
Add Oxygen To The Cells
We did 50 hours locally of hyperberic oxygen treatments. This is a treatment that is showing alot of improvements on our kids after alot of hours in the chamber. We did 50 hours and it didn't doing anything for our son. We could not afford to keep it up since we did not own the chamber. 50 hours of this autism treatment cost us $2500.
Different Therapies
Through our local school district we did four years of occuaptional therapy and we did seven years of private speach therapy. Both proved to be worth the effort and cost for our son.
We did two years of hippo therapy wich is horseback riding. Because the horse trotted or ran, it gave sensory imput into my son. On the nights he had hippo therapy, my son slept another 1 1/2 hours! A fun autism treatment to do and each lesson brought a good night of sleep!
We did intensive cranio sacral therapy at 3-5 days a week for two years. My son would bite his shirt collar as a stem. Cranial sacral therapy all but took this away. This therapy really helped with sensory problems that were/are going on in the roof of his mouth. My son still wences everyday when we brush his upper teeth. Especially on the left side. We have yet to find a way to correct this sensitivity.
Remove Heavy Metals
We chelated for almost seven years under the supervision of our DAN doctor. We never had any problems. We used five different chelating agents over the years. My favorite was DMPS. It is a lotion that you put on the wrist of your child daily. Dr. Buttar's son over came autism by chelating. Chelating our son brought on the ability to learn and use the computer in our son. This process gave us more of our son to work with and greatly reduced his hyperactivity. This is a controversial autism treatment, but I have not one regret doing it.
Get The Bowels Working Right
Poop. Lets talk poop! My son went from severe constipation to severe diahreh for years. The gut is most definately the second brain. If the gut is not working the brain does not work. After trying over a hunderd different things to correct this problem, we found one! We use #1 and #2 Canadian Tree Forrest Essences. A homopathic remedy that works! Talk with Celine, the owner of the company and she works with each individual. We now are potty trained and have normal stools because of these essences. I highly recommend these! When you can get the bowels correct...that is a great autism treatment!
Notice These kids don't sweat
Sauna therapy. A great book to educate yourself about sauna therapy is called, 'Detoxify Or Die' by Sherry A. Rogers. Saunas are a good autism treatment. My son would not and could not sweat. His sweat glands were blocked. You cannot detox your body if you cannot sweat. We bought a Miracle Heat Infared Sauna for $2500. A three person sauna with three large windows, a outlet for a t.v. and music. We use it every spring and fall and now our son sweats. The infared sauna allows you to sweat but breath because you don't have all the steam. A good investment.
Clay baths. We have done clay baths off and on over the years. This is a way to detox the body. I notice that my son sleeps and extra hour on the nights that I give him a clay bath. The clay starts off brown and turns to grey after the bath. The color change is the toxins being pulled from his body.
Road To Recovery
Do your own research and get your child on the road to recovery. Pray about every treatment. Ask God for direction and peace. Seeing your child get better makes it all worth while!
If you are dealing with ADHD, then I have a great link for you to check out! The ADHD information exchange promotes the sharing of information between parents, clinicians, and
the millions of people who have ADHD.
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