Aspies For Freedom

I happen to support dietary changes as a means of treatment (NOT cure - that's impossible). After all - sensory overload does include taste. Having said that, like most treatments it doesn't work for everyone and moreover it also depends on what physical symptoms (if any) are causing the most trouble.

And it certainly only works for children if it does work at all.

As a liberal/fine arts major, I appreciate any post that begins "Science aside,..."

http://www.ebmonline.org/cgi/content/full/228/6/639

This is an interesting article - proves nothing - but still interesting - it's always good to explore different ideas.

Like I said, Tenacious - dietary changes would only work for the young kids. Potentially. And anyway, like everything else only improvement can be achieved. Not cure.

Prevention on the other hand (ie avoiding that first sensory overload) it's an option. Of course if there's a sensory overload at birth that's another matter!

Great to hear two of my favorite ideas being thrown around in this thread:

1) In autistic/AS kids, the brain may not develop properly if the diet is not adjusted to suit their individual needs/sensitivities

2) "It all happened at birth"--forceps causing a shock to the brain, skull-reshaping issues, cord clamping caused brain damage, sensory overload at birth

The longer people with AS propagate this unsettling stuff, the longer it will stay around.

Sorry to be so blunt...  and yes I am not doing the field research...  so my opinions lack credibility.. but oh well, I think (just like "all Aspies are great at Math").. this is another thing we need to get away from.

I personally believe this stuff is crap.  I am entitled to have this opinion.

Of course you are, Batman. The thing about it all is - we don't really know for sure. All we can do is speculate.

We do know one thing at least. Autistic Spectrum Disorders at their root are genetic. What we don't know is why it doesn't affect everyone who has the gene in them. Hence the speculation. See what I mean?

And it doesn't help when we get the curebies running their mouths with their junk. The latest being from some quack called David Ayoub - who works as a RADIOLOGIST for crying out loud!!

Well, with nonverbal or partly verbal autistic kids, they couldn't tell you if they were in discomfort, because it could come out as meltdowns of which you don't know the origin. I think maybe the genetics for autism and bowel problems are related, because so many autistic people have food intolerances.

The GF/CF diet is harmless; so it doesn't hurt to make trial of it. But you have to be scientific about it--make a record of behavior before and after, so you know whether there really is some irritant that's bothering the kid. But if you have a verbal kid, who tells you there's no problems with his stomach, for goodness sakes believe him and don't mess around with his diet!

After seeing some of what she had said on the view and oprah I read the article about her in People mag. It was pretty horrible... same old curebie crap.

What really bothered me was that before her sons diagnosis when he flapped she thought it was cute, she'd tell other people things like, "He's so happy he could just fly away!" never once thinking there was anything "wrong" with it. (You'll have to excuse my paraphrase, you can't get it online unless you have a subscription and I certainly didn't buy it)  Then after his diagnosis she was upset when he did it.

I just thought it was so sad. I don't think she's necessarily a bad parent, I don't think curebies are necessarily bad, just horribly misguided.

The whole thing just seems wrought with the over emotional "poor me" attitude.

That's kind of weird... her mommy instict told her her son was happy; but then when somebody labeled it pathological, she completely turned away from it and started hating it instead. Why didn't she just listen to her instincts?

A curebie parent needn't be a bad parent. Wanting a cure can mean that they really do want the best for their child. Bad parenting starts when they don't accept their child as s/he is, right now, even if they do want a cure. Rejecting a child because s/he is autistic is not good parenting, obviously.

Here's something I've been wondering about, though: Parent/child bonding. A lot of that bonding is instinctual--Mom bonds with baby because baby does these "mirroring" things--like when Mom opens her mouth, baby is likely to do the same. Even pretty early on, he will focus on her voice and look at her face; he is instinctively tuned to human voices and faces.

But what about an autistic baby? He's no more focused on voice and face than on other objects and sounds. He does look at Mom; she's as interesting as any other object, and she makes sounds. But he doesn't "mirror" Mom; and he may even have such confused senses that being held is overwhelming.

So where does that leave the parent/child bond? I think, with an autistic child, the social bonding isn't there--the mother can't read the "Mommy" signals from her infant; the infant can't read the facial expressions of the mother.

What's left is a conscious effort on the part of the mother and later the child to connect with each other. Depending on who the mother and child are, that bond could actually be stronger than most--but if Mom just expects love for her baby to "happen", she'll probably find herself disappointed because her Mommy instincts won't be triggered very strongly by the child's behavior. (They'll be triggered by his appearance and his cry, though; so the instinctual bond isn't completely absent.)

By the end of the first few weeks, the child should associate the mother with food and warmth, so he will begin to bond to her in an atypical but strong autistic-style bond. However, the mother won't be able to see that he's bonded with her--because he doesn't communicate the way typical children do, and doesn't "know" he's supposed to send "You're my mommy" messages back to the warm, food-giving object that's at the center of his life.

That communication barrier could have resulted in the original "refrigerator mother" theory--the distance between mother and child having been mistaken for a cause, rather than a result of, autism.

It could lead to a mother who is ambivalent about her child, or even outright hostile. A mother who depends only on instinct may be sadly lacking when it comes to caring for an autistic child. I believe it is very likely that mothers who kill their autistic children have extremely weak or nonexistant bonds to their children; but I would like to see some statistics on the likelihood of an autistic child, as opposed to children with other disabilities, being the target of murder by parents.

It's good that autism runs in families. Mothers with autistic traits are more likely to form bonds by intellectual rather than instinctual means; so they are also more likely to analyze their infants' behavior rather than "pick up" social signals. Perhaps the best mother for an autistic child is a mother who is on the Spectrum herself.

Oxytocin produced by the mother during the birth and during breast feeding helps the bonding process along.

I've had the three in the bolded print, there, but no one ever tested my food intake.  My asthma was thought to be related to environmental sensitivities, dust mites, pollen, molds, etc.  Or so the specialists said--well I was young then so I don't remember what they said.

My constipation was said to be inherited from my mother's side--my grandmother always had that problem--and a lack of fiber in my diet, esp. seeing as I never liked to eat fruit (and still don't, too often.)

I don't know about the eczema.

Well, it's not really the diet stuff that bothers me too much, or the issue of how the environment can act as a trigger for AS problems, it's really the hard birth theory that bothers me the most.  Approximately 100% of people on the planet today were born, the vast majority through traditional means of delivery (and some via C-section)... who is suddenly making the decision that "hard birth experience" makes people autistic?  Who is saying these terrible things?  What gives them the right to say so?

I tend to think it's rooted in her being an idiot, a very NT one at that.

Taking advantage of frightened parents and giving them false hope is a dirty low trick in my book. Andrew Wakefield will be the first to pay for it I hope - but the trouble is he might become a marytr if it's handled wrong! OK - that has nothing to do with the food issue, but I think that needed to be said if we are talking about the fear factor.

Ellen, I know the Autism Variation blog. Joseph is a wise man who knows what he's talking about. And not only does the figures he has from the CDDS prove that the rates of Autism DX's is still going up for those born recently - I noted from a post on LB/RB that the CDDS also has three people on their list that were born before 1931 (when thiomersal was first introduced). And that's just who's on it at the moment!