“Hope is a very addictive drug”
June 26, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Says Jim Laidler, MD, the father of two autistic sons, about his experience using such biomedical treatments for autism as the gluten-free casein-free diet and various nutritional supplements. Dr. Laidler is quoted in an ABC News story about the research of Mark Geier and David Geier, “the father and son duo argue in study after study that symptoms of autism are caused by mercury once widely used in vaccines.” The Geiers will be interviewed tonight on Nightline at 11.35pm EDT—–Significant Misrepresentations: Mark Geier, David Geier & the Evolution of the Lupron Protocol by Kathleen Seidel of Neurodiversity.com provides some thorough background and critique about the Geiers.
Says Laidler:
“What [parents] are getting in exchange for their hope, they’re having to give time, money, effort, emotional energy that might be better spent other places. I know that when we stopped all the therapies on our kids, I suddenly found out I had the time and energy to actually play with them, to spend time with them, to spend time with them instead of on them.”
We tried a number of biomedical and “alternative” treatments for my son when he was younger; we liked to think that we saw results—-all during that time, he was also receiving a lot of educational therapies, including ABA, speech and OT, and learning to swim and ride his bike.
Hope is certainly a most powerful force and the greatest source of it for me is being with Charlie.
Brace yourself Kristina…
I give my daughter nutritional supplements – a multivitamin, DHA and acidophilus – mainly because her food intake is so limited in both variety and amount. I’ve noticed that her hair has become very shiny : )
And we have a bottle of gummy calcium bears in the cabinet, anything with milk disagreeing with Charlie (and his dad, and his grandparents…….).
Maybe it’s the summer sun……
I’m curious to see this show tonight. Unfortunately I think it will generate publicity to the Geiers, even if they provide an opposing view.
Somehow, I doubt Nightline will be mentioning Kathleen Seidel’s exhaustive exposé…
Jim Laidler – a good man. I heartily agree with his therapeutic regimen: be a parent, not a chemotherapist. Multivitamin? Sure, I take them too. Acidophilus? Yogurt’s great. Voodoo? Whatever floats your boat. As one who has taken the Hippopotamus oath, I subscribe to the best tenet in medicine: primum non nocere – first and foremost, do no harm. By the way, if you haven’t seen Laidler’s website, go to http://www.autism-watch.org. This is where I began my web odyssey after my daugher was diagnosed. Read his bio – it’s quite a story.
those gummy vitamins (we have the multivitamin ones) are good stuff. my husband can’t take regular vitamins cos they bother his stomach. the gummies don’t.
I got the idea of giving them to Charlie because he has developed a liking for Swedish fish—-he did not want any when I asked him this weekend. I should have known he wasn’t feeling well!
Gummi vitamins are also great for oral proprioceptive input…
Well, I guess we all end up with a little medi-speech after a while of talking therapies.
But once upon a time it was SuperNuthera I would have mentioned—–how many shirts (Charlie’s) and dishtowels did I ruin with the stuff.
Excellent topic to bring into the blogsphere.
Laidler makes good points, yet it’s hard to adhere to absolutes given most parents are willing to travel to the ends of the earth for a good therapy.
My wife and I have pursued, for our son, pretty much every known non-drug related approach to address “his” autism. To date, The GF/CF all organic diet has yielded some hopeful results in the area of behavior i.e less flapping, less hyper, less stressful episodes, and there are a few others.
Also, investing more time with him has yielded some very special results. In fact, the more time I spend with him the more I realize that we have much in common. For example, he’s a good athlete much like I was at his age (my wife too was a very good junior athlete).
Maybe it’s important to admit that there will not be a single right solution to autism.
Dr. Chew, hope it’s ok to ask, is Charlie on meds?
Have followed your blog for several months and have read, for example, about Charlie’s progress in school. If you had to sum it all up(if that’s possible), what do you attribute to his progress?
mysonsdad,
One can read and read about what others do, and then one has to choose the best path for one’s circumstances…… the diet seemed very helpful for a younger Charlie. Of late, with some experimenting here and there, we have not seen any changes—–not that I’m going to order Charlie a pizza and a milkshake (dairy products do seem to be something to avoid for him)! Food generally has a big effect on Charlie.
Charlie takes Zoloft and Risperdal (I’ve written on this here). He started Zoloft for anxiety that seemed related to his self-injurious behaviors, and then the Risperdal when he was really having a lot of difficulties, and to help him in school while we looked for a new placement.
I am going to respond to your final question in another post!
Thanks for your reply Kristina.
I haven’t done the diet because my son has no gut issues, and he tested negative for all allergies, negative for yeast overgrowth, etc. So I won’t spend our family’s time, money and energy on GF/CF. The one reaction he seems to have is to artificial dye (a little rash on the face), so I stopped giving him the Flintstones vitamins. He won’t take the gummies, so it’s been hard to find a replacement. The Trader Joe’s vitamins for kids tasted like cement.
Charlie only started to like to eat anything gummy this year. Think I’ll avoid the TJ ones……
Actually Leila, takes just as much time and energy to eat healthy than it does to eat otherwise.
If nothing more, I do think removing sugar from some of our children’s diets may show positive outcomes. Dr. McCandless book, Children with Starving Brains is one of many interesting reads about this matter.
Mysonsdad, one thing I learned is to pick our battles. Before my son’s diagnosis of autism his diet was very healthy, but then once therapy started, I realized that some sugary treats were a huge reinforcement that helped him learn things extremely fast, and behave better as well. He’s not any more hyper than he was before I increased sugar on his diet, but he certainly is way more verbal and engaged. And I brush his teeth much more frequently too.
Leila, most families are pretty precautious when it comes to battle picking, yet war scars are sometimes inevtiable. Good luck with your approach.
Charlie is now brushing his teeth on his own (almost, with supervision) a couple of times a day—-at home and school—-and been eating a bigger variety of things.
You don’t know until you’ve tried? Though some thing we’ve tried I have felt were not the most helpful, or helpful at all.
Kristina, hard to disagree with your posts. You’re right about, “You don’t know until you try”.
I believe Mark Twain said, ” A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way”.